Barb and I are feeling very proud of our son! Having completed a podiatry degree, Toby has now officially found work at a clinic offering various manual therapies, including physiotherapy, osteopathy, and a few other modalities with names I can’t pronounce. To be honest, I’m not 100% on what the difference is between most of these things – but then, we’re both history professors.
Anyway, the clinic is sending him to a complete a trigger point dry needling course. Sydney is such a fantastic place to holiday and I’m sure he’ll get a few days to explore the beautiful countryside. Now, don’t ask me to explain what that is, although Toby tells us that it’s a treatment technique for releasing tight muscles. He’s been throwing around terms like ‘neuromyofascial dysfunction’ and ‘chronic orthopedic population’, which might as well be in another language as far as I’m concerned.
Barb keeps telling me that it’s not that hard to understand, and that I’m just afraid of the big words. But then, she’s always been faster on the uptake than me when it comes to technical things like this. Still, I’m amazed that people can learn a technique like this over one weekend.
Apparently, though, these weekend dry needling courses, in Australia at least, are designed for graduates of manual therapy degree courses – they’re not available for just anyone to sign up for. So it’s not like people are learning the whole body of knowledge around it in one weekend; they’ve already got a working understanding of the field it’s embedded in.
More than anything, I’m amazed that our baby boy is grown-up clinician, with his own professional indemnity insurance and all. Don’t get me started on the fact that he’s going to be qualified to insert fine filaments of metal into people’s muscles! They grow up so fast, don’t they?
Barb says she might give the dry needling a go, seeing as nothing else seems to be working on her shoulder pain. As for me, I’m afraid of needles – even more than I am of big words – so I’ll give it a miss. But I couldn’t be prouder!
I might have said that places of artistic wonder give me the necessary inspiration for my tunes, but recently I’ve been trying out some new locations, and wow…you can be inspired by so many things!
My brother-in-law, Clarence, has just jetted off to Nepal to try his hand at climbing Everest. Well, he’s only going to the base camp, but that’s said to be no mean feat in itself (more like being mean to your feet). Anyway, in the lead up to this, he’s been reading up on how to avoid altitude sickness. It seems that this can occur at heights >2000m above sea level, and the base camp is up more than double that. 
From now on, historians will divide the days of this office in twain. There will be the time of joyous light, when power flowed freely, hair was dried in the warm breeze, hot brews were boiled as kettles flowed like rain…and the dark times. Those are times in which we live now, where we are denied such a basic right. We claw out a wretched existence in the darkest of places, labouring without dignity or hope.
This is a nightmare. I’m living inside a nightmare, and not just anyone’s nightmare. My nightmare. I am getting married in almost exactly a month and something so ridiculously insignificant has gone wrong that I would never have even thought to have factor it into my plans. Suffice to say, it has upset my soon-to-be husband to the point where he’s out of control. At this wedding, there isn’t going to be a ‘bridezilla’, it’s all about the crazy groom.
I only planted these palm trees for a laugh. Yeah, it doesn’t sound very funny, but I was at a meeting of the Carnegie Neat Garden Tending Committee and one of the guys happened to have the seeds with him. He got them free as a promotional item with his latest copy of ‘Pruning Monthly’, and didn’t want them. Next thing you know, we were all joking about what would happen if one of us actually tried to grow palm trees in our garden, I ended up with the seeds and I planted them in total disbelief, thinking that even if it sprouted a few inches above ground I’d be able to see what palm trees looked like in their infancy.
Everyone is busy getting their five seconds of fame. When is it going to be my turn, I wonder?? So much reality TV, but no one has thought to create a show called 
You know you’re getting desperate when you’re up at 2am, searching for Wi-Fi-enabled light-bulbs that steadily brighten in the morning and supposedly help you get up naturally. except it obviously isn’t natural, because it’s a Wi-Fi light-bulb. And then it’s not going to help me in the morning, because the whole point of not waking up properly is the fact that I chronically go to bed late, due to severe insomnia. So a Wi-Fi light-bulb is just going to make things worse at this point, since I won’t be getting ANY quality sleep.
It’s that time of the year again, when I have most things around the estate redone for no solid reason other than it’s been a year, and things just get old. The entrance hall is so terrible 2017; nobody uses marble anymore. I’ll leave the remodelling of the spare bedrooms up to Cecelia, because that woman really needs something to do around here. True, most of them were never actually used between now and back then, but still. It’s the principle of the thing. My father before me said: “Now, son, make sure you change things around the family estate every year or so, more if you can manage it. Leaving things the way they are is the way of the common man.” And his father before him gave the same advice, and so on. We didn’t get where we are today by leaving things the way they are!
My sister and I have always been very close but we’ve grown apart over the past couple of years. You know how it is with work and the kids, you hardly have any time for yourself let alone your siblings. Both of us have been in serious need of personal time as well as quality time with each other. We’ve been so busy that we haven’t been taking such good care of ourselves too. So we decided to spend some quality time together at the beauty clinic.