Word of the week: Paak - mouth

In my life: Do you ever have weeks where everything seems to happen together? That was this week for me at work, with a release, regression cut off and feature cut off all happening together. Suffice to say it felt crazy busy with all the support requests coming in and I’m really glad the week is over. This also meant that much of the eating healthy went out the window - I didn’t want to cook after a busy day at work - and a lot of ordering in was done.

But I’m slowly getting back to my usual exercise routine. I haven’t heard back from the GP yet, which usually means the test results were normal. So, I’ve gone ahead and added runs back in, though it’s just two instead of the usual three. There's a distinct nip in the air in the mornings now that we're seeing the last of the summer days and I will likely start taking the parka with me for walks. On the PT front we seem to be adding in newer exercises, now that the original ones are easier than before.

This week marked our 11th Valentines Day together but we're not big on celebrating it extravagantly. This time the occasion was marked with a solitary shared carrot cupcake in deference to our goal to eat healthier. Then we caught up on NCIS Sydney in the evening. All in all, the perfect day.

Woke up on Saturday morning and went for a walk/run towards Crow's Nest. The route there has a fair bit of gradient, so I've always found that to be a good work out compared to our local park which is fairly flat. Got a good walk in, grabbed some coffee and came home to relax for a bit, got a panic practice guitar session in, and then went out for the first guitar class of the term. It's been nearly two months since we had a class (or any practice) so was fairly rusty but it's always fun to get back to it especially with the whole group.

We also had the last produce market of the season, so we went and grabbed some essentials (one of our friends hilariously kept trying to get us to buy a dip he had tried) and then popped back home to drop all of that off.

We then decided to head to a cafe near the train station for lunch, only to change our minds mid-way and head to Kirribilli to try the taco place we'd seen a few times before. It's always pretty full which made me think it might be good, but Mexican food in Australia sadly continues to disappoint.

I wanted to see if we could do the bridge walk after that, but it was blazing hot and we had no sun protection (as we we'd planned only for a short walk), so we decided against it. I'm continually amazed that me, the person who'd refuse to walk the short distance to the train station, is now happy to walk so much all the time.

This Sunday was fair day, and I initially thought of pairing that with a visit to the Chau Chak Wing Museum or the White Rabbit gallery, both of which have been on my list for a while. But the hot weather from the previous day continued on Sunday so I finally decided against it. I ended the day watching a new to me Kdrama, The Red Sleeve, before accidently falling asleep on the couch, hence the day's delay in this week's weekly notes.

On my screens:

  1. ThamePo (Thai, Queer, YouTube, Ongoing) - Yikes, parasocial fans much? Such an accurate portrayal of the drama that occurs when an idol is caught in a dating scandal. I really didn't expect GMMTV to go there.

    It was sad to see Pepper and Gam break up. I'm not the biggest fan of the "I'm breaking up with you for your own good" trope but I'm giving this show a chance to see what it does with it when it comes to the main couple who continue to be totally adorable.
  2. The Red Sleeve (Korean, Netflix) - Apparently the show is a fictionalized account of the lives of King Jeongjo and his consort Uibin Seong. Historical Kdramas are often so fascinating simply because of the amount of political intrigue in them and this one has been a great example of that so far. Will have to see how much of it is true and how much was made up for the show.
  3. NCIS Sydney (S1, Australian, 10Play) - This continues to be fun, with me trying to figure out all the locations they depict in the show. This week I realized Sydney has a Royal Australian Navy Heritage Collection and Main Repository which is only reachable by boat. It also led to this website which has a huge list of museums in Australia, many of which I hadn't heard of before. Something to add to the must visit list.

On my bookshelf: I read a double agent, spy trope Shameless fanfic after seeing a snippet of that pop up on my twitter feed. I have no idea about the show or the fandom, but it was a pretty fun read. That of course led to my usual search for more spy fanfic stories on AO3 but finding good ones in a fandom I'm familiar with is always difficult. What I wouldn't give for a proper morally grey protagonist character in a novel/fanfic.

On my playlist: Matthew Ifield is a young Australian singer who first popped up on my YouTube feed this week for his Christmas song covers. Those reminded me of Michael Bublé's Christmas songs, so I went down the rabbit hole and then ended up listening to this song multiple times. So, tell me

"Are we ever really ready for love? Is it written in the stars way up above?"

On my camera:

Local Doggo was very curious about the church chickens this week. Church chickens were appropriately wary of the big doggo trying to sniff them.

Thanks for tagging along