Weekend (including swimming update)

[msss]

Well, that was certainly a busy weekend. I was woken up on Saturday morning by the insistent ringing of my mother's phone call and realised that I had promised to accompany the parental units to a share trading seminar. Gah. No sleeping in. I then successfully managed to explain the public transport system to parents and get Eric out the door to the optometrist on time. (I wonder if that was be a good thing to put on a job application - amazing persuasive and negotiation skills...)

The share trading seminar was put on by First Prudential and was a useful, if somewhat long, discussion of technical analysis. Basically, this means looking at share price-time charts and seeing if you can detect patterns. I'm not sure that I believe everything the man said (e.g. time-price equivalence), but I'm willing to go home and try out his suggested methods of analysis on a few charts.

Since the seminar went for an hour over the scheduled time, we then stopped off to eat lunch at Bismi's Gold and Fork, which is just around the corner from my office. We also stopped upstairs to rescue an aging banana from my desk drawer and let my parents admire the view. Mum wanted to go shopping, but I badly wanted a nap, so we compromised - she went off with Dad to Kathmandu and DJs, while I headed to Borders and read more of my favourite time management person (David Allen)'s newest book. I also found the 4 Hour Work Week, which sounded promising when recommended by people on my friendslist, but turned out suspiciously onctuous in nature.

I finally made it home and had a much-needed sleep before starting to make the entrees for dinner because a couple of Eric's friends came over. jekni's recipe for bruschetta rocks. And so do home-grown tomatoes. But yes, bruschetta and chicken wrapped in prosciutto with quince paste and roast potatoes and crepes. Goodness.

Sunday came around way too early. We did go swimming - 18 laps, including 5 backstroke. Eric was all macho and did 20 to prove that he could. I'm beginning to wonder if this pool water is precisely healthy. I keep getting home with a scratchy throat, although it's gone away today.

We had more bruschetta for lunch yesterday. And crepes for breakfast both yesterday and today. I think the cooking thing may be a good idea in general, although pasta sauce from scratch is not going to happen again. You have to boil and peel the tomatoes first? Peel? Hot tomatoes? I think this is why diced tomatoes in cans were invented. (We had a volunteer tomato plant which survived last winter. So I watered it occasionally. And it's produced about 60 tomatoes, which were ripening madly in the recent warm spell. So I had to do something with them. Hence the bruschetta and the sauce.)

I also spent quite a bit of time doing my budgeting for this month. It's an interesting (and at first slightly panic-inducing) fact that my monthly expenditure does not actually match up with my monthly cash flow. This is due to the deferred impact of credit card charging - in getting charged to my credit card as well as in actually paying off the charges on the card. It has been an expensive couple of months though, given my aim of saving $550 a week.

Comments

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

Well done on the swimming! I was sick again today, so missed another go (although I suspect the 12 hours I spent cooking on Saturday, including four loaves of bread = 4 x 10 minutes kneading do count as SOME sort of exercise). Will be there tomorrow, though...