A good week

Sunday a week ago I had a very low-energy day, but the next day woke up full of beans.  It was my Sabbath, where one of my goals is to do what I feel like - I felt like going for a walk.  I was up to 60 minute walks (in terms of the incremental increases I'm doing for my concussion), so decided to explore part of Great North Rd.  In particular, I'd noticed that a walkway that goes across Oakley Creek appeared to be officially open, and I wanted to see "my" creek :-)

So nice to be in the cool green, even in this cool weather :-)

the creek from the bridge

and, the other side of the bridge....  It seems it's been re-opened after the Cyclone Gabrielle damage, but has then been re-closed due to the building work at Unitec.  It says it'll be shut for a month, but it's hard to know what that means as the sign's undated - but people were very actively working on the other side, at least!

I also stopped at an informational sign outside the Waterview Methodist Church, and was most surprised to learn that "Karanga-a-Hape" (after which K Rd is named) is the Māori name for Cornwallis - which is nowhere near K Rd.  It turns out K Rd. follows part of Te Ara o Karangahape, i.e. the route to Cornwallis, and Great North Road also follows part of that route.

On Wednesday I did another walk (this one 1h15 - that's my walking goal, and if that goes well the next two times I do it, I can stop doing carefully graduated walks and return to walking as far as I want.  Hurrah!).  That included the shared walking/cycling path that runs through Unitec, where immense building works are currently taking place.

There's a seriously enormous pile of rubble on the site!

another view of the rubble - it's at least two storeys high, I reckon.

 

Looking towards Carrington Road - I think this is likely where a lot of that rubble came from.  I don't think it used to be anything like that flat.

There's also a pond that didn't used to be there.  This is looking towards the creek - the trees in the background are very near the waterfall.

I've biked through here this week, too, and find I need to go through here a lot more slowly than before - they've put up opaque fencing along a pretty windy bit, so you can no longer look across and easily see if anyone's coming.

On Thursday Martin and I had our three-weekly 'date morning', which ended up being some good time talking together in the morning, followed by lunch at a taco place that has recently opened in Avondale.  We had fish tacos (made with tarakihi - something Just Kai rates as being very unlikely to have been caught with slave labour) and a kind of sandwich made with two flat taco rounds, filled with beef and cheese.  Both were really good, although Martin felt that fish flavour was a bit swamped by the other flavours in the tacos - I didn't feel that so much.  Both also came with a little cup of beef consommé to drink (like a broth/stock, but made with actual meat rather than bones).  I wonder if this is a standard Mexican thing, as we bought a cup of consommé from a Mexican place at the Avondale night market a few months back, too.  This wasn't as good as the other place, but still nice!

They're a fusion Mexican/Samoan place, and I was excited to see they had a crème caramel-type dessert that had a chocolately base made with koko Samoa.  We usually avoid bought chocolatey things, so that looked like a real treat, but unfortunately that was already sold out :-(

We ate it at a little park on the edge of the Avondale racecourse which has this wonderful flower-painted fence running along one side.

And then on Friday I went for a swim with my friend Maria, at a new-to-us beach near Onehunga.  These are artificial beaches that were put in after the motorway went through there, I think, and I'd heard you could swim there at high tide any day - so we thought we'd check it out as Blockhouse Bay Beach was too shallow for swimming this week.  It was really nice!  And, perhaps because I've most recently only been in that area on holiday (we go past it to get to Ambury Park) I somehow felt like I was on holiday as soon as I arrived :-)  It was super-cold, but still absolutely delightful to be there!

looking towards Māngere Mountain - Ambury Park is off to the left

The swim also gave me an opportunity to test something.  I'd been feeling since Monday that something had changed with my concussion - not that I was now 100%, but that I was noticeably better.  I watch videos that are supposed to make me nauseous and they'd been doing that much less effectively this week, plus I'd managed some longer days with less ill-effect than I'd expected.  So I was keen to do an experiment when I went swimming.

Since I started swimming again after the concussion, I've been doing three blocks of x number of 'breaths', then gradually increasing 'x'.  I'd been finding in recent weeks that I wasn't getting as nauseous from the swimming as I had been, so had talked over with the concussion physio whether I could increase to doing four blocks (all within the same time frame - most of the time I'm in the water at the moment I'm not swimming at all - just standing/walking/floating).  She thought it was worth a crack, so I gave it a go.  I got noticeably more nauseous towards the end of the fourth block (to the point I briefly thought I might actually throw up), but I recovered pretty quickly so decided I'd do the same next time.  Friday was my next swim, so I was curious to see what happened - I thought I'd really know I was doing better if I didn't get that intense nausea again.  And I didn't!  I was ever-so-slightly nauseous towards the end of the fourth block, so I decided to try a bit more and tried a fifth!  I still had very minimal symptoms after that, but decided that was enough pushing for one day :-)

We'll see what happens as time goes on.  I'm definitely not 100%, but I'm keen to try to cautiously push the boundaries a little more in the various things I'm working on.