I went on Friday to get one of those two hour glucose challenge test thingies. You basically fast and get a blood test, then drink a bottle of disgustingly sweet, lime green nastiness and then sit for an hour and get more blood drawn, and sit for another hour to get yet more blood drawn. This is a test for diabetes and related tests.

Today, I got a call from the doctor's office, which is... I can't remember having the doctor's office call me any time prior. Not for the gallbladder tests, not for needing a pap smear, nothing. But today they called in regard to the blood sugar test and scheduled an appointment for "as soon a possible" which, given the doctor's schedule, turns out to be Thursday afternoon.

This can't be good.

I did some research and while this is only a guess and I don't want to be a graduate of the University of Google, I suspect that I'm probably pre-diabetic. I could have full on Type II Diabetes, but that doesn't seem as likely to me. Of course, without knowing what was in the blood test, I'm only guessing based on known symptoms and other medical history.

So, it looks like no matter what, I'm going to have to lose some weight, which I've known needed to be done for a while. It's got no vanity element, other than I will say that I'd like to be able to buy clothes at more mainstream shop. Mostly, I don't really care if people think I'm fat or not, and I don't care that much if I'm fat. It's not a big self esteem thing for me (now, anyway). However, I do have some pretty unpleasant joint pain (knees, primarily) and back strain that would undoubtedly be improved by a significant weight loss. And now I have documented blood sugar issues that are certainly going to need to be dealt with.

Looks like I'm going to be going on a Low GI diet, and I'm going to cut back on fat. I'm going to have to give up my beloved Coca Cola (I can't drink Diet Coke because I get a vicious reaction to the aspartame - NutraSweet). I'm also probably going to need to give up or seriously modify my caffeine habit (I think the occasional cup of tea - with Splenda, which I tolerate very well), and give up alcohol (not a big deal, as I don't drink much or often, but I'm wondering what I'm going to do with that bottle of Bailey's in the cupboard). Oh, and certain things like Lindt Chocolate (my favourite) are going to become just a fond memory (believe it or not, I've given up chocolate in the past, as well, and I know I can do that, too).

I can do the low-fat thing. I've done it before, though it's been a while since I actively monitored it. It's painful at first, but once you get used to it, you actually prefer the lower-fat diet. I'm also pretty okay with the Low GI diet, actually. It does mean making some adjustments, but they're not too severe and, well, if you've got to, you've got to.

I can't say I'm thrilled with this development, but it's not as bad as it could be, and if it makes me feel better (particularly if I can kick my persistent fatigue in the butt once and for all!), I'm up for the change. A little incentive is never a bad thing.

I'm fiddling with the RSS feed for this blog. If things go weird, well, that's why. I'm a mucking with it.

Whew. It's been quite hectic around here. For Christmas, I baked a caramel flan (an egg custard with a built-in caramel sauce, yummy), which isn't difficult, but it is time consuming and a little fiddly. Christmas Day, of course, the kids were up early and then we went to Nanna and Grandpop's house for the day. On Boxing Day (26 December, The Feast of St Stephen, which is the day that Good King Wenseslas looked out) we went for our traditional Boxing Day trip and we ended up in Sale, with stops in Moe and Morwell, which has an absolutely amazing public rose garden, and we made a trip to Ninety Mile Beach and stepped in the very cold Tasman Sea (Antarctic currents? Check! Even in the middle of summer it's too cold to swim there!)

I managed to get a sunburn on one arm and shoulder, and I acquired that from inside the car. Note to self: put on sunscreen even if you're going to be in the car. Oww.

At the same time as all this, my computer was acting up. My monitor is at a repair shop at the moment (I miss it! I'm using a somewhat crappy 17" CRT monitor and it's not even a flat screen! Though I am grateful to have a spare monitor to use, I want to add that.), and my primary hard drive has been going weird for some time, so Andrew got me a new one for Christmas (yes, it's fine; I once got a motherboard for Mother's Day, too, by my own request), and a bigger SD card for my phone, so in between the presents and the custards and the trips and the sunburns, I've been mucking with transferring all my data to the new hard drive.

As it turns out, I had to reinstall Windows from the ground up (which, if you're following my Twitter Feed at all, you already know). It's not so bad installing Windows, mind you. It's installing all the other stuff, as well. Happily, I'm pretty good at this and I keep reasonably good backups of my data, so it wasn't too terribly painful, just damned tedious and somewhat soul-draining.

I have most of my stuff reinstalled now. I expect I'll think of other things that need to be reinstalled, but for now I've got the stuff I use all the time, and I've got about ten times the drive space I had before, so I guess it was worth the loss of a small piece of my soul. I've given many pieces of my soul to computers over the years, one more bit shouldn't make too much difference at this point.

So, hey, happy holidays, eh? Still have New Year's Eve to get through, but that shouldn't be too terribly dramatic. At least I won't be baking any custards.

New 404 page. By the way, the photo is one that I took at my local grocery store (with my new phone, as a matter of fact).

I've also got some photographs that I took on our Boxing Day trip, but I'm not sure any of them are particularly interesting. The trip was fun, but the scenery was pretty ordinary. Pity I didn't get a picture of that decapitated kangaroo on the side of the road, that would have been something you don't see every day. As it is, I have a bunch of pictures of roses and several of the beach. I'll sort through them and see if there are any worth posting.

Image by Dixie_Native.

Yes, it's summer solstice here in Land Down Under. I celebrated by planting some flowers (alstromeria lilies, my favourite flower) and some herbs (catnip, rosemary, parsley, and coriander, all of which are for the kitchen except for the catnip, which is for the cat), and repotting a few things (one of my office cacti, a pot of what I think are some sort of violets, and the avocado pit we grew in a jar of water on the window ledge).

For those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, well, happy winter solstice.

Majel Barret-Roddenberry, wife of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and an integral part of the Star Trek universe, has died. She was really great to the fans, and, personally, I absolutely loved Lwaxana Troi. Majel will surely be missed by Trek fans everywhere.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3WOY9SwyOs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJfkYjrbPS4

First, of course, was this real life incident:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uIj0YvDBKE

And now, of course, someone has come up with a Flash-based web game where players throw shoes at President Bush.

Ah, the world wide web. You gotta love it.

Okay, maybe the newly remodelled Westfield Doncaster Shoppingtown (you can Google it if you care; I'm not going to give them a link) is cool inside. I wouldn't have any way of knowing. I lost an hour of my life and a fair amount of petrol there and never even got close to going inside. I will not be returning, which is a shame, because we used to go there frequently and I really enjoyed it. However, what I experienced today is not something I want to risk experiencing ever again.

Anyway, we went in the afternoon, after what should have been the lunchtime rush. Yes, I know it's a couple weeks to Christmas and things are busy busy busy. I get that. I'm not fussed about that, I mean, I get that you go somewhere, you see there's not really any hope of parking, and you go elsewhere. Fine, I do that all the time.

However, what happened to us today was we drove around (painfully slowly) for about twenty minutes and then said, "Well, look, we're not going to find anywhere to park, let's go," and then spent another forty minutes trying to get the hell out of the carpark. Yes, really. For a while, we were so badly gridlocked that we actually turned the engine off for periods of time while waiting to be able to proceed. Furthermore, there were a lot of cars that were parked completely illegally (when I see that, I really want to just get out my keys and walk along scoring the paint on every damned one of them). The illegal parking just contributed to the gridlock, as it turned what should have been a two lane channel into a single lane. Oh, and there was a whole big area of parking that was blocked off from use. Why? Well, there was a non-existent car wash there. Seriously. Reserved for a car wash that did not exist.

So, basically, it was an hour of my life that I'll never get back. Wasted petrol, wasted time, by the time we finally got the hell out of there, my blood sugar was very low (we were planning on having a late lunch... we ended up going elsewhere and having a very late lunch, indeed), and one of the kids was complaining that she needed to go to the toilet.

The thing that really irritates me is the incredibly poor design of the parking garage. The parking aisles all exit to a single lane to get to the exit. I have to wonder if the engineers who created this mess have ever actually parked a car on a busy day? Hey, I bet it looked great on paper and blueprints, but in practical application it SUCKS. Poor design irritates me beyond belief. I mean, this was a $600million remodel, and it took a couple of years to complete, and yet they think that "state of the art parking" means a multi-level rat warren of painfully slow moving traffic and - wait for it - you pay for your parking! (Happily, you only pay after the first two hours. This is good, because it could take you that long just to find a parking place at all, or to decide you won't find one and try to leave.)

Unbelievably bad design. I don't care how much they brag about it, it sucks. I wish I could grab all the design engineers and all of the upper management and stick them in cars and make them drive around that hell hole for an hour or so.

I used to think that the parking situation at Chadstone was really bad, and it kind of is. You can drive around a long time before you find a place to park. But the thing is, you don't sit in a gridlock for the better part of an hour. I have now elevated Westfield Doncaster to the worst parking situation I've experienced in Australia (that's ten years of living here and visiting a lot of parking garages, including in the heart of the city, multiple suburbs, and at very busy times of the year, indeed!). In fact, come to think of it, it may be the worst parking situation I've ever experienced. The only worse one I can think of would be something like leaving a parking lot after some event (concert, for example), when everyone's trying to go at once, but that's about volume, not about incredibly poor design (which the owners are bragging about as if it's great!)

As I said, I won't be back. It's a real shame, because it looks like the internal remodel is pretty cool, but honestly, if you can't get in to see, what's the point? I can't be bothered. I'm sure that after the holidays the traffic will be better, but do I want to risk it? Nup. Plenty of other shopping centres in Melbourne, ones where even if I can't find a place to park, I can at least leave the carpark without being gridlocked for the better part of an hour. Poor design, frustrating experience, I'll take my money somewhere else. (I doubt very much that the management of Westfield will ever read this, much less care what I wrote, but I wanted to write it just in case anyone else felt the same way and wanted to read my rant.)