So I’ve been having these headaches, regular ones, a piercing pain through the top-left part of my head, from my temple down to my jaw. They come and go several times a day, mostly in the morning, every hour or two for about 15-30 minutes each time. Sometimes they’re early in the morning, waking me up.

During one of the first, I was trying to open a packet of paracetemol to take a couple of pills. It was a new packet, wrapped in tamper-proof plastic packaging. Which is an absolute bastard to get into when you’ve got severe pain throbbing through your head. I was wrenching at the packet, trying any way I could to get it open. I couldn’t find a bit of the plastic to pull, I couldn’t rip it open, I was bending the box around trying to penetrate it, silently cursing whoever designed it.

I know they’ve had problems with medicines being tampered with before, but couldn’t we just have packaging that makes it obvious there’s been tampering, rather than making it impossible to get into, let alone if you’re in pain?

As it happens, conventional painkillers didn’t help anyway. After some thought and a couple of visits, the doctor diagnosed me with a rare condition known as cluster headaches. It sounds impressive because it is — apparently in some people it can induce suicide, and has been described in medical journals as the most severe pain syndromes known to medical science, suffered by human beings.

That said, I’ve evidently got a mild case, but most of the description describes what I’m getting to a tee:

• very severe headaches of a piercing quality near one eye or temple that last for fifteen minutes to three hours — check
• typically unilateral and rarely change sides during the same cycle — check
• often appearing during seasonal change — check, they popped up just as Daylight Saving started, and they virtually disappeared during our time in Adelaide
• occasionally referred to as “alarm clock headaches”, because of the regularity of its timing and its ability to wake a person from sleep — check

It’s actually caused by a dilation of blood vessels, putting pressure on the trigeminal nerve.

Hopefully this is the correct diagnosis, because I’ve now got medicine which I hope is going to work. It looks damn impressive, a little cluster in itself, a capsule half-filled by smaller bits of stuff. And apart from warnings about heavy machinery and alertness, apparently I’m also banned from eating grapefruit and drinking grapefruit juice for the duration. Not that I’m an enthusiastic grapefruit consumer anyway.

So far so good; they’ve diminished in frequency and length. So I hope we’re on the right track.

Stories from people who have them worse than me.

I’m told some people are having trouble reading this web site.

Some text goes under the right hand navigation.

It seems to be a problem with Internet Explorer 6.

Not sure why it’s happening more right now than usual.

Until I get it fixed, those affected can try this workaround:

• Select all text (eg Ctrl-A)
• Copy
• Paste into Notepad or similar, and read there

…or you could upgrade to a half-decent web browser like IE7 or Firefox

(Please leave a comment if you have any further information on this problem.
Especially if you’re seeing it while not using IE6.)

PS. Wednesday night. Although the problem’s disappeared, I haven’t actually fixed it. It appears to be a particular combination of posts that causes it, possibly related to the multitude of pictures I was posting from the Adelaide trip.

As of this morning, I have a baby niece. 3.5Kg, named TBA Isolde Isolda. Mother and baby doing well. Woo hoo!

PS. Tuesday 10pm. Picture:

What did you do in the war, grandad?

Sunday is Remembrance Day, when we pause to remember the generations of young soldiers who went away to war to fight for the freedoms we enjoy today, many of them paying with their lives.

Those of us young(ish) adults no longer have the threat of world (or even local) war upon us. Soldiers going to war now choose to do so, rather than being compelled to do so.

No, we have another war to fight for the sake of future generations.
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(Posted 12-Nov-2007; backdated to the day it happened)

And to so our final day in Adelaide. After breakfast we packed up all our stuff and checked-out, leaving the big backpack with reception to pick up later. Then we moseyed down North Terrace, passing the South Australian Parliament building, where Mcleod’s Daughters was being filmed for, as the Adelaide Advertiser reported, “a storyline where the farm is under threat again”.

We were headed to the Adelaide Museum, which to the delight of this tourist with his rapidly draining wallet and bank account, is free to enter. We were a few minutes early for the 10am opening time, and had a sit-down outside, watching the people and the traffic nearby, and the growing numbers of young school kids also preparing to visit.

We shot in as soon as the doors opened, before the school parties had time to organise themselves. First stop was the ground floor World Mammals exhibit, a very interesting display of (stuffed) animals, as well as Max the Human Skeleton, who had left his body to science when he died in 1913. We cut that short when the first hordes of school kids tramped in, and went upstairs.
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(Posted 10-Nov-2007; backdated to the day it happened)

We munched on the Continental Breakfast (not as exorbitant as the Full Breakfast, but still $13.90 a head… blargh) then strolled down to the very grand Adelaide Station. After buying tickets and going through the turnstiles (which really are turnstiles, not the fare gates seen in most cities) we boarded the 9:37 train to Outer Harbor. (Why Harbor’s got no U in it, I don’t know.)

Adelaide’s trains are all operated by diesel railcars. This one looked uncannily like an unrefurbished Melbourne Comeng train inside, and it was no surprise to learn later that they were in fact built by Comeng. The seats and walls were very clean compared to Melbourne’s trains, though some of the windows were a little difficult to see out of.

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(Posted 8-Nov-2007; backdated to the day it happened)

I’d booked a car for the day, so we could head out of the city, see the countryside, and so we could visit the St Kilda tram museum and adventure playground, the former only being open on Sundays, and both of them being impossible to get to by public transport. (They’re about 2km from the nearest bus route… which doesn’t run on Sundays anyway.)

But first there was breakfast. We went down to the ground floor cafe/restaurant/thingy, the jawdroppingly inspiringly named “Cafe 31″ (’cos the hotel is at number 31 in North Terrace). The kids decided to run the two storeys down the fire escape, racing against the lift — something they continued to do for the rest of our stay. On the way down, they’d usually beat it (it was a pretty slow lift). On the way up, the lift would usually beat them.

Looking through last year’s trip entries, I note the full buffet breakfast at the Travelodge in Sydney was $16.50 for adults and $7.50 for kids, which I thought at the time was a bit pricey, but ultimately worth it. Here? $18.90 per person, with no discounts for kids. $56.70 for breakfast?!? Yeeeeouch! I know, I know, you’re paying for the convenience of it all. We paid up this once, but I vowed to restrict us to the Continental breakfast the next day. Not that it wasn’t tasty, but jeez. I made sure to grab a complimentary newspaper to try and get my money’s worth.

After fuelling up we headed out. First we walked up to Rundle Mall, looking for the market. Eventually we found it at the point where Rundle Mall becomes Rundle Street (but before it becomes Rundle Road… who was Rundle, anyway?). The market didn’t look like very much we couldn’t find at the markets in Melbourne. Besides, handcrafted stuff bore my kids stiff, no matter how nice it is. And frankly I’m not that enthralled myself. So we backtracked to the Avis car rental place I’d booked with, back on North Terrace.

The Avis lady behind the counter seemed a little stern and business-like, but I expect I would be too if I had to work from 8am on a Sunday morning. She said we’d got an upgrade (I booked a Corolla, we got a Yaris; what a silly name) and gave me the key and the directions to the carpark, which was a couple of doors up.
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(Posted 7-Nov-2007; backdated to the day it happened. Sorry, some of the best pics are on the video, which I haven’t had time to sort out yet.)

With last year’s trip to Sydney very much the model for this year’s little jaunt, we set out on Saturday morning. Train (on-time this time) then the Skybus to the airport. This time Virgin Blue got the gong for the best deal on flights, so we checked-in then dropped off the bag.

The video on the Skybus had mentioned a ban on liquid containers on planes, with the implication that our big opaque water bottles (all three promotional give-aways from banks) would be seized by airport security and disposed of in a controlled explosion (or something like that). So I’d emptied them out and put them in the checked luggage. Of course, this left us paying $3 for a bottle of water inside the terminal… ah well. We also bought gum, traditional attempted remedy to the ear problems when ascending and descending (though I’m not convinced it helps that much).

After Marita spotted Max Walker in Mildura airport last week, I was on the lookout for celebrities. I didn’t spot any, though I did see an ex-girlfriend and (I think) her sister boarding a flight to Sydney. We had a quick couple of goes at the Simpsons pinball machine (annoyingly quick, in fact) before boarding.

The flight was fine; on-time, no annoying neighbour passengers, and the lady making the announcements was cracking jokes that weren’t excessively lame. We munched through a Toblerone and the kids were kept interested by the back-of-the-seat display showing the plane’s location, altitude and speed. (Could’ve bought a bunch of Foxtel channels for $5 per seat, but it didn’t seem worth it for such a short flight.)

We landed and got to walk across the tarmac like rock stars. I adjusted the time on my phone, then we picked up our baggage. While we waited, someone else’s suitcase fell off the carousel taking a sharp corner. Nobody else seemed to notice it, so we put it back on, so whoever owned it (obviously waiting out-of-sight of it) wouldn’t be standing there all day waiting.
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