I spoke to my surgeon yesterday for the first time since he carved into my leg and came out with a prize. He said in regards to my leg that things were going well. This was a surprise to me, as I'd interpreted Internet's advice as "you can ride an exercise bike a week after an illiotibial release" as "you'll be good to play basketball again in two."

So when I was waiting to see him I was actually slightly worried, because by my calculations it was slow that it was healing. However I learned that losing parts of your knee takes longer than a fortnight to recover from, and I left knowing it was actually healing faster than expected. I'm not sure if that's good news or what, but hooray. Not bad for a leg that drove 1600 kilometres the days before.

Today I saw my physio, who has given his blessing for me to "jog-walk" in another two weeks. He's also told me to keep stretching two times a day. I kind of paid for knee surgery so I didn't have to stretch twice a day anymore, but if I get to jog-walk in two weeks fuck yeah, I guess I'll do it.

In another piece of slowly-recovering related news, I had some blood taken today from my left arm and the doctor had to widen the tourniquet before he could slip it around my bicep. Mr. Universe, I know. For all I know the little girl that had the appointment before me was the last one to have her blood drew, but little victories, yeah?

Thrilling Times.

I made a salad today, a side for my lunch. It started off as green capsicum, cucumber and lettuce. This was way too green. There were carrots in the fridge but instead I elected to man my salad up with sultanas and cashews. Then, for dressing I used BBQ Sauce.

File this under nutrition or spendthrift or masculinity or still refusing to grow up.

Happy Mother's Day Internet!

Also, today I found out that Maxibons have the most calories of any single serve ice-cream product.

Good thing it's almost winter...

The latest Robin Hood is another Hollywood version of the history/legend of the English anti-villian. No one is truly sure about where fact blurs into fiction when it comes Robin Hood, beyond knowing he proved the theory of gravity when he placed an apple on his son's head and hit it with an arrow from twenty paces. The 2010 Robin Hood takes up the story from the end of The Crusades and carries us to just before he and Maid Marian become foxes that wear clothes and can talk.

Before getting into the body of this review, I just want to say I went to Hoyts to see this film and they charged me $20 for a ticket. And the film isn't even in 3D! It was only showing on the Xtreme Screen which is apparently the reason for the markup on the ticket compared to a normal adult ticket. I asked the cashier what made the Xtreme Screen so extreme and she said "It's a really big screen with state of the art surround sound".

I'm sorry, but I thought the whole point of going to the cinema was a big screen and surround sound? Doesn't having an Xtreme Screen basically discredit every single other cinema in the theatre? Shouldn't the Xtreme Screen be normal price and sessions on every other inferior screen be sold at a discount?

That said, the screen was very big and the action in such clarity that someone in the middle aged couple to the right of us continued to go "ooohhhh" every instance someone took an arrow to the chest or a sword blow to the head right up until the final battle. The movie itself was engaging, with nothing wrong with the pacing, action, acting or storytelling. At times it did seem like they might have blown the budget before they hired enough extras. The only real negative I had about the movie was the American-ness of it all. There were a few goofy one-liners that I don't think work for an international audience, and I'd have preferred some more English humour rather what Ridley Scott finds funny.

That wasn't to great detriment though. My main grievance was the sad appearance of the formulaic American "a bunch of rag-tags and misfits band together to create synergy and forge a win for democracy" overtone for the final quarter of the movie. I'm aware that the Robin Hood legacy involves some degree of anti-clericalism but at times it almost became a bit of a Mel Gibson's The Patriot meets The Mighty Ducks 2 painted over the Robin Hood saga, which helped to slightly unsettle my immersion despite the Xtreme sized screen.

Then again, Ridley Scott. What can you expect? Are you not entertained? I pretty much was.

Every now and then my mind drifts to features I might add to Bradism 2.0.2.0. I have boring ideas for things like an iPhone app and "FaceBook integration" (aka the ability to sit on the fence between an entry and a status update).

One feature I was thinking about was to put on every entry, next to weather icon, what my facial hair was like that day:

• Clean shaved
  
• One day growth (aka still clean shaved)
  
• Two day growth/the standard shaved my whole face with the trimmer attachment
  
• Three day growth, probably didn't leave the house today
  
• Four or greater days growth - sick, camping or recovering from surgery.
  
• Other
  

With this data and a large enough sample size I'd be able to eventually data mine my posts to find out what kind of patterns I display in relation to my facial hair. This would allow me to do some modelling/projections and customise my beard for whatever the goal or objective of the day was. Sounds crazy I know, but imagine if you described the iPad to someone from the 1980s. Same exact thing.

Today I am other, which is rare but I'll fill in the details. Occasionally Vanessa leaves her tweezers on the bathroom counter and I can't resist the temptation to tweeze randomly. Last week I got carried away and plucked the straggler hairs east and west of my lips.

Obviously tweezers are still a novelty to me because I didn't really appreciate how far below the surface hair has to extend before it becomes stubble again, and it still hasn't resurfaced in those areas, meaning separation exists between my moustache and beard. After reaching 3.5 days growth this morning I decided to trim down my entire face as usual but I left the moustache as is. This brings me to other.

Personally I think this gives me a bit of a Derrick Rose attitude, and it will continue to do that until I next have to go to the office. Vanessa as she often does had a different perspective, basically summarised "as it makes my nose hair look longer than they normally do."

Obviously I'm tweezing the wrong areas.

After counting down the days until my first jog-walk, today finally arrived. Just before sunset I set out to complete the uni jogging circuit, starting with 20 minutes of walking and then 5 minutes of jogging.
It was frustrating having to walk a course I'd run many times before. Instinct was stabbing me with signals it wanted to send to my legs to make me run. It'd been over four weeks since anything I'd describe as a gait and I had a hunger for one. Also it was freezing. And I was feeling self concious. I could only imagine what those running past me were thinking:

"Why is he walking while everybody else is running?"
"Is that supposed to be a moustache?"
"Is that the ruck for the girls AFL team I just jogged past?"
"Do you think he did that on purpose, or maybe the hair above his lip just grows faster than the rest of his face?"
And so on.

Eventually twenty minutes passed and I elatedly started loping across the grass. For about thirty seconds, before my knee's complaining went from apologetic to violent. I pulled up and rubbed my scar sub-conciously, I'm guessing for the benefit of anyone watching. After a brief walk I decided to try and run again, this attempt lasted a third as long. I then had to limp home where I dejectedly ate a giant bowl of cereal despite it now being night.

I've never understood the body's instinct to eat when sad. What is the thought process here? "I feel bad right now, so bad.. I bet I'd feel better if I was fatter!"

So, after my Cocoa Weet Bix Crunch was done I decided to do something good for my body. And I shaved my moustache off.

I stepped into a second hand book store today and sought out James Joyce's Ulysses. I heard the mammoth text covered but a single day, much like a journal entry does. I wasn't reading it specifically for inspiration, I'm not sure even why I decided to hunt it down among the spines. I think someone might have bet me once that I couldn't read it and that made me curious.

I read three pages and then put it back on the shelf. I'm sure it's a great book, it has a lot of acclaim. I think fuel prices are too high to read a book like this. Despite its greatness how relevant is it to me now? To everyone in society who is not a studier of literature. How relevant will bradism.com be in 2102? It will probably be just as easy to put down!

I had an English lecturer compare me to James Joyce once. At the time it made me feel a little bit cool. Now it just makes me think "Flinders University".

Next month I'm going to take a few weeks off work for two purposes. One - dedicate some time to creativity, in particular writing. Two - continue packing and organising what needs organising so that when Vanessa or I get accepted for a job in Melbourne we can evacuate the state with ease.

I have a lot of dead characters. When I do things like pack, it often ends up with more mess than there was initially. On the weekend when I was clearing the study I tripped over old stories from a time when I decided that the only way to write more would be to sit down and write more. This was good advice, past Brad. It brings me here, perhaps obviously..

I'd also like to take more photos, and Teds Camera sent me an email today saying tomorrow is 10% of Canon day. It's also the day my monthly wages go into my bank account. Coincidence?! Did I enter my payday into my personal details on Twitter?

I think I'll also make another Lego phocumentary. Perhaps one about the challenges in coming up with Lego phocumentaries... This won't compliment the packing agenda.

I was at my suburban call centre desk this morning, for the first time in a long time. Despite my work email signature containing its address, it's a place I'd managed to avoid thanks to mainly working in town close to a client as well as at home post surgery. My abandoned, half-full water bottle had tiny green algae growing at the bottom of it.

I left at lunchtime. On my way out I saw through the open door of one of the only offices left inside this sprawling open plan prairie. I'm not sure which executive still ranked high enough to deserve this retreat. Inside was a desk and a whiteboard, the latter plastered with my companies slogans printed on A4 paper. And I thought to myself: "Whoever works in there clearly doesn't have much to explain."

The sun's been phoning it in the last few days. I'm not complaining, but it's yet to get its winter on.

It seems the fastest way to make yourself throw out things in the penumbra garbage casts upon your possessions is to face the prospect of paying for it to be shipped interstate. It's making some decisions a lot easier. No, I probably won't need a complete, printed history of my banking transactions from 1996 to 2001.

How should I feel about these things?:
- Being able to throw out whole years if I want to.
- The fact that my life is tangible enough to that I couldn't even get close to fitting it all in our trash bin, but on the other hand the garbage is only collected weekly.
- Open space.

Don't know, conflicted and surprisingly good.

Right now I'm in the middle of a childish dream. I have over one thousand prize tickets from games at Intencity. These are tickets won in batches of ten to twenty per game. Vanessa and I won most of them when she lived in Norwood and I had my arm in a cast. Apart from darts, the only sport the world had left for me was whack-a-mole style arcade games and I let my testosterone be free against plastic crabs and rubber dinosaur heads. I never expected to win 1000 tickets though. After my arm was freed from its fibreglass Vanessa helped me rehabilitate it by challenging me to many basketball shooting challenges at the arcade. We won more tickets.

Finally, last weekend we decided the time had come to have tickets counted at pick a prize. We got up to 703 when the automatic ticket counting machine broke down and died. An unwitting staff member counted out the rest, revealing our gross of 1017. And thus the deliberation began. What to choose. What do you choose? We'd never had a goal in mind. Would we pick something big, or be hilarious and obtain 200 of something tiny. After pondering for a quarter of an hour we decided to think about it some more and come back later. And now eight days later we still haven't decided. There's so many options, and it's not just that one doesn't stand out. It's just, picking up and holding everything we could receive... Nothing feels right. Nothing feels like it's as cool to possess as giant handful of prize tickets.

I watched Game 4 of Suns/Lakers today and during the second quarter both teams went insane and started hitting shots from everywhere without missing. It was like they were playing NBA Jam and someone had entered the "All Players On Fire" code at the start of the quarter. Dan Majerle was there as well, to multiply the NBA Jam factor up further.
I like NBA Jam. I played it on Andy's Wii last Friday. It was enjoyable