Of Moose And Men
The Best Laid Plans Of Both Often Go Astray

Took a sleep aid last night, and for the first time had a bad reaction to it. Woke up groggy this morning, went in late, and by noon I hadn’t really woken up, despite coffee, so I went home and napped. Oh, and while on the way to work I managed to leave my badge at home, so I returned to get it rather than go through the rigmarole that work inflicts upon you when you forget it. Nothing like walking back and forth to Metro twice. Totally not my day today.

Once I got up, I did go swim this evening, doing a mile once all was said and done. Felt good to get moving again, and I think it worked the last of the stuff out of my system. What a mess. Won’t be using that again any time soon, which is a shame, because it had worked okay before.

On an unrelated note, if clementines were more readily available, I’d eat more fruit on a regular basis. Love those things, was happy to see them at Safeway on the way home from the pool.

All in all a very good Thanksgiving day. Was nice and quiet for most of it. The store this morning was uncrowded and uncharacteristically quick to get out of. The cooking went well, and I took the better of the two batches of cupcakes with me (made 2 dozen). Unfortunately I’ve broken a ring on my icing piper, so it was slathered on by spreader rather than piped nicely, but they did fine.

Side note: I really, really want to make the margarita cupcakes I found in the cookbook while flipping back to the buttercreme frosting recipe.

The dinner itself was fantastic. I took a zucchini risotto as well as the cupcakes (the mushroom selection stunk, so zucchini it was). The bird came out perfect, which the host was rightly proud of. He also thoughtfully saved me a batch of potatoes sans butter/milk, which was much appreciated. The other selections were equally tasty, with lots of good vegetables.

Some Wii was played, and I set Jon’s Wii up (he hadn’t played with it since he’d moved – in June). Next thing you know he’s going to be getting messages via the Wii from a certain someone who will have him registered here shortly. Bwhahahaha. We did warn him what the blinky blue light on the front means now, too.

Got the kitchen cleaned up just now after getting home, so no mess in the morning. Off work early tomorrow, and will plan to stop by the gym after that, swim, and hand in my receipt for the new shoes & lock. Wonder how they’ll do the credit.

Got the news that early registration for the Nation’s Tri opened for DC Tri Club folks, so signed up for that tonight. Hopefully with the stretching I’ve started doing on my feet will keep the PF under control, and keep it from recurring, and I’ll be able to do the race this time around.

Picked up replacement shoes (shower and gym), as well as a new lock this evening. Both pair were on sale, which is always good even when someone else is paying. Still, the replacement costs is going to be almost as much as they make from me for a year’s worth of locker rental fees.

Quiet night. There are happenings around town, but I got home from the shopping, laid down for a quick nap and woke up an hour later feeling pretty cold (for no apparent reason), so I stayed in and behaved myself. Earlyish morning tomorrow to pick up some last minute food needs for tomorrow night’s dinner, then it’s some cooking and some time spent in Crobuzon (aka my town in Animal Crossing: City Folk) before I zip down to Alexandria.

Friday in the office should be nice and quiet (I hope!). I’d like to get filing done and clear a ton of shit off my desk.

Partial success – they’re going to reimburse me for the items lost. When I take the receipts (and new items) in, I’ll give them some suggestions on how they can avoid this in the future (i.e., mark the rented lockers so when they do a “sweep” of lockers they can tell who’s paying and who’s not). Ludicrous that it would’ve gotten swept in the first place since I pay them, but at least they’re owning up to the goof and reimbursing me for the lost stuff.

Did get in a short (1/2 hour) swim. Probably should have done more drills, but it went pretty well, considering I’ve been off for three months. The new nipple piercings did well, too, which was a relief. Felt a slight tug on one push-off, but otherwise they weren’t noticeable (to me) at all.

It’s the shoes. Or, rather, the socks.

When I bought the shoes I customarily wear, I was in the habit of buying Dockers™ socks. They were generally thicker than most other “dress” socks, and if I was lucky I could find the padded dress socks (ones with extra fabric on the soles – heaven if you’ve ever worked retail, trust me). Well, either they’ve stopped making them or Hechts/May/Macy’s stopped carrying them because it’s been exceedingly difficult to find the things, or something comparable. So, I’ve been buying more conventional, thin dress socks the past year or two. Which has meant that my feet tend to slide just enough inside the shoes. Annoying, but not something I thought much of.

Then two days ago I went from wearing an old pair of the thicker socks at work to changing into the thinner ones. Right after I got up to Metro, the heel started throbbing again. Yesterday, dug up thicker socks, no problems. Today, the same – thick socks, no problem. Mo-ther-fuck-er.

Follow-up with the podiatrist tomorrow to confirm (was pre-set, before the revelation), and I sense a lot of sock shopping for me this weekend. Oy.

This past weekend sucked. I finally got productive around Sunday afternoon when I had a cleaning/laundry fit, but prior to that it was a lot of sitting around feeling sorry for myself, avoiding walking, and playing on the Wii. My usual “leave me alone until I feel better” attitude gets compounded when it’s semi-painful to walk as well; doesn’t encourage me to leave the house for a lot when it can potentially hurt to do so.

Did get out Sunday morning to use a gift certificate my newbies had given me at the end of their tri program, picked up some cross-training implements to help with that process. Was a good excuse to get out of the house, but even the walk to and from Metro ended up making my heel sore.

Then, today, not a ton of pain. Wandering around the office was fine, no real pain. The bike ride there and back was fine, of course (biking hasn’t irritated it at all, thankfully). So bizarre, pain the one day at minor stuff, none the next at a more normal course. Wish it would just heal up already, this is long past the point where it got old.

Let me preface my remarks here by saying that I use gay.com (and other chat programs) a lot to keep up with friends online. I’m on regularly 4-6 nights a week, and I happily pay gay.com for full access to their site. But I am incredibly displeased with this new implementation they’ve brought up this week. Unhappy enough to consider dumping the subscription if they don’t get it fixed.

I think I spent a grand total of 40 minutes on “the new gay.com” this evening in two different installments, after it seemed like I spent about the same amount of time trying to convince the web site that no, really, I didn’t have a pop-up blocker stopping their wretched pop-ups from popping up. Verdict: It sucks elephant butt.

Let’s catalog the deficiencies:

• It runs too slow (to be expected with a new system).
• There’s no way to ignore bots in the chat room now.
• There’s no way to turn off the entrance and exit alerts, so you frequently end up with a screen full of “so-and-so entered,” “so and so left” crap that you don’t need.
• You can’t zip through the list to find folks easily by hitting the first letter of their screen name – you’re forced to scroll through the entire thing.
• It takes forever to bring up a screen name when you want to click on their profile or view their photos.
• No clicking through to links in chat, you’re forced to cut & paste.
• Because it’s run through the browser, if someone sends you a link in another program (AIM/Yahoo/MSN/etc.), chat ends up getting shut down if you click on the link in the other program because the new page opens in your chat browser window (or whatever window you have open).
• There’s too much wasted space in the windows – they take up too much screen real estate.
• Even after full disabling the pop-up blocker and getting their pop-ups to work, Every Single Window that popped up continued to display the “you need to turn your pop-up blocker off” message, blocking the screen that I was trying to see until I could hunt down the tiny little “X” that would turn the message off.

In other words, the thing sucks elephant butt.

I’ve left feedback with them, and will continue to do so. The stand-alone chat program worked so, so much better than any browser based crap they could throw up there. I can understand that perhaps they wanted more ad revenue by bringing users back onto their site, but there are ways to do that (force users to go to the profile page on their site to see pictures – more ad revenue/hits right there, without breaking up the other features that made the program work so much better) and still make the experience user-friendly. I realize the company is (probably still) losing money like mad, but driving away core, long-time users by making the site unusable is not the way to fix that.

Limited email today. My inbox at work hasn’t looked that good since, oh, early February 2004 (i.e., right after I started there)? Evidently we had a “catastrophic cascading hardware failure” in our network stuff which killed off all email access. Whee! Still feel sorry for the CIO types. Explaining this all to management will not be fun. Especially since as of now we still have no crackberry service.

The peanut thing in the slow-cooker worked pretty well. I added water, thinking there wasn’t enough liquid, but it seems there actually was, after the veggies sweat out and shrunk down. So it was “stewier” than expected, but still good. It’s definitely been worth it to have dinner waiting for me when I get home. Now I have a bunch in the freezer for later, again, easier than trying to come up with fresh food every evening, and better than processed stuff as well.

Otherwise more splicer killing in Bioshock, and now it’s zombie movie time, before I crash.

I will say this about the economic news: at least it’s stopped people from commenting on the other inanities which the two campaigns keep spitting out. Though I’d not wish this nonsense on us any day of the week. Re-regulate the markets, tax the hell out of the salaries these fuckers made while screwing the rest of us over and bringing ‘value’ to their companies (which are now defaulting on everything they did), and to the extent necessary, let the market ‘correct’ their actions without bailing their asses out. They so love the market, then live by its rules and don’t expect the rest of us to bail out your poor choices.

Caught up on bills today, and worked through a backlog of mail and magazines (mostly by just tossing the unread magazines since it was highly unlikely I’d actually read the back issues now). Cleaned some in the process, clearing off the couch and the dining table for the first time in a while. Unboxed the new oven and microwave, in hopes the maintenance folks will be able to get to them this week or next (and in any case they look better without the huge boxes around them now), provided we can connect on the phone soon. And actually did some work (for the BGA) today as well.

Otherwise the day was pretty blue for me. Today was the Nation’s Triathlon, which was to be my last race this season, and what I hoped would be the capping race to what started out as a pretty good darned season. As it was, I couldn’t even bring myself to go down to watch it, or do any of the club events surrounding the event. The fact that I can’t run has weighed very heavily on me this year, and it’s not been pretty, nor very easy to deal with. I miss it, a lot. I didn’t realize how much it affected my entire being to be able to get out and just run. The fact that the lack of running has been the fault of fairly consistent pain in my right foot (which just brings the fact to the fore on a daily basis) contributes to this, I’m sure.

The foot’s actually been more sore, which the aftercare guidelines says is normal for the first couple of weeks after the zapping. Hopefully it’ll get better as I get closer to the follow-up appointment on the 3rd, I’m really getting tired of having pain when I get up in the morning and take that first step (or if I end up walking a bit too much during the day, which is pretty much every day for me).

Anyway, what will happen will happen, and I’ll keep working with the podiatrist until the foot’s back to normal, but in the meantime I’m not much motivated for tri stuff.

Oh, and I finally withdrew formally from the IM race in November, too, so I can get the minimal refund they’ll send for it. Much sadness there, I really wanted to finally do one of those and I thought this was going to be the year for it. Guess not.

I’ll write up the last bit of the trip to SF this weekend, promise, but first a foot update.

Got myself zapped yesterday afternoon at my podiatrist’s office. The worst part of the whole procedure was getting anesthetized by the doc, since he had to jab a needle in either side of my ankle to get to the nerves there and numb the bottom of the foot completely without affecting the rest of the foot. The inside took a while, where he found the outside right as he stuck the needle in. Regardless, I was pretty sore today from the jabbing around inside. I was especially annoyed at the “this should last for about an hour” when I was still mostly numb at midnight when I finally went to bed. Was back to normal this morning, aside from being very, very sore around the ankle.

The zapping itself was easy, I just sat there (and knitted) while the machine send sound waves into my foot, and the technician made sure my foot stayed in place for it. Not exactly exciting, which was fine by me.

Was slow going this morning, and I actually ended up leaving work a bit early today as well. Got a little nauseous, and had a nasty headache. Couldn’t take anything for the headache because the aftercare says no anti-inflammatories for the next month if they can be avoided. Part of the ESWT is to induce inflammation so the body will heal the foot, so negating that would be bad. So I left early and came home to do laundry. Well, came home after I got a replacement iPhone for the one I dropped while in SF and cracked the screen on. But that’s for the next update.