Freakin' Hot

Oh look, I'm blogging again. This could become a nasty habit. I can't believe this weekend is almost over already, but considering the sweltering heat the sooner the weekend is over and I can sit in the most excellent air conditioning in our server room at work, the better in my humble opinion.

If you didn't know, Adelaide is celebrating it's record-breaking 2,181st consecutive day with temperatures over 198 degrees celsius and it is freakin' hot. Tuesday is supposed to be down to a rather cool (by comparison) 30 degrees and then we're down into the twenties leading up to the Easter Weekend. I think I also heard that it hasn't rained for 50+ days.

The weekend started well on Friday night after work, downing a couple of pints of Pure Blonde (very low carbs) with some of the crew from work at the local pub.

Saturday was a lazy day. Damn Facebook and Scrabulous took up most of a completely sinful, unproductive morning. Hey, I did do the dishes albeit in the dishwasher, a little bit of grocery shopping and cooked a mighty fine Chicken Tikka Massala. Last night we sat down and watched Jumper (see the trailer here and watch out for little Billy Elliott all grown up). I had been told it was not that good, but we liked it.

Sunday was taken up by the open day at Abbey's school. Normally these are held up at the main campus, but this year they decided to split them across the main campuses. We were hoping it would have been cancelled because of the heat, but no such luck. It's usually a very yawn-worthy affair with lots of religion and singing, neither of them my cup of tea unless I've had a few beers first. The service was rushed at super-speed and the ever-stuttery principal still managed to screw up his speech five times in two minutes.

The second part of the open day was a little more interesting as we got to walk around the parts of the school we wouldn't normally see, such as the new classrooms Abbey will move to in a couple of years time and the library. The temptation to buy hot dogs was almost too great, but we managed without.

Although I haven't mentioned it here (hell, I ain't mentioned much recently) I have been trying to cut the crap out of my daily diet for the last few weeks. Bar a minor indiscretion while we were on holiday I haven't eaten chocolate since Christmas. In more recent weeks I've started watching everything else a little more closely and have dropped about 4kgs since I began doing it seriously. Once the heat wears off a bit, I'll hit the treadmill (or maybe the road) and try and burn some weight off in addition to the calorie control.

Current weight as of Thursday morning is a rather podgy 94.2kgs. First goal is 85kgs and then hopefully down to 75kgs. I think that's my ultimate goal. Gotta say goodbye to those damn love handles...

After two three-day working weeks because of the Port Lincoln trip, the Easter weekend will present two four-day working weeks. This week may see a day trip to Melbourne and it looks like I am back off to Germany for a week in April for a conference and some workshops. It doesn't seem like six months since my last overseas travel.

I am still majorly bummed out at the loss of guitar legend Jeff Healey last week. As we all do going through our most impressionable years, we become attached to the famous icons that mean the most to us. To think that such a great, inspirational guy has gone is incredibly sad. I've been listening to a lot of his music again since hearing the news. It had been a while since I'd really sat down and cranked up his music...

I'll end this post with a YouTube clip (poor VHS quality with out of sych dubbing, but still good) of Healey playing with another favourite guitar god of mine, Stevie Ray Vaughan, who also died too early back in the early 1990's. Strange to think that Eric Clapton should also have been on the helicopter that killed him.