Physical therapy

These past few days I've taken up physical therapy. No, I haven't been injure & am not in need of some form of medical & physio treatment. I'm taking 'physical therapy' much in the same way peopl take 'retail therapy', but instead of shopping to clear my head, I exhaust myself by doing physical labour. Yes, construction. No, I'm not cash-strapped, and in any case this construction 'job' that I've been doing doesn't actually pay. I, in fact, have to shell out the cost of all material PLUS put in my own labour. So here's the story:

A long time ago my father bought a pond set (water feature plus liner) and a few months ago while taking a week of annual leave he decided to put that in use. But my father being my father, instead of doing it properly, he simply dug a hole, put the liner on, & weighed it down with some loose bricks & pot plants. I've never liked that look, so I decided what while they're gone I'd redo that pond completely with bricks & mortor. After dabbling in with a couple of hand-drawn designs I finalised it with a digitised version & order the bricks. I was told the bricks were supposed to arrive on Thursday so I waited & waited, until 10:30 (am) or so when my phone rang, telling me that the day's delivery was cancelled because of a light drizzle & will call again to tell me when the actual delivery would be. Fuming! I switched my work days & all! So, 5-ish & they called again, saying that the bricks would be delivered Friday instea. Great, need to call in 'sick'. But at least the bricks finally arrived. I already had a couple of bags of brick layer mortor mix ready so after spending a couple of hours Thursday preparing the site (tipping out water, flattening ground, washing liner, etc...) I began shifting the bricks (all 288 of them!!) from the front to the back yard. That alone took hours & by the end of all the shifting I was buggered! Still, I managed to try my hand in brick laying & mixed a little mortor mix to start on the foundation. Then, I carried on for about 3-4 hours on Saturday (with some help from my brother, digging & stuff) before we ran out of mortor mix 4-ish when the bricks were only about 2-layer tall (I designed the pond side to be 3-layer tall & the plant side 5-layer tall). Sent brother out to get 3 more bags of mortor when he went out for tennis Sunday morning, & then spent another couple of hours in the afternoon laying more bricks, carpeting the pond size (old carpet as pond underlay), filling it with water to weigh it down & get the best fit, & leaving for Beck's b'day dinner. Then, it was a full-day of brick-laying, tipping out water again because too much muck (soil & mortor) dropped in, refilling the pond, & planting out. In the end, 3-layer was simply not deep enough so the pond side ended up being 4-layer tall, & I ran out of mortor again so 3/4 of the plant side was 5-layer tall, with the pond-plant common wall 4-layer tall. But now it's all done, & I'm quite tired, & my finger tips ratchet from the mortor seeping thru the gloves. Changed the planting scheme a little too & got rid of the side over-hang which was to cover up the gap between side wall & house wall. Now, onto the next challenge. Well, not so much 'next' but on-going - the old dreaded PhD. More books to borrow tomorrow, if they've been returned that is (even though I request that THREE weeks ago.....!!!!)

Capping off Holocaust Awareness week with a day of Auschwitz

It was Holocaust Awareness Week and because of this I wore a paperclip on my shirt (well, for half a day anyway). To cap the week off, I spent a day of Auschwitz. (I said 'of', not 'at', although I'd really like to go some day). But first, here's a re-cap of the weekend so far:

Friday | Decided to go to Flemington Market to stock up on less-perishable but still fresh produce. After some housework at home I set off, 1st to the library for a quick return-&-borrow, then Flemington. I got most of what I wanted to get - celery, tomatoes that actually taste like tomatoes instead of bland fleshy things, a sack of potatoes, carrots, zuccinis... & some other things that I didn't plan on buying. For instance, I didn't realise the plants section at Flemington sell, well, plants that are SO much cheaper that at nurseries & other places. I, thus, bought a big pot of white cyclamen for a small $8 which normally it would cost somewhere in the $20 vicinity in other places. Bargain. All that at Flemington only took an hour, so I proceeded to go to the nearby DFO which I also haven't been in quite a while. I knew that the Oroton outlet at Market City looks like closing down because the other week when I tried to go there for fresh produce I saw them having extra 30% off of a much depleted stock & I saw this square sterling silver ring again which I 1st found at DFO some months ago. It was $99 down to $69. Didn't buy it of course, because I thought I remember it being just $29 at DFO all those months ago. This time at DFO, however, I saw the same square ring again, & indeed it was $29 so, like usual, I quickly snapped it up. I walked around for a bit more, looking at things here & there & buying absolutely nothing more, that is, until Jag which is 2 stores down from Oroton but because I went the other direction, completely at the end of my, umm, walk. Fabulous crocodile leather shoes reduced from $140 to just $40!!! I know I was actually looking for replacement of BLACK leather shoes, but since Aquila chooses to remain so damn expensive even at its outlet stores, I had to settle for the dark brown, very pointy, crocodile leather slip-ons instead (no lace-ups please, too lazy for that!). Quick lunch at home, some cooking (soup mainly) & putting away the produce it was time a quick half-hour work-out before dinner at the Fung's. Naturally we followed that up with 4 rounds of mahjongg (lost about 1/3 but who cares 'cos we never play with real money :P). 2 hours of Wii before finally going to bed at 1:30 even though I was already quite buggered by 12.

Saturday | Because of Wii I didn't end up getting up until 11 this morning. What I had planned as a day of catching up with my reading ended up being a day of TV, & here's where the day of Auschwitz comes in. 2 back-to-back episodes of Oprah was on Auschwitz, 1st with Dr Elie Wiesel then the winners of the Oprah essay competition discussing the impact of the Wiesel book 'Night'. There were many footages of Auschitz in the snow, plus some of other, more recent genocides like Rwanda, Bosnia, & Darfur. There was, of course, a very well scheduled (manipulated?) reunion of a Rwandan refugee with parents & younger siblings which she's not seen or contacted in 12 years. That was my 1st 'of' of Auschwitz. After lunch I settled down to watch 5 episodes of the Amazing Race All Stars, 1 leg of which the teams travelled from Warsaw to Krakow via Auschwitz-Birkenau. The task for to light candles & have a minute of silence. Rather daunting. That was my 2nd 'of' of Auschwitz. My 3rd 'of' of my day of Auschwitz was just now. Having been forced to read up on abjection as part of the 'dressin gup' of my thesis I turned to Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror. Not 5 pages into her explanation of abjection there pops Auschwitz again as an example of 1 of her explanations of abjection - morbid fascination. It just seems I can't escape Auschwitz today.

Tomorrow onwards | More reading. 3 chapters of Kristeva to go thru in total & then there are probably 20 other articles on various things. Luckily I've already finished my readiing for this coming week's lab. Oh crap, dental on monday, & during the day. Great, need to make special trip down @&%#^&@

BTW, it was 'no' & no' from the 2 jobs that I applied a few weeks back, so no moving down to Melbourne any time soon.

A sure sign of aging...

On my way to the library just now I passed by a couple of Asian students, with the guy looking into the girl's phone. As I was passing by them I heard the guy said "that's actually a pretty good picture of a camel toe". Taken aback, I had another think about what I thought I heard before quickly realising that he actually said "that's actually pretty good picture for a camera phone"!! This of course got me thinking some more - is my hearing going that badly? I know bad hearing is a hereditary trait in my family, but surely not (way :P) before the age of 30? Am I really wearing a giant paperclip on my shirt? (Wait, how did I jumpt to that topic all of a sudden?) So many questions. (BTW, the paperclip is apparently a thing for Holocaust Awareness Week. This guy passed me a flyer with a paperclip on it which reads:

By wearing a paperclip during Holocaust Awareness Week, you are creating a link in the chain of awareness about the Holocaust and genocide around the world past & present.

Because I'm such a good Jew (& invalid & political prisoner & homo & Gypsy & Jehovah's Witness) I'm therefore wearing the paperclip. For the week anyways...