Fun. - I Wanna Be The One (2009)

It's a really good feeling walking out your front door into sunshine with a MP3 player fresh with new tracks. Forecasts of sun, lack of rain in the longterm rainfall predictions, healing and pure optimism had me decide over the weekend that it was going to be Spring now. The wettest July for a while was done. There were going to be flowers and baby ducks on my walk to work, calendars and misaligned knee-caps be damned.

Okay, I may have let hope get the best of me when I tried to cut across the grass for the first time and still came out the other side with damp shoes.
Also apparently it rained sometime overnight. And no ducklings were born. But I'm done with Winter officially.
This of course does not mean much in reality.

I umpired tonight, turning the sense of curiosity some teams had at seeing three umpires on the court at the start of the game into dread as I floundered about aiming for something between competent and noticed. As usual I've discovered the picture I have in my mind of how things will go is nothing like what eventuates in real life. But I had fun and I got twenty dollars which covers the whistle I bought and the petrol to get there.
I got to tech someone too, but I didn't get the rush of power I assume all the referees get when they do it to me.

Blind Melon - No Rain (1992)

I know I did nothing but favours for farmers with my entry last night. Journal jinx is a pretty powerful phenomenon, and I managed to convert the Bureau of Meteorology's prediction of 20% chance of less than 1ml of rain into a day of ubiquitous greyness. At lunchtime I went to the river to write and I concentrated hard on parting the clouds but in entry-spiting fashion it instead starting spitting light, fluffy rain that went at the right angle to penetrate the shelter I was sitting in and dampen my words.

While sitting there I did see a bird work on a new nest, provoking hope that the spring spirit was alive elsewhere. Once my break was over I stood up to return to the office and immediately the clouds parted and it spewed sunshine. An hour later there was another double rainbow despite there being dick all rain. Finally when I finished work after 6pm I walked onto North Terrace and into showers. But I'm done with Winter, officially, apparently, so I didn't use my umbrella. I just played cheery music all the way home.

A double journal jinx led to beautiful sun today, and in mentioning this I realise what will come tomorrow.

It's rarely a good thing when your inspiration for dinner comes when you're sitting on the toilet, but last night I had a delicious gourmet mash potato blend. The recipe was in July 2006's Men's Health but my variations aren't. I mashed potato into peas, corn, fried onion and diced cabbage. That's right, cabbage. I bought it on a whim for dinner because it was cheap and it felt on some level like a testament to my Scottish heritage. But when it came to preparing it I freaked out a little as I planned on eating this meal for the next few days and I didn't want to discover I hated cabbage after inserting it into half the week's menu. So I diced it very thinly, which in the end was wasted effort as fried up cabbage is actually pretty nice. It tastes sort of in between a lettuce and a pickle.

The Thermals - When I Died (2009)

In case you didn't catch this breaking news story today, I'll repost it.
Dwarf horse beats odds

The reason I bring this up, which should be obvious, is because me and that horse have the same fucking life! OK, obviously he is smaller than normal and I'm bigger but I get the feeling that dude gets as devo as I do every time he has surgery or gets something fixed only to discover some other part of his body is now going wrong.

Yeah it was ridiculously sunny yesterday and today, I didn't wear a jumper or a jacket during each. I even wore shorts on the way to the physio on Wednesday so he could try and fix my knee cap without me taking off my pants. And despite nearly being blown away on the way back from the podiatrist this morning there was still a tingle of warmth with the cold news that I'm now getting orthotics and a ban on lower body exercise to go with my current separation from upper body workouts.

To make matters worse I then had to limp home past the Torrens as well as the plethora of sports fields that mark my walk home. Each filled with revelers enjoying the spring and running around or playing sports. There was even some Chinese dude doing a set of deadlift-to-lateral raises with a barbell outside Jolleys Boathouse. Come on!

On a positive note today, all the trash clogging up the Torrens seems to have been cleared from the river. Wish someone would tell me how to do that.

I saw this article in LifeHacker the other day, titled Discover Your Life's Purpose in Around 20 Minutes.
I love LifeHacker, not only because it's full of useful tips but also because I can make a plunger coffee at about 10:30 every morning at work and get away with reading fresh stories for a good ten minutes while drinking a French Vanilla mug.

After learning how to discover my life's purpose in 20 minutes and interpreting the instructions I was ready to fetch the grain of salt from my A-L drawer in my desk's filing cabinet, but hesitated. Part of my brain really wanted to dismiss this experiment as charlatanism, but that could just be a mental smokescreen. It's two weeks later and I still haven't tried this because I'm positive that what I'm doing at the moment isn't going to be what's left on the paper.

Anyway, Internet, tell me: what's your purpose in life? And are you living up to it?

But the triple-choc fudge cookies helped a lot.

I don't trust new "concentrated" formulas and I use slightly more than half of what I used to use just to make sure.

Spoon - Got Nuffin (2009)

Today I've seen so many birds fucking, or fighting their rivals for the prize of passing their genes on.

So it's almost Spring.

For a while there I was taking photo of the duck couple I used to see every time I walked through the parklands to work. Of course I knew that it wasn't always the same duck couple I saw in different spots each day, sometimes right next to themselves, but ignoring this and revelling in my duck innocence made me happy. Even knowing that ducks hang out in couples generally makes me happy. Which is why when I walked home along the river and saw a single female duck alone on the grass I felt a bit sad for it. Then a few more metres down the path I passed some reeds in the water where two male ducks were with another female with the intention to impregnate her, drown her or both. And whatever their intention they were both fighting for the right. On her back.

So, thanks ducks, another optimistic day of cloud penetrating sun wasted by that display.

Because I broke the lightbulb above my head. It writes itself!

At first I thought I was bad at umpiring because players on each team would get shitty at me throughout the game. Complaints tend to fit into two categories. Category A - I can't believe you called that tiny touch as a foul. Category B - that guy touched me why didn't you call a foul?

The main complaint the other referees have about me is that I don't call enough fouls, or take control of the game enough. At first I thought that was just a mindset I had, to not call light slaps or cheap fouls and let the game be played. Where did this mindset come from? I realised, I'm a big man. I've spent my entire career being slapped, jumped on and hammered with nothing being called and now that's how I umpire! I didn't even comprehend this until I was driving home. Six teams worth of players got umpired like they were big men tonight. No wonder everyone complained. Except the big men. They were used to it.

I now burn 12 less calories per day.

In six days - on the sixth of September - the sun will be out at 6pm. For the first time since April. This means that if it takes you half an hour to get home from work you will have an equal amount of time to enjoy sunlight before it dissappears. From that point it just gets better.

22 days until House starts again.
24 days until NBL season begins.
34 days until Daylight Savings.
57 days until NBA season begins.
61 days until average maximum temperature is 25 degrees.
77 days until my wrist works again.
91 days until Summer!