The
word of the week is OUCH.
Aug
8 – Sprung Hamstrings?
It's amazing
that I can somehow hurt myself without even trying…
Yesterday
evening, I did my usual 30 min. exercises on my stationary bicycle, not pushing
myself hard whatsoever: just an easy ride with a slow buildup and slow down, exactly
as I have for months now.
What was different
is that I did it at 7:30pm, instead of right after work and didn't do more than
sit around for the rest of the evening working on my blog.
Big mistake, apparently.
I awoke at 3
AM this morning with twin lines of fire running down the back of my legs: my
hamstrings felt like I'd pull the money have to machine. It was bad enough that
I was nauseous a few times and had trouble getting back sleep for more than an
hour afterwards. I had trouble walking in the morning and though I managed to
stay mobile, it was difficult to sit for good part of my day with any comfort
and I had to move around often in order to allay the pain to manageable levels.
Adding insult
to injury, when I got home tonight, my desktop computer displayed this message:
Well, f$*k.
It’s been a
few years since I’ve last been down the failed-computer-drive road, and while
I’ve prepared for such with redundant backups of my data offline and in the
cloud, it still means that I’ve got to rebuild my drive to exactly how I had it
configured. Meaning a few weeks of installing, tweaking and head-scratching.
Not to mention
replacing the dive( a new SSD too, only 9 months old! )which
fortunately is still under warranty.
I’ll probably
end up investing in a total-image backup software solution this time around,
meaning nightly backups of the entire boot drive so I can just reload a copy of
the previous day’s drive and go on about my business as if nothing happened.
That won’t be as easy if I decide to get a bigger drive; even the current 240gb
one means a sizable backup.
Aug
9 – Tent City Gone, Homeless Remain
Yesterday was
the deadline for the homeless camp downtown to move out.
Most of its
residents had complied with the court order by late yesterday, though there were a
few holdouts waiting for room placement elsewhere in the city. Surprisingly, it
was quite an orderly resolution to the problem that began late last year, when
homeless campers in Victoria discovered that the land next to the city
courthouse was owned by the province and so did not fall under the city's
jurisdiction: nobody could tell them to leave at 7 AM like they had to in city
parks or other city-controlled areas.
Things just
went downhill from there; soon dozens of homeless had set up camp on the
courthouse lawn, and remain there until yesterday.
It's ongoing
issue, homelessness in the city, and there's no one single answer to it. The
low vacancy rate and high rental costs mean that many people, even those with
jobs, cannot find affordable housing, though $60 million in funding has been
allocated for such to begin in a month's time by local government. The easy
living in Victoria in terms of weather means that many homeless end up here and
never leave, simply existing in the cracks that society leaves for them without
really wanting to look too closely.
The fact that
Tent City stood in plain sight for everyone to see for almost a year means that
at least the issue was out in the open, and because of that, housing was made
available for many of its former residents. However, the issue remains that the
costs have to be borne by someone and there are many angry taxpayers in the
city asking why it has to be them.
On a side
note, I went tonight for acupuncture to help deal with my hamstring issue. The
soreness is still pretty bad, to where I have to watch my every move lest I
‘twang’ my legs with any movement to cause even more pain.
Happily, the
acupuncture tonight succeeded in reducing the soreness to a dull ache. It also
resulted in my right leg feeling like the muscles had been pinned together near
the knee… as turned out to be the case when I got home to discover the
therapist had missed removing a needle – OUCH! Fortunately, the tip was only
bent after the short trip home by car and hadn’t broken off INSIDE my leg; I
was lucky.
At this point,
it’s not so bad that I can’t sleep, but I have to watch it: no way I want to
stretch too far without thinking and have things go all widdershins…
Aug
10 – Stomach Spasms
Gah… can’t I
even enjoy a simple meal this week without
pain?
My lady and I
sat outside on a patio at Garrick’s Head Pub after work tonight, enjoying the
glorious weather and the good food. I had a chicken burger and 1.5 beers… which
I ended up regretting later that night.
As I was going
to bed, I still felt… full, oddly so. Laying back down, I had sudden sharp
pains in my diaphragm area, as though I’d pulled a muscle – OUCH! I noticed
that my stomach felt tight, but not bloated… what the heck was going on?
Since I didn’t
feel otherwise inconvenienced, nor nauseous or feverish, I decided to let
whatever was going on work itself out, with some help. I propped myself up on
the pillows at a 45-degree angle and went to sleep.
Sidenote: the
next morning was rather painful for me, with oatmeal barely staying down. From
what I could figure, the meal yesterday at Garrick’s had been too large and I'd complicated things by ‘expanding’ due to the more-than-usual volume of liquid I
had with it, effectively ‘plugging up’ my intestines – hence the OUCH
spasms. Since I don’t have a gall bladder any more, any large meals take much
longer to digest, and apparently I crossed that threshold with that burger and
beers.
Next time,
it’s water with the meal, and beer after.
Or, just beer
and snacks.
Or just water…
Aug
11 – Silence, Sirens!
I don't know how
urban dwellers can stand the noise.
My apartment
where I live right now is about 20 feet from a main north-south road and there
is constant traffic during the daylight hours. Apart from the bevy of
motorcycles roaring up and down, there are always heavy delivery trucks,
transit buses and pickups with lead footed drivers wanting to show off their
pricey V8 or V12 engines to every passerby.
Yet I think
the most telling noise pollution are the constant sirens.
Every day, at
least a dozen emergency vehicles flash by my apartment, sirens wailing. Their
proximity is such that I usually have to plug my ears its windows are open, but
at least I can hear them coming with enough warning to do so.
If I'm experiencing
the stored of siren-noise in a semi-suburban area of the smaller city, I can't
imagine what kind of noise people in larger cities must have to deal with.
Unfortunately,
it looks like the Whisper noise-canceller system( designed for entire apartments )isn't going to happen, with less
than 2% of its 785,000 NZD goal realized and only a week to go:
It's a shame,
because I think a device of this type is sorely needed in urban areas, if only
to reduce the noise that people experience living so close to one another. I
know that I gladly purchase this device if it was less than $500, as the Kickstarter
looks to have cost, even with shipping. Yet someone else will have to come up
with this and tried in the future, as the Whisper looks to be sounding quite
dead at this point.
Aug
12 – Sitrep
In the
afternoon, I had my massage appointment I’d been waiting all week for.
It took me
about 20 minutes to get there, walking slowly downtown, with the idea of
stretching my legs without overdoing it. All the same, I could feel that the
sole of my left foot was too tight for comfort still, after days of simple rest
and relaxation.
The massage
therapist was able to do a fair bit of heavy work on both my legs, though
without a definite cause, I couldn't really tell her anything other than the
symptoms of the payments feeling. All the same, with that information she
worked over my legs pretty thoroughly, to the point where I wondered if she'd
managed to mess up some of my other muscles in my legs. It was pretty intense,
but at no point did I feel like my hamstrings themselves were made any worse.
Walking home,
I was pleased to find I had a greater range of motion than I had walking to my
appointment, though again the soreness from the treatment was distracting. I
took a bath with some Epsom salts added, in order to help add hydration through
the skin to the stretched hamstrings. By the time I went to bed tonight, my
legs didn't feel like they were burning on the back any more and I slept fairly
well.
Aug
13 – Stay In Saturday
It was quite a
busy day for me today.
Despite the
gorgeous weather, I ended up staying in for most of the morning and afternoon
today, as I have a lot on my plate in addition to regular household doings. One
of the things that took the most time was completing the critiques of the two
chapters I'm doing for this coming week’s Critique Night. I sort of fell down
last month, having had too much on my mind to realize that I reviewed the same
chapters as I have the previous month - quite embarrassing and something that
took me by surprise, though looking back I obviously had too much on my mind to
notice at the time.
Another thing
on my plate was updating my website for my novels, which I did in only a few
minutes: it's easy enough to tell people what I'm up to a month if there's only
one subject. Seeing as I only get about a half-dozen visitors every month to
that site, it's not as though I'm provided much fodder for form discussion,
though I hope that's the case in spades when I finally finish the trilogy of books
in the near future.
As well, I did
some research for an article I'm writing for the quarterly Divisional
Newsletter for my workplace, about the history of the Ministry, which has been
interesting as its current incarnation only came about in late 1997 - barely 20
years ago. I'm pleased to be part of the Editorial Board for the newsletter,
and feel that the work I'm doing now will result in something that will
continue long after I moved on to other things or other jobs.
In the
evening, my girlfriend was gracious enough to sit through three episodes of Star Blazers with me, to my delight. We
are already at the point where my re-watch from many years ago stopped and my
memories are somewhat vague, so it's almost as though I'm watching the series from
a fresh point of view, which is delightful as well.
Much later
this evening, we made a short sortie down to the ocean on Dallas Road, in the
hopes of catching glimpses some of the Perseid meteor shower which peaked
tonight. In normal years, stargazers in less urban areas might be treated to
anywhere from 30 to 80 meteors per minute, but this year's shower was more than
double that. Even though passing cars and light pollution meant our night eyes
were quite strained, we did manage to catch a glimpse of three different white
streaks in the sky as meteors burned up, which was thrilling to us both.
Even more
amusing where the Pokémon Go players wandering by in the dark, completely
oblivious to the short-lived wonder of the heavens taking place above them.
Aug
14 – Serendipity
Why not end the week with a bang?
More like a ‘poof!’ as money disappeared from my wallet this morning.
I always run programs on my computer to tell me of anything going
wrong, and today one of them told me that my backup SSD drive( the one running
my computer while I wait for the replacement to arrive by mail in a few weeks )was
also failing:
Perfect timing – or not, as I don't have another redundant backup to stick
in the case this one fails, which would mean that I have only my laptop to work
with and that isn't really meant for the daily use that my big computer is,
hooked up to my big screen TV.
So, I had to suck it up today and order a new SSD drive, one that would
be exactly what I needed and will also arrive in a few days’ time. By a stroke
of luck, an SSD on sale I'd been watching on eBay last week came back into stock
just this morning and after gritting my teeth, I bought the SSD, to the tune of
a cool $250.00 - plus taxes and shipping. OUCH.
I consoled myself with the fact that
since it's a 1 terabyte drive( 1000 gigabytes ) it's four times the size
of the drive it's replacing and extremely highly-rated. The bottom line was
that I paid about $.25 per gigabyte, which is half what usual going rate is for
solid-state drives… so I shouldn't run out of capacity anytime soon.
Though I will still be making a redundant backup of the drive as soon
as I get it configured under Win10 the way I like it - no sense in tempting
fate with my data any further than I have already this month.
/endG33kBlathering
My hamstring still hurt, as I've been alternating sitting down and walking
around all day long as I've been home today, working on my blog among other
things. I'm hoping that this is in a relapse but just a reflection of things
healing, but the fact remains that I still have to discover exactly what's
wrong with my everyday physical posture that could be causing such tightness in
my hamstrings. More than likely has to do with my office job of the last
several years, as I've never had this sort of issue standing up and being on my
feet for long periods while working. One more thing to add to my list of Things
To Do Now….
