August Review

 The August review, another birthday over.

Nothing for the miscellaneous section this month.

So straight onto running, registered for races in the Athletics Victoria XCR winter season at Albert Park 10km and Ballarat 15km. Both were good events with lots of much better runners than myself, I was a bit outside top 200 (36 minutes) and top 100 (55 minutes) for the two, but easily improved PB for each. Instead of doing the next XCR half marathon I registered for the Melbourne Marathon half in early October.

Also two new parkruns at Warrandyte and Phillip Island before finishing my consecutive tourism streak at 52 events. Having not purchased any shoes in a while I got some New Balance RC Elite 2 at 40% off for racing and Nike Tempo Next% at the factory outlet for training.

A horror month of shares after one quiet month, losing like 10% in a week. Just investing the ASX 200 would have returned about 4% per year over the past five, sometimes I don't know why I bother. I've started selling down my investment loan as it's not as worthwhile now that interest rates continue to increase.

The Commonwealth Games finished early in the month, disappointing TV coverage due to the time difference, the only highlight was being able to watch the Australian gold medal in the men's 1500 metres athletics live on a Saturday night. The AFL regular season finished also, without going to one game. It was no surprise to see Carlton just miss the finals in the last week. I'm not sure how many finals I will attend as I don't have too much interest in some of the teams.

Nothing happening on the to do list:

• End Of Year plans
• Domestic travel is quite expensive - if you don't have baggage or flight cancellation problems
• Perhaps a short local or interstate trip to line up with double parkrun weekends - if they have them

Enjoyment at work is declining due to having to support some terrible vendor software with event worse support, probably increases the likelihood of looking for a change next year.

That's it for this month.

• Books
• None
• Movies
• The Black Phone
• Made the most of the limited characters and locations
• 7 out of 10
• Music
• None
• TV
• All Or Nothing Arsenal
• The All Or Nothing shows are always good, but ruined by way too much Arteta
• 6 out of 10
• Atlanta Season 3
• The non-Atlanta character episodes were better, the rest weren't very good
• 4 out of 10
• Video Games
• Forza 7
• Finished everything except for a couple of achievements
• Forza 6
• Just filling in time finishing the main game while waiting for Saints Row
• Saints Row
• Only started late in the month
• Good so far, but quite similar to previous ones