sunday morning

I am about to go to the gym again (first time in two days - because Friday morning was my day off and Saturday I had too much whisky the night before and I thought I would be dehydrated or whatever). It is a great, excellent, autumn morning in Melbourne and I can very indistinctly hear the traffic or whatever that city ambience is in the distance though surely there's really barely any traffic out there in the world right now. I am drinking coffee from my large marimekko mug which is actually too large eg surface area means the coffee gets cold too quickly, I am sure that's true. 

It's still that transition period between summer-autumn. The night before last there was a mosquito in my room. Yesterday afternoon I let a big fat blowfly out the bathroom window, that mildly satisfying experience where it bangs at the window for a while but you know eventually it's going to go out and, while at this moment the two of you are existing in that space, very shortly you will part forever. Yesterday I gave Nancy some Aldi food, she will sometimes tolerate that stuff but in this instance she wasn't having it, and it stayed there for a few hours (rich dark red mince meat) then later I noticed some yellowy-white notches on it which were, of course, little maggots. So someone had seen their chance late in the warm weather to lay a few cheeky eggs in that processed corpse. But this morning, it's adequately chilly that you couldn't imagine a fly getting around naked to lay eggs or do anything else flies do. 

This morning I woke with Nancy at my feet and Helmi at my head - I can tell this is going to be more of a thing as time goes by - they even, somehow, occasionally contrive to get close through the blankets (i.e. Helmi under the doona, Nancy on top) though they would never admit it. 

OK off to the gym. I have discovered a new function that allows me to walk in a few more nice towns, like one in Germany with delightful old cobblestoned squares. It's worth it. 

brush with fame

So continuing my ginger reimmersion in the gym world, cautious because of danger of further back problem, I went to Anytime Fitness again this morning and was mildly active. They have new treadmills (or whatever those things are called) or at least different ones to what you got at Anytime Sunshine in 2019. These ones allow you to choose a walk through a pastoral scene during which slow vehicles pass you going in the opposite direction and people - apparently people from all over the world, christ only knows how this works or what it is meant to mean - are also walking with you, more or less. It is my tendency wherever possible to learn by doing rather than by trying to comprehend a manual or an instruction so I am just letting this wash over me taking baby steps in the first instance, I mean almost literally. Anyway you can choose a walking place, and I chose Ireland, because it was the first on the list. It looked a lot like, I don't know, the road between Coldstream and Healesville. The interesting thing was you walk behind people (some come towards you, there was even one weirdo just standing I guess on an embankment on the side of the road looking at the road and not moving) and when you get close to them...

They become transparent, and you see their arms, which are of course in front of them, through their bodies, then you kind of walk through them I guess. Actually the most disturbing example of this is people (women, presumably) with ponytails, whose ponytails become head holes. 

But this is still pretty creepy. Also, I was in Ireland with a celebrity! Alright, I wasn't in Ireland. And I am almost certain that this is not the celebrity but someone else with her name. Also, I am not even really sure May Pang is a celebrity. Though I did read about her on wikipedia last week. 

So, out of 10 I would say, 7 not a bad gymsperience this morning and I will go again soon. I would also mention that unsurprisingly I suppose the Travancore Anytime Fitness is less intimidating than the Sunshine one, where some man who might have been really into steroids or really into ice or both always seemed to suddenly appear out of nowhere from the back of the room (I would only ever go before 7am, and it often seemed empty when I got there). I walked back through Royal Park it was raining lightly and that was a pleasant experience.