I think the balance of words versus pictures has been a tad off lately, so here's some pictures to summarise my hike with Dad today.

Admiring varieties of wattle.

Bird spotting.

Occasional patches of sunlight.

Where I would have been if I was working today.

It was a pretty nice day today.

Earlier this year after a visit to The Bluff, Nash led me to believe that she might be about to die of old age.

Thanks to some medical science - namely 4Cyte and a course of anti-arthritis injections - she has bounced back and returned to The Bluff with the vigour of a puppy, or at least an eight year old dog...

On a late winter day that hinted without subtlety about the coming new life of spring, Nash enjoyed my temporary retirement.

After we started with coffee and breakfast among the almond blossoms.

I also spotted some birds and a van.

(Not pictured - lamb and rosemary pie)

Much nicer than the office today.

For those who are new to this website, every Olympics I pretend it's a joke to reflect on my own life since the last one, and not the successes and memes of the actual Olympics.

You would think that having one year less between Olympics would mean one year less of accomplishments and adventures. And you would be right. In that time I've only managed to have four employers and two major injuries. It feels like I've been living in the same house for as long as Patty Mills has been representing the Boomers.

Despite all of this, I still made it to Paris... Last year, on a holiday, where I didn't get any medals but I did get to stare whimsically down the Seine from a spot on the Pont Neuf. And just like that evening, it's now time for me to reflect on the shit that's constantly flowing by every time it rains. (Metaphorically).

Life is not a sprint, it's a marathon, but like the Olympics there's actually both and in the past three years I have not won any sprints but I'm doing okay in the marathon, I think.

My family life is a private paradise. I'm married to my best friend, we communicate well, support each other through everything, have our own independent pastimes but also a shared collection of routines and happies that make life worth living.

I've broadened my technical skills across many disciplines, notably architecture, software development, and understanding generative AI. I've contributed to a lot of projects and organisations, as well as my own side projects.

Despite big and small issues affecting my body, I've recovered from injuries and recovered from setbacks during those recoveries, and fought on a daily basis to keep myself from turning forty without actually dying.

I've managed the finances relatively well, mostly by not buying a new house or a new car or a new computer or a new couch in the past three years, and by cancelling Netflix. I did buy a new camera after 13 years of the Canon 500D and that camera did then motivate me to spend many thousands more on holidays and road trips. I did buy new headphones after 16 years of the HD-515s. I did buy a coffee like five times every week, but I never regretted it once.

Creatively I have done more between Olympics. I wrote 75% of a novel in 2022 and then dropped it. I wrote one short story. I don't really like a lot of my photos. I tried DJing again for a few minutes.

I spent more time on video games this Olympics than I can recall any other. Which is not saying much. I finished three games in three years. That's mostly because my house is super cold in winter and at times my wrist has been too sore to write stories or build side projects.

My goals for the last Olympics were: to be vaccinated, on my way to financial independence, travel overseas, live in a house that isn’t cold in winter, and go camping.

I am vaccinated against Covid, flu, whooping cough and tetanus. Did it stop me from getting Covid? Not every time! But the experience was pretty mild and left me only with a weird metallic taste when I snort my nose in the shower.

Retirement finances seem likely to depend more on interest rates than savvy investments, based on my recent history of unsavvy, yet thankfully small investments.

I did travel overseas, and it was amazing. If I'm creative, I can also claim this as living in a house that wasn't cold during Winter, because that Air BNB I booked in Colmar last June was not chill.

I did not go camping. Well, maybe in Hyrule.

The next Olympics are in the USA and maybe my goal should be to make it back there too. Or at least somewhere cool and not in Australia for a while. I'd also like to configure a private GPT agent to make my life easier. Plus make a DJ Mix to commemorate twenty years - or five Olympics - worth of seasonal mix tapes. And maybe this time I will actually go camping properly, as I bought RDR2 last summer sale. But mainly, my goal is to keep steady on the marathon, with maybe some side-quest sprints for a medal along the way. And no breaking…

I'm not retired, but for a week I'm technically unemployed, and its been ten days since I last got paid to use the toilet.

To give my memory even more of a break, I'll capture what I've done so far on my holiday.

Saturday - cloudy with some rain. Managed a coffee stroll with Nash and Vanessa to Anchovy Bandit. In the evening, Callum's 40th which featured a thirty minute epic video and way too much food.

Sunday - Bakery stroll. Vanilla slice. More strolls between showers.

Monday - Dad Hike, followed by apple pie.

Tuesday - Finally, bluer skies. Bike ride into town for physio in the morning. Coffee, bike ride back home. Much mulberry tree pruning. Bike ride back to town for dentist, and then home.

Deadpool and Wolverine in the evening. Many laughs, but the tiny seats may have reverted all the work the physio did that morning.

Wednesday - Road trip to Willunga and Encounter Bay. Much sunshine. A lot of coffee. Sea air. Later, a walk to the supermarket.

Thursday - Jasmine coming into bloom.

Banana pancakes and puppy walks to the cafe.

First trip to big box hardware for a few months. Planting seedlings ready for spring.

Friday - foggy morning by the beach, then sunshine.

Drive to Freeling for lunch and family. Watched Boomers vs Serbia basketball - epic game.

Saturday - Sunshine. Morning walk to markets to re-up on fresh food and drink coffee. Aerated the future vegetable patch, added compost and erected the trellis. Stuck one stake in upside down. Then workout, salad in the sunshine, followed by visit to Alex's in the evening to watch two close games of football.

Sunday - More blue skies for the bakery walk.

Beer in the sunshine in the afternoon, followed by homemade pizza and watching USA vs France basketball.

Monday - Ridiculous amount of sunshine. Another walk to Anchovy Bandit, and around Prospect.

Some more gardening, another workout, then a visit to Semaphore with Nash - wearing shorts - for ice-cream and a walk down the jetty.

I spent some of my holidays processing more Europe 2023 photos. I also spent some of it walking around in the sunshine with Nash, drinking good coffee and admiring flowers without a care in the world.

We only visited Switzerland for three nights last year, but I seem to have taken more good photos there than I did in Italy over two weeks. Noting that my opinion of good photos seems to be strongly corelated with "has a nice mountain in them". I do like a nice mountain.

Early morning in Venice

Dog walkers in Milan

First view of Kriens

Sunset cows on the way back from dinner.

A lone drone pilot and the Swiss Alps.

Pilatus at sunset.

Pilatus in morning light.

Somewhere halfway up Pilatus, in morning light.

Switchbacks and cogwheel train routes up the south face of Pilatus.

Cogwheel train descends down Pilatus (I would ride it myself later).

Swiss houses featuring a barn with a massive solar panel, off Lake Lucerne.

Sunrise over Emmen

Lucerne from the Männliturm.

Because I did not go to Bali or Vietnam or Queensland like a smart person with two weeks off in August, I felt the need to create a holidays to-do list so that I could be productive with my fortnight off, as well as relaxed.

As it turned out, the weather for most of the last two weeks has been close to immaculate for early-late winter and I even slept without socks on for half a night. Every time I've looked out the window and seen sunshine, I've had the luxury of saying "whelp" and then going for a walk in the sunshine. While everyone else is working. Pretty cool.

Back when I had a job, around Easter, I sat through eight days of Azure training. I've used Azure services a lot, but have never had the need to create virtual networks, set up VMs, or even deploy App Services. Let alone monitor, govern and maintain them. It was cool to get a rundown of all the infrastructure and platform as a service offerings and how they worked together. I did not do the exam, because at about the same time I was working a lot and it was easy to attend the training online while I was working, but not so easy to study for the exam and take it while balancing clients and projects.

The context was different when I was making my holiday to-do list, I had plenty of time, and it only took me a couple of seconds to write "do Azure certification exam" on the list under "plant chilis" and "buy dehydrator".

I booked the exam for today - my last day of leave - figuring I could enjoy most of my holidays with Vanessa, keep my mind clear for pub trivia on Wednesday night, then dedicate Thursday to some revision and practice tests before taking the exam on Friday morning.

Well, this plan was going well through the parts where I was out hiking and coming second in pub trivia. When I began my revision in earnest it was clearer to me that this was an exam that might not be possible to pass with only a day of study, and that the recommendation was to take it after "6 to 12 months of hands-on experience".

My dilemma was that I had already begun to study, and to cancel my exam attendance would mean that I would have wasted precious holiday time. The mitigation to this risk would be to dedicate even more time and energy to studying, but that then increased the risk that a failure would have been an even bigger waste of my break. I consumed a lot of content and videos about the exam itself as well as the documentation about the products, and I decided that I would not waste my holidays, no, I was going to play a fun game with my brain called "see how much Azure information you can cram into your memory over a day, and thus prove how smart/idiotic you really are".

I would at least get a journal entry out of it.

A recent science article described how human beings have dramatic "ageing" windows in their early forties, which scared me, but also motivated me a little too.

Luckily, on Thursday it was raining.

So I watched a lot of videos and did a lot of practice questions and read a lot of reference material and after doing all of that up until the minutes before my exam this morning, I did not feel confident at all that I was going to pass the exam. I was already mentally drafting this entry and my feelings about failing.

Then, after some technical difficulties and delays that made me glad I'd brought a backup, certain, blue drink bottle for my desk, I was finally into the exam and man the questions were a lot harder than the practice questions.

It took me about a third of my allocated time to realise that the exam format included a link to the Azure documentation. This was helpful, but also meant the questions were also harder because there was an expectation that you would look up the relevant technical information assuming you knew what and where to review.

Because I did my exam prep with YouTube videos from random internet people, instead of I guess reading the exam details themselves more closely, I was now way behind schedule.

With twenty minutes left I still had fifteen questions remaining, nearly a third of the exam. Most questions had multiple parts, and I have one particularly grand memory of trying to trace in my head the network traffic from one subnet to another subnet to a DNS server to an A Record, repeated for multiple VMs in different networks, while watching the clock trickle down. In the end I had to go by instinct for a lot of questions. I finished my first pass of the questions with thirty seconds to spare, and I did not make any changes in the review that followed.

If my expectations were low going into the exam, they were even lower after clicking "OK" and letting it calculate my final score. The online proctor surely would have chuckled at my reaction to the pass score I was presented with. And a little firework animation. Nice. The final report included my identification photo that I had to take twice after the first round of technical difficulties, and how I looked in that snapshot was the opposite of how I looked on the other side.

So, I didn't waste any of my holidays and I won the game of "see how much Azure information you can cram into your memory over a day, and thus prove how smart/idiotic you really are". I don't know how I did it, other than I am an incredibly logical person with a good recall of minor details, 77.9% of the time... If I have learned anything from this experience, it is that I am both smart and quite dumb, and also how to configure virtual load balancers across cloud and on premise networks.

The last six days of my holiday (2.4% of a Jupiter day) have passed by at the normal, inevitable speed of life on planet Earth. Overall, an excellent break, where I accomplished nearly all of my to-do list (leaving enough to feel justified that it was a suitable amount of tasks) as well as relaxing and living in the moment occasionally as well.

Tuesday - a leisurely stroll around Morialta, with a break for breakfast, and then coffee on the way home. Plus more home-made pizza because, why not, it was holidays.

More wattle.

Wednesday - the sun was forecast to be shining, and I'd thought of doing a bike ride in the morning but after putting on my red shorts I decided I'd prefer just to walk around Croydon looking at flowers with Nash and drinking coffee. Here we are both enjoying a sun-patch.

In the evening, caught up with J and then took on the quiz at Big Shed with other members of Pump up the JAMB. Took out second, which I was quite elated about.

Thursday was my Azure Certification study day, noting that a lot of that study was while walking around the neighbourhood, clearing out my closet, walking clothes to the charity shop, cooking dinner, and working out. But mostly it was a lot of Azure study. I did walk Vanessa over to a friend's before dinner, and walked home westward watching the dark-purple sky light up with lightning flashes in the distance. As I wasn't getting rained on, this was pretty epic. I was listening to Azure study material at the time.

Friday was more exam revision (while walking around Croydon) followed by the exam which wrapped up around lunchtime. The rest of the afternoon was a blur of eating, working out, walking in the sunshine (and rain), and then writing up all my feelings about the intense cram session as my brain decompressed.

Saturday was a busy day, starting with a very short, slightly misty walk around North Adelaide with Nash who enjoyed the occasional patch of sun, but wanted no part of the activity once she realised the bakery wasn't our destination.

After that, went to the Central Markets for some produce and a good coffee and a brunch with Vanessa's friends, followed by a workout and then afternoon tea with in-laws. Then, dinner and showdown with Alex.

Sunday, the final day, partly cloudy but no rain, has had the feeling you get when you spend the afternoon in the winter sun and then the night settles in, multiplied by sixteen. That's not to say it hasn't been pleasant or productive. It began with the customary North Adelaide walk to bakery, pide-based pizzas for lunch, and then an afternoon doing some coding for the quiz night.

Before sunset we drove to the beach for a final walk in the sun.

I bought coffee all but two of my days off. The garden is looking fresher, the seedlings are shooting up ready for planting in September. I've seen family, friends, the beach, the hills. I've hiked and walked and been productive around the house. I watched half of a movie, and didn't play any video games. I've exercised nearly every day of the break. I've eaten desserts every day of the break. The flowers in the backyard are just starting to bloom, and there's fresh skin on my fingers after the friction burns of the first Tuesday from using the pruner... Hopefully these are good omens for the next chapter of entries tagged 'Office'. If not, I am not afraid of temporary unemployment once more.

There's been a lot of weather this week, basically every time I walk out the door the planet looks different.

Flashes of colour coincide with brief bursts of sunshine.

This cool tree does its annual thing of looking good against a blue backdrop.

Mist rolls in to give all the vibrant flowers a spooky haze.

Sunsets come later, and you can feel warmth after the work day is done.

Whole streetscapes seem to exist purely as a tableau for you to walk down on Saturday mornings, drinking coffee.

I have not been looking forward to turning 40, and it certainly wasn't something that made it on to my "Things to do this summer" list when I started my journal in November 2001.

I've never forgotten turning 30, and 20, and on both occasions being overwhelmed by existential dread that a milestone was passing that I could never return to. That a barrier now existed between my youth and myself, and that I was edging only closer to death.

Well in hindsight it turns out both those times I still had youth on my side, and now I have the life experience to know for certain that a barrier between my youth and myself now exists and I am edging only closer to death.

But, other than dying, what can you do to avoid turning 40? Nothing, you just live as best you can, helpless in the epoch, admiring the flowers occasionally and wondering if there are things you should be trying to do before the day arrives. But there's nothing.

And when it finally happens you expect relief because at least now it's over, but it's even worse than you expected.

You wake up and eat cake for breakfast and go for a walk with your dog and wife and you see family and drink coffee and eat more cake and look at the ocean and feel the sunlight and smell the jasmine on the breeze and pat your dog and talk to friends and beat Connections on the toilet and do forty-five minutes of stretching and rehab and some single leg squats.

And that's why I don't want to turn 40. Because I could do this every day forever.