hudebnik | Entries tagged with health

160.3 lbs.
breakfast: grapefruit, yogurt, cereal, soy milk
lunch: chicken bacon avocado sandwich, lemonade
dinner: chicken tortelloni, pesto
dessert: chocolate bon-bons

In bed about midnight; D. followed half an hour later. Up once or twice to cough and pee; up 7:00 to alarm (for an 8:00 doctor's appointment).

Not a lot of coughing overnight, but I have a scratchy throat this morning.

shalmestere and I came home from two weeks in Europe with colds. We didn't pick them up on the plane: we both woke with scratchy throats last Tuesday morning, the day we were supposed to fly home. Anyway, after various misadventures we got on a plane Wednesday morning, we wore masks on the plane to somewhat-reduce the chance of infecting anybody else, and got home Wednesday afternoon, still with scratchy throats but nothing worse. (I had an intermittent, unproductive cough, as I have been since a bout of COVID in July, but that's become "the new normal".)

shalmestere spent most of Wednesday afternoon and much of Thursday and Friday in bed -- partly jet-lag, partly having a familiar, comfortable bed for the first time in two weeks, and partly cold symptoms, which always hit her hard. I still had only a scratchy throat, so I went about the usual post-vacation chores: triaging two weeks of accumulated mail, re-stocking the refrigerator, picking overripe raspberries off the vines in the back yard, paying bills, etc.

Somewhere in the two weeks' worth of work e-mail was an automated complaint from ${EMPLOYER} that I had been physically in the office less than two days a week in Q3, "well below" the three-day-a-week standard they'd issued last year, and they were informing my manager and my grand-manager. Nevertheless, I worked from home Thursday and Friday because I figured I was probably contagious, being only two or three days out from first symptoms.

Saturday I went to a "No Kings" march and rally, on my own because

shalmestere was still too sick. Marching and standing outside in the sun for hours are tiring at the best of times, but I had picked the march/rally two miles away rather than the one in Manhattan, so I got home quickly, drank a lot of water, and collapsed. That evening I noticed that I was getting physically tired more quickly than usual, and coughing and sneezing more often than normal, and having some general all-over body aches. (And

shalmestere was still alternating between the bed and the living room couch, getting tired out by the slightest exertion.)

Sunday it hit. Walking the dogs around the block tired me out. Re-heating lunch or dinner tired me out. General body aches, nasal congestion, headaches, frequent coughing-and-sneezing spasms, all that. Sunday night both of us woke up every few hours to cough, blow our noses, pee, and drink, usually not at the same time.

I officially called in sick to work Monday, thinking I might get some programming work done in between naps and reheated meals, but not at all confident of that, and not wanting to further exacerbate the hybrid-work-policy issue by working-from-home too much. Again, general body aches, nasal congestion, headaches, getting tired quickly, frequent uncontrollable coughing-and-sneezing. Monday night was the same as Sunday night: we both woke up every few hours to cough, blow our noses, pee, and drink. And I feel about as good this morning as yesterday morning.

To add to the angst, between the 4:30 and 6:30 wake-ups last night, I had a nightmare.

I was walking down the street in a fancy, rich neighborhood and saw a small black boy and a white woman walking together. I asked the boy "And where is your house?", and he proudly stopped in front of one of the grander houses and replied "Right here!" There was a small slab of rock in the front yard, under which were a couple of plants he'd been taking care of, and I helped him plant another one. And I walked on, preparing a standard-issue lecture in my mind about racial prejudice.

But the next block was our own block, and our house wasn't there. I recognized all the houses on the street, but there wasn't even a gap between our neighbor on the left and our neighbor on the right. It seemed that other houses were missing too, although I wasn't sure which ones, because again there was no gap where they should have been. This was now seriously scary.

Conveniently, Pennsic was a short walk away, so I went there, to check on our encampment, and our pavilion wasn't where it should be. I saw Cariadoc in the marketplace and asked him about the phenomenon: he was aware of it, and had identified several people we both knew who seemed to have vanished not only from the site but from the memories of other people we knew. He said he was "going into town" and asked whether there was anything he could pick up for me, and I replied "Well, all our food is in our pavilion, which is missing."

Before I could elaborate on that, I thought I saw (in another market stall in the distance)

shalmestere, in modern clothes, so I ran to catch up with her. But it wasn't her, and I realized there was a substantial chance that she too had vanished completely.

I saw Thor (from the Marvel movies -- I guess we're in the middle of "the snap") standing and talking to his girlfriend on a cellphone. She too was worried about all the missing people and houses, and was calling him "Chris", so I guess this is an out-of-universe girlfriend. But at least they could find one another.

Set alarm for 5 AM Tuesday, in an attempt to get a head-start on jet-lag, but woke up at 3 AM to go to the bathroom, and was unable to get back to sleep. So I checked in for our flight, scanned in our passports, etc. then did some gainful-employment stuff.

Took three hours out of the middle of the day to drive the dogs to the dog-sitter's home near Newark, eat lunch, and drive home. More gainful-employment stuff. Packed bags.

After dinner, car service took us to JFK to fly to Paris. Flight left on time (a few hours ahead of the government shutdown).

Some time in the middle of the night, somewhere over the Atlantic, I woke up feeling extremely ill, and drenched in a cold sweat, with my wife shaking me and saying "Are you alright?" She reports that I had keeled over into the (vacant) seat to my left, my hands were twitching, and she tried to wake me up without success until I sat up on my own, staring straight ahead and breathing through my mouth. A flight attendant or two also came to help, offering water, "moist towelettes", etc. Eventually I got up to go to the bathroom: standing up and walking seemed to help clear my head. But it was at least another hour before I felt mostly normal.

Once we landed in Paris on Wednesday morning, passed passport control, and retrieved our luggage, we stopped at the urgent-care clinic in the airport. They took my temperature, BP, and pulse-oxygen, and took an EKG, none of which showed anything interesting. Since I was feeling OK by this time (aside from jet-lag), I opted to go on with our vacation plans (at least until it happens again, which it hasn't yet).

We checked into our reserved studio apartment (which is literally the size of our bathroom at home) and crashed for a while.

The building, in an apparently gay-leaning part of the Marais, is decorated in interesting ways. Every room is named after a different fashion designer (we were in Dior). And every room has a different original wall-painting: here’s the Avengers wall painting revealed when we folded down the Murphy bed to sleep on it. In fact, you're looking at basically the entire apartment. Including the bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, and sitting-room, it's about 12

hudebnik-feet square. (You can see both the bathroom sink and the kitchen stove in the mirror.)

Using the wifi in the room, I e-mailed my doctor in NYC, who thinks investigating the seizurey-thing can probably wait until we get home.

Tomorrow, as we continue trying to get over jet-lag, we're visiting three museums in Paris. One opens at 8 AM, and another closes at 9 PM, and we think two of the three don't have a lot of stuff up our alley, so we might actually do justice to three museums in a day. If not, one of them will fall off the list and that's OK.

The next day, probably, a day-trip to Chantilly for the Limbourg Brothers exhibit (among other things).

169.2 lbs.
breakfast: yogurt, cereal, almond milk, dried cranberries
lunch: grilled cheese sandwich, apple slices
dinner:asparagus, sliced turkey, hollandaise

In bed 1:30 AM (MODF; D. was in bed with the lights on).
Up 7:30 or so. Underslept, obviously. Not much coughing overnight, but coughing every few minutes yesterday and today, with a "coughing fit" a few times an hour.

Exercise this morning: 30 leg-drops, 20 push-ups.

The Manhattan protest march was scheduled to start at 2 PM in front of the Central Library (the one with the lions), go down 5th Avenue, and end at Madison Square. It rained all morning, forecast to taper off in the course of the afternoon, so around 1:00 I put a transparent recycling bag over my protest sign, walked to the train station, took a train to Grand Central (a conductor said "I love your sign" as I boarded), and walked a block to the library, where things appeared to be more crowded than at the last two protest marches. (I use the first-person singular because

shalmestere was in Boston, winding up a week at the Early Music Festival.)

Oh, about the sign. In honor of Flag Day, one side had a US flag, followed by the words "with liberty and justice for ALL!", the last two words underlined. The other side said "1775-2025: 250 years and we still don't bow to KINGS".

Chatted with various other protesters around 42nd Street, as the crowd surged forward a foot or two, then stayed in place for ten minutes, repeat. About 3:10 I got to 41st Street, but after that things moved more smoothly, and it wasn't quite 4:00 when I got to 34th Street and peeled off for Penn Station because my lower back was hurting.

The next train to my station was in 45 minutes, but I figured I could happily spend that time sitting in a chair with a back. A couple of white twentysomethings asked to see what my signs said, and seemed quite puzzled that I opposed anything the Trump administration had been doing. We discussed the DOGE dismantling of numerous government agencies, and I suggested that if you actually wanted to reduce waste, fraud, and inefficiency in government, you would start by understanding what the agencies are supposed to do, then identifying particular programs that are working well and others that aren't achieving their goals, then analyzing them to decide whether the unsuccessful programs could be made successful or should be abandoned; you don't start by firing (illegally) all the inspectors general whose job is to reduce waste, fraud, and inefficiency in government, then firing tens of thousands of mostly-competent workers regardless of whether they're doing a good job. Doing things the right way takes months, and Musk didn't have that much time: he wanted to destroy agencies in a hurry before the courts could stop him. The guy I was talking to acknowledged that there might be more effective ways than Musk's to improve government, "but Musk is gone now. You've been talking for ten minutes, and you're clearly very passionate about what Musk did, but you haven't mentioned Trump once.' [I had, in connection with Musk having no actual governmental authority, but not much.] "So what has Trump himself done that makes you think he's a king?"

So I took a deep breath, thinking "where do I even start?", and didn't do a great job of this part, before a middle-aged black guy walked up and told the kid I was talking to that he was full of shit. The kid stood up, they started shouting in one another's faces, and almost came to blows before the black guy's female companion persuaded him to walk away. One of the twentysomethings reported the episode to a cop, then came over and shook my hand before they all went to catch their train.

At which point I looked at my phone to check on my departure time, realized that I'd been looking at the schedule of trains in the opposite direction, and that I had just missed my actual train; the next one was in another 50 minutes, so I took the subway home instead.

Meanwhile,

shalmestere had just boarded a train home from Boston. I got home, took an ibuprofen, lay down for a while, applied a heating pad to my back, walked and fed the dogs, ate a little (I wasn't very hungry), then went back to Penn Station to meet her and accompany her home. After which it became a relatively normal evening.

Thirty years ago or so a chiropractor X-rayed my hips and informed me I had a 6mm leg-length difference, which he said wasn't enough to see with the naked eye but was enough to put my pelvis at an angle and my spine into a slight S-curve, so he prescribed a heel insert. Which I used for a few years, and I think it helped with back pain, but over the years I lost the habit (particularly when wearing sandals), and then forgot which heel it went in. I've looked in a bunch of my old shoes for inserts, and found one pair in which the left shoe has a full-length after-market insole and the right shoe doesn't, so I'm guessing it was the left heel. So on my way home yesterday I stopped at a dollar store (they're really going to suffer from Trump's tariffs, since almost everything on the shelves is made in China!) and got some gel heel pads a few mm thick. I put one in the left heel of each of two pairs of shoes that I wear commonly; we'll see what difference it makes.

After two rainy days in Córdoba, we checked out of our room and walked in the rain to the parking lot, where the car was intact and not flooded (although the lot was, as expected, even muddier than before). Drove in the rain to Antequera, where the ~~stone~~ gate had indeed been rolled aside and we were able to visit the dolmens, variously 4000-6000 years old. The two in town, Viera and Menga, have a slick modern visitor's center, QR codes to download detailed descriptions, etc. while the one a few km outside town, El Romeral (next to a shipping-pallet warehouse) has bathrooms and a couple of tour guides standing around. Viera is oriented, conventionally, so that its inner chamber is illuminated by the rising sun on either the equinoxes or the summer solstice (I forget which). The other two are more unusual: El Romeral, which we visited first, is unique in Europe in that its entry passage points west: specifically, it points at the highest point of a nearby mountain range.

And Menga's entry passage points south-southeast, at the highest point of a lone mountain which, seen from here, has the shape of a human facial profile. Although of course we couldn't actually see it through the rain and fog. Which are also why I don't have a bunch of pictures from yesterday.

Then we drove in the rain to Granada, parked at an underground lot, dragged our suitcases outside in the rain, caught a taxi in the rain, walked a block or two in the rain to the same Granada hotel we were at last week, and checked in. Hung things up to dry, put the room's climate-control system in "dehumidify" mode, and fell down in bed, about 3 PM.

We appear to have left a bag of Easter chocolate and related goodies in the hotel at Málaga, so we needed to replenish the supply before Easter was over. So after an hour or two of resting and drying off, we headed out (in slightly less-driving rain) to the downtown shopping district where the fancy chocolate- and candy-stores are. Then stopped at an Italian restaurant for dinner:

shalmestere had gnocchi with some kind of Calabrian-pepper sauce, while I had lasagna bolognese (which seemed appropriately warming and hearty for the weather). By the time we finished, the rain had stopped, and we walked two blocks back to the hotel.

Turned on local TV to see what we could understand. Watched a few minutes of a hunting-and-fishing show, a few more minutes of an action drama involving a lot of people shooting one another and blowing up train cars, then stumbled into the Spanish-dubbed version of one of the "Shrek" movies that we hadn't seen (Shrek is in an alternate universe where none of his friends, nor his wife, recognize him). Which is good visual humor even if you can't make out all the words, so we watched that to the end. Next on the same channel was a show about a couple of teenaged friends who work in a garishly-colored video-game store, and at the end of every scene they metamorphose from live-action to frames in a comic book. Again, largely visual humor (the female protagonist had mistakenly put on a customer's boots, couldn't get them off, ended up borrowing a bucket of Italian dressing from their friend who works at the pizzeria next door and pouring it down the boots to lubricate her feet enough to extricate them... and then they return the boots to the wrong customer and have to retrieve them... and then there's a plot thread about the male protagonist having, then losing, the high score on a particular video game and trying to regain his title).

My scratchy throat of a few days ago has mostly gone away, but the occasional coughing fits continue, and today I added occasional sneezing fits to the mix. Which was a problem while I was driving in the rain; fortunately I didn't actually hit anything. Slept with a bunch of pillows under my head, getting up every few minutes to drink water or blow my nose or pee. Not the most pleasant of nights, but we both eventually got some sleep.

The good news: the long-term forecast for our remaining week in Spain shows no rain whatsoever in the places we'll be, on the days we'll be there. In particular, our Alhambra tour this afternoon and our Sevilla tour tomorrow should both be rain-free.

Last night I made fried rice, with mixed veggies and Chinese sausage, for dinner. Within a minute or two of starting to eat,

shalmestere said the epithelial cells in her mouth were doing something funny, and her sense of taste was off. I replied "Me too: I'm not noticing taste problems, but it feels like there's something stuck to the insides of my gums, yet when I try to scrape it off, nothing comes off." After a few minutes, including swishing water around in our mouths, the weird gum sensation went away.

Neither of us had any subsequent gastrointestinal distress, so it wasn't the sort of food poisoning that makes you sick for 24 hours.

I imagine it was an additive in the Chinese sausage, which was a different brand than we've bought before. But has anybody else encountered this particular symptom?

When it stopped raining yesterday, we went outside and planted some bulbs. And I edged the front edge of the yard with decorative bricks. And replaced the low fencing around the front sublawn. There are more bulbs to be planted, and there are still some gaps left behind by the front-walk construction, so I think we need to buy a couple of bags of topsoil, and probably some mulch -- I hope we can find some that aren't water-saturated, after the past few days of rain. And I need to bake bread today.

[UPDATE: we planted most of the bulbs yesterday, and bought mulch, and topsoil, and potting soil, and sand (which I used to fill gaps between the brick edging and the sidewalk). The rest of the sand may be used for annealing ferrous-metal clinch nails, or something like that. Baked a loaf of sourdough bread. Picked raspberries, and turned them into a mixed-berry smoothie with yogurt and tofu.]

I want to attach about a hundred loops to the shoulder of the tent roof, and toggles to the top of the walls, to hang the walls from the loops. Ideally, the toggles and loops would be equally spaced (in the 6"-9" range) around the perimeter, so the walls can be attached equally well wherever you start. I'm not sure that'll work, since the tent is oval rather than circular, but even if it were circular, there's another problem: how do you measure the length of a tent edge, and the distance from one toggle to the next, with sufficient accuracy that the latter divides an integer number of times into the former, with no remainder? I can measure them both in such a way that the quotient is whatever I want, and it'll come out pretty close, but the remainder is much more sensitive to measurement error. On the divisor side, the Law of Large Numbers works in my favor: if each one has an error bar of 5%, their mean has an error bar a factor of sqrt(n) (i.e. about ten times) smaller, or 0.5%, so the quotient is fairly predictable. But if the dividend has even a 1% error bar (which is quite optimistic -- it's almost 50 feet of length, measured on a heavy mound of fabric that can't be laid flat), the remainder can be literally anything from zero to the distance between toggles.

Perhaps the answer is to set up several checkpoints along the way, dividing the perimeter a priori into halves or quarters, and reset at each checkpoint. This way each quotient is only about 25 rather than about 100, so I can have as much as a 4% error bar in the dividend before having no control whatsoever over the remainder. And if one of them comes out horribly off, I can fudge that checkpoint a posteriori and try to correct it gradually between that checkpoint and the next.

About Sept. 14 or 15, I noticed a scratchy throat. On the 16th, I started coughing. It's over two weeks later now, and I'm still coughing. Two different kinds of COVID tests both reported negative, and it doesn't feel like flu (no fever, no general body aches, little or no nausea, no "my hair hurts"), but it's lasting longer than a cold usually does. Yuck. I'm due to see the doctor again on Tuesday.