Back to a New Week of Swimming

Monday was a rest day as the swimming pool is closed Mondays for maintenance. In the wee hours of Monday morning, our older son James arrived home after six months in Australia and Nepal. So it was good having him back and consequently I was up when I should have been sleeping and sleeping later in the day when I should have been up.
Monday night I felt tired, and a little run down with signs of a slight cold (not that it is at all cold here, but quite the opposite). However, I got up as usual early Tuesday, slowly biked to the pool and got a 3,000 meter workout in by 8 a.m. when the pool closes for the rest of the morning. Nothing spectacular, and in some ways I was just going through the motions of swimming. Maybe one fairly fast 200m near the end, and a few hundred yards of hand paddles to finish off, to focus more carefully on pushing through to the end of the stroke. I felt better after the swim and cycled slowly along various trails around the lake featured in the blog before returning home.
Later this morning, I had a blood test. My wife had arranged for a nurse to visit our house to draw samples of blood from us. This is covered by the health insurance here and will let us know our cholesterol levels among other things. I hope nothing is seriously amiss. I always worry about such things. However, it is probably better to know than to try not to know. A couple of years ago in Kona I had such a blood test and I think my cholesterol was something like 135, which was apparently a good figure. Nevertheless, I need to eat more healthy food than I am now.
Today, I was also not too focused on my work and in fact almost ran out of things to do. It made me think of the US economy being on the brink of a recession. If things get worse there, it can affect all of us. What if I ran out of work, etc.? All these thoughts went through my mind. Fortunately, some more work came in today, so I expect to be able to stay busy this week. At least I am glad I had the opportunity to think about the possible effects of an economic recession. To end on a more positive note, though, the recent elections in Taiwan will probably help me with my work, as people always tend to get busy with a change in government, which creates more work opportunities at least for people like me. Then it seems that the Chinese are making more and more money these days. When I started to be interested in Chinese in the mid 1970s, Taiwan was still relatively undeveloped and China was pretty much closed up. I thought by learning Chinese I would just be engaging in a time-consuming hobby, and that I would have to find employment in another profession just to support that hobby. At the time, I never realized that there would later be so much economic integration and globalization and new technology, etc. In England 25 years ago, you were considered to be pretty weird if you spoke three languages. Now I think that to speak three languages and have experience of living in at least three cultures is the ways to go. The past is not the future. Think of the future.