A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Doc ran battery of tests, and localized the pain source to my elbow. I was a little skeptical, but I must admit that it was the only place that actively hurt while we wrung out my whole armal region, from shoulder to wrist. And it hurt rather a lot.

He pronounced it as lateral something-or-other (feel dumb for not writing it down now), took X-rays to be sure I wasn't hosting any bone-gnawing alien symbiotes (negative), and prescribed anti-inflammatory pills, ice, and taking it easy until next week. I will do this.

He had nothing to say about my "sunburned" feeling except to keep an eye out for shingles. OK.

I am also self-medicating with a wrist brace from CVS. Yes, I know not to treat it as a cure-all, but it seems a not wholly unwise adjustment, just the same.

Blessings again to all who virtually frog-marched me into the doctor's office yesterday. I wasn't expecting to hear that, and therefore needed to hear that.

So something went b'doink in a non-TMI region of my body. Coincidentally, I have a physical coming up in a couple of weeks. I am looking for confirmation that it's OK to wait for that, or if I should run-not-walk to the doctor's office to escalate this.

Since Saturday afternoon -- so, for three days now, without letup -- my right forearm has felt somewhat numb and rather painful, from elbow to fingertips. The pain recedes for several hours whenever I eat ibuprofen, but the numbness stays: an unpleasant tingle, especially on all the affected area's skin. It feels especially weird on the inner surfaces of my fingers.

The pain arrived in a sudden rush while I worked on Saturday, and has remained since. But I otherwise feel great, and my arm is fully functional, with no muscular weakness or anything. So: thoughts? Meh wait it out (with a doc appointment after two weeks), or holy shit, jmac, pick up the phone now?

So, the country is set to walk a sane path again - can you believe it? - and I had my last PT session today, as well as a flu shot. My hip isn't popping (nearly as much) any more and I'm told the relevant muscles are much stronger than they were a month ago. Yay.

As for the other stuff: I'm no fanboy, and I'm already working on a healthy dose of skepticism about all of this. But. What I saw last night is that it is possible to sell a national population on Hope, even when Fear is so cheap and abundant. I suppose I'm saying that it's the voting public I'm really impressed and hopeful about, moreso than the president-elect - though all props to him and his for making it happen.

As far as I can tell, Obama's true campaign platform was less "My policies are the best" and more "This is who we can be". And a majority of Americans said: OK, I'm game. Let's try this. I'm feeling quite optimistic that a stronger, saner national self-image will, eventually, result in good policies. We all have a lot of work to do, but it really feels now like - begging your pardon - yes, we can do it now.

...and I would like to see one of his first actions in office be to start rewinding those terrible double-secret executive powers that Cheney and pals set up. And I am not sure how to best communicate this to his office. More writing congressfolk, I guess.

Those missing my liveblogging (coz I didn't watch the debate) can read Defective Yeti's take on it, or Todd Alcott's thoughts if you'd like less snark.

I played Wiz-War last night, by gar. It was the shortest Wiz-War game ever. I want to play it again.

Going to a physical therapy session in a couple of hours. What's this? Well, after we moved I detected something strange, and rather than whine in LJ about how it's surely a tumor, I broke tradition and went to the doctor first. Turns out it's some benign condition with a long name that makes me feel a pop-pop in my hip when I walk around outside. I was told that if I ignore it, it may get less benign, so I'm gonna have it stretched out of me. Bought some running shorts yesterday, just for the occasion. Woo.

Also, I have been making a point to eat breakfast! This is unusual for me. "Breakfast", for me, is traditionally a coffee and some sort of enormous doughy lumpus. Now I'm actually puttin away the eggs and cereal and such. (And keeping the coffee, of course.) This is great.

Should I go to the doctor for a checkup next month? I have heard disagreement about whether it's an annual or a biannual thing (at least in my age bracket). But it can't hurt, right?

Next month it'll have been a year since I was first given a proper diagnosis and treatment for those awful stomachaches. They've come back once or twice since then, but I can always make them go away by myself now. In retrospect I can't believe I lived under them in painful ignorance for as long as I did.

In other news:

I screwed up my ability to pay taxes on time. I have the money, more or less, but it's not in the right location. I'll spare you the details. So anyway, I filed extensions for the first time in my life. The thing that people seem not to know about extensions is that you're still supposed to pay what you owe on-time; the extension's just for the paperwork.

Fortunately(-ish), tax slackers are a common case, so the gov't will happily take your payment later, plus interest for however long you slacked. The rate is based on the Fed so it's cheaper than credit cards. They won't raise too much of a stink so long as they see their tardy money in a reasonable period of time.

The feds got an in-good-faith payment of $1K from me, and the commonwealth got NOTHING. I'll have to make it up to them next month. I need to be a busy beaver with Appleseed work for the next coupla weeks to make sure I can pay all that and everything else, but the work's right here in front of me.

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Climbed back on the exercise horse. I guess it's better that I keep fallin off and gettin on than just stop altogether. The funnest thing about getting back into shape is objectively observing your strength come back, day-to-day. I could barely do five push-ups last week, and now I can do six smoothly. Let us forget that I could do ten easily a coupla months ago. Stupid, slippery horse.

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Been playing a lot of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The best parts of the game are wandering the countryside on a mission, as it really is quite beautiful, and getting into utterly insane encounters due to the fact that monsters and NPCs can, if they wish, locate or follow you to literally any location in the game world. Once I had an ally from the game world's main city show up three levels deep in a dungeon to ask me about a quest I had left half-finished. Also, if crazed goblins ambush you in a cave, you can let them chase you right into the middle of the nearest city, where the imperial guards'll be like "wtf?" and stick 'em for you.

Yesterday I did this by accident, except that I got into a situation where two assassins were chasing me, and a guard was chasing them, and I got them all to run into the middle of a deep lake - I have magic boots that let me walk on water, see. None of these guys had any issue with either buoyancy or oxygen, and the assassins stood around directly beneath me, puzzled, as the guard methodically relieved them of their hit points. Presently their bodies floated up like dead guppies, which was nice, coz they're easier to loot that way. Moments later, the guard burst out of the water on a shore dozens of yards away, and zoomed off over the hills, back to wherever he came from. I laughed.

Starting today, I am eating resveratrol supplements with my breakfast.

I feel good about this. After following anti-aging developments for years, and flirting with some ideas like calorie restriction, this is the first time I have applied a promising technology to myself. I do not mind saying that I went ahead and made a little ceremony of my first dose, eating the pills with cold water while standing under a hot shower. From tomorrow on, they'll just go down with my morning coffee.

Effects so far: some of my burps taste funny. Stay tuned for updates.

My plan, henceforth, is to continue following the news about anti-aging treatments and applying the single sanest-sounding one to myself, letting it complement a lifestyle of varied diet, frequent exercise, low stress, high friendship, and all that good stuff. I suspect, though, that there'll only be so many more candidates before one treatment really blows the lid off.

Still, I can't help but feel a little self-conscious about this. Many of my friends are apathetic about, or even resistant to, the idea of clinical anti-aging therapy. I can understand where they come from, because it's based on countless generations of the shared human condition, and that's awfully strong stuff. It doesn't help that decades of advertising have confused the definition of "anti-aging" with the promises of beauty creams or plastic surgery. This can make the desire to truly eliminate aging seem like a shallow pursuit, when really it's no shallower than wishing to eliminate any other debilitating, degenerative disease.

The meme that aging is treatable started working its way into the mainstream just as I was turning 30. I don't believe in fate, but I do believe in auspiciously timed opportunity.

Here's to the future, eh?

Edit: I'm shutting off anonymous comments on this entry because it's getting a lot of anon-spam.

Thursday was a sick day. Clobbered and miserable. At the end of the day I greeted the returned classicaljunkie and she gave me Tylenol cold & flu pills, which (after an hour of sleep) snapped me back into sensibility like a light switch. I swear by this product now.

Friday did some contract work for the first time in a while. (This coming week I'm gonna be doing a lot of it, actually.) After that, delivered an HTML snapshot of the web client's table UI (not super-easy to do since it's a slippery DHTML app) toradiotelescope. He insisted that this demo needs to make a much better first impression than I was preparing, and then volunteered to help make it happen himself. I have no problem with this sort of criticism!

Saturday started to set up the machine that will host jmac.org. After moving over! It's mostly Gameshelf episodes, and I discover that a few seem to exist in duplicate. Well, i can do something about that, at least. Then attended an art salon featureing cthulhia's paintings, marymary's poetry and C's recorder-playin. It was delightful.

Sunday, more machine setup, and reaching out to prodigal jmac.org users via email to tell em what's up and ask if they'd like to stay. Discovery, via daerr, of Google's domain-level management apps. I am likely to point jmac.org's MX records at it to let Google handle all my domain's incoming mail. Yeah, I know.

Afternoon meeting with taskboy3000 about the Gameshelf shoot we're having on Tuesday, including a script read-through. Also, we played MULE again. Trader Joe's dinner with classicaljunkie, and then we hung out at dictator555 and Nate's place for a while, drinking their tea while I wrote some new game news segments. It will be a good show.

I am having a good day.

In the wee hours this morning I played two games of Tic Tac Toe against a bot with the Volity web client. The application is not in a state where anyone other than me can use it, but we have nonetheless acheived target depth. It's all lateral digging from here. I IMed radiotelescope around 1a.m. to share the moment. He said "WTF, mid-August?" and told me to go see a movie.

I've suffered discomfort from zits growing deep in my left ear over the past couple of days, and they burst while I was showering this morning. It was briefly horrible, but after spending a while mucking the ear out with Q-tips I felt my old self again. If it weren't for classicaljunkie I probably wouldn't have had any Q-tips on hand. Truly, this is what love is all about. (Actually now that I think back I originally bought the Q-tips to clean my keyboard. Wev.)

Walked to Kendall to squirrel the spoils of my July contracting work into the one ATM in town that accepts deposits for NetBank. Buoyant and listening to favorite podcasts, I thought upon Zarf's advice and looked at the movie theater, but they had no noon shows, so instead treated myself to lunch & beer at the CBC. I think I ticked off the server when I changed my mind about outdoor seating and asked to go inside instead; though the restaurant had few people in it he sat me next to a couple of grumpy people talking business, ignoring their cranky protests about why I had to sit there. I listened to my iPod and enjoyed my meal anyway, and said hello to modpixie on my way home.

Now it's pouring out even though I was walking through the sunshine. Who knows!

Wii sees your DDR and raises you by knocking you to the floor and making you do pushups.

The proof's in the pudding, but this could be pretty excellent. Check out the trailer at the bottom of that page. If it doesn't suck then it's almost certainly a must-buy for me.

The reviewer asks some pertinent questions about how friendly it is with larger folk (who are not featured in said trailer) and whether BMI is really the best scorekeeping mechanism... but if the device can function fine under heavier weights, both it and the Wii Fit software might be equally friendly for all kinds of body types, which would be even awesomer.

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In other news I finally made a George Bush Mii that I'm happy with. It's hard to do without the ears. I wish it were easier to post one's Mii collection as images or I'd have already done it; I finished my BSG set long ago and have started in on politics, doing both Clintons and Obama last month and also making a little Cheney. My Miis. Let me show you them. (If you're a Wii-friend and you don't have any of these and would like em let me know, and I'll send them over.)