Even though it’s only been a 4-day week, I am bushed. Evidently 3-day boozefests are beyond me nowadays, and I seem to have picked up a cold to boot. Excellent!
Thankfully, I’m off to my parents’ place for some R&R on this 3-day weekend, with the girlfriend heading off on a hen do and me left on my lonesome for a day of sport on the Saturday. There’s nothing like being on the sofa for eight hours, with a laptop on one side and the TV on the other (or, ideally, with both in front of you so you can watch both without having to turn your head. I have previous on this matter).
Then it’s round to a mate’s house for a barbecue on Sunday, come rain or shine, and back to London on Monday. With any luck the girlfriend’s sister will have cleaned our flat whilst she’s staying there in our absence!
OK, so nerve pain in a tooth is something I don’t want to experience again any time soon. Pain like a motherfucker.
It seems that part of an old filling fell out at some point recently, which I didn’t really notice. I didn’t have any pain, and I was able to eat ice cream (etc) without any problems. This morning, however, I’d just finished munching a bagel when I was hit with an absolutely blinding pain in my jaw/cheek.
I’ve genuinely not know a pain like it for many years, if ever. Enough to make your eyes water, and it just wouldn’t go away. Two paracetamols didn’t really help, and I made an emergency appointment at the local dentist.
She told me that part of the filling had come out, and now the nerve was exposed. She managed to numb it and then repair it somewhat, but told me I’d have to go back to have a proper filling put in next week. More expense…
I don’t mind the dentist, but the drilling today was pretty thudding and painful. Even though she gave me some local anaesthetic, it still made me squirm a couple of times when she touched the nerve.
I’ve taken two more painkillers since I’ve got back to the office, and to tell the truth am feeling a little lightheaded right now. Better than being in eye-watering pain, I guess!
[I]t will help to get us fitter, it will help to tackle the scourge of obesity, or Big Society, as it is sometimes confusingly known.
Our great and glorious Mayor (ahem!), Boris Johnson, simultaneously singing the praises of the new London bike-hire scheme, and having a little dig at the Prime Minister’s “big society” programme of policies.
As much as he is a bumbling toff beyond belief, he can be quite funny sometimes.
(Via the Guardian’s liveblog of the launch of the bike-hire scheme, in the 8:22am entry)
I’m not totally au fait with things like health insurance, as I get mine provided by my company free of charge, but as part of this year’s renewal I’ve added the girlfriend to the company scheme. Is £900 a lot for one year?
I don’t have the explanatory notes to hand, but I’m pretty sure that it’s worldwide cover, which is handy given the amount of travelling we do, and I think that when it comes to health it’s better to be over-protected than under-protected.
Yes, we have the NHS here, which I am a massive supporter of, but having the option of going private is a benefit which I’m willing to pay for. Hell, if I go private for something, that means the NHS waiting list is one person shorter, which helps that system to be more efficient.
The sum total of what I ate yesterday:
Healthy living Rob, healthy living…
OK, so I may have had a sausage+egg sandwich for breakfast. But I did go to the gym just now, and am munching a mixed bean salad for lunch.
Two good things cancel out a bad thing, right?
RIGHT?
T-minus 37 minutes until my first (and probably only) session with a personal trainer at the gym. I was in there one lunchtime last week, trying to fight off a godawful hangover, when one of the trainers came over and started chatting about what kind of routines/programmes I do, and so on.
I tend to be relatively aimless when I’m at the gym, and am not working towards anything in particular, other than a vague goal to lose some weight around my middle and be a bit healthier. I like programmes such as 200 sit-ups, because they give me concrete targets and numbers to hit each week, which in turn motivates me to get my ass into the gym in the first place.
Without that motivation, it’s far too easy to not go, and then it becomes a cumulative effect, knowing that each time you don’t go, the first one back is harder. Miss a whole week and you really don’t feel like going any time soon.
The session I’m having today is free, which is a bit of a result, but I can’t see myself paying for any further sessions, to be honest. They’re just too expensive for me to really justify it.
I’m hoping to get some ideas, and to get some motivation back into my system. Maybe even some finite targets to achieve. It’s definitely a mental thing for me, because I thoroughly enjoy the act of working out. But getting to the gym seems to be the difficulty that I need to overcome…
A gym session is fucking hard work when you’ve not been for nearly a month.
But at least I went! I was going to go yesterday, but apathy and laziness took hold of me instead. And then four beers in the pub after work also took hold of me, dammit.
I’m determined to lose the gut which has developed in the last few months, and handily the girlfriend is going on some kind of gradual detox diet so I won’t be able to eat unhealthily at home either. I have no problem in giving up certain foods that I eat too much of (bread, cream, chocolate), but it’s going to be a wrench having to avoid cheese…
Now, all I’ve got to do is replace beer with G&Ts, and I’m sorted. I’m not going to kid myself and say that I won’t drink, but at least I can cut down on the calorie content of my alcohol.
That hot spa in Iceland has absolutely ruined normal baths for me.
I took one this evening as I’m feeling a bit under the weather, and it was just plain crappy. It wasn’t big enough, it didn’t stay hot long enough, it wasn’t an opaque sky-blue colour, there wasn’t an Arctic wind whistling over me, and there definitely wasn’t an Icelandic girl called Eva massaging me.
It was not altogether the relaxing, soothing experience that I was looking for.
Hmm, at some point over the last couple of nights, I have definitely chewed a big chunk out of the inside of one of my cheeks.
Owwwwwwwww.
