So it is that we will soon hit the 6 month mark of our stay here in Argentina. So what have we done in the months leading up to now you may ask, and why the big break in writing. I would love to have an deep and meaningful answer, but unfortunately I lack the intellect and Sara lacks the time, so maybe we’ll postpone the deep and significant parts for another time and just use this post just for fluff and gags! 🙂

Work remains pretty busy and I have diverted almost all of my attention into learning to develop and extend an ecommerce platform called Magento, which is pretty complex, but nonetheless pretty interesting, and very time consuming. All of this has been driven in order to assist the owner of an online organic shop here in BA. This has the knock on effect of leaving the bulk of the day to day work that was being done by Sara AND I reduced to Sara, so her days have increased in work load, and so far she has not hit the bottle!! Powerful work eh?

I finally found and joined a gym chain called SportsClub, and managed to get a reasonable monthly rate, although I had to join the gym for a year contract to get that price. Sara opted against joining with me, as gyms are not really her thing and will likely result in money being spent for a nothing service. The great thing about the gym is that it has quite a few locations around the city, so no matter where we live, I can generally find one close.

I have continued my running with Pablo (our neighbour and friend. I must add that he is our friend as he took great offense that I referred to him only as our neighbour previously! 🙂 ). I ran another 10km organised event with him a couple of moths back and he got one of his fastest 10k times, which was awesome!! 🙂 He has signed up for a 15km next month (which I also need to sign up for), and he and I plan to do a half-marathon the month after. The unfortunate thing is that my erratic heart rate has surfaced again, and I have reduced my weekly running load to one day a week to see if it may be triggered by fatigue. This remains in analysis, and I have significantly increased the amount of recording that I am doing, which leads me onto a couple of new things, at least for me.

I have started (still early days) of looking into the Quantified Self movement, with the idea to measure and record more of my lifestyle to see if I can see patterns. Part of this is about the measurement and there are many new and wonderful tools out there to help wannabe QSers like me. Firstly, I have purchased (and awaiting delivery of) a Fitbit One. This I will use to track my overall daily movement, and more interestingly for me is my sleep patterns. I have started using an app called SleepBot, which tries to record a range of things, and records sound and movement throughout the night, which I may find useful, but it is not terribly convenient. Sara and I have also backed an IndieGoGo project called the Scanadu Scout. This is expected to be a medical scanner that can measure a range of body functions and emotional states. I am pretty excited by that. I am also looking into the world of measuring physical things about myself, as the first step to understanding is in measuring I feel. I’ll keep you posted.

The food situation has sorted of entered a phase of normality for me and Sara. We get 2 orders a week of food delivered, tomatoes have been out for a couple of months and the fruit range has radically dropped, but we are coping. I have food bars shipped in on occasion from the UK, and Sara gets to eat cake most days, so we are both pretty much okay for now! 🙂 So that is grand.

The complaint that Sara’s life is not really addressed in these posts, has not really been resolved here. However, she is available for Facetime chats, WhatsApp texts and Skype conversations, and she would love to hear from you. So while I will attempt to address the balance somehow, please contact her and let her know what is going on with you, she would love to hear from you I am sure. She love to hear from everyone, what with being the nice person in the relationship!!

Please comment if you have anything to say or just cannot stop yourself. 🙂