I am very tired. It has been a long day. Even though it felt peaceful, I felt a lot of pressure to finish work on the experiments for our upcoming paper. Everything looked fine, except that for a few isolated cases the results contained unexplained glitches. I have tried very hard to be careful — [...]
Conditions: 23°, clear skies Time: 19:10 BMI: 31.83 Nothing much to report. Calves very tight but, once again, no cramping and no shinsplints. Instead, my legs were crying out to start running. I took a slightly different route today. I hadn’t realized that was a corridor of “parks” that stretches across a large swath of [...]
When I have a smoke in the backyard at night, the neighbours’ bright outside light shining in my eyes is sometimes disturbing, but tonight I found an interesting use for it. It casts a sharp profile against the opposite wall of the yard, and I can clearly see how “bendy” my spine is. Perhaps it [...]
I might have mentioned before that our university has a peculiar system when it comes to research funding. The government supports research in various inept ways, but one sensible way is that they pay a generous amount for each paper published. In my case, it amounts to about 6 months’ post-tax salary. This is more [...]
It feels as if I have done nothing today, while I have, in fact, accomplished at lot. Somehow the day just slipped by. Other days seem so long. It reminds me of how subjective our perception of time can be. Obviously we are all aware of this when we are awake, but I often notice [...]
Conditions: 20°, clear skies Time: 18:50 It should have been Week 1 Day 7, but the important thing is not to quit when you fall behind but to get right back on schedule. Calve muscles were really hurting, almost cramping, but not shinsplints. I have seen people bleeding from shinsplints and it is not the [...]
This morning I had an appointment with a physiotherapist. I have never been to one before, but my GP recommended it. Last year August my back was hurting badly, although not as severely as it had done in the past. X-rays were taken and luckily the problem appeared not to be a disc, but just [...]
Oops. I had to miss today. I was working through the night and up to my appointment with the physio. After that I worked some more, napped, then off to Bellville for more work-ish kind of stuff, and finally back home at 22:00. I have moved everything on the schedule one day forward. Marathon target [...]
In 1993 I was sharing a flat with two fellow students. [I have a lot of food memories from this time, including my first, not-too-successful attempt at gazpacho.] Just around the corner, they opened a “food court”: a mini-mall with restaurants of various kinds. I remember a Nando’s and some kind of ice-cream parlour. The [...]
The birth rate in South is about 2.11. Among some people (a tiny minority) there is some worry about the different birth rates of different races. The reason for this difference is probably cultural. Or is it economic? As formerly poor black people rise through the middle class, their average birth rate declines. But this [...]