Travel

Being a good greenie

by feurmann

OK, so we all want to do the right thing with the packaging and so forth that we bring home. But confusion reigns. The War on Waste programs a few years ago (the third season of which was shown on ABC TV in Australia recently) highlighted the lack of clarity at the household level around recycling practices. Are plastics that spring back when you scrunch them up treated differently from those that don’t? What about “recyclable” coffee cups?

Fear not. A recent guide was published in a free online magazine that takes you from the soup to the nuts of household recycling. I printed this out to put on the fridge. Then the thought occurred to me: other people might want to do that too, without the fiddling around that is involved with printing a web page. So, to be a good greenie, I have pasted the text from the original document into a Google Doc, taken out excess line breaks, and added a bit of content. (The guide is in two parts. I haven’t interfiled the new content with the old, so you will just have to live with that.) The new document is unimaginatively called Recycling, and is available here until I get a take-down order.

I’m aware there is a controversy about whether plastics recycling, in particular, is responsible for much of the microplastic pollution currently occurring. I don’t know enough about this to comment. The collapse of the Redcycle plastics recycling scheme has left us, like everyone else, having to put our plastics in the general waste bin, thus eventually into landfill. It is all rather depressing.

We returned a few days ago from two nights in Hepburn Springs. The place we stayed was new to us, and much less expensive than our usual villa in Daylesford. The only negative for the property was that it was on the side of a hill, and thus down about five steps. However, it was very neat, well appointed, and snug inside. We had the facilities for cooking breakfast; this is a must on account of my beloved’s food intolerances. Going midweek was definitely less stressful than on the weekends, when half of Melbourne seems to flock there. Of course we chose to go a few days before the winter solstice, and thus the true depths of winter — down to about two degrees overnight. Melbourne was discernibly warmer!

Snakes and birthdays

by feurmann

I went to see Dr P yesterday and received some mixed news. The bad: the PSA is now 24, up from 16.The good: he emphasised that I looked “fantastic”, and that the disease is not causing radiological progression. (This will be tested the next time I see him in 4 weeks, by which time I will have had my three-monthly CT and PET scans.) I asked him if he was happy with me and he replied he was “happy with everything”.

Obviously an increase in the PSA is no cause for celebration. However

  • the reading hasn’t doubled (Dr P’s criterion for intervention);
  • one should remember that this is an increase recorded over two months, i.e. double the usual obervation period; and
  • the PSA itself is just a marker of the underlying disease. It is therefore a mistake to fetishise it. It’s not the quantum of the PSA, but the trajectory of the increases that is important. As long as I feel well and can do the things I want to do — both of which are the case — the number can be what it likes. (Short of point #1 above.)

So where do birthdays come in? This morning as I was trying to get back to sleep, I had the following thought. You know how after you’ve had a birthday, you think “Actually, I don’t feel different from when I was a year younger”? A monthly PSA score is a bit like having a different age each month. I was 16 in April, and 24 now in May. Something is happening, but I’m still the same person.

Dr P and I were both away in April (hence the two-month gap between consultations), he in Rome, we in Singapore. Below are some brief impressions from our five nights there:

  • Getting on the plane was a bit ugly (a one hour queue at Tullamarine for seat allocation). We learned later that Singapore Airlines had oversold premium economy. Also, my beloved and I were both affected by an annoying issue about our tickets. The form of name appearing in our passports was different to that on our tickets, the passports bearing our middle names, the tickets not. We had asked then travel agent specifically if that would be a problem, to which she replied “No”. Unfortunately she was wrong. This meant we couldn’t use the automated kiosk for seat allocation, because it couldn’t reconcile the two forms of our names, and we had to find a human to resolve this — who were in short supply.
  • The flight over was OK, and the hotel (the Shangri-La) was fantastic. My left ankle had gotten quite sore from all the standing at the airport, but I bought a (very expensive) sports elastic bandage for it, which made walking around a lot easier. The hotel is in 11 hectares of beautiful grounds, so we had a couple of tentative wanders around there.
  • The weather was very hot and humid — even the locals said so. So it was a bit too hot to walk around outside any distance. Fortunately the hotel had a shuttle bus to the CBD, and taxis were readily available — both air-conditioned.
  • The highlight of the trip was a visit to the Peranakan Museum , a tribute to a particular aspect of Singapore’s multicultural heritage. Fortunately this had a lift! All very fascinating with lots of personal stories.
  • The flight back was on a newer aircraft (Airbus A830), with better entertainment facilities and quieter. We had been to Singapore about 11 years previously, so knew what to expect. It is a very painless and tidied-up bit of SE Asia, redolent with shopping malls, great food, and tous les conforts modernes.