It's been A Week. My mother had an emergency hospital admission, which in the middle of a Covid wave meant she was stuck in the ED overnight before she could get a bed on a ward. It looked like it might be something that has a 30% fatality rate, but luckily it turned out to be a lot less serious, and she was home again after a three-day stay with ( Read more... )

When I decided (long pre-pandemic) I wanted to make sourdough, it wasn't exactly an overnight process. There's a lot of advice out there on exactly how to go about it. A lot. For a long time, it just seemed easier to keep spooning in the commercial yeast and stay well clear ( Read more... )

Where we left off yesterday, I'd finished eight full weeks on 800 calories a day, and another five weeks of 800-calorie days five days a week. At this point, I weighed myself. I'd lost almost exactly 10 kilos (22 pounds). Pretty good, at least for me (people without thyroid problems would lose more), but Prof Taylor's participants had had to lose ( Read more... )

So, to recap: according to Prof Roy Taylor, what to do about diabetes and prediabetes is lose weight so you get below your personal fat point and free the pancreas from the fat stopping it from working properly. How exactly was I supposed to do that ( Read more... )

[I don't always have much to talk about here, but when I do, it always seems to be massively long. (This is why I'm not on Twitter.) So I'm splitting this into three parts to make it more digestible ( Read more... )

Since I've been home for months dodging New Zealand's Covidy winter, I decided I should make the most of it by venturing into thrilling pastures new. Like playing with my air fryer ( Read more... )

I couldn't bring myself to watch the Queen's funeral service (too sad), but I did watch the funeral procession, because that was a spectacle and a half. If there's anything the country of my birth has a complete lock on, it's pageantry. Absolutely breathtaking. The hats alone! An endless variety of fluffy, feathery, and furry, and I'm not talking ( Read more... )

Like a lot of countries, New Zealand is "moving on" from the pandemic ( Read more... )

Last night before I went to bed I read that the Queen's doctors were worried about her health and her family was gathering at Balmoral. They would never say anything like that unless things were very serious, so this morning the news of her death was not a surprise ( Read more... )

Today I'm making some pretty diagrams for a client. I have to do this because, I am informed, upper management "doesn't like to read".

It's a newspaper company.