Of Moose And Men
The Best Laid Plans Of Both Often Go Astray

I feel very, very sorry for our IT folks today. Our network connections (email, internal drives) went down sometime right after lunch, and stayed down all day (and, from the lack of email on my work crackberry tonight, looks to still be down). Not fun, and I’m sure they were sweating buckets trying to get it all back up.

In the meantime, with no access to pretty much anything I need to actually write things, I worked for a brief while on a presentation I have to give next Friday (before that program seized up and refused to play nice, thankfully after I’d saved my work to the desktop), and then I ended up leaving early along with most of my coworkers since there wasn’t a hell of a lot we could do. I played a lot of Bioshock once I got home (needed to just kill time & monters), and enjoyed the fruits of the slow-cooker’s labor all day, a garlicky chicken stew, which needed a touch more salt and a lot more garlic; eight cloves was not enough to make something ‘garlicky’ in my book.

Cleaned up the slow-cooker and prepped veggies for another batch of stew tomorrow, this time a peanut sauce, after I’d bagged up today’s stew for the freezer. Saved one serving for tomorrow’s lunch.

Finally updated WordPress this evening, both on the main CountFour home page and on the /legalmoose site. Got tired of the constant “a new version is out, update today!” warnings that have been there for a while now. Also popped in some more plug-ins, to make viewing the site friendlier for mobile browsers (thank you for that example, Brian), and to be truly obnoxious and make Twitter go off when I post new things here as well (thank you Brian and Fredo). Put in a new cross-poster for LJ which seems to work better than it had before (since my preferred one stopped working a couple of iterations of WP ago), even if the text box is a bit much. I suspect that’s editable, but I’m not going to worry about it tonight.

And with that, I’m off to bed.

Caught up on bills today, and worked through a backlog of mail and magazines (mostly by just tossing the unread magazines since it was highly unlikely I’d actually read the back issues now). Cleaned some in the process, clearing off the couch and the dining table for the first time in a while. Unboxed the new oven and microwave, in hopes the maintenance folks will be able to get to them this week or next (and in any case they look better without the huge boxes around them now), provided we can connect on the phone soon. And actually did some work (for the BGA) today as well.

Otherwise the day was pretty blue for me. Today was the Nation’s Triathlon, which was to be my last race this season, and what I hoped would be the capping race to what started out as a pretty good darned season. As it was, I couldn’t even bring myself to go down to watch it, or do any of the club events surrounding the event. The fact that I can’t run has weighed very heavily on me this year, and it’s not been pretty, nor very easy to deal with. I miss it, a lot. I didn’t realize how much it affected my entire being to be able to get out and just run. The fact that the lack of running has been the fault of fairly consistent pain in my right foot (which just brings the fact to the fore on a daily basis) contributes to this, I’m sure.

The foot’s actually been more sore, which the aftercare guidelines says is normal for the first couple of weeks after the zapping. Hopefully it’ll get better as I get closer to the follow-up appointment on the 3rd, I’m really getting tired of having pain when I get up in the morning and take that first step (or if I end up walking a bit too much during the day, which is pretty much every day for me).

Anyway, what will happen will happen, and I’ll keep working with the podiatrist until the foot’s back to normal, but in the meantime I’m not much motivated for tri stuff.

Oh, and I finally withdrew formally from the IM race in November, too, so I can get the minimal refund they’ll send for it. Much sadness there, I really wanted to finally do one of those and I thought this was going to be the year for it. Guess not.

Well, the foot is doing better. The ankle finally went down, and stopped being sore. The bottom of the foot hasn’t really been sore, though I had a twinge this morning after not wearing the night brace last night.

Work has started to pick up now that we’re fully into the last month of the federal fiscal year. It’s going to be nuts until early to mid-October, but that’s the norm for me. We’re doing drafting assistance like crazy for the CR that’s coming up in October. Still not sure how long the thing will be for, probably at least 3 months, but it depends on when and if Congress wants to come back for a lame duck session to pass real appropriation bills or just fund the gubmint through to after the inauguration. This is no way to run a government, but it’s what we’ve got.

I’ll write up the last bit of the trip to SF this weekend, promise, but first a foot update.

Got myself zapped yesterday afternoon at my podiatrist’s office. The worst part of the whole procedure was getting anesthetized by the doc, since he had to jab a needle in either side of my ankle to get to the nerves there and numb the bottom of the foot completely without affecting the rest of the foot. The inside took a while, where he found the outside right as he stuck the needle in. Regardless, I was pretty sore today from the jabbing around inside. I was especially annoyed at the “this should last for about an hour” when I was still mostly numb at midnight when I finally went to bed. Was back to normal this morning, aside from being very, very sore around the ankle.

The zapping itself was easy, I just sat there (and knitted) while the machine send sound waves into my foot, and the technician made sure my foot stayed in place for it. Not exactly exciting, which was fine by me.

Was slow going this morning, and I actually ended up leaving work a bit early today as well. Got a little nauseous, and had a nasty headache. Couldn’t take anything for the headache because the aftercare says no anti-inflammatories for the next month if they can be avoided. Part of the ESWT is to induce inflammation so the body will heal the foot, so negating that would be bad. So I left early and came home to do laundry. Well, came home after I got a replacement iPhone for the one I dropped while in SF and cracked the screen on. But that’s for the next update.