The year started off on a high note due to having bonus paid holidays from December 25 right through to January 1 thanks to some old bargaining agreement with the university staff union I suppose. Starting the working week on a Thursday is always great, but particularly because not many other people bothered to turn up. Getting back into the rhythm of a five day week afterwards was a little bit harder to deal with...
The only downside of having so much time off was that I did a lot of running, too much in fact, and picked up a right hip injury and left hamstring injury at the same time. The left hamstring has been particularly frustrating because it refuses to get better, and I seem to keep aggravating it just by sitting in a computer desk chair at work or at home. It still hasn't really got any better going into February yet.
Throughout January the trains were not running between Ringwood and Blackburn so that the train line could be moved underneath the road (at last). Thankfully it only lasted for three weeks, and even though it was only two stops closer to work, I already started getting used to spending a little bit less time on the train. This just serves as more motivation to move closer to the city this year (or next).
I had to do my second on-call shift for work early in the month, this time during the week instead of over the weekend. Everything was going well until Wednesday morning at 2:30am when I got a text message on the on-call mobile phone saying that logging in to one of the servers had failed. I had to get up, turn on the computer, connect to VPN and run through the on-call guide just to find out that it was a false alarm. It took me 2-3 hours to get back to sleep afterwards. On Wednesday night the same thing happened, first a false alarm from a different server at 10:00pm and then the same false alarm as the previous night at 2:30am again. I got paid about $400 after tax for the week of being on-call and the couple of hours of actual work I had to do, but I'm not sure if it's worth it if I'm going to be woken up in the middle of the night that often...
Despite just having a mini holiday (at home) in December, I was already keen to get planning my next holiday, and I have managed to organise and pay for a short trip from March 7 to March 16. More on that in the coming months...
In the middle of the month we encountered a crazy heatwave with four days in a row of 40 degrees or more. The beginning of this coincided with me picking up a cold, not sure how that it possible. Once I had worked through that illness I was ready to tackle the heat with a lunch run of Thursday and Friday, approximately 44 degrees each day. On Thursday I took on two laps of The Tan and Friday I was up around Princes Park. The first day went alright, but the second day in a row really took a toll, and I was close to total heat meltdown on the way back to work, I had to stop every couple of minutes to get some energy back, and there was no drink taps around the city to help either. As an example of the amount of fluid I lost, after one run I had a 500ml Mother energy drink, followed by a 600ml plain milk and 500ml of water, and I was still thirsty. My weight from the Thursday morning to Friday dropped from 72.4 kilograms to 69.6 kilograms.
The Australian Open tennis ran through January, despite the heatwaves, as did the Big Bash cricket. I found that I really don't have the attention span to spend much time watching either, I tend to get bored within half an hour usually unless something particularly dramatic is happening.
One sport that I can still watch is the National Football League. I arranged a "work" from home day to watch the NFL Conference Finals - Denver vs. New England and Seattle vs. San Francisco. Both games were alright, although I knew New England didn't have much chance and that game was over well before the final quarter.
The Big Day Out lineup for 2014 was quite poor, but there was a couple of good sideshows that I attended. On the Wednesday before the festival was Arcade Fire at the Music Bowl. This was running the same time as the second week of the Australian Open, so traffic and parking was a bit of an issue but we got there before the start although we were right up the back of the hill. The setlist was good although I would have preferred a few more tracks from the first two albums. They also came out on stage a couple of times with these big heads on which was pretty cool.
The Thursday right after was Grouplove supported by CSS at the Hi-Fi Bar. CSS were quite underwhelming and didn't seem to have their usual energy, perhaps because they were only the support band. Grouplove made up for it though, with a very good and exciting set. I hadn't heard of Grouplove before this tour so it was a good find too.
The weekend that followed was the Australia Day weekend, which of course means the annual Triple J Hottest 100 barbecue, this time hosted at Daren's new house in Prahran. I looked up the projected top twenty beforehand and I didn't mind most of the songs too much, definitely was better than the last couple of years. A few in particular I liked:
- Lorde - Royals
- Daft Punk - Get Lucky
- Arctic Monkeys - Do I Wanna Know
- The Preatures - Is This How You Feel
- London Grammar - Strong
- Arcade Fire - Reflektor
- Birds Of Tokyo - Lanterns
I spent a bit of time finally finishing off Grand Theft Auto V, I wanted to get the (pointless) achievement of 70 gold medal missions in single player. A lot of the missions weren't too hard to replay and get gold, but the loading time is horrendously slow, it really ruins the game. I was also having a bit of fun going around in online mode again, but my Xbox Live Gold membership has just run out, so I'll have to decide if I want to subscribe to that again. Next I will probably go back to Grand Theft Auto IV briefly to finish off The Ballad Of Gay Tony and maybe a few achievements from the main game and other expansion too.
