Health check yo self before you wreck yo self

Just a quick one, as I'm about to have a couple of other ALTs round for a more laid-back, intimate Rock Band night than Friday's very successful 12-man raid.

Today and yesterday there was no school for reasons I'm not fully clear on, so I was killing time at city hall again. This isn't as painful as it used to be, as I now have some idea of things I can do to prepare for future lessons. I had been cursing the fact that I lacked entertaining talents like playing an instrument that I could use in the classroom, when it dawned on me that maybe my programming ability could be useful after all. I spent monday putting together a little JavaScript program to flash up flashcards, and then made it into a competitive game by having two sumo wrestlers attempt to push each other off the screen, so that your team's wrestler loses if you take too long. I added random Gaussian jitter and everything. It was just like the good bits of doing my PhD all over again. So I'm looking forward to trying that one out in the classroom.

Today I was subjected to a fairly thorough medical. It seemed everyone at city hall was getting check-ups - that doesn't happen in the UK, right? While I'm still eagerly awaiting the results of the urine and blood analyses and the X-ray (will they discover my Bent Spiner?), I can tell you that my weight has stayed pretty much constant: I've lost perhaps 1kg since I came here. So it seems the removal of king rib suppers and doner kebabs from my diet has been balanced by the copious amounts of drinking and the lack of exercise associated with owning a car. My efforts to acquire a bike are still ongoing. The good news is that my blood pressure, at 115/76, is down considerably from my pre-departure medical, an improvement I'm attributing directly to my lower stress levels.

I put an invisible stats widget on this blog a few days ago, to check whether anyone was actually reading it. Happily, people are. My hits are exclusively from the UK so far, which is good; while I'm careful not to put anything in here that could compromise me professionally, I'm still quite glad no-one here is reading it. I'd like to give a special shout-out to my visitor from Cambridge, who I assume is Toby.