Anotherblog

Pandemic

We played a game of Pandemic at lunchtime yesterday, at the normal difficulty level (five outbreaks) and with four players, missing the medic.
It was as exciting and tense as I remembered from the games day at Iain & Llyn’s, but this time we won. We cured all four diseases, and in the nick of time: yellow fever was spreading uncontrollably throughout South America and we wouldn’t have lasted two more turns.

We greatly enjoyed the victory, but it did feel a little hollow. As we watched the pandemics spiral out of control despite our best efforts, the victory condition – finding cures for all four diseases – felt inadequate.

I suppose in flavour terms, the cure for all four diseases is the turning point: if the pandemics are out of control and you *don’t* have all the cures yet, then countries shut their borders and infrastructure collapses and it’s impossible to actually do the research to cure the final diseases.

If you do cure all four, even though in the short term the world is screwed, people can see that the bad times will end, and keep going. The Doctors have won.
Yep, hope is nice.

Weight

The early days of this year were an exciting time for my bathroom scales, as they started getting erratic and finally gave up and refused to tell me my weight any more. And no wonder: I’d put on a couple of kilos over the last who-knows-how-long, and I’d gone from my normal weight of 84kg to almost 89kg, which was a little startling: obviously the scales had been under-reporting my weight for at least a month.

So, for the past month or so I’ve been on my no-sweets thing and doing plenty of jogging (when possible) and cross-trainer (when not, eg. when the temperature outside is 40 degrees), slowly dropping back down to 84kg. I started using Wii Fit to report on my weight instead of the rather manipulatable bathroom scales. Wii Fit is pretty harsh. My avatar is distinctly plump.

Despite difficulty in getting to archery, I’ve decided to start getting my arms back into shape. At the moment, I’m scarcely able to do 12 arrows worth, which would be a rather unfulfilling trip.

Gung Hei Fat Choy!

It was Chinese New Year on Monday, in addition to being Australia Day, so of course it was an extra special day for Hong Kong Australians. Von and I spent much of the day with Von’s family eating excellent chinese food and watching Cantonese soap operas. I also saw “The Sound of Music” for the first time all the way through, on their ancient laserdisc player. A good day, but I made it a little stressful for myself by trying to memorise a couple of new year greetings. It’s traditional to exchange good wishes for each other, so I memorised:

Sun1 Tai2 Geen3 Hong1 – Good health
Maan6 See6 Sing3 Yee3 – Luck
Tshing1 Chun1 Suong6 Jiu3 – Beauty
Sum1 Suong5 See3 Sing6 – Ten thousand things as you desire

The numbers represent tone (which I think I have roughly correct): 1 is high level, 2 is mid rising to high, 3 is mid level, 4 is mid falling to low, 5 is low rising to mid, and 6 is low.

Anyway, I had a lot of trouble going from one phrase to the next, so it took me a couple of seconds of run-up to give my good wishes in Cantonese, which was quite frustrating, as the others stood around wondering why I was chewing on my lip and staring into space (specifically, the space to the upper left of my vision) muttering to myself.

Still, we were all happy that I managed to say the phrases (eventually), and hopefully next year I’ll start practicing a bit earlier, so they’ll be more second nature. The Cantonese soaps will hopefully have helped with that too – they’re great practice for picking out phrases that I’ve learned.

EDIT: Fixed some of the tones in the phrases.

Brisbane

Our trip to Brisbane was very brief indeed – just over 24 hours – but we did manage to see Grandma, Michael, Nanna, Ev & Sara-Jane, and Simon, so it was fairly filled. I captured some footage for a nice video effect that I’d like to do for one of Ev’s music videos some time.

Speaking of which, the fantastic music video for Ev’s “We are People People” is now up:

Happy New Year!

Almost three months in, and married life continues to be awesome, though there hasn’t been all that much that I want to write about.

We had a couple of brief trips to Port Macquarie and Brisbane to visit friends and relatives (hi!), Christmas with Von’s family, and New Years with Nandi, Kat, Jon & Kate, and several of the Comic Irregulars.

Since then – classical guitar (learning Villa Lobos’ Prelude #1), designing and coding an online game, lots of cooking with Von, not enough exercise…