Peacocks have more than 19 tail feathers.
© PJ Croft 2014
Why do I say this? A caller to Eoin Cameron's
ABC breakfast program a few weeks ago
said peacocks only have 19 tailfeathers.
Well, as you can see, I disagree.
I tried very hard to send this image to
Mr Cameron via the ABC website, but they make it
nearly impossible! The ABC does NOT want your comments.
They put barriers in your path. Not happy.

Heh heh.  I’ve been thinking about what to take on my trip and some music would be nice.  CDs?  No, too heavy and bulky with the portable CD player (yes, I still have one from about 1995. It’s been a good one.)  MiniDiscs?  Could do — both the discs and the player/recorder are lighter and smaller than CDs.

Aah, mp3s.  No weight or bulk for the media at all.  Very small and light mp3 player.  But, I thought, I don’t have one, so I looked for one at Joondalup today.  And a pair of lightweight headphones.

Then it hit me —  I’ve already got both!  I have my iPod Touch 16GB.  That holds mp3s and plays them.  And I have a pair of folding noise-cancelling headphones that I bought for my 2008 trip.  Problem solved.  Keep up, Pete.

___________________________________________________

Another thing I have to take is a small chilly bin, with a freezer block.  No, not for the beer, for my insulin.  The fresh pens have to be kept cold until opened for use.  I’ll need an Esky to take them from home to the ship and from the ship to the hotel in Singapore.  When I come back to Perth, leaving Singapore for the flight home, I’ll have injected at my daily time of 7am and the flight’s at 3.30pm, so I won’t need that Esky any more.  That’s why I bought a $15 cheapie — I’ll just dump it in Singapore to save bulk and weight on the plane.

________________________________________________

This is my second week injecting insulin.  When I first filled the prescription, I was surprised to be given 5 boxes of 5 pens each box, 25 100ml pens!  Wow, so many.

But I went from 10ml per day to 44ml per day now, and I’m still not under control yet.  The goal is a BSL between 4-6 mmol/L – I’m still around 9-12, although an hour ago it was 6.3.  It’s clear that I’ll need about 50ml per day, i.e. half a pen per day.  No wonder you get 25 pens.

I’ll need to be careful to calculate and take what I need for the trip.  There’ll be no trouble getting more pens here within this month’s prescription period.  That’s allowed for travel reasons.

____________________________________________

Do I take the laptop?  At first I thought I’ll need it to download photos from my camera cards, but nah, you can fit an awful lot of images on a 16GB card.  Leave them there.

Playing BluRays?  It has a BluRay player/recorder built in, but it’s only a 13.3″ screen.  Nah, read a book, listen to music, stay on deck and smell the sea.

Email/blog?  Take a break!  It would be nice to blog about the trip and write about cabbages and kings, but carrying that extra 2Kg item?

Viewing and editing the video I’ll shoot?  The camera I’m taking with me (the Olympus OM-D E-M1) can shoot HD video and this is a chance to make a story out of the trip.  That’s a pretty powerful reason and might swing the balance.  I’ll pack the bag and weigh it up, so to speak.

__________________________________________________

A few snippets from today:

• I need some curtains.  I finally found two patterns that I like in BigW  (yeah, cheap, cheap).  But for both of them, there was only one curtain on the shelves.

• Always on the lookout for watches (even though I’ve just bought one), I browsed jewellers’ windows.  No price tags are allowed to be seen! OK, that makes me take note of any design I’m interested in, then go home and find it on the web.  The jeweller loses any possible sale.

• Same for sunglasses today.  I passed a stall with some that I might have liked. But none of them was priced.  I walked on …

• The new multi story car park is open at Joondalup so I parked there and walked toward the lift.  A workman was coming out and he said, “No mate, you can’t get into the centre from here. The lift only opens onto the building works. You have to walk outside and walk about 100m down there.”  So I got in my car and drove to the Seniors bay near where I wanted to go.
• I bought a big lot of boxy storage type things from the Reject Shop using one of their plastic shopping carts, piled high.  The checkout chick said, “Do you want a big bag for this?”  I said,  “No, I’ll use the trolley.”
  “Sorry sir, trolleys are not allowed to be taken out of the shop.”
  “Just watch me”, I said.  “My car is right there.”
  So she left her checkout post and carried half my load out to my car.  Nice of her, but …

And on and on …  I have no sympathy for retailers.  Dumbness rules.