Rubbish Bins

My mother is a bit silly at times.

Take our trip to Australia this year.  Mum doesn’t travel much, but joined me and our extended family in Perth for Chinese New Year.  Perth is at the other end of Australia.  A bloody long flight from Wellington, New Zealand.

Oh, and guess what she bought on her holiday?  A rubbish bin.  Yep, a rubbish bin.  Not a particularly expensive or fancy rubbish bin. Just a very large and very plastic rubbish bin, with a revolving lid.  And lugged it all the way back to New Zealand.  I tried to make some feeble excuse about this woman standing next to me, checking in a rubbish bin at Perth airport.

She was so proud of it…after all, she always wanted a rubbish bin in that particular shape. You can’t get it in New Zealand, apparently.  It slots in nicely between the oven and the wall. I don’t think she purchased anything else on that trip.

I’ve been away but got back home this week, and you know what?  The very large and very plastic rubbish bin is no more.  It has been replaced by an even larger and metallic rubbish bin.  It’s like the mother of all rubbish bins.  And she didn’t travel to Australia to get it this time.  She found it in the local rubbish bin shop.

Well, I’m a particularly guilty party in all of this.  When I was young, and somewhat less thoughtful, I purchased a fancy (or at least I thought so at the time) rubbish bin.  And gave it to mum for her birthday.  Yep, I gave mum a rubbish bin for her birthday.  It’s not something I can recall proudly, but mum is so hard to get presents for.  She has everything she wants.  She likes things that are useful.  And so, son thinks….Aha!  She needs a rubbish bin.

So I bought her this really cool metallic rubbish bin.  It has a lever you step on to flip the lid.  I used up a lot of pocket money in order to purchase it.  Unfortunately, circumstances change.  We moved houses and whilst it was still a nice rubbish bin, it did not fit in the space between the oven and the wall.  Round things do not fit in rectangular spaces.  So her one-time birthday gift was replaced by a  cheap plastic bin from Australia.  Gargh!

Moral of the story:  Never ever buy your mother a rubbish bin for her Birthday.

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Protected: Spring Clean

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Skinny

I’m getting skinny, apparently.  Which is odd because I’ve always hovered around 60kg.  Give or take a bit.  But I weighed myself today and I’m sitting at 57kg.  So yes, maybe a little.

I’ve always been kinda stocky.  It comes with being short, you do pad out quite well. I wasn’t the skinniest guy at school.  In fact, I was downright beefy. The only time I was really skinny was in Primary School.  Or not so much skinny as scrawny.  Then puberty kicked in, and peanut butter and jam sandwiches did the rest.  No, I was never fat, I tend to put on muscle bulk instead.  But bodybuilding and weightlifting are really not sexy sports, so I duelled it out with the uber-lean cyclists and runners.

The funny thing is, relative to my peer group, I’m one of the few to weigh the same as I did in High School.  I hardly recognise people I went to school with.  They’re much larger than I remember them, even the real skinny ones.  Why is that?  Maybe I’m the only one still actively being active at what I do.  Cycling, running, Tae Kwon Do, or whatever.  And being a little hyperactive does burn a few calories too.  I don’t walk anywhere.  I bounce from one place to another.

The diet has also changed as I get older.  These days I’m a semi-vegetarian.  That’s watered down vegetarianism.  An  analogy might be like how a tiger is the Diet-Coke version of a lion.  Or Michael Jackson is the vitamin-enchanced, skim-milk version of Elvis.  Which means, I eat mostly veges, but if I feel like meat on occasion, I’m not going to explain myself to you.  I mean, feck off!  Just eat less animal protein…it’s good for the environment.

Every time I come home mum says I’ve lost weight.  But mums are like that.  They think if you don’t eat a home cooked meal every day you will turn into some emaciated orphan from….let’s say…uh, take your pick of any number of third world nations.

But this time she is probably right.  I’m hovering at the low end of what I naturally gravitate to.  I have bones jutting out everywhere.  Over the past year, I’ve been going from motel to motel, living out of a rucksack, and surviving on Coffee.  I spend half my time travelling from place A to place B to place A and to C, D and E.

I’m back home this week.  Mum is force feeding me essential nutrients and no doubt I will be back at 60kg again shortly.

Ken

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Stuff

I keep stuff. Call me a sentimental but I have a habit of hoarding things, years after their use by date. It drives people mad. I have a shitload of things sitting in the family home. I can’t bear to throw any of it away. It’s a reminder of experiences I had, the emotions I felt, dreams at the time, and the people I shared them with.

Take alcohol for instance. I’m a social drinker, and my drink of choice is Ginger Beer. Anything stronger tastes like medicine. And yet I collect the stuff.

I have a bottle of Villa Maria 1998 Sauvignon Blanc. I got it for my 21st Birthday. It’s not an expensive bottle of wine.  Chances are, it tastes like vinegar by now. Yet I keep it as a reminder of my 21st, which wasn’t particularly memorable. I had my flatmates, my lab (I was a research student), and a couple of friends around. It was 1999, but we didn’t party like it. I worked really hard that year, harder than I’ve ever worked in my life. I worked my arse off for a BMedSci. A degree I am never going to use.

I have another bottle of wine. A Selini Semilon Late Harvest 2003. I was so happy to find it that I bought three bottles of it. It’s a reminder of what someone meant to me. I will disembowel myself with a rusty teaspoon before I let anyone drink it.  It’s the only one left.

Then there are the bottles of wine from my 30th Birthday. Why the hell does everyone give me alcohol on my Birthday? By the time I’m 80 I’ll either have a very valuable collection or become an alcoholic.

I have eight unicycles. I don’t ride half of them anymore. My 26″ Muni hasn’t been ridden in 4 or 5 years. I broke my ankle on it in the Himalayas, and then spent 2hrs crawling through leech infested ground to the next village, and 10hrs or so being carted out on horseback. And yet the unicycle made it back with me to Kathmandu. I may not ride it, but it’s still my baby. A very kind family looked after me there and taught me what it means to put other people first. I think about them when I see that unicycle.

There is a dusty box in my room. In it is a collection of assorted coral and seashells. It reminds me of when I was a kid, when we went on holidays to the beach. I loved the beach. I could smell it a mile away.

It’s not just my own stuff I hoard. I have an assortment of tools, a lawnmower, various gizmos and widgets. They belonged to Alex. They meant alot to him, and now even more to me.

One day I might actually figure out how to use half that stuff!

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Protected: Monopoly

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Daydreaming

Ever had one of those days where you find yourself staring blankly into space?  I’ve been having a few of those lately.  But you know, where I work, there is not much space.  Just lot’s of things that go beep.

Normal Sinus Rhythm

Now, a heart tracing is an interesting thing.  It shows the rhythm of your heart.  Basically it goes blip, blip, blip.  A QRS complex, if you want to get scientific about it.   Just like how  you see it on TV or in the movies.

Well…there I was.  Staring blankly into space.  The space, which happened to be occupied by a big flat screen that goes blip blip blip.  You know what?  It suddenly turned into a wiggly line.  Yeah, wiggly like a scribble.  Hmmm….

Ventricular Tachycardia

I stare blankly into space.

That looks  like VT.  Ventricular Tachycardia.

Stares blankly into space.

Shit.

Why isn’t the alarm ringing?

No, not my head, the machine with the screen on it.  It’s supposed to be screaming and flashing by now.

Shit.  That’s VT.  Bed 4.

That guy looks ok.  What the heck?

Wiggly line get’s wigglier.  Ooh. VF!  Ventricular Fibrillation.

Shit….it’s the bed next door.

We ran next door to see a family coming out screaming and in tears.  Pops was lying on the bed, purple and unconscious.

CPR.  Where the heck is the defibrillator?

To cut a short story even shorter, we stuck some pads on and gave him a helluva shock.

And he’s alive.

Some days you just have to stare blankly into space.

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The new Adventure Unicyclist!

Some of you who have known me a while have seen various re-incarnations of Adventure Unicyclist.  Now, I’m sorry that I’m momentarily redirecting you to my blog.  But it’s just so I can update you on the AU progress.

I started the original AU site as my personal site…really just to show off all the cool things that can be done on one wheel.  The great thing about unicycling is that no matter how good (or how bad) you are at it, you always have the opportunity to do something no one else has done before.  There is always somewhere to go that has never been ridden on one wheel.  And it’s a great way to meet people.

I cranked out the first website in Microsoft Frontpage, without really knowing what the heck I was doing.  It seemed to work, but looked pretty messy and amateurish.  Gawd, I even used Comic Sans Serif font (*cringe*)

It was partially rebuilt, but came crashing to a halt as with everything in my life at the time.  I’m left with a big pile of rubble that is going to take a while to dig myself out of.

Well…so the new AU is a work in progress.  I’m doing it the old fashioned way, in between organising Unicon XV, and Induni, the India Unicycle Tour, I’m trying to figure out all this html business.  This time, AU is going to be rebuilt as an all purpose site for Adventure Unicycling.  Not my personal website, which is what you’re on right now.  I’m planning to have a blog, articles, and a Unitouring and MUni forum, and a few sponsored riders.  Keep an eye out for it later this year.

In the meantime, here are a few old unicycle tours to keep you suitably amused:

Uninam: The Vietnam Unicycle Tour 2008

SINZ: The South Island, New Zealand Unicycle Tour 2007

The Laos Unicycle Tour 2006: An Adventure of Epic Proportions

And the next unicycle tour:
Induni, The India Unicycle Tour 2009

Enjoy!

Ken

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Protected: Cyberspace and Social Skills

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Deja vu

Something funny happened to me today.

Have you ever lost something you loved very much?  Something that was precious, and you cherished it, polished it, took it everywhere with you, put it on a pedestal, showed it off to your friends?  An inanimate thing that never cared for you no matter how precious it was to you?

It turned up screaming abuse at me today.

It’s been a year.  And with every day that goes by, it hurts less.  But you know you are never the same again when you bury yourself in work, cry in the middle of the night, and listen to Elvis at 3am in the morning whilst wondering what the hell you are doing here instead of asleep in bed.

Moral of the story.  Don’t date a rock.  They won’t love you back.

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Airports

Airports are one of my favourite places.  Even the really awful ones.  Like London Heathrow and LAX.  They are not just a hub for air travel, they are a heterogenious mixture of people.  Like a salad bowl, containing fruit salad. Only it’s not fruit, it’s people.

Funny looking people, some with frizzy hair, some with no hair, some fat, some skinny, dark people, pale people, smelly people, and people that could grace a magazine cover.  I like watching them. Figuring out where they come from, where they’re going, and what their lives must be like.

I love their accents too.  Even godawful ones like the Aussies and Malaysians.  And Kiwis too.  We talk funny.  Real funny.  I did a round the world trip once.  Then got home and heard the New Zealand accent for the first time in four months.  We sound like chimps.

Airports are part of the travel experience.  I hate being a tourist, going from A to B, for the sole intention of getting to your destination.  Getting there to take photos of yourself at some famous monument, buying the local trinkets and souveniurs, and then jumping back on the bus.

To me, the destination itself is secondary.  It’s how you travel, the odd, crazy and often stressful experiences you have along the way.  Airports are part of that.  From the US airports where you are treated like a virtual terrorist, to the welcoming experience of Singapores’ Changi Airport, to the complete disaster that is Copenhagen airport, and the welcome home familiarity of Auckland and Wellington airports.

I love them.

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