My favorite ice cream topping is a toss up between caramel and butterscotch. Part of the attraction, for me, is that the cold of the ice cream changes the consistency of the topping, making it gooey, then gummy, and finally brittle.
This thickening of the topping is the best analogy I can think of to describe how my back feels when the arthritis flares up. Normally my back is fluid and flexible, like warm caramel topping. Some days it is a bit thicker, like topping freshly poured over cold ice cream. I can still move, but there is a band across my lower back, about the height of a tuxedo cummerbund that feels sticky and prickly. It is sort of an itching sensation.
A moderate arthritis episode resembles the caramel or butterscotch when it has been on the ice cream for a while. It is thicker and far less pliable. You get the feeling that if you moved to fast or too far something would break. The itching sensation is more of a burn, and tends to be localized in one spot rather than across my entire back.
A bad episode, like the one I’ve had the past couple of days, results in loss of mobility and flexibility. The arthritis “coating” has now hardened into a rigid shell that cuts and bites when I move. Relaxing actually helps to lessen the sensation but as that is often accompanied by a change in posture, and movement equals pain, you are left trying to hold still, hardly daring to breathe.
Where the thickening ice cream topping analogy breaks down is in the treatment of a bad episode. Heat, which would soften the topping, is the wrong way to treat arthritis. In my case the nerves are pinched in my bad due to degenerating disks; the pinch makes the muscle sore. Sore muscles contract and, since they are attached to the spine, they pull the vertebrae out of alignment, pinching the nerve even harder. This spasm builds on itself - a really nasty feedback loop. Using ice to numb the muscles and deaden them to pain allows them to relax breaking the feedback loop. A strong all-day painkiller is truly a Godsend.
A severe arthritis episode leaves you flat on your back. Literally. Fortunately I’ve only experienced one of these, and it was the result of some well-intentioned massage that was done without awareness of my condition. At the time I thought I was still experiencing the lingering effects of a pulled groin muscle and that a massage would help. Instead it produced massive pain as every muscle, and every nerve, in my lower back was sore at once. Had I known that I had arthritis I wouldn’t have had the massage. And I would have used lots and lots of ice afterwards.
The other thing that is not intuitive about this condition is that some movement is good. When it hurts to inhale deeply and you aren’t able to bend forward to put on your own socks and shoes, the idea of moving to feel better is very counter-intuitive. However, movement that doesn’t add to the pain helps to circulate blood and the body’s natural responses to pain to the afflicted area. Talking a short walk can make a huge difference in how tight or painful the hardening shell of arthritis feels.
Today my arthritis is nice and warm, loose, not impeding me at all.
Now that I am working downtown I park in an underground ramp. My employer is nice enough to offset the cost of this (roughly $60 a month) so all I have to do is slow down at the gate while my token is scanned by the overhead reader and enter (or exit) the garage.
The entrance I use off of Washington Street has a booth that is manned for those visitors who don’t have monthly parking passes. In the mornings it is manned by a very cheerful woman who, if you smile and wave to her, will smile and wave to you in a manner that suggests she is delighted to see you. It puts a smile on my face every day.
We need a word for those strangers in our lives that we see on a regular basis, that we have some interaction with, but whom we don’t really know or maybe even speak to.
Recently I’ve been using a new email client, which means I’ve been training a new spell checker to the foreign and technical words I use commonly. The one word that the dictionary didn’t recognize, which really surprised me was OK, or as I am wont to spell it, okay.
Curiosity got the better of me, so here is more than you ever wanted to know about okay.
Yesterday we installed a new digital thermostat, replacing an ancient, mercury filled model. Usually I’m not one for reading directions, trusting instinct and dumb-luck to see me through whatever it is I’ve undertaken. Since I’ve never played around with thermostats before, and on the assumption that there might be electricity involved, I actually read through the instructions before starting.
Turns out there is some electricity involved, but that wasn’t the highlight of the directions. No, the highlight was the line that suggested wrapping the wires disconnected from the old thermostat around a pencil to prevent them from falling back into the wall until they were attached to the new thermostat. A seemingly simple step but one that defined the whole experience for me.
We employed a small screwdriver in lieu of a pencil, and between the two of us held on to the wires while reattaching them to the new unit. Thanks to the directions we avoided a wire fishing expedition, and moreover, we were successful in making the thing work.
There are lots of situations in life where dropping the wires into the wall could happen. Wouldn’t it be nice if more of them came with directions to warn you ahead of time?
For the past several years I’ve been actively reading numerous blogs on a near daily basis. At first it was just a handful of sites that I liked for one reason or another. Over time links these sites had led me to other sites, and so on. Being moderately organized I keep all the blog URL in a folder on my Bookmarks bar in Firefox so when I want to see what everyone has to say I can just right-click and select “Open All in Tabs.”
Unfortunately the list has grown and grown until there are some 220 entries in the blogs folder. Firefox is capable of opening all of these sites more or less simultaneously. Selecting “Open All in Tabs” results in 100% processor use and a jump in memory allocated but it does eventually work. Trying to consume 220 sites, however, doesn’t work. Not all of them change on a daily basis, and trying to find the new signal amongst all the unchanged noise made the experience less and less enjoyable.
(Yes, I know about RSS and have at various times employed a RSS reader. However, I much prefer to read a site as formated for the web. As much as I enjoy the content I enjoy the look and feel a site employs.)
In an effort to make my daily read list more manageable I went through all 220 sites yesterday and culled out the ones I really like. Sites that hadn’t been updated in the past six months were left behind, as were those that no longer scratched the aesthetic itch that originally caused them to be included in my list. In the end I reduced the list to a mere 75 sites. The full list still has it’s folder, and once in a while I’ll load it just to see if any of the “b-side” sites merit a return to the “a-list.”
You can see my “a-list,” and all my other bookmarks over on del.icio.us; at my del.icio.us.
After a seven year hiatus I returned to the dentist’s office this morning to have my teeth evaluated and cleaned. Over the years I have had a fair amount of dentistry done in my mouth, some of it rather painful and traumatic. My mother always said that we were each born with a set amount of dental courage, and that once it was used up, it was gone. My dental courage is long gone.
The last dentist I saw wanted to do several things all at once in my mouth, enough so that I was looking into the concept of “sedation dentistry,” where they knock you out for the duration. She felt that one of my oldest fillings needed to be replaced and, since the surrounding tooth wouldn’t support a new filling, a crown would be necessary. She wanted to have the tooth evaluated by an oral surgeon prior to her removal of the filling to see about a potential root canal. All of this came to a screeching halt when I lost my job (and therefore dental benefits) in May of 2000.
Since that time I have been fearful of going to another dentist since it would mean the removal of that filling, a crown, and maybe a root canal. Imagine, then, my delight in hearing the dentist say this morning that my teeth were in good heath and that as long as the filling was holding he would prefer to leave it alone. No cavities, no need for anything more than a cleaning in six months time.
I nearly levitated off the chair in relief.
As a reward I treated myself to Peanut M&Ms and an orange soda after lunch.
Seven years ago this month I created a new domain, one for my professional self. At the time I was engaged in negotiations for a contract that would set me up as an independent consultant. I would be working for myself rather than a company. Being hugely enamored of the entire web experience I wanted to have a domain for my doing-business-as name; I actually developed the doing-business-as name as a result of which domain names were available. In the end, Partition Software was created. Using partition in the name was a play on words as the primary development platform I was working with at the time allowed distributed software to be created and partitioned across many servers with ease.
To be honest I never really did very much with the site. I changed the layout once or twice and added my resume to it, but I didn’t really need it for my business. It was primarily a vanity thing; it gave me an email address for professional matters. Domain based emails being a magnet for spam, I get for more junk mail there now than I ever got real mail.
The site registration expires later this month and I am strongly considering letting it go. I don’t need the domain any more; if I were to have a professional site I’d want to call it something different to begin with. Being a bit of a pack rat it is hard to let go of anything so I find myself looking for excuses to keep the site. The technology I was using in 2000 is now defunct, so the name partition software is no longer really meaningful either.
I suppose it’ll be like the house I moved out of in 2004, I’ll never go back to that site simply because I won’t want to see the “Buy This Domain” site that will appear there almost immediately after my registration expires. Being an independent consultant was a rite of passage (in more ways than one) for me, and the name Partition Software, will always be important to me. But I am not currently an independent consultant, and were I to be again in the future there is another name that I would choose.
Recently a friend sent me one of those joke emails containing a list of politically incorrect “laws” that govern a gender. In this case they were “man laws,” and one dealt with the men’s room. To whit:
Never talk to a man in a bathroom unless you are on equal footing (i.e., both urinating, both waiting in line, etc.). For all other situations, an almost imperceptible nod is all the conversation you need.
Just a few minutes ago, after washing my hands in the restroom, I and another man were both reaching for paper towels from the lone dispenser. After giving him a nod, and gesturing for him to go first I thought we following the aforementioned law. He, on the other hand, took my politeness as an excuse to talk. A lot.
My tactical mistake was to allow him to be between me and the door. Throughout my drying of my hands and then while I stood there waiting, he stood, holding the door half open, telling me all about some new hot-air hand dryer that will use “400 MPH air” to instantly dry your hands. When my lack of response didn’t cause him to stop I had to resort to crowding him and reaching for the door. Fortunately, there are two paths away from the men’s room. Pausing slightly I was able to let him choose one and then I picked the other, to effectively end his now rambling discussion of using the “same cyclonic wind tunnel technology some high-end vacuums have” to dry ones hands.
Normally I think the contents of gender specific humor emails are worthy only of being deleted, but for once I agreed with the author. I’m not trying to be anti-social, I just would rather not strike up lengthly conversations with strangers in the men’s room.
I was hoping to write today about finding a cure for my Yahoo Messenger ills. The latest and greatest instant messenger client from Y! refuses to stay connected for more than about 10 minutes. It drops connectivity in the middle of chats, file transfers, and when it is just idle. Repeated forays into the support forum world haven’t been helpful other than revealing others with the same issue. One posting (which I should have bookmarked) purported from Y! itself suggested that using a third-party client might solve the issue. It is pretty sad when a major software producer creates a standard or protocol and then their own software can’t utilize it without blowing up.
The “cure,” discovered last night in another round of Googling-for-Answers was to change the Ignore List settings in the client. By default it gives you the option to ignore people on a list you create. The alternative is to ignore everyone who isn’t on your buddy list. I guess the thinking is that there is some kind of client-server communication required with the specific ignore list, and that this communication is somehow responsible for the connectivity issues. Unfortunately changing this setting in my case did not solve the problem. I still get dropped every ten minutes or so.
It has been pointed out to me that “you get what you pay for” and that Yahoo Messenger is free. So is Pidgin and it never drops my connection. For my two cents I think software producers should spend more time making simple software that work flawlessly, and when it can’t work, errors gracefully. Instead they seem more interested in stuff all sorts of ancillary bits into the install package (NO, I don’t want the weather bug installed. Or your toolbar. Or anything else.).
As a professional who makes his living creating or designing software I understand how incredibly complex even the simplest tasks are, and how vastly difficult it is to create fluid, easy-to-use interfaces. So I understand that Y! and Microsoft, and others are doing their level best. But I would be interested in software that did one thing, did it extremely well and effortless far more than I am interested in software that wants to invade my computer and deliver ads and unwanted extras. Because even thought the Yahoo Messenger product is free, putting up with all the shortcomings of the software combined with diligently avoid all the invasion-ware extras definitely is not without cost.
The cubical I occupy at work is fairly nice as cubes go, it even comes with a small built-in whiteboard. The whiteboard is maybe 18 inches tall and 40 inches long. I had to request a set of dry erase markers and an eraser, but that was easily accomplished in a couple of days.
The wall that the whiteboard is embedded into is shared with the neighboring cubical. This wall is shorter than the others so that you can peer over it into the next cube. You can also poach dry erase markers and the eraser over it when you are too lazy to order your own set.
Now, I’m not opposed to sharing. Well, not very. But I really don’t like sharing when the item borrowed is returned in a lesser state than when it left. I’ve had these dry erase markers for, what, 45 days now? They are still new. The chisel points are still all chiselly. Well the green one isn’t. It looks like someone used it to pound nails into really hard wood. You can’t draw a nice clean line with it anymore as the point now resembles a mushroom.
So instead of residing on the nifty little tray at the base of the whiteboard the markers are now in my drawer.
I’m taking my marbles and going home. So there.