A couple of weeks ago I had a health checkup - after all I'll be seventy early next year, and at an age when doctors start to worry about your prostate and your overall health.
I don't have a regular GP, as I'm hardly ever sick, and usually end up being allocated to a locum, which is fine if all you need is some antibiotics to shift a stubborn chest infection, but for this it would have been better to have a regular GP for a bit of continuity with the test results.
The first locum was a little bit worried by my cholesterol levels - everything else looked fine - and by the time I could get another appointment he had moved on and I saw a different locum, who wasn't quite so concerned but was all keyed up to give me the 'healthy lifestyle' talk, which he promptly abandoned once he realised that I wasn't a drunken burger eating slob.
My blood pressure is a little bit high, so I did two things - since summer's coming, I got my bike serviced ready for some summer morning bike rides - while it's still a bit chilly in the morning, the sun's now up early enough to get a ride in before having to deal with morning commuter traffic.
We've also still got an old cross trainer which we used to use over summer to keep us fit for cross country skiing in winter.
Well we havn't skied for fifteen years so the cross trainer's been gathering dust, so I decided that, along with bike riding, I'd start using it again some mornings before breakfast.
Certainly, when I rode my bike to the bike shop to be serviced I noticed that my heart rate shot up and took some time to recover, so earlier this week, equipped with some nice new bluetooth headphones to listen to ABC Classic FM, I had a little work out - and it was a little workout - despite swimming and snorkeling in FNQ at the end of August, I wasn't as fit as I thought.
Hopefully, between biking and working out on the cross trainer I'll get my blood pressure and cholesterol levels down before I go back for a follow up set of tests early next year.
Up at the Athenaeum, I've not really got started on my guerilla cataloguing exercise, for some reason the local health centre only does some tests of Friday mornings which clashes beautifully with my Friday morning sessions at the Athenaeum, however I did draft a procedure for handling removable media - increasingly when people donate the results of their family and local history research to us for safe keeping, it comes on a USB stick, and we need a reproducible methodology for keeping it safe until it can be deposited somewhere more permanent.
I've also done a little bit of detective work on a pair of 1905 postal covers, and also blogged about the use of letter cards in late Victorian and Edwardian times, as well as reading 'The Other Trench', the diary of a German officer that tells the story of all three fronts (the Western, the Eastern, and the Italian Alpine front) from the German perspective.
J had been complaining that her 15" laptop was a little bit bulky to take to meetings - she's still running art classes and has got involved again in the theatre group, so I picked up a refurbished Acer Travelmate for her.
Not the most powerful, but a pretty tidy little machine, and it runs windows 11.
I went outside, checked, and the sky hasn't fallen, but obviously with the end of Windows 10 support, both the old Thinkpad I use for my work for the Athenaeum and also used for my work with the national trust, and the refurbished lightweight laptop I bought to take with us on road trips are on borrowed time - while they both work well, feature creep will inevitably kill them, and while I have several perfectly adequate Linux machines, you do need to sometimes fit in with other people and what they use, especially when working on shared projects.
I've personally never really cleaved to Acer as a manufacturer, but I was quite impressed by the little Acer laptop with its robust gorilla glass screen while I was configuring it for J, so perhaps the long term answer for the Athenaeum/road trip problem is something similar to the refurbished Acer Travelmate I bought J.
However, I can wait a bit, we've no substantial travel planned until March, and for the moment, both machines are doing their job...
No comments:
Post a Comment