Little white balls

This morning I could hardly feel my arms and legs. I dragged myself out of bed at 9:30; if I'd stayed there any longer I might simply have floated away. I took a nosedive early in the week and haven't felt right since then. Now I think I know why. My Efexor "extended release" pills don't contain powder; instead they contain dozens of tiny white balls which are presumably designed to "go off" at different times. But for me right now, these balls aren't going off at all. Instead they're going straight through me. I need to see my GP toot-sweet.

Today I haven't felt like doing anything, though I did play pétanque at Bayswater with Phil as last-minute preparation for tomorrow's competition on Waiheke Island. Phil is someone I find very unscary, so I was happy to do that rather than be stuck inside on a sunny afternoon. I won three of our four games. Phil likes to travel, and once or twice as we were playing he looked up flights on his iWhatsit - apparently you could fly to Vancouver or Honolulu for a dollar. This will be the fourth time I've been to Waiheke - each time to throw boules - and it's a pretty cool place. The last time I went was two years ago when the tournament quickly descended into farce. The organiser, if you can call him that, carried a hip flask. He was sozzled before we even started and after a couple of hours he was four sheets to the wind. The rain, which completely obliterated his draw sheet, didn't help either. We seemed to play more games than anyone else, advancing to the next round despite losing in style virtually every time. All in all it was an interesting day.

Yesterday I didn't go to work. Instead I went to Mt Eden to meet with Grant, who Andy kindly put me in touch with, to talk about jobs in mental health. We had a power cut (a fork lift truck hit a power line, blacking out half the city) so my alarm didn't go off. I overslept badly, missed my medication (as I found out today) and got there late. In the end though, we had a very productive meeting. Grant is a really nice bloke and he knows a lot of people in the field. Mental health work is certainly something I can consider. It must be very satisfying after a day's work to know you've helped somebody. Whether I'd be suitable is perhaps another matter - at this very moment I'm struggling to help myself, let alone anybody else.

In the afternoon I took out a few CDs from the library. One of them was Moon Safari by Air - a great album in my opinion. I love all that "spacey" music. The album came out in '98 and as such it reminds me - though not fondly - of my first year at university. I also took out Tracy Chapman's Our Bright Future which was a bit of a disappointment compared to some of her earlier stuff which I really like. I only grabbed one book which I couldn't resist simply because of its title: Bonjour Laziness - Jumping Off the Corporate Ladder. Of course I want to jump off the corporate ladder at my first opportunity. This book talks of the "incomprehensible no man's language" you get in the office: "AGIR has become IPN, which supervises the STI, divesting the SSII of control of the DM, but the latter will waste no time in subsuming RTI." Personally I call all of those acronyms TFIs: three f***ing initials. I've only read two chapters so far, but it's an absolute scream. Better than Who Moved My Blackberry? and that wasn't bad.

I had a good week on iPredict. They have stocks in petrol prices; Wednesday's five-cent increase at the pumps netted me $190, though that did little to lift my mood. My overall profit is $800 of which I've decided to withdraw half. In a later post, who knows maybe my next post, I'll give a run-down of my biggest winners and losers.

I'm pleased to see that the bastards who killed 32 birds at Temuka's aviary in August have been put away. I have fond memories of the aviary and the park as a kid. I happened to be there days after the attack; it was very sad to see all those flowers outside. Some people just make me sick.

From tomorrow, anyone caught using a mobile phone while driving faces an $80 fine. I think it should be more like $200. People have been dashing around buying hands-free kits, wondering how on earth they'll cope with this new law. It won't affect me - while eating a sandwich, reading a map and driving all at the same time remains legal, I'll be fine.