I have a benign mass in my retro peritoneal space that I've been advised to leave alone since a surgery to have it removed would be quite involved. Said mass has no side effects except that it is pushing on my bowel and making the exit of certain things much more circuitous than it would otherwise be. And that is how it came to be that I spent part of the day yesterday feeling like my insides were being knived just because I had to poo.
Is yours more embarrassing than that?
My hip hurts, because I am old.
Zardoz has hoof and mouth disease, but she doesn't seem terribly bothered.
1: Huh. If that's going to happen much, it sounds surgery-worthy.
1: My sister. Except you went presidential, so I win the embarrassing.
3: I'm usually able to stay on top of it by taking a huge dose of magnesium every day. If I get even the slightest bit constipated though, my intestines feel like they're being shredded.
I thought getting yourself off the iron-heavy supplements had solved your problems. No?
We should probably just assume that everybody here has a retroperitoneal mass unless they affirmatively speak up. I myself lack one.
6: It was working amazingly well until we went to Kansas, and then I've basically been a trainwreck for the past two weeks. We're about to go to Montana, and I'm starting to panic. What the hell is it about traveling.
The Christ Y is the original branch of the YMCA.
Try blueberries. When my intestines hurt, that takes care of things quickly.
You would not believe how much insoluble fiber I have consumed, either by fruit or Fiber One.
Two or three blueberry muffins clean me right out. Or prunes. When I was little I would eat the whole bag of prunes and not connect that to the pooping spree that followed. They're lnature's shit-making candy.
When I was little I would eat the whole bag of prunes and not connect that to the pooping spree that followed
You do your intestines a disservice, sir.
When I was little, my body worked like magic. Time to sleep? Ok! Time to use the bathroom? Ok! None of this shutting down whole systems stuff.
The intestinal portion of the my body works better now than it has at any time I can remember. I had horrible gastric pain from as a teen right up to maybe thirty or so. Regular exercise, not smoking, and not eating junk actually did make a difference.
You would not believe how much insoluble fiber I have consumed, either by fruit or Fiber One.
When I was pregnant, I would get rageful when I read advice about ending your constipation through eating better. Not caused by a bananas and white rice diet, not gonna get fixed by eating more fruit.
I don't bother with fiber anymore. In my experience it just makes things worse by making me gassy and creating a whole new type of pain in addition to the already existing pain.
I've tried everything out there and have found magnesium in pill form works the best by far. I would recommend checking with your doctor to see what dosage is safe during pregnancy and starting on it right away assuming it's safe.
A whole thread for complaining? It's like a dream! Where will I start?
2: my sister once had hoof & mouth disease, but then she's had it all, she's an exotic invalid.
Allegedly I shouldn't confuse "hand, foot & mouth disease" and "hoof and mouth disease" but whatever, I like confusing them.
A whole thread for complaining? It's like a dream! Where will I start?
This is truly the basis of our twinship. Exercise be damned.
23: totally! If you can't as a parent or sibling capitalize on that "confusion", might as well give up!
I woke up one morning about six weeks ago with my neck feeling fine unless I tried to look left, but my vertebrae cracking painfully if I looked left. I assumed I just slept wrong and that it would go away in a day or so, but it hasn't. No idea what the problem could be. I've started to compensate by shifting my whole body left when I need to look that way, instead of trying to turn my head. It makes driving difficult.
Except the cat is sitting behind me on the pillow with the front half of her sort of draped over my shoulder and it's so cute I feel slightly less kvetchy than usual.
I've tried everything out there and have found magnesium in pill form works the best by far
"I'm on the thermite diet."
I've tried everything out there and have found magnesium in pill form works the best by far. I would recommend checking with your doctor to see what dosage is safe during pregnancy and starting on it right away assuming it's safe.
I was reading up on this since you mentioned it upthread, and the first thing I'd come across talked about how it was a bowel relaxant, which seemed like the wrong direction. (I'd only googled magnesium+pregnancy.) Now I'm getting more informed results though. They throw it in prenatals, so I think it's safe, although I'm still reading.
26: Lyndon, go to a physio, who will bounce on your thoracic vertebrae, causing excruciating pain which will in 24 hours turn into a kind of freedom. Two or more of them have got stuck together.
Unless you have what my uncle had: multiple myeloma. Then the tumor will not feel better for being bounced on; you will need surgery and to wear a Frankenstein neck and skull brace, plus ongoing treatment for the underlying cancer.
Eleanor: do you mean something more elaborate than just Milk of Magnesia? That looks safe.
23: I was forbidden by my parents to call my littlest brother Little Hoof because that's totally what he had; whatevs, I just did it behind their backs and my other brothers ended up giving him worse nicknames.
I'm almost fed up enough with my lower back problem to go argue about I/P on the other thread. But not quite.
But I can complain! My always-hurting back has been more hurty than usual lately, and I did that stupid thing where I dropped a very tiny piece of furniture on my foot and broke some fucking blood vessels that were pooling in the toe joints painfully, but the pain is still there even though it should have been better by now or at least soon. Also, I'm not supposed to complain about things at home anymore. I guess maybe my poor sad foot would be an allowed complaint there.
"I have nipples, heebie-geebie, could you milk me?"
32: I specifically take this because I find MOM to be gross. I take 600 mg on most days, 800 mg when things get bad. That's a pretty high dose though and even 200 mg might be enough for you.
Also some of my complaints today are going to end up as humblebrags. Owwww my legs hurt from moving boxes up the stairs into our fabulous new apartment.
I just tore another goddamn callus on my hand from doing a kettle bell workout. This just as the torn callus on my other hand was finally healing.
38: I understood you had shirtless college students to do that for you?
I will probably have to get fitted for a custom mouth guard that costs hundreds of dollars and represents one more thing to clean every day.
If you could get one made that looked like a grill (and said something cool, like "PDBSOG") you could use it for work, too.
But the important thing is that I'm complaining, right?
I probably have to deal with Comcast in the next couple of hours.
41: sadly there was no box to check for "shirtless" so they were shirted, but anyway they took the furniture and ~30 boxes of books and stuff, but we basically hadn't packed other than that, so the rest of the day was us scrambling around, putting kitchen stuff in boxes, making lots and lots of trips up and down stairs...
||
The thing where my hacker friends are rich yuppies now is kinda weird sometimes. On of them just asked on FB:
Okay nerds, I want to put a wine cellar in my garage somewhere. I have a few locations that would work, but I don't know what the temperature and humidity swings are like. For example, would it be too warm in my utility closet. Can anyone recommend a data acquisition system that wouldn't break the bank for this?
|>
46: it probably says something fucked up about me that that seems completely unremarkable.
What worries me is that I really, really can't see the problem. Could he not leave a thermometer in the closet and check it occasionally?
I have to travel tomorrow! My thought about this, as it always is, is: Why did I agree to travel why? Now I have to PACK THINGS and pay attention to what I am doing and generally not just take advantage of my usual autopilot routine. Then when I get home we get to start packing up our entire kitchen so it can be constructed upon for a long time.
48: eh, I can see wanting something not terribly expensive that'd do the same thing automatically. Plus at some point you'll want a system that will alert you if something's gone wrong and the temperature has gone wildly out of range.
I'm not really helping my case, am I?
Just put a Nest in the wine cellar.
A reasonably sensitive kitchen thermometer with an alarm (like you'd use to alert you when a roast is done cooking) could probably do the trick. You just check the temperature a couple times and then set the alarm for a bit above that temperature and see if it goes off at some point.
Okay I wasn't asking the question. You people. Anyhow he got like four good answers (as far as I can tell) right away. I'm happy to paste them for whomever of you is installing a wine cellar (or merely extending your existence wine cellar down to a new sub-basement, or just double-checking that your wine cellar is staying within parameters acceptable for storing your Thomas Jefferson Opus One Chateau Lafitte 1491 California Bourdeaux).
I'm sure there are museum/historical building suppliers who have tools for this though the best stuff is pricy.
Boone's Farm wines can just go in a regular refrigerator.
I'd like to make my own vinegar (better quality wine or cider, could potentially control the level of acidity, also just the fun factor of fermentation), so I bought some live mother and a hippy how-to booklet from the beer making supply store on San Pablo in Berkeley. Alas, per the booklet the requisite temperature band to create vinegar in anything less than methuselahan time frames is well north of the prevailing temperatures in our drafty, fog-bound SF apartment. The only potential locations that *might* be warm enough have been taken out of the running by technical innovation run amok. The coat closet upper shelf is no longer reliably toasty as the heating duct running next to it for the upstairs neighbors isn't stuffed with hot air constantly since the ancient gravity fed heater was replaced with a fuel efficient forced air noise making monstrosity on the grounds that the asbestos insulation on the gorgonesque ducts had to go. And the really rather shockingly warm spot on the top of the refrigerator is gone as we replaced it with a floor model on sale that doesn't cause the poles to materially melt each time it cycles on. The up shot: no homemade vinegar, but I have a small barrel of boulevardier aging away to console me.
What kind of hackers don't already have a preference among Arduino/RPi/Beaglebone/Basic stamp/custom board/somethingevencooler?
I've done something bad to one hip. Pretty sure I've pulled a hamstring. Am no longer exercising, even running; should probably give up waltzing for a while. Went to the doctor after two months of increasingly cautios pilates. Doctor, annoyingly, did not immediately send me to agonizing physio, instead just sent me home with drugs. Double dose of naproxen is fine, but the muscle relaxants don't seem to be doing *anything*. And this infuriates me, because without really vigorous exercise I *can't sleep* and I was hoping at least the muscle relaxants would do that. WHINGE.
57: Put it in a runner's backpack bladder and keep it under your clothes.
I am just mildly irritated with the whole world today. shiv is taking classes and acting like having to write a 3-page paper means the end of existence as we know it, and he wants to travel right before the start of the semester. I have to prep for the semester, I point out, and so a long trip actually makes it hard for me to get stuff done. Oh, I should prep now, and work ahead, so I'm done then, which I would get right on but for the manuscript writing and the increasingly unfair amount of housekeeping and childcare I'm doing because OMG, he has a whole three pages to write for a class. The problem is when I point this out I tend to use phrases like "omg, a whole three pages" which is not helpful.
The jogging stroller has a flat tire again. The Calabat is teething. I am so damned tired.
I have a small barrel of boulevardier aging away to console me.
Mmmmm.
Would destroy the line of clothes, this is why only allowed to put a neatly folded hanky in pockets. Slim flasks are an exception, obviously, but prefer to reserve for post-fermentation beverages.
Then when I get home we get to start packing up our entire kitchen so it can be constructed upon for a long time.
God, ugh. We've been packed up in the back of the house since June 3 with no end in sight for kitchen renovation. And this Thursday we drive to Montana, and despite giving the contractor tons of advance notice, there are lots of decisions (ie, what stain color? etc) that he has not asked, and I fear will not ask before we leave, and nothing will get done over the two weeks we're gone.
Plus: a fucking 3.5 day drive to Montana.
58.1: various of the solutions involved arduinos. Somebody offered a custom library for using the DHT12 with an arduino. So, not to worry, I guess.
Acquire voluminous clothes, travel with small barrel.
God, ugh. We've been packed up in the back of the house since June 3 with no end in sight for kitchen renovation.
Christ! That's too long for no end in sight. We are doing our two weeks of traveling near the beginning of the project with lots of encouragement to them to get the loud messy demo parts done then, which I think and hope will really happen. Fingers crossed. (These are the contractors we used to get some stuff done before we moved into the house when we bought it, and they did that totally properly, which bodes well. I hope.)
I have to move out of my apartment next Friday. And then I can't move into the new apartment until the following Tuesday. The next two weeks will be extremely not fun, but at least I emerged from NYC apartment-hunting hell with a lease.
The lease is on a 2014 Accord, but it's a start.
(I'd only googled magnesium+pregnancy.) Now I'm getting more informed results though. They throw it in prenatals, so I think it's safe, although I'm still reading.
Don't people take magnesium supplements during pregnancy to stave off leg cramps?
When I was in university, I gave my father a beginner's wine-making kit for Christmas. For several years after that he constantly had three or four demijohns bubbling away in various stages of fermentation. After much experimenting, he found that the location in the house with the optimum fermentation temperature was my bedroom, and every time I came home to visit I would have to try and go to sleep to the accompaniment of yeasty-smelling bubbles of carbon dioxide going "plop plopplop PLOP PLOPplop" through the airlocks.
I've seldom regretted a Christmas present more.
My dad made wine once. It was really bad.
He's made other bad things, but among them is wine.
70 manages to top the functional toy accordion we gave our son then-aged appx 3. Just.
My darling mother-in-law is such a great person that I have to overlook the fact that she gets the kids the shittiest, noisiest, plastic crappy toys on earth. The worst was this carnival-music playing plastic elephant whose trunk sticks straight up in the air, that (in theory) blows air out the trunk, and you feed it balls through the big ears and they shoot out the trunk. In reality they barely make it out of the trunk. This shitty thing. Oh there is a lot of competition, though. Singing dog with flapping ears. Etc.
Ugh, Teapot (and Scomber mix!) just had hand foot and mouth too, a case so mild it was (post-fever) barely detectible AND YET still enough for him to be banned from daycare for a week, which of course was a week with significant deadlines for both of us. I learned midweek that the diversity office at our university had a program for junior faculty in which they provide emergency backup daycare (and a pony) in your home for $4/hour, yea even for sick children, which sounded life-changing, but apparently they've cancelled that in favor of a program in which they subsidize access to a classified service to which one can post desperate pleas for full-price sitters. (I am reminded of the time our credit card switched from 5% cash back to 2% cash back "in response to customer requests".)
Plus a paper got rejected for ridiculous pettifogging reasons. So now that's 4 manuscripts to submit or resubmit in the next six weeks. No problem!
I learned midweek that the diversity office at our university had a program for junior faculty in which they provide emergency backup daycare (and a pony) in your home for $4/hour, yea even for sick children, which sounded life-changing, but apparently they've cancelled that in favor of a program in which they subsidize access to a classified service to which one can post desperate pleas for full-price sitters.
URGH
We were able to take Zardoz back today even though she still has the blistery things; their rule is pretty much "no fever or puking for 24 hours" regardless of the disease, which is nice. The fever part we... missed, I guess? We were on vacation towards the end of last week, when it presumably would have been happening. She was certainly not sick enough to not want to run into the ocean &c.
75: My nieces have one of those. It works perfectly so far as the ball-shooting. The music is horrible.
The barely sick daycare bans drive me nuts. Obviously the kid caught it from there in the first place.
Jane had HFM and strep simultaneously when she was about 2.5. That was a good time.
Over here I am having a major attack of I HATE YOU, STUPID BOOK MANUSCRIPT WHY ARE YOU (AM I) SO SLOW AND STUPID NO ONE WILL EVER WANT YOU. But I soldier on. It's preferable, at least, to getting all my shit in order for tomorrow's travel. But best of all is whining here!
I guess Mattel or whoever does its research, but it surprises me that marketers seem to unanimously agree that annoying electronic tunes are precisely what purchasers of products for kids under 3 desire more than anything. Why does my fucking baby swing need to play an incredibly bad electro version of Fur Elise? And that's not even on the list of worst 1000 baby music toys. Why does every fucking thing have to play music?
I've often thought there would be a market opportunity in "sick cares," higher-priced day cares for your sick kid. I guess they might make the kid more sick but I'm going to leave that problem to my technical staff to solve. We can combine it with the trained goat wet nurse program for total day care dominance.
My Dad and I made root beer once but failed to use proper pressure bottles. One of them exploded in the middle of the night and set off a cascade failure that took out all the bottles and left the kitchen floor a sticky mess of broken glass and half-brewed root beer. I, being about 7 or 8, thought it was the most awesome thing ever. My Mom made my Dad clean it up without help from me due to all the broken glass.
Yep, from the kid who went through the actually-contagious feverish period in stealth mode and then erupted into blisters. Argh.
82.1 - There are two separate groups of people who buy toys for children, right? Some people are buying them for their own children, and others are buying them for other people's children. Maybe the noisy ones are supposed to be for the second group.
57: I want to do this, too! The only reliably warm spot is where our boiler is .... which also happens to house our downstairs toilet. I always worry about fermenting things in a place where bad bacteria might abound, but it's the best place! The best place!
I feel really bad even beginning to complain about this around parents, but man, am I not getting enough sleep. I was beginning to feel like I was adapting to > 6 hours/night but I realised today that, no, I'm just getting stupider. I can, however, perform routine housekeeping chores. And sift through giant piles of mail and come up with three months of pay stubs, bank statements, etc in fewer than 10 minutes. I just can't actually finish sentences or remember what I intended to do when I entered a room.
49 I have to travel tomorrow!
Me too! Boo, travel. It's to an awful suburban place I don't like going and I regularly turn down their invitations but I decided I should go this time so they don't hate me.
89 kinda reads like it means I'm going to visit my parents, except that that's what I'm doing right now.
I've often thought there would be a market opportunity in "sick cares," higher-priced day cares for your sick kid.
These exist. I know there's one in Austin, at least. It charges an arm and a leg, unsurprisingly.
I'm looking to move too in August. A little closer to work and a bigger apartment with a better kitchen. The place has one major drawback: its address is on Jefferson Davis Highway. I mentioned this to the leasing agent and she thought I was complaining about the length of the street's name. Hell no! (Also, not looking forward to packing, deäccessioning, and moving. Why do I have all of these books?)
My knees had improved so much, and my pain was so infrequent, that about three weeks ago I tried to do the first week of Couch to 5k on a treadmill in shoes I hadn't fucked up yet, though I let myself run through one of the walk segments. It felt like reuniting with an old lover -- holy shit! this! nothing is like this! -- but it became evident that my knees actually weren't going to tolerate it. Ok, that was a big request of the universe. Then maybe two weeks ago I started bike commuting to work and that was like returning with an old friend. Trusty steed, wind in my hair, feeling of agency and competence. But after about five times it became clear that that was hurting my knees too. I'm lucky I have at least yoga I can do without pain (and yoga seems to improve matters), but yoga is a pain in the ass to get to. I just want to be able to take off somewhere and move through space at greater than walking speed. Meanwhile, my neck/back/shoulder, while better since I got expensive furniture, have never actually gotten all the way well, and most of the time I'm in some pain. I'm supposed to go to physical therapy but I work a 60 hour week and just don't feel like I have time. Someone recommended acupuncture to me and said to go to the ones who gave you electricity -- that he found it rapidly pain relieving for his issues. I have a vague subjective feeling like that's the *kind* of thing that might help -- especially my neck/back stuff. It seems like there are some muscle fibers permanently contracting back there that might be shocked into submission.
The worst was this carnival-music playing plastic elephant whose trunk sticks straight up in the air, that (in theory) blows air out the trunk, and you feed it balls through the
Well at least the next word was "ears."
The awful toys subthread is making me laugh.
I'm supposed to go to physical therapy but I work a 60 hour week and just don't feel like I have time.
You don't have time, but sometimes physical therapy actually fixes it and that's worth *so much*.
I remember one semester I felt really, dreadfully overcommitted and overworked (this was pre-kids) and so I charted my hours exactly so that I could later have documentation if I ever need to sob officially.
It turned out I was clocking in about 50 solid hours of work each week, maybe a couple extra on the weekend. Nothing like the hell I expected I'd clock in. So I am a fragile flower with newfound respect for people who are actually working 60+ hours. I don't actually understand how that transpires without a great deal of fuss. Some people work 80+ hours! I can't compute.
In truth, it may be less in practice, but that's because I shortchange my job. What I should say is, I have 60 hours worth of firm commitments.
97: I somehow doubt that most of the people who claim to work 80-hour weeks actually work 80 hours.
Probably not, but even figuring out how to log 80 hours at a job unproductively is crazy.
99: yeah, I generally assume that people who say that are either full of shit, or have a lot of unproductive (i.e. meeting/conference call) time.
Yeah, I suspect most of the 60- or 80-hour work people are exaggerating, including time they spend in their office on Facebook or blogs or whatnot, or both.
I spent at least a year really clocking sixty to eighty hour weeks (hourly employee, did not feel like I worked less after I got hired on salary) but it made me pretty sick and I was only in my twenties. And some hours every day were `dumb' hours babysitting some build or checkin or what-all.
All of our stuff has been boxed and in storage for three months and will stay that way for another four months. This not a good way to live. Truly, I could write a (very likely best-selling) primer on how not to relocate. On the other hand, but for the humidity* of this wretched coast, things are going pretty well, so I probably shouldn't complain. For example, my wonderful tween just came back from socialist utopia summer camp, and it's amazingly great to see him and he seems to have had a wonderful time and now deprecates how bourgeois we are. Winning!
* Which actually broke last week, thank goodness.
105: and you made fun of me when I brought up the humidity.
I made fun of you for other things, I'm sure, but not for that. I may have said that people from here insisted that it's not that humid, which, by the way, they continue to insist, claiming that the hot and humid weather we had for most of June was aberrant. And maybe it was, hater!
Other than all the humidity, it's a dry heat.
Anyway, having enough water to support both human habitation and agriculture without stealing it from other states tends to come with some humidity.
Truly, I could write a (very likely best-selling) primer on how not to relocate.
For example, you spent not nearly enough time in a (this) third place altogether!
110: no lie, I have LOVED all the rain. As much as I miss California, as much as I will always miss California, life there felt somewhat fragile the past few years, and especially this past year. A couple of El Nino winters and all's well(ish), but man, it was scary as hell when it didn't rain more than a couple of times in December, January, February, and March.
111: truth. But we'll be back later in the summer. Alas, I fear you may be in CA when we're in OH.
You've also been doing a terrible job of visiting Massachusetts.
Alas, I fear you may be in CA when we're in OH.
There's not that much summer left when you subtract the part when we're in CA, so probably!
I made black beans for dinner, which involved cutting up a jalapeño. And at some point I must have touched the inside part of my nostril, which is now ON FIRE OHMYGOD.
I really need to make it to Cleveland, though I have no real excuse beyond seeing unfogged people. We have a Dayton trip in a few weeks and we might as well keep on the greatest-hits-of-a-state-that's-not-ours tour.
Speaking of Ohio, what happened to IDP?
114: we're coming to Boston/the Cape for a few days in August, actually. And my brother-in-law's family will be there, so I'll be looking for any excuse to be somewhere that isn't where they are.
Trial days are pretty long, and a two week trial means a whole lot of hours. I've not had to work like that on a sustained basis, but a couple long weeks here and there take a pretty big toll.
115: where in CA are you going to be? Somewhere that we also are?
I have been working too much, and generally feel tired, old, and stressed, but it's definitely less than 60 hours a week.
There were definitely weeks on the rez that my wife (and her colleagues) worked 60-70 hours, but then they'd get three or four days off. It's a crazy amount of work (squeezed into a five days). I don't think that's all that unusual among doctors though.
115: where in CA are you going to be? Somewhere that we also are?
Sadly, no -- the Bay Area. AND the conference that was going to bring me to you turns out to have scheduled itself in a remarkably teaching-hostile way (plus proximity to Thanksgiving and this other thing I am doing in Germany) so that may be scuppered too. I'm bitter!
various of the solutions involved arduinos. Somebody offered a custom library for using the DHT12 with an arduino. So, not to worry, I guess.
I wonder how many of those solutions are reinvented wheels. Not to deny hacker yuppies hacker yuppie fun or anything.
Probably not, but even figuring out how to log 80 hours at a job unproductively is crazy."
I don't know about 80 hours, but based on my brief experience in journalism I can see how people can do 60+ and actually work most of that time. The full-timers were at the office 8:30-6:30 with maybe 20-30 minutes for lunch, but often lunch meant grabbing something to go and bringing it back. Throw in work from home occasionally monitoring sources and developments (this was an online operation) and the occasional weekend day and you could hit 50-60 hours easily. I was there during the 2008 primaries, so it was unusually busy, granted, but that added late nights and weekends all spring.
Oh. I see now that I posted 126 without a name. I blame my bad tethered connection. Or all day air travel. Given that I'm supposed to be at a conference tomorrow and the time zones aren't in my favor, I should go to sleep.
It's okay. It was pretty obvious that 126 was you anyway.
I work 49 hours/week about once a month, and that's in retail. It's definitely pretty easy to do (in terms of, oh, hey, hours!) but I really don't like it.
Speaking of Ohio, what happened to IDP?
I'm around, just not commenting much. I don't have much to add--I know, I know, when did that stop me? I guess the answer is now.
There's also that I'm following on my phone, which makes commenting a burden. A smart phone is a great blessing if you're stuck at a workstation and need many hours of facetime, but commenting is difficult enough to be inhibiting.
And I'd really need the bridgeplate rdf to follow comments as I'd like, and my OS doesn't format it correctly, even though it's Mozilla. I haven't rooted my phone because it's pretty much ok, so I'm stuck with it for now. Feeds in general could be better, although Kevin Drum, for instance uses simple-enough formating that I can read around it. I coded content for years in sml at my long-time editorial job so it's second nature.
