I spent a good portion of the week feeling more than a little shithouse... I think I came down with a minor bout of the flu or something... so I wasn't feeling on the top of my game for most of the week... fortunately the worst of it seems to be over, and hopefully I manage to avoid it again for the rest of Winter.
I started the second Will Kostakis book, Sidekicks... and I'm loving it to bits. I think I like The First Third more from a story perspective, but this is still fantastic.
I'm also completely obsessed with the podcast 99% Invisible... I'm mainlining all the episodes currently one after the other during my bus rides to work and my walks home. It's all about weird little quirks of architecture and design... or more accurately, how people interact with those quirks. And the host, Roman Mars (I know, it's just the best name ever), has one of those voices you want to listen to endlessly.
Work was pretty much just work... there were a couple of days that were somewhat light on, but again I'm pretty sure that this is just the calm before the proverbial storm once the other project launches. Then all the work that other people have been doing will end up with my team. Joy.
My standing desk continues to be both good and make me glad to sit down at the end of the day.
To be honest, nothing much happened this week until the end of the week... when everything seemed to happen all at once.
Wednesday was slightly weird, but ended up as a good thing... Owlgirl came back from getting something to eat and she'd gotten one of the awesome homemade sausage rolls from a place down the street... which made me suddenly want a sausage roll. So I headed down the street to get one, only to find the shop deserted. The door was open, music was on, but not a single staff member to be seen anywhere.
So I waited... and I waited... and I called out "hello"... and I waited... and another customer came in to buy a small iced coffee... and still no staff. Had I had the right change, I may have grabbed one of the sausage rolls and left the money on the counter, but I didn't, plus witnesses are never good. So instead I just left. And I think I saw the owner (who only bought the place reasonably recently) standing and talking to one of the Big Issue guys in the street. Yeah, buddy, you're going to be out of business in about six months you keep this shit up. I've already stricken the place from my mental rolodex.
Anyway, the sausage rolls were a great success, I probably ate more than I should have, took a couple in for a few select people at work (ie the ones who begged beforehand when I said I was making them) and still had enough left over for dinner on Thursday, and part of dinner Friday.
Thursday I left work at lunchtime, walked home, ran a couple of errands and then headed off to Progression Tattoo to finally get my cover-up done. When I got there, my artist, Tom, came out to see me and show me the design he'd done. And it was pretty much everything I didn't want. Argghh! Drama! However he was really cool about the whole thing and went and got some paper and we talked through what I was thinking, he went away found a photo that was more in the ballpark and then drew something up for me on the spot. Talk about good service.
I was much happier with the second version, and after some back and forth about a couple of other bits, he drew up the final version and we got started.
The worst parts were, as always, the very beginning and the very end. Mostly, I think, because in both instances he was mostly working around the edges, which meant that he was tattooing the soft, tender skin on the inner/outer extremes of my arm, and owie. Holy fuckballs owie to be exact.
When I go back for the colour (this was just the outline and some shading), I think I might just take some headphones and either listen to podcasts or rock the Journey game soundtrack... podcasts might be better for keeping me distracted, although the Wrestlemania they had on the teevee in the big room was doing a reasonable job of that for the most part.
Weirdly, beyond it hurting in the spot he's actively tattooing, it never really hurts until after he's finished. I'm going to chalk that up to the endorphins. And it's not like it really "hurts", I always equate it to a reasonable sunburn... it's more that your skin is really hot, and anything touching it is a little painful, especially hot water.
I was there from 2:30 to around 5:45pm, but because he had to redraw the design we really didn't get started until just after 3:15, so it was a couple of hours of solid work. It's still working it's way through the angry red phase at the moment, and it still feels hotter than the rest of my skin, but overall it's not too bad.
From there I came home, had a shower, ate some leftover sausage rolls for dinner and then headed back out to Tink's place to get my hair did.
Short version, we tweaked the cut a little... the colour remains the same (although I am considering going back to my natural colour at some stage just to see if I've actually gone all grey and shit).
Otherwise it was pretty much business as usual. She cut hair, we chatted.
Friday was a fairly quiet day at work, but I got a call first thing in the morning about moving my chiro appointment back an hour and seeing the other chiro... so after work I wandered down to the Mall, poked around the shops for a bit and then had my appointment. That led to more poking around afterwards and I picked up one of those American Crew value packs at Priceline, which is always good.
But given that it's no longer Daylight Savings, it meant that by the time I got home just before 7pm it was already dark, and had been for the majority of my walk.
Today was semi-productive but overly a little dull.
Ma came down as usual, I seriously need to get back into the groove of not only being ready when she arrives but also having tidied up a little... I'll get there... I just need to get my butt into gear in the mornings.
I will say that Ma's reaction to my tattoo wasn't exactly what I expected (I was expecting "it's very big") but it was in the ballpark (a lot of "oh my goodness").
Anyway, we headed off to the supermarket, and did the usual kind of shop, at least usual in relation to the new supermarket. Once of the annoying things, a little like when I was trying to find stuff in Coles on Wednesday, is that I don't automatically know where everything is. Both of my old regular supermarkets I knew where things were... I might not know exactly where every individual product was, but I knew what aisle things were in.
I'm planning on making a big old batch of vegetable soup, throw in some chicken breasts, then blend it down and throw the chicken back in... I still haven't perfected my chicken soup, but I'll have another crack at it.
After we'd come back and unpacked things, we realised that we really didn't have all that much we wanted or needed to do... so after a quick visit to the Village to pick up my dry cleaning and some things on special at Coles, we came back here and Ma went through the boxes of my artwork, cataloguing where everything was while I made some kind of headway on sorting some other stuff out, and moving yet more stuff around. Like I said, productive, but dull.
And that was it really... that actually lasted for a good chunk of the afternoon, until I was over it, and then I sent Ma on her merry way.
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