July & August in a nutshell

I haven't been so enthusiastic about blogging over the past few months. There's many reasons, and also many events that have occurred that I'm not yet sure about in my mind's eye at this point. I'm also spending a lot of time in our apartment thinking, tinkering on my Mac, and stringing-out all of the few tasks I needed to do for our impending visit home to Queensland (Brisbane & Magnetic Island). Vacillating between a personal horizontal and vertical orientation has been the flavour of the past few weeks. Copious amounts of snoozing, DVDs, and satellite TV with a sprinkling of the odd meet-up with friends and other small day excursions. A lot of the latter activities have been organised in part in shame for my complete lack of spark.

This week I've picked up my socks a little, and thought summarising the past few weeks would be a good start to get back on the writing horse. By the way, I'm going to be doing a lot more writing very soon.

Ok, here we go.

In terms of a sequence of events, Linda has written a nice summary of what has happened to us since the beginning of August (awesome summary TimmyB - good start).

There's a couple of other things that weren't mentioned, like a side-trip with Lin & her parents to Tongli. Tongli is one of Jiangsu Province's famed "Water Towns" that is located about 90 minutes from Shanghai and is worth a day trip. Perhaps not in the middle of Shanghai's latest heat-wave (like we happened to do), but rather in a cooler clime and perhaps with some early morning fog on the water for some cool photographic opportunities.

As I brought up photography, you can see the photos from my flickr Tongli set below.

I've actually spent quite a bit of time on my flickr site over the past few weeks. Why? Well, I'm not entirely sure. There were a few problems a few problems with my older digital images when I migrated my Gallery install over to my Flickr page. Many of the images were improperly titled, and few of the tags/keywords were copied over correctly. So, I spent a bit of time cleaning them up. Really something you wouldn't do unless you have oodles of time at your disposal. Lucky I have that then eh?

I've also started to re-explore Shanghai in my spare time. Infrequently, I've been jumping on my bike and setting off around town looking for a cool and quiet place to do all the things I was doing in the cool and quiet place I call home. But with better coffee. In the last week, many of these little trips have involved purchasing little bits and pieces from two of the new fake markets around Shanghai. In summary, I can say these markets contain all the same stuff at the same prices, and most importantly it is still a pain in the neck to buy anything. The only plus for me is now the markets are indoors/underground and air-conditioned.

I haven't been playing any sport either. My knee is still giving me grief. One of the first things I'm doing when I hit the ground in Brisbane is arranging a few doctors/physio visits to see what's going on there. Needless to say lack of exercise has been adding to my doldrums and also my beer gut. I haven't been able to tear myself away from basketball completely though. Each Sunday morning I've been coaching Reign Design to reach their potential. Unfortunately my skills in this regards aren't that great - and the team that won last season's title is now 0-8. Ugh. There's still one game to go though. Fingers crossed for you fellas!