An iconic image. (C) PJ Croft 2016

Oh please, stop saying ICONIC. Someone saw a fox in Kings Park a few days ago and was quoted as saying “you don’t expect to see foxes in such an iconic location.” The word has lost its meaning. It’s now used for anything that’s good, great, outstanding, superior, historic, nice, special, unique, and a dozen other useable words. I wouldn’t care except that this word has become the word you use when you don’t know what other word to use. It’s lazy journalism and copycat popular usage.

Along the same lines:

“They’ve been in a position where they’ve been at the hospital this morning and had an opportunity to say goodbye and to start to try and grieve.”

That’s called Police Speak. “A male person was seen to be proceeding in a northerly direction, whereupon he commenced to cross the carriageway. Consequently, he was struck by a motor vehicle travelling in a southerly direction, sustaining non-life threatening injuries.”

Translation: a man was walking up the footpath, crossed the road and was hit by a car. He was OK.

Y’know? I mean, it’s, y’know, not cool man, y’know. Yeah no. I mean, like, y’know, I wish they’d learn, y’know, to speak. Yeah.

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I had my latest blood test results yesterday and my HbA1c is 7.1. A reading of 7.0 is considered satisfactory blood sugar control, so the doctor was quite pleased. So am I. She didn’t mention any other problems and I forgot to ask, so I assume everything’s fine.

As well, my weight is continuing its downward trend – I’ve lost 10Kg in the past 12 months, and 15Kg since 2013. I can feel it, and people are commenting. Nice. One way I can tell is that my watch bands are loose, and my fingers feel sorta boney when I wash them. Haven’t felt that in a long time.

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I went on from the medical centre to the train station and went into the city. Free travel when yer a Senior, ya see. I wanted to look at a particular shop in Picadilly Arcade to see if they had a small Swiss Army style knife.

But the shop is gone. Disappointing, but I went on to Carillon Arcade to have lunch at my favourite cafe, Croissant Express. You guessed it – gone, closed down.

I started to notice how many other shops are closed down. Wow, it’s a desert in there. There’s nothing left for me, it’s all jewellers and women’s clothing shops, hairdressers and “nail technicians”. So I don’t go into the city much any more, and that makes more shops close. It’s a vicious cycle.

I’ve looked for a small multi-function knife in Target and Bunnings, as well as that fruitless foray yesterday in the city, but I found the ideal item at Masters, just up the road from here. A shop assistant was so keen to show me that she headed off faster than I could keep up, but she came back with the ideal thing. It’s an Arlec fold up pliers, screw drivers, small saw blade, knife blade, and the only thing I actually wanted, a bottle opener. I had to open bottles by banging the caps on the metal door handles in my last Bali hotel (it worked perfectly and didn’t harm the door handles).

The best thing is, this beautifully made stainless steel knife thing cost a whole $4. Cheap!

At the same time, I found small 12V lamps to suit my garden lights (that were already here when I bought this place). I couldn’t find those at Bunnings either.

Unfortunately, there were probably more staff than customers at Masters yesterday. It’s a great pity – I find Masters quite good. I’ve mentioned before that Woolworths set this chain up out of sheer arrogance, thinking they’d crush Bunnings. Well, they were the ones that got crushed, but that’s tough on the employees who’ll lose their jobs. Not to mention Dick Smith, another Woolworths disaster that’s costing thousands of employees their jobs. As I’ve said before, I won’t shop at Woolworths any more. Too many times, they’ve dudded me.

I notice that a new building is going up near Masters just up the road; it’s an Aldi. More competition.

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I could only keep going in the city for about an hour before I was just too fatigued to continue and had to come home. I was knackered! I was desperate to sit down on the train station but there are very few seats and they were all occupied. One was taken by a young guy with legs crossed working on his phone. I considered asking him to give up his seat, but chickened out.

I slept well last night and hoped it would fix me, but I’m still tired today. Gee, I can’t walk as much and I don’t recover like I used to.

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Having bought this new laptop, I wondered what to do with the Sony VAIO, but I’ve sold it to a good friend, so that’s a good outcome. I asked $400 as it’s a high spec computer (it cost $3,500 in 2009), and $500 is about the starting point for anything decent in laptops these days. He’s happy.

I’ll be sorry to see it go. I’ve done several o/s trips with it and it’s done well. It’s a good weight. That it lasted so well shows the value of paying a bit more to start with.

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I hope to see a cloud free mountain in the next few months. (C) PJ Croft 2016

It’s annoying! I can’t get the copyright symbol on this laptop – using Alt 0169 just doesn’t work without a separate numerical keypad. But if I try to insert a symbol using WordPress’s symbol facility, you can’t insert it into an image caption. The symbol only inserts into the next line down. It’s just one of the infuriating bugs in WordPress. I know this is free software, but do the bugs have to go on uncorrected?