Sitrep

The last few months have been all over the shop really.

Spent the rest of my summer looking after mum and did a couple of army courses. Met some good guys (and some amazing NCOs), and spent a goodly amount of taxpayers money on pyrotechnics. Got paid for it too.

Since then its been a bit chaotic - I've moved out into an apartment so this is the first time I've actually had to look after everything myself - its been a good learning experience but we've only just begun to settle down into a routine and so the past few weeks have been fairly chaotic. Getting the internet connected was a pain in the ass - ended up costing me $220 more than it should have and I needed to dig round in the MDF with a screwdriver myself to get it working. Learned a lot about how the phone systems work though, so it was worthwhile. The money thing has ceased to bother me (though it did at the time), especially since whatever I am earning now is pittance compared to what my starting salary will be when I graduate.

On the subject of phones, I picked myself up an iPhone to replace my old nokia. It's a great bit of kit when jailbroken - the lack of internet for the first month in the house was less of a problem than expected as I could use the phone (though my computer rejected internet tethering, which was a pain) to write documents, save them and attach them to email, etc. Very handy for various hospital related things. Being in Australia, and on 3, I ended up logging up some roaming data charges. Plenty of stories about the how and why of this over the rest of the internet (try whirlpool if you're interested), but long story short is I am trying my hand at C++ to try and write an automatic APN changer. Currently using DragonfireSDK, which is mostly designed for games and so am thinking of having a go at building a hackintosh and using the official SDK. It's been a long while since I've done anything like this, and it's interesting at least... although my coding skillz are understandably rusty.

Most of my time has been taken up with hospitals. Been logging anywhere from 6 to 12 hour days so far, averaging about 8-9 hours. This isn't a bad thing - I'm learning loads and enjoying myself immensely (this is going to be my career. I have found my muse.), but it has meant that on top of sleep, feeding and cleaning myself not much else has been going on. Exercise has been squeezed in wherever it can - I've taken to running to hospital each day - 80% of the time with the weight vest. With a camelback with water, lunch and clothes in it I'm running about 5k a day with between 5-6 or 15-16 kgs extra, and running each 2.5k block in about 10-19 minutes. What I can say is I ran a BFA recently in my fivefingers (new leather FiveFinger TrekKSOs have the Ukemi seal of approval. I cannot more highly recommend a piece of footwear. If I could go through surgery to make my feet into them, I would do it) and 10kg weight vest in 10:24. Which meant I beat 5/6 members of my section (to be fair, they are pretty unfit. Still, a bit embarrasing for them :P). In general though, I have found my running times to have been pretty erratic, so I'm planning on getting myself a nike+ipod pedometer to help me track such things and try and better push myself.

Which neatly segues me into the next and most common topic to grace this blog - exercise. The running (more than I have ever regularly done before) has been great, but my traditional domains of strength and power have been untrained (though maintained and possibly improved through my 10-minute alarm) My spirit has suffered a bit from this, but not as much as one might expect. I have a bullheaded nature, and as I have developed intellectually over the past few years it has expressed itself in an intellectual manner. So whilst my body has been maintained through some army courses and some exercise, and my intellect worked through study of the human body (it is so fascinating), my spiritual training has been somewhat unfocused. I think it has been there - I spent two months looking after broken family members and study brings it's own kind of mental strength... But it remains that there hasn't been a situation where I have been balls-to-the-wall working in quite some time, where I am in pain enough that I stop feeling it, exhausted enough that I go deaf, sweating enough that my eyes burn, and where the only thing pushing me onwards is my own self-discipline. So I feel as if I've gone a little soft of late.

So.

Found a building over the road I can exercise on. Going to write a few small workouts for it. Simple, cross-fit style ones that can be done in 15-20 minutes. I'm sure I waste more time than that a day right now.

Going to do my weekly runs and time them. Try to get them down to a pre-SF selection standard, yet with the weight vest.

Going to smash this year academically. Pulled a very-near HD average for the past two years.

We'll see how it goes.