14 followers
128 daily readers
rank of 135
Receive an e-mail notification of new posts on this site:
|
|
|
Work Report - Mike Crowl focuses on jobs and work and anything connected to the two.
Mike blogs in two places on Orble, and two on Blogger. His wife thinks he writes too much.
Well, did the pity me stuff (pity me prostate!) for most of last night and some of this morning, and then somehow perked up again and carried on with life.
My wife reckons I'm more of an optimist than I give myself credit for...especially in some areas of life. As we agreed this morning, nothing has actually changed since yesterday. I haven't had any nasty biopsies as yet, and haven't had any actual bad news (just threats of it - and sticks and stones my break my bones, and nasty needles may poke my prostate, but threats will never hurt me).
I must say I'd sooner have several more PS3s - I mean PSAs - than any further fiddling around with the rear end, but if it must be, it must be. I've had a very healthy life, all up. Never been in hospital for more than a couple of nights (and that was a false alarm - think I may have mentioned this in this blog before -forgive me if I'm repeating myself; it's the privilege of old age), and never broken any bones or chopped off any important parts
[ Click here to read more ]
Today was one of those days that needs to be remembered. For the second time in a few years I had an appointment at the hospital to have a prostate check. Can’t remember how long ago the previous one was, but it must have been at least two or three years.
Doctors keep an eye on the state of prostates by using blood tests that give them a PSA reading. PSA means Prostate Specific Antigen, if that’s any help to you. Apparently it’s something that the prostate exudes into the bloodstream as a matter of course. The blood test can tell whether it’s normal or not.
As guys get older, the PSA number goes up. For my age, around 63, it should only be around 4 or 5. Mine is 10, and has been climbing slowly for a few years. At my previous prostate examination, the hospital doctor decided not to do a biopsy, for which I was grateful. The examination itself is invasive, though short. Basically the doctor sticks a finger up your rear end and fiddles around, finds the prostate, and determines its rough size. (Prostates grow as you get older, just to make things tricky. If they get irritable about life, they can start cutting off the uretha, which passes through them
[ Click here to read more ]
This is connected to the theme of work, in a roundabout way. Yesterday my wife and two of my grandchildren visited the Chinese Gardens, and then, because they’re next door, to the Otago Settlers’ Museum (formerly the Early Settlers’ Museum), which is now partly in the
wonderful old Art Deco building that used to be the main bus station, and partly in its original building. The two have been combined.
I wanted to go particularly because they were holding an exhibition, called Shopkeeping, a view on Dunedin Retailers by Chris Gable. I’d received a notice about this in the post the other day, and remembered then that there was a good reason for me to get a notice: I would be in the exhibition’s photos.
About three years ago, I’d think, Chris Gable came to the shop I managed in Stuart St, and said he was doing a project: photographing shopkeepers around the city. He aimed to put on an exhibition of the results at some point. He photographed both John – who owned the secondhand bookshop that was in the same space – and me. I got a copy of the photo a while later, and it hangs on the wall somewhere in my house. I just can’t think where at the moment
[ Click here to read more ]
How's this for a nicely poetic phrase: easy green bean recipes? Doesn't it have a ring to it?
Don't ask me what it has to do with anything in the area of work, except, I suppose that it takes a bit of work to de-shell green beans. If you consider that necessary at all
[ Click here to read more ]
Watched the movie, Lars and the Real Girl last night at a friend' s house, along with some other blokes who form the Men's Movie Night group at our church. I'm not sure that the blokes appreciated the movie much, although I enjoyed it. You can see my comments on my other blog (link above).
Before we started the movie, we went out on the deck at the back of the house to watch while mine host and one of the other guys inspected an extremely tall tree that's growing in the garden, with a view to trimming it back considerably at some stage. I hadn't been out the back of the house before, and the deck turned out to be several metres above the ground. The section drops so sharply under the house that while you go in almost at street level, the garden is in a gully, as though there'd once been a river running through it
[ Click here to read more ]
Back in the 60s, when I was still a young man, the Catholic priest, Charles Davis, left the Catholic Church and his priesthood in a blaze of publicity. (He'd chosen the publicity, by the
Charles Davis: a photo taken around the time he left the Catholic Church
way, in order to clarify his position and to confront the Church's position on contraception, amongst many other things.) He married Florence Henderson in due course, and they had a family. While cataloguing my boss's books at work, I came across A Question of Conscience, the book that made Davis famous around the world. It occurred to me to check up on the Net what had happened to Davis, who died a few years ago.
An interview with his daughter, Claire, appeared in the Guardian back in 2006, and she has some interesting things to say about sex - in relation to her parents, who were both around 40 when they married.
[ Click here to read more ]
I mentioned in a recent post that my wife and I had gone back to aquajogging. Well, we went for our second time on Saturday morning, and my knee, which I hurt during the run of the play, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, didn't enjoy the water at all.
I have this sense that when I tripped up in the play and went flat on the floor, that my left knee almost seemed to have the sense of having smashed something, but it still works, and apart from niggling at me if I try and make it work too hard (as in aquajogging) or literally telling me to 'get up' when I try and kneel on it without any support, it's certainly not preventing me from walking. However, it's a bit like I've got the wrong kind of cable in there at the moment: some decent CAT5e might do the trick!
When all's said and done, I've been pretty fortunate over the years in terms of not injuring myself, or being injured by anyone else. I haven't even been in hospital since I was in my early twenties (forty odd years ago), and even that was a false alarm
[ Click here to read more ]
My wife and I went to Moana Pool before work this morning, for the first time since 2006, I think. We used to go regularly in the mornings, she to swim and me to aquajog – as I’m not much of a swimmer. Today, however, we both went aquajogging, and managed 35 minutes
Photo courtesy of Piscines1.com
or so without collapsing completely. However, I was very tired by the time I got to work, as you can imagine, and needed some coffee to get functioning again.
It was interesting to see that some of the people we’d last seen in 2006 were still there, still doing their regular round of the pool (aquajogging gets done in the large diving pool), and still working hard. Some of them do nothing but go round and round. That would drive me crazy. I don’t mind aquajogging if I mix it up a little, holding the floats in my hands and pushing them up and down, or keeping them behind me while I do a kind of cycling round the pool. But just to go round and round, especially if you’re doing it on your own, doesn’t seem exciting to me at all. You may as well just stay home and swallow the diet pills.
I’m not quite sure why we stopped back in 2006. Perhaps it was because I resigned from the shop and then had trouble getting work – and then my mother died at the end of that year, and that changed things again. And then I had odd temp jobs and things were a bit all over the place. And then, of course, we went overseas for nearly six months. So aquajogging went on the back burner – if that’s a place you can put it
[ Click here to read more ]
I’ve spent some of my three days off work in carrying on copying and orchestrating the children’s ‘opera’ I began to write back in 1976 (yes, no mistake about the year).
I wrote a good deal of it into the Sibelius music program a couple of years ago, but got sidetracked and didn’t do any more. Part of the problem, I suspect, was that if I finished what was already in hand (about 25 minutes worth of music) I’d have to go on and finish the work off altogether, and that meant thinking, and being creative.
The original music and words were written in some remarkable burst of creativity: it just flowed along writing itself, as it were, for page after page. But when that petered out, it left me with a story to which I didn’t entirely know the end, and didn’t even know where it was going to go next. And that’s been the case for thirty years. Crikey! Of course it’s helped that Sibelius has turned up in the meantime, meaning I could actually get the music out of the scribbled pencil marks in a manuscript into something that was readable and comprehensible
[ Click here to read more ]
I’m having three days off work! First official and complete days I’ve had off since I began back in early December last year. (I had two days off while we were performing The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but that was because we were doing the show in the morning, and trying to go to work after a performance is usually a waste of time.)
The only trouble today – my first day off – is that it’s really cold, and I’m almost tempted to go back to bed with an electric blanket to keep me warm. That or sit wrapped up in the rattan rocking chair watching old movies.
Nevertheless, between bouts of biting cold wind outside I managed to whip out a chunk of weeds in the garden, and then inside file a bunch of invoices that haven’t got in order because I’ve been too busy (or lazy) of late. I even scrubbed the bath where the make-up from the show had left grime. (Probably shouldn’t tell you that, but I have to prove I’ve actually done something useful with the day
[ Click here to read more ]
More Posts
380 Posts dating from December 2006
Email Subscription
Receive e-mail notifications of new posts on this blog:
|
|
|
Read More
Comments (4)
Add Comments
