Seasonal blabberings

So, what's new..?

I am ill again - for the 3rd BIG time inside 2 months. I am seriously beginning to question my general health. Before this autumn I remember thinking how little I had actually been ill the past few years - child and all taken into account. And now it's turned into one massively diseased end-of-season, sprinkled with fragments of mediocre well-being.
I suspect my almost complete lack of exercise the past 6 months, since we moved to the countryside. I ride the car to work 3 out of 5 days. The rest is by bus. My only weekly exercise (apart from being a Dad which certainly also counts) is a good long walk from work to the school where I am currently studying Spanish, each Monday evening. Without that I would probably be snapping bones and losing teeth during work hours.

Speaking of illness, there is always someone worse off. Really sad, although I did wonder about the sinister tone that many of his supporters have been sporting. Until I read more on AD, that is, and realised what a bastard condition it actually is. Not because it is immediately dangerous, but because it is fairly inevitable. Symptoms may be suppressed but the chemical deterioration will steadily continue. And if PTerry has been having phantom strokes already then his case is surely not trivial.
He is trying to be cheerful, though - and on the bright side, I realised that Hogfather has already been produced as a mini-series. And 'The Colour of Magic' is also in the works, starring Sean Astin of The Shire.
So, in any event, Mr. Pratchett surely has triumphs to come and plenty of them.

And now it is almost Christmas - and I am steadily forgetting (as usual) to write my annual card to my friends in Australia. I think I will drop the paper format - and send a digital piece this year.

Gifts are almost in place - although Vat19 parked my order in limbo because of some weird credit card approval procedure they apparently have. Please, don't just park the order, less than a month from Christmas. Other web shops have a credit check incorporated directly and finish it straight away - why can't you?

Last comment is on the climate conference in Bali - once more a piece of hypocritical bullshit politics, flamboyantly showing the inability of ALL politicians across the globe to keep promises that got them elected. And, once more, the US makes an ass of itself, demonstrates its status as the Idiot Bully of the schoolyard. Obstructing the entire process till the very end...instead of giving concessions in the beginning that would have risked progress towards further, constructive steps.
I may still be skeptical towards the wobbly scientific rhetoric that is commandeering both media and world demagogues on this issue, but the fact that everyone has been barking about global warming the past year and yet cannot coordinate ANY substantial actions other than "now we agree that we will agree NEXT time", makes me infinitely disappointed and increasingly cynical. That feeling is not pleasant - what do I do? Usually, I laugh - but recently I find it harder and harder to laugh about this stuff. On a larger scale, it is all so monumentally incompetent that tragedy just kicks comedy in the bollocks.