the_rck

I went for a 30 minute walk Thursday evening. That was the third time I'd taken the walker out for a real walk. I discovered a bit of pavement along one of the better walking routes that the walker can't handle; it's asphalt rather than concrete and is, I believe, owned by the city. The wheels of my walker got jarringly stuck more than once (and I dropped my phone, cracking the screen protector); I came back on the other side of the street which has normal sidewalk, and that was fine.

There were a lot more mosquitoes out than I really expected. I should have considered the fact that I was walking by a wooded area and prepared with insect repellant.

The phone thing is frustrating since part of going for walks is being able to play Ingress.

Scott has looked into replacing the wheels of the walker. He says it's prohibitively expensive. If we hadn't had to shop online, that might have come up as a feature, but, as it was, this was the only walker with a seat that I found that was up to my weight. (Also, Scott saw it on my wishlist and didn't realize that I meant it as a 'save for later' and had put it on the wrong list. He bought it for my birthday).

The first time I took the walker out was with evalerie in mid-July. We walked over to the park by the school and sat outside and talked. I sat on my walker. She sat on the ground because none of the benches have shade.

She gave me some peaches from her tree. I ended up cooking them in a skillet with margarine honey. They were excellent that way. I've been cooking Imperfect Foods peaches and nectarines that way since. Sadly, they don't reheat well. I mean, they're fine reheated, but they're actually amazing when they're first heated.

A couple of days later, I walked more than that distance after an appointment so that I could meet Scott in an area with less traffic than the main entrance to the hospital.

The walk with evalerie required rest stops for me to catch my breath which I think is entirely down to me having talked while we walked because I had no such trouble on the walk two days later even though I moved faster and went farther.

Wearing my bright pink thumb splints helps a lot with the vibration pain from the walker. I have to keep them tighter than is comfortable, but they help enough to outweigh that.

( Discussion of different thumb splints, including links )

Cordelia has become more comfortable with her job. She doesn't love it by any means, but it's no longer new and scary. She's added a shift so that she's working five evenings a week across two locations, but she no longer shares a shift with her friend.

I've hired that friend to come over to do some house cleaning. I need the help, and she lives within walking distance. It's not easy walking distance by any means, but I could probably manage the walk (though part of the shortest route is dirt road, and I'd be unenthusiastic about moving the walker over it). I told her that I'd match her hourly rate at Jimmy John's. Hopefully, I can go better than $11.25.

She came over Wednesday, and she and Cordelia did some basic cleaning. We need to replace our mop because, although they mopped in the kitchen, the condition of the floor doesn't reflect that work.

I've written twelve fics for We Die Like Fen so far, and I'd like to do more. The archive won't reveal for a while, and it'll be even longer before author reveals, so I can't really talk about what I've written except to note that I picked up a pinch hit for myself (assignments and pinch hits are kind of random. Ish).

I've got 500 words toward my Crossworks assignment, but that's only the first scene. I think the story will run considerably longer than the minimum word count. I've been doing canon review in order to get the characters right.

My hands are giving me a lot of trouble today. They’ve been hurting since last night when we went to Barnes & Noble. I carried several books for about twenty minutes, and that hurt more and more as I went on. I wore the day splints that the orthopedics people gave me from when we first got home until some time in the middle of the night. The day splints work much better at night than the ones intended for night wearing. My hands don’t go numb when wearing them to sleep.

I’m wearing the night splints now. They decrease the thumb pain a lot, but they make a lot of things very difficult or even impossible. Typing while wearing them makes my shoulders hurt. Actually, just sitting and doing nothing while wearing them makes my arms and shoulders ache. I think my best course is to wear them just until the pain stops and then either to do without splints or to switch to the OTC versions I had been using (assuming I can find them).

I really can’t wear the day splints during the day because there’s a strap that wraps around my hand and goes between my thumb and fingers to fasten over the palm of my hand. When I pull that tight enough to get support, the bit between my thumb and fingers is wide enough that it digs in on both sides. It doesn’t matter so much if I’m not going to use my hands, but it’s a big problem otherwise.

Scott found the new prescription cards last night, so I don’t need to call to ask for new ones.

I thought that I had gotten through the book store trip without aggravating the tendinitis in my Achille’s tendon, but it started to hurt over night. Well, it didn’t hurt until I got up and walked to the bathroom. I’m not sure why my calf muscle should tighten up while I’m sleeping, but it definitely seems to. Fortunately, at this point, I’m not hurting there as long as I don’t press on where the tendon attaches to the bone in my heel.