I thought it would be life as normal down here, and that the time change would only be a slightly annoying thing, where our watches would read differently, but otherwise not impact my life. That is not true. The time separation, arguably as much as the physical, is annoying me. By the time I have come home from whatever wonderful adventure I have been on for the day, all my friends and family are sleeping. I get emails from them at 3 am (I love the emails, don’t let this deter anyone, and they don’t come through on my phone till I’m awake). It just highlights that we are on almost opposite clocks.
It’s a bit funny, and really it’s normal I suppose. I don’t think about the time all over the world when I’m at home. Or at least I didn’t really before this. I’m sure I will now, being so much more involved here. But when I’m here, I am acutely aware of the time all over the world.
It’s today, right now as a matter of fact. In North America it’s Saturday. It’s weird that it’s actually been that long, but in some ways it feels so much longer. So much has transpired, and I have come so far, literally and figuratively. This is one of those punctuations of life that stand out in the timeline, both looking forward and backward.
It’s too bad that I’m not home for it, cause a lot of the people there would be great to see, it’s been many years for some of them. Many have families or careers that seem to defy the time since 98. I regret not being there, but this is pretty good too. Christmas is soon, and I will see many of them then.
Here today it is really a perfect day. The sun is gaining heat, and it feels like summer is coming back. Yesterday was insanely windy, but today it’s clear and calm.
Every now and then songs stand out to me, as I’m sure they do to everyone. I thought I would make a way to share them here so I can remember what music impacted me and what I was listening to over time.
This song stuck me at the beginning of the year, as it highlights a central tenet of the philosophy by which I conduct my life.
Click the blue triangle to have a listen.
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Google’s StreetView is causing a little bit of a stir for some privacy freaks in Australia… If you’ve never seen it before, you can basically see what a street looks like over the internet… just look at the google maps link to the right to see what my street looks like. You’ll have to click the Street View link on the top right.
Australia seems like a strange target for Google to roll this out. I honestly don’t know why they did it here before Canada, but what do I know?
This is the front of my apartment building. It’s a little off on the address with the maps, but the addresses are approximate it says.
On Saturday night one of the student groups here, TIME (Towards International Medical Equity), held a trivia night. A few folks from my PBL group and their friends got together a group and we made a table to try our hand. It was a fun round of weird trivia, some local Australian impossibilities, “O Canada” was one of the answers, and the first question to come up was: “What does the word ‘icthyophobia’ mean?” Ah… finally, my general biology degree has become useful at Med school!
We started out running… in first place and with each round floated around the top, but then fell back a little. Julz didn’t want to finish first, so she was particularly happy with second, being the highest you can place without attracting all the attention and scrutiny that numero uno has to endure. Anyways, it was fun.
And I’m pretty happy I did it. I have long thought that it’s something I should do while I’m young and healthy, but have never got around to doing it. I tried once back in Canada but fell ill on my appointment day. This time however I was ok. I felt great and I told them I was sick a week ago, but had been feeling better since then. I was a little apprehensive about it, but it turned out to be not so bad.
Surprisingly, I didn’t feel a thing afterwards really, I didn’t feel lightheaded or out of breath at all, I never got woozy or anything, I just went on normally. It was a little sick to see that big bag of my own blood outside of my body, and to feel the warmth of the tube as it rested on my arm. Seeing that blood reminded me of the time I bled from my tonsil stumps when I was 21. I had tonsillectomy and a day or so later started to bleed at night. It poured out, probably half as much as I just donated. It also coagulated really strangely in the cup as I recall… anyways, that’s a pretty gross memory. This blood letting session was much cleaner.
Someone out there will get my blood and it will course through their body as it did mine, which I still think is a really disgusting idea. Maybe I’ll get over that as time goes on.
Since being sick and not really doing anything else otherwise, I’ve seen a lot of the apartment lately. This afternoon I started to feel a bit better, and a bit cabin feverish at the same time. So I decided to go downtown and just wander. It was a pretty nice afternoon and I went all over downtown and then headed to southbank. It’s easy to forget that you’re living in a place that looks like this sometimes. It just becomes what is normal.
Here’s a bad idea… get really sick, so that you can’t really move around very much. Then stay in bed all day, so you have that sick lethargic didn’t-do-anything-all-day feeling. Then watch three episodes of House back to back. Then try to sleep. With your clothes on. I tried this and I ended up tossing and turning all night dreaming of how the people who test blood are trying to cheat you and they’ll just as soon stab you with the disease blood to see if it’s still diseased as actually do the test. My mind went over and over through all the bad things that could come from blood tests… That House show… I don’t think they’re really true to life. I know that will come as a shock, but that’s just my opinion. Anyways, I was really sick this week, and am now just starting to feel a bit better. I still get out of breath pretty easy… which means walking up the hill to my house is sometimes a two step process.
This is a video I took in June some time when I was walking to the Princess Alexandra Hospital. I had my camera set on slow motion video, but didn’t know that the slow mo would be so slow. So, it’s choppy. I wanted to do it again, and use the regular video setting and then speed it up, but given the weird looks I got marching all that way with a camera stuck in people’s faces, I probably won’t. So here it is. People who have been there before will recognize it. [Read more →]
Nowhere near as bad as I thought it could be. Actually when I think about it rationally, it was precisely what I imagined. I suppose it’s another example of the fear of the unknown.
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