The Mandelbear's Musings

So this morning as part of transitioning to non-binary, I got my first-ever body piercings. Three pretty little platinum helices. I am amused.

Of course, nobody but my radiology team will ever see them -- they're in my prostate. But that counts, right?

It was a lot less painful than the biopsy, which was kind of surprising. Well, except for the part where I was supposed to have a full bladder going in -- they use it as a landmark. Ouch!

I had a nice conversation with Dr. H, starting with the observation that my birthday is Wednesday. I will quote directly from her visit notes:

[mdlbear] is a very pleasant 76 year old male who presents for fiducial marker placement.

[...]

He plans to celebrate his upcoming birthday with family over Chinese food and chocolate cake.

I mentioned that I was probably going to have ma po tofu.

( Content warning: unpleasant medical details. See icon. )

TL;DR, now I'm taking testosterone blockers. That's the other transition. If I were transitioning all the way to a trans woman I'd also have to be taking estrogen, but I'm not. So I guess I'm transitioning to a trans enby. I find this amusing.

My right peroneus muscle is still painful. No idea what I did to it or am doing wrong, though one article suggested that it could be plantarflection due to sleeping under heavy blankets. So maybe I should go back to sleeping on my side instead of on my back. Sleeping on my back is fairly recent, so that may be fairly simple.

I've been doing a lot of puttering, and arguably a lot less practicing than I should, given that I have a concert in less than two weeks at Orycon. I've been practicing most days this week (see notes), and I think my calluses are back, so that's something. Need to print out my set and start doing more complete runthroughs.

Halloween was fun, going out with N and her kids. Gave the adults someone to talk to.

I've been taking care of the critters, since N, G, and g are away at OVFF. Cricket's been in the Great Room, mostly hiding in the Cubhouse -- at least, that's where I usually find her when I come in. Ticia's been pretty good about not trying to come in, though I still have to warn her away from the door.

Puttering. Yeah. G' did some major re-organizing and cleanup involving the downstairs closet and playroom, and the upstairs closets. Unfortunately, this was accomplished mainly by moving things into the garage and craft room. I've been gradually moving stuff to more sensible places. Some of the decisions have been good ones, though; I'm not complaining about the kitchen cabinet re-org.

Oh, yeah: the Cubs won the World Series. I'm not a sports fan at all, but that's pretty extraordinary. If it's a sign of the apocalypse, I'm hoping that it continues with the person the wingnuts are calling the Antichrist getting into the White House. And that's the last thing I'm going to say about politics until November 9th at the earliest.

( Notes & links, as usual )

So, in the interest of raising my word count for the day, have a post.

Please note: this post describes a medical situation that turned out not to be the emergency I thought it might have been; I'm ok and, as it turns out, was never in any danger. However, if you have problems reading about medical emergencies, scary symptoms, hospitals, or needles you will probably be best off with the cut text.

Lab work, EKGs, and X-rays all looking perfectly normal, around 3:30 am they gave me my discharge paperwork, and I called G for a ride home. He was sleepy; N came instead. Have I mentioned recently how awesome my sister is? She's awesome.

Note that at this point most of the pain had gone away, but there was still a little achiness around my right shoulder, and the second joint of my right index finger was still almost as painful as it had been at the start. It still is, over 12 hours later.

On the way home N, who is a professional massage therapist, said that it sounded like a pinched nerve was the most likely explanation. Specifically, something called thoracic outlet syndrome. Which is sort of like carpal tunnel syndrome, only between your collarbone and your first rib.

When we got home, I put a sick day on my work calendar -- if I go to the ER in the middle of the night I've damned well earned a sick day no matter how much better I feel in the morning.

So here's what Wikipedia says about it: "Pain can be present on an intermittent or permanent basis. It can be sharp/stabbing, burning, or aching. TOS can involve only part of the hand (as in the 4th and 5th finger only), all of the hand, or [...] the pectoral area below the clavicle, [...] and the upper back (i.e., the trapezius and rhomboid area)." Um... right. What they said.

"The two groups of people most likely to develop TOS are [...] and those who use computers in non-ergonomic postures for extended periods of time. TOS is frequently a repetitive stress injury (RSI) caused by certain types of work environments." ... and I noticed, as I sat there at my desk with my right hand on the trackball, that my right shoulder was uncomfortably higher than my left one.

My desk at home, which consists of a sheet of plywood resting on a 2-drawer filing cabinet and a couple of 2x2 legs, is about 3" (7.5cm) higher than it needs to be. That would probably do it.

... so it looks like I need to take everything off my (cluttered) desk, disassemble the thing, make shorter legs for it, and put everything back. Grumble.

A pretty good day. I even took a walk, albeit a short one because the weather looked dicey. I felt a few stray drops, but stayed dry. (In fact, it did rain, hard, in the evening, and I got wet taking the garbage out.) I walked over to Savers in search of dress pants, and found a pair of dark gray ones that will work nicely with the darker of the silk jackets and the gray-and-black striped shirt that I'm wearing now.

Hey, I'm a fan. Dressing up for an interview is cosplay. Easy.

I made a yummy pot roast for dinner, using most of a bottle of cheap red wine and two bottles of non-alcoholic beer (left over from the last party, because nobody would actually drink the stuff). I had some of the broth in a mug -- it made lovely soup. And a cole slaw, with half a head of cabbage and a Granny Smith apple.

I got the Mac Mini, Whitewood, installed on the desktop to the right of the main monitor, and got x2vnc installed and working. That'll be my machine for doing taxes.

And I got through about 2/3 of the pile of papers to the left of the desk, turning up my (expired) passport, two uncashed checks, a renewal notice from AARP, some still-valid Office Max discount cards, ..., and some sore muscles in my left side from reaching back to throw stuff in the recycle bin.

In a separate search, I found a photostat of my birth certificate and the stub from my social security card. So that's good.

In other news, the move to Seattle is looking more and more feasible. Colleen spent several hours thinking about what books she wanted to keep, and searching for restaurants and museums. Naomi and I talked about housing options. Moving is going to be somewhat hellish, but we'll manage somehow.

I am encouraged by the fact that an albatross, metaphorically a dead weight hung around one's neck as a penance, is a beautiful and far-traveling seabird when it's alive.

And finally, Colleen made it through the entire day without using her scooter -- I think that's the first time in months.

Hmm. OK, I guess. My time at work was mostly spent on a combination of triage and archiving for my files. Including figuring out which parts are open source, and so can be put up as part of my portfolio.

I also brought home the Mac Mini and an enormous (160x1200 20" Dell) monitor that I may decide to take back on Monday because it's just too huge and power-hungry. It has a 20" usable area, but at least a 2-inch-wide bezel around it, making it about 25" overall. I also have a 1920x1200 monitor that's about half the weight, and not much bigger overall. That one's a keeper.

We went out to Red Lobster for Colleen's birthday dinner. Yum. The RL is in the same shopping center as a Ross; I picked up three assorted shirts, two with colors that should go well with my new silk sport coats.

I had a couple of painful twinges in my left side. Possibly a gallstone or kidney stone. Seems to be gone for the moment, but I don't trust my body any farther than I can throw it. Or something like that.

A pretty good day, despite not getting very much done. Took a 2-mile walk, which went pretty well modulo a little hip pain and the fact that my pants don't fit very well right now. My weight was under 190 for the first time since 2009! It was still down this morning, so it's possible I have some momentum going there. Hope so; my goal is to have a waist again.

I installed Puppy Linux on one of my keychain drives using UNetbootin, which totally rocks! Puppy didn't quite know what to make of the large screen on Cygnus, and it didn't have the right wifi drivers, but it has enough tools to be useful and it'll probably do just fine on my older hardware. UNetbootin, for those who don't know, is a cross-platform program that lets you select from a list of dozens of live CDs, which it then downloads for you and installs on a USB drive. Slick.

Public service announcement: Google apparently added all my gmail contacts as IM "buddies". Growf. I have, accordingly, disabled the gmail and lj accounts in my IM client; if you want to talk to me, you're stuck with Yahoo or AIM for the moment. I'd welcome feedback on that decision.

Link sausage: Can Augmented Reality Save the Printed Page? (cute hack) and What would Sharon do? - Cringely (computers and education).

Hmm. The day had its ups and downs, I guess. I feel particularly good about my st/roll with Colleen around the Rose Garden, and I got some practicing in, and major bug-fixing done the new makefile for recording directories. And quite a lot of decluttering, and a verse and chorus of a parody (still in progress).

On the other hand, I got very stressed in the early afternoon -- not sure whether it was sensory overload, family friction, or what -- the walk helped a lot.

On the gripping hand, I actually noticed at the time that mailing my filk to Naomi and getting thwapped for it made me happy. I may be getting better at that.

On the fourth hand, I wound up feeling very discouraged, especially when Colleen pointed out that I hadn't gotten any of my usual oddball stocking stuffers. She sent me out into the cold; Fry's was closed, but CVS was open and had gift cards and some suitable small tools.

So the day ended pretty well, at least.

No links. Must have been busy.

A good day? Mostly. I went up to the Menlo Park office for a meeting, and took my walk to and around the little artificial pond in the nearby park. I was struck by how many phone conversations I recalled while passing the place where I'd had them. Apparently location is a powerful trigger for me. (Now I'm finding that just thinking about the places brings back more memories. Eeep!)

I spent some time comparing netbooks -- I am now thinking of a Thinkpad X120e. The HP Pavilion dm1z has gotten better reviews, but I really want the pointing stick and middle mouse button.

I also spent some time researching laryngopharyngeal reflux (again). After rejecting the idea of using omeprazole (which interferes with citalopram metabolism), I decided to try raising the head of my bed about 10". This appears to have worked -- I woke up able to breathe and without having to constantly clear my throat. So... YAY!

Another patent with my name on it has issued. I have very mixed feelings about this: there's a sense of accomplishment, but I really hate the idea of software patents (which this is, like most of mine). I have 24 now.

A long phone call from a lonely Wolfling -- she's depressed, and I don't know how to help. I don't know what to call that feeling, but it hurts. Empathy? Maybe that's why I kept my feelings buried for so long, and so deep that I didn't know I had them.

A couple of good links: Ysabetwordsmith's Asexual Awareness Week Wrapup, Liralen on the difference between religion and faith (among other things). As a total outsider to religion, I've mostly seen its bad side; "faith" in particular has always baffled me.

Hmm. This one seems to have gone a little deeper than usual. Have to do more of that.

Mumph. No walk -- both the weather and my left foot were a bit dicey. Grumph. I spent most of work reading documentation, and most of the evening looking for things. Which I eventually found -- more on that below -- but I spent too much time on my knees and bending over, and ended up pretty wrecked. Went to bed early, and wound up spending the hour between 3:30 and 4:30 reading. Thank goodness for Science! It's complex enough that it can grab the hamsters in my head away from their wheels and thwap them until they stop moving. (The next move would be to feed them to the snakes, but I don't think I have snakes in my head right now.)

The one really good thing is that Plink's new bag arrived. It's a Wilson BLX sling bag originally intended for tennis racquets. Plink fits nicely with only her head and an inch of neck showing, along with my songbook (a 1.5" binder). The secondary compartment will hold Minnie, with a little finagling. The obvious name for him is Max Wilson. I think he's Minnie's big brother.

I posted a signal boost for Alan Grayson's Where's Your $50,000?, but it was pointed out in comments that the GAO report shows that he's playing fast and loose with the numbers, counting repeated short-term loans as multiple transactions. There's currently an outstanding balance of about a trillion, and the Federal Reserve is actually making money on the deal.

On the other hand, there's still plenty to be angry about. I believe it's fairly certain that if we still had the tax and regulatory structure that was in place pre-Reagan, the government would have a budget surplus and banks would not be too big to fail.

More links below.

So here we are, in the middle of National Invisible Chronic Illness Awareness Week. I first became aware of this two years ago, and kept putting off posting. I'm not, after all, disabled -- you wouldn't know to look at me that I have multiple chronic illnesses. That I'm limited. Most of my limits aren't physical, but that doesn't mean they aren't there.

"Out of sight, out of mind"? Not so much.

So let's get the obvious physical problems out of the way first. The biggest one is sleep apnea. Hence the "facehugger" userpic -- I sleep with a CPAP. With it, I can get a halfway-decent night's sleep. Without it, I snore loudly, wake up tired, and have a greatly increased risk of heart attack or stroke. I like my facehugger, even though it's annoying and takes up a lot of space in my carry-on luggage. I worry about the power going out, though. (Yes, I have a UPS for it. Thanks for asking.)

The other one is Celiac disease. Also known as "gluten sensitivity". "People with milder coeliac disease may have symptoms that are much more subtle and occur in other organs rather than the bowel itself. It is also possible to have coeliac disease without any symptoms whatsoever. Many adults with subtle disease only have fatigue or anaemia." Yeah. That.

If I eat wheat, rye, or barley I only get a little bit of intestinal pain. What I get is mostly more depression.

One of the two mental illnesses I have is called dysthymia. It's not the same as major depression -- you can think of it as chronic, minor depression. With emphasis on the chronic part. I literally can't remember when it started. Can't remember when feeling "ok" didn't mean feeling noticably better than usual. I do remember reading a post where someone talked about "reaching out for joy" and not having any idea what she was talking about. I still don't, really.

I'm taking an antidepressant now, and it's worth the side effects, but it's not a "cure" -- all it does is move my baseline up a little, so that "ok" is normal and "good" isn't too unusual.

The other thing the antidepressant does for me is give me a little more "cope". I can usually deal with setbacks and stress without falling apart or becoming paralyzed and unable to function. Usually.

The other one is alexithymia. That's the one that's really hard for me to describe, because what it means is that I find my emotions hard for me to describe. Usually, they're hard for me even to notice. I can sometimes notice that I'm happy if I can catch myself smiling. If I'm shaking, it may take me hours -- or days -- to figure out where I was because I was afraid, angry, relieved, happy, or just hungry.

Maybe it ties in with the disthymia -- it's probably hard to learn to recognize emotions when your range mostly goes between "blah" to "ok". Maybe it ties in with being easily overloaded, so that I learned to block emotions rather than being overwhelmed by them. I'm still working on it.

So... there you have it. Nothing that rates me a good parking spot, or a reserved seat on the bus. I could walk for five miles any time I wanted to. But I don't usually want to -- that's how disthymia limits me. Walking feels "good" for some definition of the word, but I don't know that definition, so I don't have a good way to remember how it makes me feel. That's how alexithymia limits me. I could go on.

But I won't. I think I'll stop here. I'd go have a beer, but it's made from barley.

Hmm. Not a bad day, with a two mile walk and a little music practice, though the van needing major service and new tires did put a slight damper on things. The pain was noticably less, but I noticed some "muting"; much the same audio effect as walking around in a fog.

The fog doesn't seem to have affected the programming part of my brain much; I was actually more productive at work than I have been in about a week. Pain is a major distraction, apparently, even when it's not the only thing I can think about.

The UBF's severe back trouble, dating back to an fall at work, is apparently an act. He couldn't help load his boxes into the van, but had no trouble unloading in Simi Valley. Fascinating.

Moving the new switch evened out the load on the UPSs nicely; there's still some additional power consumption on the router side that I'd like to get rid of, though. That will require moving off the old 3.5" hard drive, and is probably best combined with an OS upgrade. So... when I have the time? Oh. Right.

Did I mention that Colleen had her cast taken off Monday? Her arm is still sore, and her fingers are pretty weak, but she can actually use her dominant hand now. Happy cat. Happy bear, for that matter. She can do a lot more for herself now.

A few links up in the notes.

Took a 3-mile walk at lunchtime, and was fairly productive at work. Nothing notable done at home, though, and a See's candy caused a distinctly unpleasant sugar rush after dinne. Do Not Like. Something else to avoid, I guess. Dark chocolate and dried fruit are still ok, though.

Most of the pain seems to have settled in to a couple of spots on the right side of my head and the back corner of my right jaw, with occasional tension on the right side of my neck. Weird.

As for links... go watch Keith Olbermann's The Four Great Hypocrisies of the Debt Deal. Good, rabble-rousing speech. But will the rabble be roused? Somehow I doubt it -- the issue in the '60s was the draft, which hit high school and college kids at about the same time as the revolution in sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Washington's sellout to the greedy rich is a grown-up's issue.

Time to re-learn Banks of Marble (Pete Seeger - YouTube)

I've traveled round this country
From shore to shining shore.
It really made me wonder
The things I heard and saw. 

I saw the weary farmer,
Plowing sod and loam;
I heard the auction hammer
A knocking down his home.

CHORUS:
But the banks are made of marble,
With a guard at every door,
And the vaults are stuffed with silver,
That the farmer sweated for.

I saw the seaman standing
Idly by the shore.
I heard the bosses saying,
Got no work for you no more.

But the banks are made of marble,
With a guard at every door,
And the vaults are stuffed with silver,
That the seaman sweated for.

I saw the weary miner,
Scrubbing coal dust from his back,
I heard his children cryin',
Got no coal to heat the shack.

But the banks are made of marble,
With a guard at every door,
And the vaults are stuffed with silver,
That the miner sweated for.

I've seen my brothers working
Throughout this mighty land;
I prayed we'd get together,
And together make a stand.

FINAL CHORUS:
Then we'd own those banks of marble,
With a guard at every door;
And we'd share those vaults of silver,
That we have sweated for.

Words and Music by Les Rice

Not nearly as productive as I wanted the day to have been, despite a three-mile walk.

I'm just sort of drifting right now; sleepy and fuzzy-minded. Maybe the weekend was more depleting than I thought? In any case, I spent the early evening in the living room watching the news and a cooking show with Colleen.

In (other) news, Borders went bust. I never liked Borders much; they and B&N pushed out a lot of independent bookstores. But now they're gone too, pushed out of the meme pool in turn by Amazon. Looking for an alternative? Take a look at crowdfunding, which is in the spotlight this week. Very few people, if any, can make a living off it. Yet. But I think it'll get there eventually.

You can tell it was a slow day because of all the links. Many are to folding music stands, though I don't think I want to buy one without looking at it. I also want a packable mic stand; that's going to be even harder to find.

Mostly the day consisted of a nice 3-mile walk framed by thoughts about the last launch of the Space Shuttle. Good day? Damned if I know. I'd rate it "mostly ok".

I could do without the muscle spasm on the right side of my neck and head; I gave it cyclobenzaprine, a warm wrap, and a hot bath. Not so bad this morning, but still very much there.

I'll leave you with If the Last Spaceship Leaves On Time. A couple more links in the notes.

A pretty typical end-of-con day; lots of goodbyes including some to people I never even got to say hello to. And there was never enough time for conversation.

Then I managed to pull a muscle in my left arm near the shoulder, hefting suitcases. OWWW. It took a long time for the pain to localize; it started out in the whole upper body, leading me to worry about possible heart trouble. I spent the evening being totally wiped out. Naomi suggested putting ice on it, which helped but was very awkward.

It would have been a pretty good day if it hadn't been for the injury. Pain appears to be exhausting mentally as well as physically; the effects seem to be similar to the sensory overload caused by the noise. Which makes, um, sense, since pain and hearing are both senses. Bears can be a little slow on the uptake sometimes, though I am learning.

A couple of links.

I ended the day totally drained, hugging Colleen's stuffed wombat, and all tensed up. I still don't know what the emotion connected to it was, beyond wanting to crawl into a hole and pull the hole in after me. Is overloaded an emotion? It doesn't seem to fit with a need for comforting. Grief? But why? Suggestions welcome.

I had a very productive, though very stressful, day at work; I was able to end it with a real sense of accomplishment. (We will ignore for the moment the fact that things changed out from under me and I had to diagnose more problems in the same code this afternoon after Seth changed it overnight.) But exhausting. I felt under tremendous pressure, and very close to the edge of breakdown.

We went out to Red Lobster for dinner, having skipped our usual dinner on the way home from Lamplighters Sunday evening. Shrimp and bacon-wrapped scallops. Yum.

A few good links under the cut.

Sorted and totalled the CD sales receipts - sold 62 disks, which isn't too bad for this far down the long tail.

I went out for a walk, but started having pain in both hips and my left knee. Realized that I was wearing the New Balance running shoes, which I hadn't used for a couple of weeks. Hmm. Around 5pm I started feeling as though I had the flu. Apparently the flu virus hasn't gotten the memo about "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas."

On the way home I stopped at Lucky's for vitamin D and a couple of red snapper fillets. Yum.

Still feeling distinctly under the weather, I went splat around 10:30.

Not all that good a day, really, though I don't think my mood suffered much as a result. And I was pretty productive at work, which was a good thing since I stayed home sick today.

A pretty good day. The entire afternoon went into a Costco expedition with the Cat. Followed by a quick dash into the Vitamin Shoppe looking for L-tryptophan. (Aside to the drug-interaction experts in the audience. How much of that stuff, if any, is it safe to take with an SSRI?)

After that I fired up the barbecue, for only the second time this season as far as I can remember, and cooked up some rather large lumps of dead cow. Which lead to an obvious instafilk...

    The fox and his wife, without any strife
    Cut up the cow with a fork and knife. 
    They never had such a supper in their life
    And the little ones left them the bones, oh...

The kids, for some reason, have always preferred not to deal with meat with bones in it. More for us.

In other news, I managed to get the office clutter down to the point where all of the moving boxes are under the counter. (This involves a certain amount of cheating, since there are still a couple in the living room, but it's still something of an accomplishment.

In the links, we have Getting Amazon Kindle for PC running in Ubuntu under Wine and a deeply weird music video in Russian of people being mind-controlled by Mickey Mouse.

A pretty good day, but occasionally painful without even the compensation of a walk or bike ride. It started with the standing, bending and lifting involved in doing the dishes and putting away the groceries, and ended with overusing some arm muscles manhandling a gig bag made way too heavy with songbooks and a music stand.

In between I mostly hung out at the Ugglas' house, which they're moving out of next week, hanging out and helping pack, mostly by handing things to people. It was followed by one of their Rise Up Singing "songfests". A good day with friends, and worth the comparatively small price.

I came home to aspirin and a hot bath in the walk-in tub, which I can soak in up to my neck if I scrunch down into the footwell. The hot water triggered the same trembling that I get from a good backscratch or nestling down into Colleen's arms. So that's one more data point to triangulate from: simple physical pleasure. I'll figure it out one of these days.

The 2010 Pegasus Ballot is up online. I'm not on it, so I'll just be pushing for Ship of Stone in the classics category. That will make it even easier to trade my trip to OVFF for one or two trips to Seattle to rehearse for the Tempered Glass gig at Orycon. I'd like to do both, but there are these time and money things... (ETA: not to mention a friend's wedding that I really need to go to. So it will be good not to feel torn about it.)

A couple more links under the cut.

More support, if any were needed, for why I think that not being conscious of my emotions is a problem:

Last night I was feeling a lot of upper-body tension, mostly across my chest and shoulders. Anxiety? That's what it usually means. But then I noticed the thermostat, which was down to 66F from our usual 70. I decided that sleepytime tea, naproxen, warm snuggle and a hot bath would probably take care of either case, and they did.

I still don't know what the problem really was. If I really was afraid of something, it's still out there waiting to scare me again. I was just lucky that, in this case, I was able to handle either alternative with the same treatment.

And some things, like mild depression and contentment, don't have physical symptoms that I can recognize. I think it would be important to tell those apart, so that I know what to stop doing or keep doing. That's a large part of why my depression went untreated for decades -- I couldn't tell it was there.

It doesn't feel any different inside my head. Isn't it supposed to?

Spent much of the day feeling physically and emotionally drained. Some of that was, I suppose, getting and dealing with the check from my broker. Too many digits there. Realizing just how deep a hole I've dug for myself; that's not a comfortable thing to have to face.

And the hospital beds arrived -- but without the mattresses. I stupidly didn't count boxes and check them off against the packing list, so I'll have a lot of hassle to go through today. Again.

And the XO, that I felt so good about finally finding its way to a kid who will love it, is having problems. They may be minor, but at this distance I can't fix them. More later, maybe.

Sometimes it isn't a case of the glass being half full or half empty, but of it being twice as big as you can handle.

Something of a down day; I don't think I was at all recovered from a long weekend of sleep-dep and driving. Plus the inevitable post-con let-down, and maybe a little caffeine withdrawal.

Even a walk, which I practically had to force myself to take, didn't help a whole lot -- I kept nodding off while watching the koi. The hawk I saw on the way back helped more. Beautiful.

And what's with this business of avoiding things I can be pretty sure will make me feel better? Is it just the fact that it makes me feel guilty because I'm avoiding all the less pleasant stuff? Or something else?

Some pain in my right hand -- mostly a lump at the base of my ring-finger. Well, at least the associated research positively identified the painful, fluid-filled swellings I had on my elbows a couple of months ago as bursitis.

The back toilet was leaking; Colleen called a plumber to have it fixed, and discovered that she is capable of using the front bathroom now. The seat's lower, but there are plenty of things to grab onto.

The best link of the day is The City and its Flooded Double (from gizmodo) -- beautiful renderings of scenes from New York and Tokyo flooded to a depth of four stories.

Also, Ubuntu has announced the upcoming retirement of the lpia architecture, which is what Dell is using for their netbooks. So maybe there will be an upgrade path for me after all.

The main thing yesterday was taking my Mac in to work and printing out the tax forms. Needless to say, it was a huge relief. (The stupid machine didn't want to print -- I ended up putting the postscript files on a thumbdrive and printing them from my Linux box, which of course worked perfectly without any fuss.

My arm and shoulder were doing much better, but in the process of getting into my car coming home from work I managed to put a lot of pressure on my right side around the bottom ribs, and did something unpleasant to a muscle there. Cyclobenzaprine and naproxen sodium are my friends.

On reflection and going through the symptoms, I don't seem to have much actual social anxiety, though I probably did at one time. What I have now is a set of very efficient avoidance mechanisms that keep me out of potentially painful or embarassing situations. Possibly it can be dealt with the same way.

I do have a lot of apathy to go with the avoidance. That's from the disthymia, presumably.

It rained all day -- no walkies. Not really a bad day, just not a notably good one.

I started the day with comparatively little pain in my shoulder, but trying to put my shirt on took care of that detail very quickly. Ouch!! It turns out that reaching up or behind my back is what makes it hurt the most; that must have been what I was doing when I damaged it: picking up something a little behind me.

I spent the rest of the day listless and rather foggy. It seems that pain wears me out physically and eats away at my ability to think; probably effects of adrenaline and endorphins, respectively. I could pretty easily identify the adrenaline reaction, since it's similar to anxiety; a little deep breathing helped.

At Colleen's suggestion I took a walk around the rose garden. It did help; I found that I could swing both arms naturally. It took out a lot of the stress.

After my walk I did the final data entry on the taxes. I get a little back from my withholding, which was a huge relief. (For those not familiar with the US's horrible income tax system, you can get an extension on filing, but you have to pay up front or you end up paying both penalties and interest on the difference.) I still have to do the printing, and mail in the forms.

I finally put Argo (the Thinkpad) away pending a memory upgrade, and switched over to Barnard (the Dell netbook). Much smaller and lighter, though the keyboard is pretty bad and the touchpad is absolutely loathsome. A mouse largely fixes that.

I spent the evening out in the living room doing things that didn't involve either my right arm or much of my brain: re-arranging files and culling old stuff from my to.do file.

Anyone out there reading this who has chronic pain has my heartfelt sympathy.