Friday, January 20, 2017

Managing the adrenaline factor in the lead-up to Perth

Saturday 21 January 2016

There may be some who can sit down, cool, calm and collected, on the verge of an extended excursion but Hughesy is not one of them.

The itchy feet started on Wednesday, and at that point starting off on the blog entries seemed like a reasonable way of keeping the mind occupied.

I was also, of course, looking to verify that dictation was a viable option when it came to recording blog content.

But it wasn't.

The old laptop just didn't have the grunt to handle the task I'd assigned to it.

We fixed that by ordering a new machine at arranging to collect it in Perth. I suppose I could have started on the dictation on the desktop computer immediately afterwards, but I put it off until Thursday.

After all, I needed to do some research on wining and dining options in downtown Perth, where are the knowledge is sketchy and the multiplicity of choices intriguing.

By the end of the day, I heard enough likely candidates to cover lunch and dinner from Tuesday afternoon until Sunday morning.

Breakfast, I figure, is going to be closer to brunch the day after to Springsteen concerts.

So arriving on Tuesday afternoon and booking into the hotel, probably sometime around 2:45 will be followed by a brisk stroll to the Apple Store to collect the new laptop.

There are plenty of dinner options within a couple of blocks of the hotel, so once the new machine is set up and dinner has been negotiated that should be Tuesday done and dusted.

Wednesday is rest up before the show, a decent lunch and something at the venue and a start on the concert review once I'm back at the hotel.

The city of Fremantle at the mouth of the Swan River looks like an ideal candidate for the day between shows, and I should be able to spend much of the day at the Maritime Museum, the shipwrecked galleries and at the historic precinct in the port city.

Throw in lunch at the Fishermans Wharf and that should make for a good day out that will be a pleasant breather in between shows.

Friday is show day again, with a similar approach to Wednesday: a substantial lunch, concert and concert review.

And then, on Saturday there is a window for a lengthy ramble around Kings Park and possibly across to South Perth, lunch and dinner before Sunday's flight from Perth to Adelaide.

Sorting out that little lot kept the adrenaline under control through Wednesday.

Dictating what should have been Wednesdays blog content took a fair chunk out of Thursday morning, and the one-day cricket international (coincidentally played in Perth) looked after much of the afternoon and evening.

In between, I repeated the Perth exercise for the three night stop in Adelaide.

That wasn't quite the exhaustive process I'd employed the day before because I had a much better idea of what I was looking for, a slightly better grasp of the on the ground geography, two fewer nights to deal with and a late afternoon arrival.

So the Adelaide leg looks to be: arrival on Sunday evening, book in and eat; do the washing and the preconcert routine on Monday, and take a ramble around downtown Adelaide on Tuesday.

So there was Thursday's adrenaline the control exercise duly completed.

Friday morning saw more dictation and a lengthy discussion about the arrangements that would get Hughesy to the airport on Sunday.

Likely weather conditions had caused concern earlier in the piece, with showers and possible thunderstorm forecast for Sunday.

Throw in the start of the packing process, and a long look at the Melbourne restaurant scene and that was Fridays itchy feet syndrome comfortably tackled.

Which brings us up to today, around twenty-five hours before a likely departure from Bowen, lunch somewhere around Airlie Beach and check-in at Whitsunday Coast.

An early morning session in the garden, a light breakfast and the last of the packing will take care of Sunday morning so that only leaves the rest of Saturday.

We finished the dictation exercise just before 10:30, so that gives us about half an hour to start with the proper packing before the music show on Radio National at eleven.

Follow that by adding the final touches to the Numbers spreadsheet called Springsteen Tour 2017 and sort out the rest of the packing, and I should be right to watch the last two matches in the qualifying rounds of the Australian cricket's big–bash competition with dinner in the middle.

The critical reader will of course, by the stage be wondering why anyone is bothering to put this stuff down and the answer is quite simple.

The half hour or so spent dictating this detail has delivered just over 800 words of content with minimal use of the keyboard. So, the dictation thing is working.

I must say it delivers quite a buzz to be sitting here and watching the clearly enunciated the content appearing as if by magic on-screen.

Will be back to do it again tomorrow morning with a little exposition on local geography, the North Queensland wet season, and similar factors that could have thrown a spanner into the works.

They could still manage to do that, but tomorrow is forecast is 25 to 34 mostly sunny, partly cloudy with a slight chance of a shower developing aor a thunderstorm from the late afternoon.

So we'll see how it looks in the morning.

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