Category: health

Car Music

I had six songs ready for vocals. This morning, while sitting in the movie theater parking lot, I cranked out four of them… poorly… as usual.

It was foggy out so it was a little harder to see people around me. I saw a couple of dog walkers and a jogger, but that was it. There was a tractor trailer parked near my usual spot so I went someplace new on the other side of the lot. A mall security car did a slowish drive by. I don’t think he was checking on me, I think he was just slow.

On an unrelated note, I have not had breakfast. The last food I ate was just before 9:00pm. I won’t eat anything until lunch at 1:00pm. I am officially trying this 16:8 fasting shit on for size. Also, I am really hungry. Four hours to go!

Oh, That’s Just Ducky, Part II

On the last day before the start of the school year, earlier today they cancelled all sports because a bunch of student athletes caught the ‘rona.

Tonight they cancelled all in person classes for the first week. My step son will have his first day of school in his room at our house.

I want very much for him to have a normal senior year, but selfishly I am so friggin’ relieved. We haven’t even made it to the first day and already the virus has started spreading through the student population and it’s already bad enough to send everyone home for a while at least.

Finally, a smart move on the school district’s part. Finally.

Addendum: He’s going to have his first day of school from dad’s house and then come here afterwards. Same difference.

Oh, That’s Just Ducky

We just got a message from the superintendent of schools. Tomorrow is the first day of school and already we have a bunch of cases in the student population. The message says that many of them are athletes so the school is suspending all sports for the time being.

Sounds to me like they let some sports have camps and they did a shitty job keeping everyone safe… because they let kids play friggin sports. I can just picture a football huddle with Covid-19 jumping from kid to kid like Roger Moore jumping from alligator to alligator in whichever Bond movie that was (it was probably a stuntman anyway).

Happy last day of summer vacation.

Not Today, Maybe Tomorrow

I fully intended to get up early today and do car vocals. I actually did get up early but… As I mentioned last night… that last song I worked on… the lyrics were so bad. It just took the umph out of the situation, you know? I need to rewrite.

So… fasting. What’s up with that? Give yourself an eight hour window each day where you can eat to your heart’s (stomach’s?) content, then the other 16 hours you don’t eat. In my 56 seconds worth of Google “research” it looks like most people set their eating window at 1pm-9pm. Outside of breakfast, that works okay for me. I want to cut down on between meal sowing. Something like this could gimmick me into cutting back some. Also, my 56 seconds showed me that zero calorie drinks (water, diet soda) are allowed during the fasting times.

I found an app I wanted to try to use to help. I thought you’d plug in times and it would tell you when to eat. It doesn’t. You turn it on when you’re fasting starts (9pm) and it tells you when it’s over. Okay… I guess I’ll start this fad tonight at 9pm. consider today’s breakfast my breakie swan song. What the hell, it’s quarantine. Let’s jump on this (a/any) stupid bus.

After my horrid performance trying to predict the winners of the second round of the NHL playoffs, I went into the third round with a tiny bit of optimism. Then on Sunday night the West series started and my pick lost game one. That’s okay, I guess. It’s just putting my pick into a statistical hole that is too big for the majority of teams to crawl out of but that’s okay, right? Ugh. I had this bad feeling that when the East series started up last night there would be another crushing loss. I checked the score just before bed. Would Tampa crush my heart again? Nope. They were up 7-2. I checked the final score today. They won 8-2. I feel a tiny bit better now.

Television. Season two of The Boys is out. I forgot that Amazon released shows weekly. Crap. At least they put out three on the first day. They are good so far, but now I have to wait for Friday for episode four. On top of that, Jen and I started watching Cobra Kai. We plowed through the first season. It is so much better than I thought it would be. I expected it to be goofy and silly and a bit of a farce. It was, sort of. Not a lot though. It was just good. Yeah we saw the series finale coming miles away, but it didn’t lessen the effect. I’m looking forward to season two, and season three is supposed to be on the way. I’m paused on The Watchmen for the moment, but I’ll get back to it. Same with Breaking Bad. Eventually I’ll get to Lovecraft Country too. For now though… I’m up to season four episode 15 of Agents of Shield. The rewatch continues.

For now though. Let’s have a good work day on this, the first work day after Labor Day. The first work day after the symbolic last day of Summer. Today is probably in my top three least favorite days of the year.

Ugh.

Day Off

Is everyone in the USA enjoying their Labor Day holiday?

My to do list today is clean the bathroom, change the litter box, and work on 50/90. Also, do some of that exercise shit. I went for a five minute walk already today, similar to what I was doing last week… just walking in place. By the end of the five minutes I could barely lift my feet off the floor. Being criminally out of shape sucks.

50/90 update. 31 songs done, 10 ready for lyrics, three ready for rhythm guitars, and one that’s just a bass riff. 45 songs total. I was hoping to be at 40 before August ended. I missed it by three. That makes September a little harder than I expected.

It’s been about an hour since my five minute walk…

I think I’ll do another one now.

Yikes.

I Might Be Dead

Remember yesterday when I mentioned I had tried to walk in place for a measurable amount of time in order to trick my back into letting me exercise a little tiny bit?

I did it again today. Five minutes of walking in place. Also… I did it twice.

My watch says I have fake walked for about half a mile. For normal people, a half mile walk isn’t anything. For someone as dangerously, dare I say criminally, as out of shape as I am… half a mile is insane.

There is a little part of me that thinks I am actually dead but just haven’t fallen down yet. Like that scene in that movie that I was just about to spoil but won’t because that would be mean of me. She hits him, he talks to her for a while, then he walks away and after a specific number of steps just dies? That movie that I’m not going to mention the name of because it will spoil it for the three people left on Earth who haven’t seen it yet? You all know what I’m talking about, right?

I’ll tell you what, if I do in fact keel over I will immediately post about it from the after life. I promise.

Seriously though… I wonder if I could get myself into the habit of doing this three times a day. I might do it again after work. Assuming I’m alive, of course.

Mark Time March

I can’t exercise. Every time I try my back starts to hurt like crazy and I have to stop. It’s really frustrating. I’ve ballooned up to the size of a small mountain and I can’t do anything to work any of that largess off.

I was thinking back to marching band, because I am mentally deficient, I guess. We used to do a lot of marching in place. Marking time, it was called. Yesterday I had a moment where my watch gave me a notification that I hadn’t stood up at all for almost an hour so I pushed my fancy desk chair away from my desk and stood up… and started marking time. Just walking in place. I did it for 2-3 minutes and felt a little tiny bit good about myself. It took a while to realize what that feeling was because it’s been so long since I felt it, but eventually my brain worked it out.

I decided I’d try it again today. Just before 11:00am I did it again. This time for five minutes. It left my legs feeling like rubber, but once again I was a teeny tiny bit pleased with myself. Just after 2:00pm I did it again. Five minutes. This time I turned on the exercise tracker on my watch. I feel like I’m going to keel over this time, but again… it didn’t feel like a mistake.

I don’t know if I’ll do it again tonight, but I think fat boy might do it again tomorrow. Once, at least. Maybe twice.

Marching band… for the win? Who woulda thunk it?

Tendinitis

Friday night/Saturday morning, while I was sleeping, the ace bandage I’ve been wearing for my thumb started really irritating my hand. I took it off and went back to sleep. I left it off all day yesterday. I may have also missed an Advil fix while busy with other stuff.

What did I learn?

I learned definitively that I am just as bad as I’ve been for months. Overnight last night there were a couple of times when the knuckle did the thing where the tendon is all swollen and it gets caught on the bone and the knuckle won’t bend. When that first started it felt icky. Now it hurts.

The bandage is back on. Is this ever going to get better?

Total and Complete Epic Fail

I was having a really good day, poison ivy wise. No itchy, no nothing. For the first time in over a week I was feeling confident and a smidge optimistic. I even skipped my planned 2:15pm steroid cream/calamine lotion paste of grossness.

Then…

The clock struck 5:30. The work day was over. Happiness. That was followed a millisecond later by the worst blast of itchy I’ve had since before I went to the doctor. Oh my sweet christmas it was awful. I started scratching, I started bleeding, the dead skin was falling off my arm like an avalanche. It was terrible.

I scratched until it hurt too much to scratch and then I cleaned up the bloody mess and put the various goops on.

I was feeling so good about things. I was really, really wrong.

Damn it.

Questions About Meds

Yesterday, after taking my second of three daily doses of steroid anti-itchy cream, I decided to skip a dose. My arm felt so swollen it was a little sore. By the time I reached today’s first dose I felt a lot better and there wasn’t any question of skipping again. I took it.

Today it was my tendinitis’d thumb that has me questioning things. It hurts just as much as before. I don’t feel any improvement, but keeping the ace bandage on does seem to help. The doc gave me two of them saying that the first one was “gonna get smelly.” Can you wash an ace bandage? I was hoping to get through today before I opened the second one, just so that I could say the first one lasted a week. Today when I put it on it was irritating my skin. Itchy. How ironic is that? I decided to leave it off for a while.

On the plus side, the visual signs of the poison ivy are starting to clear up. There’s that. The anti-itch cocktail of the steroid cream and the calamine lotion and little bursts of cortizone cream are helping a lot, but every once in a while the itch gets so bad that I can’t stop myself from scratching. In fact, actually rubbing the goop onto my skin can sometimes lead to scratching like the world is ending.

Things are better. Things are not right. How long is this going to last? Who the hell knows.

Speaking of my thumb… I want to play some guitar today but… I’m a little scared to try. Agents of Shield and laundry are helping to keep me away from the potentially upsetting discovery that it hurts too much to play.

I don’t like this.