Hamspring Update

According to my physio, my healing progress is slower than he'd expected. Maybe if I buy a third standing desk it could make the difference?

There was one day my butt didn't feel so bad, and I began thinking about taking my rehab to the next level. How do you rehab sitting, I wonder. Find a bench in a park and sit on it for 30 seconds? Repeat five times. Rest one minute in between. Am I seriously only 33?


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The woman with the fake tan stepped into my office, sat across from my desk and lit a cigarette.
At least, she would, sometime in the next 20 minutes. Smelling the future has advantages, but precision isn’t one of them.


I did Zero Chin-Ups Today

This time, a decade ago, I was in the final days of my six week weight-lifting and eating experiment I called BULKTEMBER. The fact that I’m writing this at my standing desk, wearing my sacroiliac belt, and twenty-kilograms below my old goal weight tells me something has gone horribly wrong since then. But, if I’m going to dwell on the events of the past ten years of my life, there’s one thing worth focusing on - breakfast.

On October 3rd, 2007 i documented the preparation of my daily breakfast smoothie. And of all the things the universe has taken from me since that day, fruit smoothies ain’t one of them (you tried, Cyclone Yasi, and Hepatitis A Infected Berry Pickers).

My Bulktember documentation gives me an amazing opportunity to see how I’ve changed as a person over ten years. As least when it comes to my smoothies. Some of the changes are related to my lack of current bulking, many others are the influence of Vanessa, who has bulked my heart since 2008.

image 1647 from bradism.com

I still make berry and peanut butter smoothies regularly, but today I thought I’d share my current version of the tropical smoothie, which has been tasting better and better in these first warm spring days.


20072017
6 Ice Cubes15 Ice Cubes
50g Frozen Fruit (mixed berries)500g Frozen Fruit (frozen mango, banana, pineapple ring)
3.5 Weet Bix50g Soaked Oats
200ml Skim Milk0ml Skim Milk
150g No Fat, Low Sugar Yogurt300g No Fat, Low Sugar Yogurt
30g WPI Protein SupplementNo protein
1tsp Natural Peanut Butter1tbsp desiccated coconut

First we can see a 250% increase in ice cubes. Ice cubes are calorie negative, and this basically extra breakfast for nothing. Vanessa taught me this one, she has a PHD in Physics.

Next we can see the amount of fruit has gone up… A lot. Like, an incredible amount. Like, having re-read a few of the Bulktember entries, I’m pretty sure I was just guessing some of these measurements, and surely I was using more than 50g of berries. But given how much of a tight-arse I was back then, maybe not. Anyway, fruit is good. Read Men’s Health, I’m sure there’s an advertisement pretending to be an article that talks about it.

Three and a half Weet Bix? I don’t remember this. Obviously I needed to eat more than 50g of berries back then, maybe then I wouldn’t have these memory issues. A bit of reasoning tells me at some point I switched from Weet Bix to ice cubes.
Up until this year I did continue to add a single Bix to my smoothies. That was until I tried being a vegan for a few weeks. Weet Bix are vegan, but wet oats help blending non-dairy smoothies a lot more easily than dry Weet Bix. Will I go back to Weet Bix again? Maybe. Come back in 2027.

Milk. I used to use a bunch of it, now I don’t use any. Why? Because I’m a vegan, who eats yogurt and meat and stuff. Every morning is like a running joke about how amusing I found veganism. Still, I guess there's now 1.4 litres less milk that gets drained from some poor cow between atmosphere-destroying farts, and giving some dairy farmer the false hope that they’re not in an unprofitable, dying industry.

Yogurt. I think I’ve covered this enough before, I really like yogurt. (Note to self, add ‘Yogurt’ as tag to future tags feature).

Protein. I get enough protein from vegetables, legumes, oats. And yogurt. And meat. Plus it’s expensive. Who needs protein powder. Right? Or Up and Go Energise, and Tribulus Terrestris and tight-fitting long-sleeve knits. It’s all just the invisible lead up to vanity above a vanity. Focus on more noble pursuits. I mean, why--

image 1648 from bradism.com

Coconut makes it taste tropical and gives it a bit of texture to help replicate that old Weet Bix taste. If it was a berry smoothie I’d use peanut butter again. I no longer feel the need to substitute skipped peanut butter with extra protein powder.

There’s no secret to mixing this thing, other than to defrost the frozen mango if possible/it’s winter. Also I stand by my 2009 Blender choice. It can, and often does, handle twice the number of ice cubes. It doesn’t have a “liquefy” button, but it has one that says “Smoothie” which does the job.

I no longer slam my breakfast smoothie down out of the jug. Instead I sip it through a straw. I think straws can make things taste different, maybe it delivers smoothie to different parts of the tongue first. Someone at Men’s Health should write an article about it to sell some brand of straw or something.

I also drink my smoothie’s with the help of my happy every day monkey cup holder, another of Vanessa’s influences on my smoothie process.

image 1649 from bradism.com

This concludes an eight-hundred word summary of my breakfast smoothie. What a bulky entry.

Todo Lists

As I walked down my hall, I noticed one of the canvases needed its wall adhesives re-applied. This on top of the continuous drip, drip of the dying washer in the en-suite shower.
Fine, I sighed, and I did my tax return.


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Hamspring?

Sacroiliactober?

No Exaggeration

I think fictional crime has ruined true crime podcasts for me. They all kind of sound the same.

On this date, in the seventies or early eighties, a horrific murder took place. Police immediately arrested Bobby McCriminal, who matched the description of the suspect who had sped away in a stolen car.

McCriminal had a history of drug and robbery crimes, but denied the killing. Police interviewed his friend, Heroin Terry, who confirmed Bobby was the killer in exchange for placement in witness protection. Police found a stolen car in Bobby's driveway, and the bloody weapon on his kitchen bench. They arrested him for murder.

Six months later, right before the trial, Heroin Terry confessed he invented his testimony in order to live in witness protection on taxpayer's money. He wasn't called as a witness.
Bobby went to jail, wrote a book and then fell ill and died shortly after his release. That's the only reason I feel safe recapping his clumsy exploits in this podcast.

Foresight

image 1650 from bradism.com

I remembered to clean my BBQ after its last use before winter. Today I appreciated my past efforts so much I wasn't sure if it was altruism or egotism.

The Moment You Realise You're Not In Adelaide Today

image 1651 from bradism.com

A Baxter Inn

I was in Sydney for a conference today, and I made the poorly-reasoned decision to attend the networking drinks afterwards. I spoke to no one, drank a beer quickly, then fled downstairs to write by a phone charger.

I still had over an hour to kill before I needed to leave the city. I opened Maps to plot my route to the train station, and that’s when I saw, a few hundred metres away, a pub named The Baxter Inn.

Only a few people would recognise this significant of this. Why Google’s unfeeling brain felt the urge to present me with it, I can guess. It probably has something to do with one of the heavily-used tags in my Keep notes, plus the time of afternoon. I clicked on the details and learned that the venue offered an amazing selection of whiskeys and gins. I wondered if this also included the most exotic of dark, spiced rums.
I was already walking. I was about to find out.

I turned down a narrow alley off Clarence Street, which widened into an old loading dock shrouded in the shadows of skyscrapers. In the corner was a speakeasy, bottles of liquour visible through the windows.

image 1652 from bradism.com

I stepped through the low doorway and approached the bar where a young man with a hipster haircut and a trimmed moustache watched me approach with a friendly smile.
“I’m looking for a dark, spiced rum,” I said. “What do you recommend?”
He glanced over his shoulder at the long shelves of whisky bottles. “We only have one, actually.”
“What is it?”
“Bacardi.”
“Oh,” I said.

I had nowhere else to go, and the itch to write more, so I ordered a dark, spiced Bacardi (which wasn’t actually that bad). I sat in the corner of the bar, working on a short story by candlelight, learning how to sip while negotiating the single, giant ice-cube that floated in my cup. I wrote a couple of pages, felt good about it, noticed on a coaster that the name of the place was not actually The Baxter Inn. I’d gone and bloody stepped into the wrong speakeasy-down-a-laneway-on-Clarence-street and some delicious, spiced rum was in a bottle waiting for me somewhere else. Or maybe The Baxter Inn didn’t exist, or it did but it was in a different universe to the one I was in. That could make sense.