tables

Hey hey! On with some poorly-written summarization.

As long as it's been, I still don't have much to relay about therapy. Same old stuff: rolling around on the mat for shoulder and core strengthening, sliding back and forth for transfer practice, and the occasional day of biofeedback, plus bike/Motomed/weights on my own time. What excitement, eh?

Not sure if I already told you, so here's the high-speed primer on this "biofeedback" stuff. For the etymologists out there, it is exactly what it is called, so feel free to imagine and move on. For the rest of us, biofeedback involves wiring pairs of electrodes to muscle groups, EMG-style, and watching a graph on a computer screen while I try to activate the monitored muscles. The stronger the activation, the higher the measurement on the graph. This activity has a zillion applications, but in the neuro world, it's mostly used to see how well, if at all, a person can control certain muscles when the muscles have little to no motor function. Typically, that's anything waist-down for a para, arms-down for a quad. The results show what someone must do to get the strongest activation, where in the range of motion a muscle group is the strongest, etc. It only becomes more technical beyond that, so we're done.

NOTE: wiring up to biofeedback is not the same as wiring into the e-stim bike! Where the bike sends electricity through the electrodes to my muscles, biofeedback is the opposite, measuring the strength of the electrical impulses I'm sending from my muscles to the machine. That is, the bike zaps me, while I zap the biofeedback hardware (um, essentially).

Elsewhere...

SofC: an a is gone! The madre is ok. It's hot, even for me. Blood pressure, where are you? I'm ashamed to admit that "should've went" spilled from my oral cavity a few weeks ago. I'm AT&T's iTool for two more years, but mwa ha ha ha, I grandpa'd my way into keeping unlimited* data. Should I become a twit? Don't forget, E5, A5, E3, A3, E1, A2, E0... In a plastic cup. End!

Penultimately, last week we went to an Eric Clapton concert! Yay. The opener was Roger Daltry of The Who. I'm not a big fan, but I still thought his band did fairly well. Roger looked an amusing bit like Dr. Lima, the OMA neurosurgeon in Portugal.

Sorry, btw, no photos - I forgot my camera, and though we were close enough to see everything, it was sufficiently far and dark to render phonecam pictures unintelligible.

Clapton was excellent. He's showing his years, but not through his fingers. Like Mr. Daltry's set, I only recognized about half of Eric's stuff, but that doesn't matter. His whole band was bluestastic, and Mr. C can solo with the best. I got to experience the acoustic rendition of "Layla", so my night was complete. Who cares if I was way too young to be there.

Finally, the Mensa national/sort-of-worldwide Annual Gathering was here in Detroit last week! Err, it was technically at the Hyatt in Dearborn, but sorry folks, that's still Detroit. BTW, "Hyatt" is by far my favorite American hotel to mispronounce. Anyway, I'm not in Mensa [yet], but the padre and I were able to attend freely as guests of the Steph. It was quite awesome, though there's at least one knowitall at every session (guess what, smartypantses - if you're at a lecture with a room full of Mensans, you're very likely not the brightest one within earshot). Fear not, for 'twas not all lectures; I spent a fair amount of my time going to socialize-and-enjoy sessions, sneaking into GenX stuff to hang out with Steph + other people slightly older than I, and trying out crazy local craft barley pop at Hospitality. Not sure what I'm allowed to mention beyond that. The top 2% can have fun too!

Enough nonsense for now. Fusée!