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Thursday, February 18, 2010

Will It Ever End?

Posted by Melanie at 11:12 2 comments

Even now, in late February while spring is bursting out on other peoples blogs and on the news in other places, and despite the fact it’s been the warmest winter on record and I find myself running through mushy puddles when I'm outside training, and other people are enjoying lunch, sitting outside at cafe tables on the south side of concrete buildings, despite all that I don’t have any desire, like some of my gardening friends, to create real spring, by starting seeds under the fluorescent lights in my basement, or anywhere else because, damn it, it’s still winter.

To prove it I can show you photos of the two feet of snow that still surrounds my house, and, it’s snowing again for the second time this week.

Purple Light

Ok, so its been nice to only feed the woodstove the occasional log and to hardly ever feel the need to crank up the baseboard heaters, to be able to go for a run outside without the fear of frostbite, on the tender skin of my face or my long suffering fingers and toes and to only have started the snow blower a handful of times.

But, skiing for the most part has been shitty to nonexistent. It's depressing to spend the better part of a morning climbing up a mountain, wishfully thinking the snow will get lighter and drier, but it doesn’t. Instead of slush the mountains further north have ice. Slicker than a Teflon frying pan it can be dangerous in the bumps and boringly stupefying on the groomed.

Desperate for something exciting and stimulating to do between intense periods of writing I've stated knitting again, only to find it exacerbated the pain in my shoulder, already sore with an RSS injury from too much trackpadding on the MacBook.

I almost think I should buy a big screen, HDV TV and a satellite dish, the only way I can get TV, so I can watch the Olympics in comfort, rather than squinting and cursing at the poor graphic quality and sketchy feed of the CTVOlympics.ca stream over the internet.

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Saturday, February 6, 2010

Woe Is Me

Posted by Melanie at 17:37 1 comments

My right arm hurts or more specifically my shoulder and part of my neck. Lifting my arm above my head is painful. Everyone’s been telling me the pain is from scrolling and clicking on the trackpad of my Macbook.

I’ve tried limiting the amount of scrolling and clicking I do but even with keyboard shortcuts there are still things one needs a mouse for. Someone suggested I get a special mouse, sort of like a joystick, made especially for people with problems like mine.

I‘ve decided to train myself to use my left hand for all mousing activities, and after reading this article, make an appointment with a physiotherapist.

Last week was not a good week for running. I’ve discovered running 13 k through 2 inches of snow is like running through sand and makes me feel extremely tired. Downhill skiing the next day, hard and fast, makes me feel even more tired. Despite having a great run, after a couple of days rest, I found running today was making me feel tired again. I’m really hoping next week will be better.

A few days ago I found out Blogger will no longer be supporting FTP blogging. that's how I publish this blog. It seems I can either move all my files back over to their servers, still keeping my domain, or find some other blogging software to manage my blog. I have no idea what I’m going to do. I’m scared my limited HTML knowledge is not up to figuring out how to meld my blog with new software.

Update: I've found these stretching exercises to help with my RSI pain.

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