This evening I’m making a special effort and wearing my glasses as I write. Not because I’m struggling to see what I’m writing — goodness, no. Instead, I’m using Jude’s lovely shiny new laptop that I got today. It’s a 13″ macbook pro retina, which has just the most wonderful screen.
When I got my laptop, the retina screens had only recently been available on the macbooks and I couldn’t see the difference between the resolutions. Two months later I discovered that I needed glasses for reading. Great! All of a sudden the slightly blurry but perfectly fine screen was now a crisp platter of teeny tiny pixels. Each one perfectly visible and mocking me in crisp, clarity. Not now. The smaller sibling of my much loved, much hacked, bashed, upgraded and tweaked 15″ MBP has a crystal clear screen which looks even better when I don a pair of specs.
So tonight I shall write bespectacled.
The only reason that I’m using it is because I’m supposed to be installing apache/php/mysql, but that took about five minutes. It’s more fun to play with!
Anyway, I spent the morning working on shapie.me again — while trying to turn off all other devices that were trying to coax me to do other work. This afternoon I was at the hospital for a follow-up on the nut allergy diagnosis a couple of months ago.
Long story short, I’ve been told that I need to avoid hazelnuts (and birch pollen). All other nuts are fine. It’s an oral sensitivity thing, for which there’s a term and I can’t remember it. Basically, I scoff hazelnuts and apparently my body mis-interprets the proteins as birch pollen and then reacts. So no more Nutella, which I was resigned to anyway, but I can go wild on the salt and vinegar peanuts — which I thought were written off for good. This makes me very happy.
They also asked if I would consent to being involved in some medical research into allergies and asthma, which I agreed to. To start with, it involved a long series of questions into my medical background with particular emphasis on when I would have reactions and from what age. I confess that I’ve never been one to be in tune with his body, and so I wouldn’t normally notice when things were right or particularly wrong. I did a good job of frustrating the consultant by shrugging, waving my arms and generally being unable to identify when I would have an allergic reaction. “Well”, I would say, “my eyes get all gloopy in the spring, but that’s just what happens isn’t it?”. “No Mr Hanlon.” she said, too many times, “It’s because you’re allergic/asthmatic. That’s not normal.” Hmmm. We didn’t hit it off as well as last time. Also she seemed quite cross that I wasn’t carrying my antihistamines around with me. I felt like I’d disappointed her. I’ll have to keep some in my wallet.
However, I shouldn’t lose sight of the bigger picture here. The consultant told me that I could scoff most nuts to my heart’s content, and this makes me very happy.
Most of the rest of the evening has been fairly run of the mill. My Mum had picked up the children because I couldn’t be at the school in the afternoon. We’d also had a pre-first-communion session with Joel at 6pm at the Parish Centre. So I’d grabbed the children, had a chat with Mum and then zoomed over to the church to get to the session in time. When I finally got home, I heated up the chilli that Mum had super-kindly made for Jude and I. I’d been panicking a couple of days ago, not knowing how I would fit everything in, and so she came to the rescue.
It was about 8:15 and I realised that I hadn’t been for a walk yet. I checked my phone and it was as flat as a fluke. Panic! (Again…) I couldn’t walk if the phone was dead because then I couldn’t measure it with runkeeper and therefore it would never have happened. In the end I got the phone charged to the point where it turned on again. Then I threw my trusty old macbook into my rucksack with the phone plugged into the USB and I headed off, with the phone charging from the laptop and with me listening to audiobooks as I pottered. I also grabbed some milk, wine, biscuits for the children and some test peanuts at Nettos down the road, so I did the subsequent 30 minute walk weighed down with the weight of the laptop and the groceries. I had to remind myself that I’ve lost a lot more weight than that over the past 12 months, which helped – a bit.
Tomorrow is more of a clear run at things. I’m hoping to get some reporting into the shapie.me system so that I can then make a new set of code live. If there’s no reporting, then it’s as if all the other stuff isn’t actually happening!
Until then, best wishes.x