decad3

Ahoy! I've been doing my best not to drag out cheap "this happened x years ago" random-anniversary posts, but I guess this one's unavoidable for at least a brief acknowledgement.

This 24th marks the passage of ten years since the event of my spinal cord injury. Ten - dix; ju; diez; zehn; dez. A whole decade. 3652±1 days. Loose bookends for The Colbert Report, even.

...an excessively long time. There have been ups - it was a fantastic adventure hurrying back to college (like an idiot) and trying to resume as much of my life as I could post-injury, and I've been fortunate to spend almost four years of those ten improving myself in physical therapy. Of course, though, there have been downs. Plenty of downs. Let's not kid around; across the whole spectrum from "forest" to "trees," it's been mostly downs. Surprise! Surely you weren't expecting me to claim that my life was vastly improved that night in 2004.

Speaking of not-positives, this time of year is a two-fer for now: three years plus a few days ago, I went in for the initial surgeries that stuck me in bed, then went awry and froze me here. It's a miserable reminder to me that "it'll be about 6-8 weeks" might really mean "it'll be a few years, and your life will be systematically destroyed." Optimism has no seed here, so I shan't dwell on it further.

Wheee... Aren't memories fun? I'd like to get off the ride now.

-stasis

Hey, forks! This should be top-notch anti-smooth. I've rewritten this post at least a dozen times in a dozen different ways over the past month-plus, but it has yet to come out worthily. I can't seem to find the right version, so here's a version.

First, not much worth telling has been happening in the realm of health. I haven't been up in the chair for a while - as I've mentioned many times before, I have a delicate skin graft donor site area on the side of my right hip/leg, right where the sling for the Hoyer lift rubs pretty hard. That's what happened the last time I was up: that area was almost completely healed, but the sling ripped everything open and erased a ton of progress. Now the area is 95% healed again... Cue nervousness and frustration.

Anyway, enough of that. It's time to get meta.

I'm still here. The blog is still here. I like the blog, and the blog treats me well. Writing is fun! Responses are a pleasure! A+ to all that.

However, my current level of interestingitude is near-zero. My health situation is generally intensely uneventful; when it is eventful, though, it's almost never in a good way. That stuff is a bit private and more than a bit dreary - and usually not viable for entertainment conversion - so it doesn't really belong here.

Elsewhere, I'm still pretty epically humdrum. For a while, I've been in a... hmm, let's call it a groove. I churn a ton of RSS butter, "take" nerdy not-for-credit video lecture-based courses, and do various other unspeakably dorky things to keep learning and stay sharp; I keep tabs on Jon & Stephe (and Chris, because I'm that mature!), nap randomly, and play games on the weekends - again, among other not-fun-for-normal-people pastimes - to keep the work/play balance in check.

That sums up most of what goes on here in my tiny little world. As you can see, there's no PT right now, and neither the "health" nor the "otherwise" provide much material for rapid-fire updates at the moment. There are things brewing in my head! I do have some elaborate missive missiles in the silos, and will be launched once they're capped with literary warheads. For now, though, updates just won't be particularly frequent. So it goes.

For the record, unless I somehow become incapable of doing so, I will absolutely announce when I will no longer post here. I hate when people just let their blogs fade, leaving me checking for updates months, or even years after they've secretly decided that they're done. That's not happening here; if there's been an extended silence (like the one I'm breaking now), but I have neither died nor posted an adieu, this game is still on. Got it? Good!

Ok, let's call that done. Catch you around!

frangelic

"Buddy..."

"Buuuddy..."

"Buddy Buddy..."

"Buddy! Buddy! Buddy!"

"Buddy - Buddy - Buddy - Buddy - Buddy!"

"Buddy Buddy Buddy Buddy Buddy Buddy Buddy Buddy..."

"Buddy Buddy Buddy Buddy Buddy Buddy Buddy Buddy Buddy Buddy Buddy Buddy Buddy!"

"Buddy-Buddy-Buddy-Buddy-Buddy-Buddy-Buddy-Buddy-Buddy-Buddy-Buddy-Buddy-Buddy-Buddy-Buddy-Buddy-Buddy-Buddy-Buddy-Buddy-Buddy!" *gasp*

I'm not so sure he's grasping the pattern yet... Or maybe he really is fibbing.







(Fun fact: in colorblindland, he's wearing camouflage!)

bent

Hey there! It recently reached about 50, then 60 degrees here - part of nature's plan to turn the lovely winter wonderland into a muddy, slushy, black-icy nightmare - so I suppose I could thaw a little bit as well and tappy-tap some wordy-words. Hopefully it won't turn me into similar muddy pseudo-ice before I'm done. Analogies are fun.

Thaw, indeed. After two years and two months in bed and only in bed, I sat up in my chair last week! It was pleasantly uneventful; I was up in the power semi-automaton for about an hour, and nothing happened. I didn't even leave the room - just tilted forward and back to test my blood pressure and spun around a few times. Wheee! Fortunately, there was no drama, of the dizziness variety or otherwise. I was surprised not to have any bp troubles at all; after so much flat time with no postural stress whatsoever, I was not expecting to survive long. Then again, I was in the power chair, which is designed for tilty cheating. We'll see how it goes when I try out the manuel...

Here we go then, it seems - step one of infinity on the road to not being bed-trapped anymore. Wait, "step one [...] on the road"? I might as well be climbing the bridge... Yes, analogies really are fun.


In rather more farcical news, I will soon be smothered with incogitably bounteous wealth! Yea, for my response to Final Jeopardy has long been "Who/What/When/Where/Why is Falstaff?" regardless of FJ category, with an appropriately trivial (heh) wager. After all, I usually don't have a less ridiculous response, and while I'm generally anti-Shakespeare, I know from nerd bowl et al that he's a good choice because he is the character with the most lines and appearances in Ole Willy's complete oeuvre. (Really, Scholastic Bowlers, if it's a Shakespeare bonus, he had better be at least one of your answers.) This makes me look like an idiot most of the time, but less so than if I actually tried and failed every every every time, right? Well, my number [character?] has finally come up: a few days ago I randomly took the time to watch, and the category was "Shakespearean Characters"; I placed all I had on the shoulders of Sir John, before the commercial break and clue as usual... And I was right! The "answer" was "this character blah blah most blah blah blah", and my whois query was spot on.

So, Sony, since I was obviously one of the contestants and playing within the mathematical bounds of the game, I expect my check promptly. I wagered eleventy billion dollars. Pay up.