I was gripping the barbell in the gym today and I noticed that the pinky finger on my left hand had wrapped itself around the bar, aligned nicely with the other digits.

This was notable as for the past few months of winter this behaviour has not happened, and I've been forced to use my right hand to position my left hand's fingers as part of racking the barbell. Maybe that palmaris longus tendon was useful after all. (Chat GPT disagrees). Now that the air is warm and there's literal flowers blowing around the neighbourhood, my hands work properly again.

This is relieving as it means I don't have to move to Thailand but also means that if I do move to Thailand that my wrists will probably work over there. Also thank goodness for Chat GPT, and LLMs in general which mean I don't need to use my hands as much as I used to any more. Although if AI development continues along its current velocity, maybe I won't need to use my hands at all, and I'll be moving to Thailand sooner than expected.

There are lots of things that Chat GPT can't do for me right now, like clean my pool, and - some time in the next few decades - wipe my butt and open my medicine bottle. Today I bought my first real robot. It's an intelligent pool cleaner that WALL-E's around the bottom of the pool and also climbs the walls and brushes down the waterline to remove any build up.

It's pretty cool, and it only cost $600. It's comforting to know that the robots might be useful in my lifetime, but I wouldn't trust it with the toilet paper for now.

I don't recall even roughly when I first pumped a squirt of Normal conditioner from the bottle in my shower. Some time after the Battle of Issus. It was definitely a while before we moved in 2025, because I remember considering throwing it out instead of packing it. There was no shelf in the old bathroom, and living on the tiles came with some accumulated soap scum.

I did pack it, then we moved and for 16 months the dirty bottle was at eye level every time I showered. It kept on pumping out conditioner though, day after day.

For some reason, the conditioner bottle reminded me of the time I climbed Reinebringen at the end of the Norway trip. Perhaps because - like I had been that night - it was perched on a high up ledge in unpredictable weather. I must have mused this in June last year, and every shower since has prompted the same holiday memory. This could be why I still resisted throwing it out, but the main reason was that it still somehow had conditioner in it. Depressing the nozzle must be releasing less than a gram each time. It felt sisyphean. I was ready to move on, have other holidays, use that unopened bottle of conditioner that I also packed and moved at the start of 2025.

Finally, last month the pumper ran dry. The momentous occasion had arrived. I picked the bottle up from the shelf, and it felt weightier than I had expected. I opened it and peered inside. There was still a considerable amount of conditioner inside...

I was incredibly conflicted at this point. I had been drafting this entry in my head every shower since April and my anniversary of the first shower in the new house. I persisted with the old conditioner, despite needing to pump for extended periods of time to eke any white stuff out. I got tired of this after another week, and finally threw it in the bin today.

This week, coincidentally, I also installed my new great white loofah in the shower. This has actually been in the drawer for the last month. I chose not to hang it until after we got back from the islands, for fate temptation reasons. It's a lot more abrasive than I thought it would be. I don't think that it will be present in the shower in 2028 to conjure any memories of swimming off of Whitehaven Beach.

It was only 25 degrees in the pool this afternoon, despite it being over 30 degrees on the pavers next to the pool. I don’t think it has been under 25 degrees in the pool since September, which is coincidentally when I started a note titled “Things I've put in my pool” to commentate on the painful and occasionally rewarding tasks that come from being responsible for maintaining a pool.

Now it looks like pool season might be coming to a close, I need to dive back into that list and update it otherwise I might only post two entries this month instead of three.

Things I've put in my pool

Water test strips
Phosphates remover
Gordy (the pool robot)
Bricks (accidentally)
Hydrochloric acid
Cyanuric Acid
Salt
Gordy again
Myself
The wifey
Nash (once, briefly)
Diving rings
Inflatable basketball hoop and inflatable basketballs
Foam basketball
A lot more hydrochloric acid and test strips.
Myself and the wifey a few more times.
Friends
Friend’s children
Gordy (a lot)
More water
The wifey
Myself

Things I've put in my self in my pool

Beer

I rode my bike seventeen kilometres this morning down to West Beach along the coast.

Back in Spring I decided that over summer I was going to make roast chicken, feta and baby spinach salads my staple. I must have eaten that meal over sixty times since November. The addition of Lebanese Cucumber, red onion, rocket, and tomato was a great combination. I call this a success. It's amazing what you can achieve when you set your mind to it.

At the start of autumn I made a mental decision to use the cooling months for longer bike rides. Today's self fulfilling trip to the sea was the first step towards that. The ride was more about conditioning my neck, wrists and legs to handle the ride than the coffee I drank on the sand in the middle of it.

I think my goal is to try and ride all the way to Hahndorf. And then to drink a litre of German beer. I think back to 2020 when I bought my bike it was at the same time as I got a good deal on a carton of Weihenstephans and so I conditioned myself to drink German beers after a ride. Hahndorf is like fifty kilometres away up a big hill so I'm not sure if this is going to occur but if there's no Armageddon before the end of May I might make it happen just like all those salads.

After my ride I used the public holiday to fix a few more issues around the house. I found a down light in the garage that worked when I plugged it in. I thought this might be a replacement for the dead light over the pantry. This is the kind of problem you need to fix as the sun sets earlier.

I pulled out the dead light hoping that I could follow a cable back to a standard socket and not any hardwiring. Not only was the old light not hardwired, but the socket itself was mobile and I could pull it all the way to the cutout in order to replace that light easily and push everything back up into the ceiling.

I found this extremely convenient, because my last LED light replacement at my old house required an electrician to crawl around in my roof and to rig up a little clean zone due to the excessive insulation. Whoever built my current house seems to have actually had a plan to maintain it. So I had a beer in the pool in their honour.

I spent over an hour lifting up a corner of my grass tonight so I could replace a sprinkler head. Youtube made it look very easy, but I think my garden shovel was the wrong tool compared to the pointer spades I saw online.

I eventually did uncover enough to unscrew the top and put a new head on. Luckily when I mowed over it last week I just clipped it, and the barrel was intact. I probably wouldn’t have mowed over it if I had a better lawn mower, but I don’t. What am I supposed to do? Buy a garden spade and a new lawnmower and a new shaver head every few months?

On Monday we had a blackout for a few hours. When the power came back on, the alarm system control by the back door was flashing. I have enough LEDs in my life so I pressed some buttons to try and stop the flashing. This armed the alarm system. I did not receive the code to the alarm system from the original owners. A few seconds later the alarm went off.

The house alarm was very loud. Luckily I knew where the box was - in the roof cavity. I also had experience from the old house which also had an alarm system. At that house I unplugged the alarm system, but later it went off and I learned that there was a battery connected for backup. So, I went into the roof cavity and there I learned that the alarm was hardwired in this house AND the battery connection was corroded on. Fortunately, I was in there with a Philips head screwdriver that I’d needed to get into the alarm box in the first place. And I realised that I could use this to unscrew and pull all the wires from their connections. This took a few minutes, and it was quite satisfying hearing each siren and alarm go silent as I pulled out wire after wire. It was like defusing a bomb in a movie.

I am not sure I have done anything to actually improve the house recently, despite many attempts. I can’t just blame my tools. I think I am the tool. I did buy an inflatable basketball hoop slash ring toss for the pool. Let’s count that as a win.

Henley Beach for Ice-Cream

Park Run (walk), cafes, swimming, sausages.

Onkaparinga Gorge, Somerton, Grange

Bakery, Family, Friends, Reading.

Yes, it was another perfect long weekend of hiking and beach walks, catch ups and coffee, back roads and BBQs...

...Partially ruined by Big Box Hardware and home ownership.

At least the front lawn looks less weedy now.

I gained one kilogram of weight including 900 grams of lean muscle mass over the weekend. According to my smart scales anyway, which sell for half a grand on top of hoping I'll sign up for their monthly premium subscription. So I suspect they have incentive to lie to me. Especially considering the amount of working out I did over the weekend was far out-ratio'd by time consuming pizza, lemon delicious, Freddo cake, baguettes, protein bars and coffees.

My scales also claim based on the electrical pulses it sends through my body that I have a biological age of 30. It's claimed this since October, so I was expecting on my birthday it might go up, which it did not! Even more impressive is that my birthday was actually weeks ago according to my account data, a measure I took for privacy obfuscation.

I have complained a bit recently about having to maintain a pool. Something which is very much a first world problem, but also legitimately frustrating. I took the water in for testing this afternoon expecting another poor result. In fact, today my chlorine was in the good range! The salt and hydrochloric acid was off instead, but the phosphates were back to healthy levels after I poured something from Bunnings in there last week. So I felt like maybe I was getting better at pool chemistry. And if pool issues are a first world problem does that mean that if you solve them you win the first world? Like it's the last level?

Tonight at the quiz we technically came second again, but I left quite happy anyway because I won a jug of beer during Tough Teacher. It was "guess the novel" and after a few passages I said "The Great Gatsby” and I was right!

I didn't remember any of those passages from when I read the book between naps in 2011. I just got an F Scott Fitzgerald vibe and I trusted my instincts. I also did a lot of squats at lunchtime. Maybe those scales are right...

This slip of the tongue has stuck with me since it was misspoken at the start of a webinar some months back, another life.

In early April, booking accommodations and scrutinising ferry schedules, Norway felt much more imminent than it did two days ago.

Work deadlines, life events, upcoming holidays, a moment to sit on the couch. Everything was happening in these parallel layers of time which felt unquestionably persistent.

The present was constantly becoming the past, so was the future. Memories of old houses, old exercises (side planks!), old injuries, old feelings. All mixing in with the new.

I haven't had a smoothie for months. I used to drink ten a week. I've been eating almonds almost daily, after forsaking them based on a blood test in 2023. I'm nothing but living echoes. My house is no longer mine. Driving around my old neighbourhood and GI tract I see new shops and changed roads. You move on, but time persists.