PAgent’s Progress

Two pieces of PAgent-related news to report. First, I got piece of comment spam that was flagged for moderation. I deleted it. Then when looking through my visitor stats, I see a referring page that I’m not familiar with. When I check it out, it’s a page titled “WordPress blogs I have spammed” with a running list of URL’s of WP-driven blogsites that have been hit with that same spam comment. This succeeded in pissing me off enough that I took the time to fire off a nastygram to the ‘abuse’ contact address for the ISP’s I could find in the trail. The next day, when I tried to find that site again, it was 404′d, and I had a reply email that said “Sorry, I was testing something out. It won’t happen again”

Yet again, I wish I had a button that I could press that would slag a spammer’s server remotely.

Then this morning I got a very kind email letting me know that someone had appropriated one of my Flickr photos for their eBay listings. I particularly like how he put the name of his company on the back of the van in the picture. All my Flickr photos have a Creative Commons license that requires attribution, and does not permit commercial use. So I found the appropriate chain of communication at eBay, and am in the process of filing a Notice of Claimed Infringement.

My first notice of copyright infringement. I feel like a real adult now.

Bonus Question: What hurts worse than ASTYM therapy on an injured muscle?

Answer: ASTYM therapy on an injured muscle when it’s bruised all to hell from the last ASTYM session.

This is so wrong. And so funny.

Thanks, Mick!

This is a busy, busy week. I had to spend a couple of hours taking a glucose tolerance test on Tuesday. I can’t wait to see the results, since there is still some disagreement about whether I am ‘pre-diabetic’ or ‘diabetic’. Frankly, the point is moot. It has very little bearing on how I should be eating and treating my body. Still, more information is usually better than less information.

A glucose tolerance test involves drinking 75 grams of dextrose on an empty stomach, and seeing how your blood glucose levels change over the next two hours. If your blood sugar zooms too high, congratulations, you are diabetic. The dextrose comes in the form of a sickeningly sweet orange-flavored beverage. Some people complain that trying to drink that stuff down almost makes them throw up all by itself. Frankly, it wasn’t that bad. I see people who drink Big Gulps of Coke for breakfast, sort of doing the home version of a glucose tolerance test every day. It’s not that different.

The nastiest part was getting blood drawn three times – an initial sample, a sample one hour after taking the dextrose, and a sample two hours after taking the dextrose. Let’s just say it didn’t go smoothly. I ended up getting stuck four times to get three samples, including once in my wrist (my wrist?) and once in my left bicep (my bicep??). Remarkably, I have very little bruising from any of those sites, except for my left bicep, which looks like it was run over by a streetcar.

Then yesterday I had my first physical therapy session. The physical therapist was very nice, a slim and soft-spoken gentleman. After asking questions, poking, prodding, twisting, and watching me walk, he opined that my pain was not so much due to the arthritis in my knee, as an overworking hamstring on the inside of my right knee. It seems I have an overdeveloped muscle on the right side of my quadricep on that leg, which is pulling the patella over, and the muscles on the left side have been overworking trying to compensate. This probably has something to do with the excess wear they see in the joint.

So the first thing he decided to do was start a therapy called ASTYM, which stands for Agonizingly Severe Tearing of Your Muscles. I kid. It really stands for Augmented Soft Tissue Mobilization. But it is kind of painful. It involves putting a healthy coat of cocoa butter on the skin, and then applying pressure to the underlying muscles by scraping them with acrylic blades. Yes, blades. The resulting microtrauma to the muscle fibers helps remove adhesions and heal old injuries and stresses. It does hurt, though. I also got some exercises to do to help correct the imbalance in my musculature. It may be my imagination, but after the ASTYM treatment, and the stretching, my knee does feel a bit better. I would be thrilled if this could knock the pain back to a more manageable level. I just have to remember to DO the exercises.

Mea Culpa, I honestly intended to draft an entertaining and enlightening post sometime this weekend, but it just didn’t happen. We had too much going on.

First: The ongoing bathroom renovation trauma. This project has been hanging over our heads for months now. We would really like to get it moving, but before we can actually BEGIN the project, there is a Byzantine series of decisions that must be made. If these decisions were to be plotted out, for example as a flowchart, the resulting mess would resemble a map of the Los Angeles freeway system.

What pattern of vinyl would we like on the floor? From which manufacturer? This question alone has sucked up enough of my life that I’d be willing to go with bare concrete. Hey, put a drain in the center of the floor and cleanup is a breeze.

Then, assuming we pick out a floor we like, what bathroom vanity do we want? Which manufacturer should we use? What color should they be? What kind of sink, round or oval? One piece, or drop-in? Most damning of all, what kind of countertop?

Because you see there’s solid surface, and engineered stone, and granite. Corian, Zenith, Silestone, etc. etc. Except as soon as we make a decision on a floor color and pattern, we discover that there are ZERO colors and patterns of countertop that will go with that flooring.

As an aside, why is everyone making 256 versions of camel-puke tan? What’s wrong with BLUE?

Then there’s the bathtub and shower. Don’t get me started on tub surrounds. The horror…the horror….

All of which serves as a partial explanation as to why Saturday was spent doing the home improvement tango, going four steps forward, then three steps back, while our children grew progressively more and more cranky.

Sunday was busy for a different reason altogether. We are going camping next weekend. We haven’t done a lot of family camping in the past, simply because the we were reasonably sure if we took our children out into the wilderness, at least one of them would not return. But they’re much older and more responsible now. And 3/4 of us are now medicated. It actually might be fun to go camping. So, we are going to try to “get away from it all” next weekend.

When I was a young man, I went backpacking. Backpacking meant that you carry everything on your back, you pare down and simplify. You prepackaged your meals. Some folks drilled holes in the handles of their toothbrushes. Weight is everything, and you have to be ruthlessly organized to make sure you have everything you absolutely need, and not one ounce more. But you got really close to nature. You had the freedom to move far beyond the artificial support system of civilization, and really relax.

Car camping, on the other hand, means you can bring everything with you, up to and including the kitchen sink. You can be comfortable, and not worry about having enough to eat, or being comfortable on a skinny little sleeping pad. However you aren’t going to get any closer to nature than the end of the asphalt loop in the campground. Well, life is about little trade-offs. With two kids and our various aches and pains, it’s time to embrace car-camping. Small steps, right?

You may not be aware that you can actually reserve a yurt at many Oregon state parks. With furniture, heat, and electric lights, a yurt is perhaps the most civilized form of camping available, outside of a monster RV. I can honestly say that I’ve been in hotels that are less accommodating than the yurts at the state parks. So this weekend, we will be staying in a yurt.

Nonetheless, there are preparations which have to be made. I needed a sleeping bag. I haven’t had one (or needed one) for decades. My first thought was to go to REI, which proved to be an exercise in humiliation. They simply don’t make mummy bags that fit fat men, at least, not fat men with tendencies toward claustrophobia. If you’re very tall, you have a couple of options, but if you are very wide, you are simply out of luck. This meant I had to purchase a large, heavy, cotton bag, which in this climate makes me absolutely cringe. It will never go on a backpacking trip, but I tried to remember that I was going to be sleeping in a yurt, so I should just treat it like a rustic slumber party.

Food prep should be similarly luxurious. We had picked up a two-burner Coleman camp stove for a Girl Scout function, then never used it. I fired it up yesterday and it worked beautifully. While I was shopping for a sleeping bag, I picked up a couple of camp chairs, a camp hatchet, and a cast iron Dutch Oven. I’m looking forward to cooking something other than hot dogs over an open fire, and you can do some interesting things with a Dutch Oven.

And that’s pretty much how the weekend went. We made some small steps toward getting the bathroom done, but some pretty major steps toward being ready for our trip. And in-between I made a life-altering batch of chili macaroni (it was delicious), and we watched Mr. and Mrs. Smith (it was much better than I expected).

I love Bill Plympton’s twisted animation sensibilities. His characteristic hand-drawn style immediately informed you that you were watching a Plympton short — as if the surreal and hilarious violence didn’t give it away. If you ever get a chance, watch his animated feature I Married A Strange Person (1997). In the meantime, here are three of his best shorts:

25 Ways To Quit Smoking – 1989

How To Kiss – 1989

Push Comes To Shove – 1991

Bill Plympton is a native of Portland, Oregon!

If you don’t have one yet, run out and buy yourself a Nintendo Wii.

Not for yourself.

For the children.

via Kotaku.