April Review

A rare two items for the miscellaneous section this month.

The election campaign was underway for the whole month, with politicians travelling through multiple states each day to make more short term announcements. In the background the issue of housing affordability goes unanswered because there are more "have" than "have not" voters.

Meanwhile following the USA elections the rest of the world was impacted but numerous rounds of tariff announcements, even going over 100% increases. With only three years of stability and recovery after the covid years we could do without another round of global uncertainty.

A busy month of running according to my notes, so I'll switch to a list:

• Two slow parkruns before race day
• Two faster parkruns in the 17:50 range, but not managing regular 17:30 yet
• After a few weeks using the Garmin 955 I got to try it out on track mode
• It defaulted to 1 mile auto lap so I had to manually stop the first time
• The distance is much more accurate, so my training looks slower than usual
• A rare trip to the Nike factory outlet and an unexpected 40% sale
• Most shoes were about three years old so only got one pair of Infinity Run 3
• Two races at each end of the month
• Run For The Kids 14.4km
• Up at 6am to leave for the train
• Started slow, still felt good at 12km but didn't have much more speed for the finish
• Hills weren't too bad except for the last one at Southern Cross
• Ballarat Marathon 10km
• Hoped to finish a bit closer to 36:00 but had some wind around the lake
• Could have gone quicker for the downhill finish if I knew how the course ended
• Sore hamstrings driving both to and from Ballarat

Based entirely on the tariffs mentioned above there was a big drop in shares everywhere around the world. The decrease included 8% in a week and another 5% over the weekend. The technology shares like Nvidia were down even more. The rest of the month was spent slowly recovering a bit of the loss.

Another month of major expenses will hopefully settle down now:

• Holiday flights $2500
• Holiday hotels $4000
• Holiday tickets - Universal Studios $250
• PlayStation 5 with games $900
• Tax quarterly payment $1800

Had some rare athletics coverage on television with the Australian national championships - the 1500m and 5000m were the most interesting - and the Stawell Gift.

The to do list has a bit of progress:

• Running
• XCR 5km June 15 - depends on my half marathon training
• Auckland half marathon November 2 - probably instead of Singapore again
• Winter Holiday
• Japan flights booked for July
• Japan hotels booked
• Osaka Universal Studios booked via Japan website translated by Google
• Other tickets aren't on sale until May

Things are slowing down again at work towards the end of the financial year, so hopefully I'm not sitting around with nothing to do. I've finished studying for the Java exam and now doing a lot of sample tests, but the amount of trick questions and needing to memorise Javadoc type information is very annoying. Hopefully I can get through the remaining tests and do just enough the pass the exam in the next month.

That's it for this month.

• Books
• None
• Movies
• The Monkey
• Disappointing, even for a Stephen King short story adaptation
• The reviews suggested much better
• 3 out of 10
• Music
• None
• TV
• Boy Swallows Universe
• Entertaining Australian short series, set in the 1980's was quite authentic
• 8 out of 10
• Severance season 1
• The first episode was very slow and depressing but it got better afterwards
• The Enter Sandman scene was a highlight
• 7 out of 10
• Severance season 2
• Didn't really expand on the first season
• 5 out of 10
• The White Lotus season 3
• Another great season with a good cast
• 8 out of 10
• Video Games
• PlayStation 5
• Got an Astro Bot disc console just before all retail prices increased
• Alan Wake 2 deluxe
• Final Fantasy 16 - hasn't arrived yet
• Gran Turismo 7 - PS4 version is all I could find for a new copy