A few weeks ago my physiotherapist gave me some exercises for my wrist, which I damaged in a kayaking injury. I was supposed to do 15-30 reps of these three exercises with a 1-2 pound weight. Well, I couldn’t find a 1-2 pound weight, so I started off doing 10 reps with a 5 pound weight. That was going ok, so I went up to 15 reps, and that worked ok too. But last night I tried to do 20 reps. That was too much. My wrist hurts like hell today. I think I’m going to go back to 10 reps again, and step up more slowly.
Category: Pain
Ok, that’s better
I had an appointment with my physiotherapist today. She’s pretty pleased with the progress on my wrist – I’m getting more range of motion back every day, and my grip strength is increasing as well.
I got my KVM switch working again, by unplugging the monitor cable from it and plugging it back again. Not sure if that’s a KVM problem or a monitor problem – next time I’ll try power cycling the monitor instead.
And the network connector arrived for the upstairs TiVo. That means I can do a daily call using the network, instead of the phone. That’s not a huge win, although there wasn’t a convenient phone jack near the TiVo and formerly I’d been using this device that puts the telephone signal through the power lines. But far more importantly, this enables multi-room viewing. I just tried it, and it works ok, but not great. On one Tivo, you can browse the “Now Playing List” (ie the list of recorded programs) from the other TiVo. You can choose a show and “transfer it”. It doesn’t quite transfer in real time, so you have to wait a bit before you start watching, although you can go back to the menu and watch something else, or even choose more shows to transfer, while it’s transferring. And when it’s done transferring, it’s on both TiVos.
If I had any wishes, I’d want the transfer to happen fast enough that instead of transferring, you could watch it directly from the other machine’s hard drive, and therefore when you finished, you could delete it or otherwise manage it on the originating TiVo’s drive. Oh well.
Got the cast off!
I went to the doctor about my wrist. They took off my cast, and let me wash my arm. All the skin on my palm was flaking off, but when I went to the sink to try to wash it off, the technician who’d taken off my cast called from the other room to say “you can’t get all the flakes off”. She says everybody goes back to the sink when they discover all the flakes. While waiting for the doctor, I made the mistake of trying to look at the back of my hand to see if it was flaking too. OUCH!
The doctor examined my wrist a bit and said that since it’s doing so well, instead of a cast she’d give me a brace. She said to treat it like a cast and don’t twist my wrist around too much, although of course I can take it off to wash. She said if it’s too painful I could come back and get a cast.
I can almost type normally with this brace on, but only if I raise my elbow at a high angle. And my elbow is very stiff and sore. But it’s nice to be mobile again.
What a weekend!
Saturday, I woke up to an email saying that my waypoint generator had a bunch of Canadian airports with US-style identifiers (instead of CYRP, Carp was KYRP). I fixed that first. Then Vicki and I replaced the outside front floodlight which had a wonky socket. And we replaced the floodlights over the garage, which supposedly had a light sensor (although it was more of a randomness generator) with one that had a motion detector. Since we can’t find a switch for these lights, I like the idea that they won’t be on all night. This involved hacksawing off a bit of iron pipe conduit that was sticking out too far to put the box where I wanted it and some simple wiring. Or at least it would probably be simple wiring for somebody who isn’t scared of ladders and electricity (gee, my brother used to shock me with electricity and throw me off barn beams – see a connection?). But we got it done – I’m so domestic it hurts.
Sunday, I got up bright and early to be a safety pilot for Paul P. He’s been my safety pilot in the past, so it was only fair, even if it did mean getting up ungodly early. I took some pictures while he was buzzing around, but most of them sucked. Here are a few that didn’t suck too bad.
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Back at the airport, there was an ancient Dornier flying boat re-engined with modern turboprop engines. Cool!
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After that, I went kayaking again. This time I went a little slower, and went up all the way to Blossom Road. The river was still quite shallow, and fast. I lost track of the number of times I had to put down my paddle and push down and forward or backward on the bottom of the river because I was bottomed out. (Try that with a canoe!)
On the way back I took one of the other branches because this canoe full of girls can careering across the river and rammed me without making the slightest effort to slow down or avoid me – after they saw they were on a collision course, they all stopped paddling – and when I got to the fork there was another one of these canoes full of girls sideways in the river. But it worked out well – there was a Great Blue Heron on the bank of the river that I got a couple of shots of, and then some “ducks in a row”, and then a Green Heron, which I ‘ve seen very few of over the years.
The best pictures from today’s paddling.
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Unfortunately on the way home I noticed that I had a really badly sprained wrist. Unfortunately it’s my left one (I’m left handed), but I suppose the right would have been worse since it would be hard to shift my car like that. It was literally a big pain trying to put my kayak away afterwards.
Bleargh
This morning, because of the pain in my elbows caused from overzealous paddling yesterday, I took some asseto^Waceto^Wecset^Wtylenol with codiene. At first I just felt this weird feeling of disassociation from my body – except the pain in my elbows, that penetrated like a million candlepower spot light through fog. But 5 minutes ago I broke out in a sweat and now I feel like I’m going to throw up. It’s going to be a fun day at work.
Update: Around 10:30 I had to literally RUN to the bathroom because I was about to throw up. I got there, but I didn’t throw up. I stood over the toilet for 15 minutes until the urge passed. It’s now 2pm, and I finally feel like I can actually think and work again, but of course my elbows are quite painful – although no worse than they were a few days ago. I used to have a large jar of ibuprophen in my desk drawer, but I took it out for some reason. I think I need to bring it back.