A hundred days of quarantine

We've passed 100 days of self-isolation but, in the tradition of this blog, I missed it exactly and will just post some half-finished thoughts here to expurgate them from my mind. Welcome to approximately the 112th day of solitude. And unlike grad school, there's no end in sight.

I miss people. It turns out that many of my pastimes actually required people, or at least the passing proximity of others, and are now extremely ill-advised and mostly unavailable. Board games are so great in-person as a way to escape into a shared brain-space with friends; at a distance, board games (and pretty much everything else) take a lot more effort and yield a lot less feeling of shared camaraderie. Ditto rock climbing, but extremely more so. And forget singing along during road trips --- the travel, the singing, the enclosed space, all of it is now verboten to the pandemic-pragmatic.

I miss the full-bandwidth promise of a real-time in-person conversation, one where no one drops out, no one freezes, talking over each other can be moderated by subtle physical and social cues, and my headphones do not leave a grooved imprint of my glasses on my skull.

I miss the fantasy I once held, maybe a decade ago in the midst of my extremely academic studies, that I might be living in a golden age of rationality and scientifically-founded decision-making. I miss the feeling that I might be effective or a positive influence on others, and I'm struggling to see how to "pivot" (eugh) my skills, which are almost 100% cultivated for in-person activities, to be effective and useful in a permanent pandemic world. I miss feeling like I can be effective at all, beyond donating my money and privilege to try to ameliorate the many ravaging horrors of our age. From a distance, of course.

Positively: I've cleaned my house, and it's staying quite clean. (I'm the only one who can enjoy this or pass judgment on inadequately-dusted ledges, anyway.) All houseplants are flourishing. I'm doing yardwork. I'm 2 full weeks ahead on my workout plan. I'm working on a lot of solitary at-home projects that would otherwise have languished. I'm contemplating what I want to do with the rest of my life to try to have a positive impact; I'm answering emails, letters, and postcards, and pumping the snail-mail system full of words, feelings, and time-delayed connections. I've learned to bake cheese in pastry crust. I've reworked my budget to enable more donations. I'm watching performances from artists I would never get to see in-person, as everyone has been forcibly shoved online, so they are effectively closer and more available to me than previously.

I'm waking every morning to shake my fists at the Gods of Bandwidth and propitiate the Lesser Deities of Lag and Latency.

I wonder...
... when was my last hug? I remember one pretty late, but was that truly my last hug?
... when was my last handshake? Will that be the final handshake of my life?
... when was the last time I ate in a restaurant? I don't remember. Maybe that will never happen again.
... when will I next see my family? Paradoxically it will probably not be enjoyable to see them because of the apprehension that the very act of meeting will impose a danger on everyone involved.

I think I could last a long time, a psychologically inadvisable time, in socially distant isolation. Comparing it with the risk of transmitting disease, contributing to transmitting disease, or myself becoming sick, and remaining isolated looks like a moral imperative. Whether by my example or by the incidental impact of self-selecting out of the situations where transmission occurs, this seems like my only acceptable mode of conduct. YMMV.

Don't worry. I'm not a hermit. I have an extremely healthy correspondence; I am an active letter-writer. And of course, now as always, I am a being that consists 80% of Simply Being Online.

Plus ça change.

This post's theme word is empanoply (v. tr.), "to enclose in complete armor." We are advised to empanoply ourselves at home, and I have empanoplied this cheese in flaky pastry.

When you are sick, your comfort food is

I've almost completely lost my voice, but that of course should stand as no impediment to the dissemination of knowledge, which is my primary goal. So I got miked and gave my lecture in a husky "late night radio DJ" voice.

I take attendance by having the students answer a question.

When you are sick, your comfort food is:

Soup, in increasing order of specificity:

• soup
• noodle soup
• ramen
• chicken noodle soup
• chicken noodle soup heavy on the noodles
• chicken noodle soup and ginger ale
• 
  

Other starches or sugary foods:

• bread
• crackers
• triangle toast
• cinnamon sugar toast + apple cinnamon tea
• cookie dough
• jello
• Skittles

Outliers:

• ginger
• beef rice pudding
• congee
• water with lemon juice and pulp
• water
• tofu

The most extreme outlier is "hot toddies" --- someone's family has adopted the same "use alcohol to burn out the germs" approach that I've heard bandied around by half-joking grandparents.

This post's theme word is leechdom (noun), "a remedy or medicine." What a wondrous panoply of leechdoms!

Extremely first-world, privileged problem

Nothing comes out perfectly round in practice; observe, my residence in Paris will not be a number of months divisible by 12. Thus, my gym membership has run out, and I will be here for only ~2 more months. Renewing for a full year is unreasonably expensive when amortized over 2 months; paying per-entry is unreasonably expensive at 25€/day multiplied by my 5-6 day/week gym habit.

What to do?

It's summer, so of course I could just switch to outside/no-equipment exercising, but I find this dissatisfying and it also means zero swimming during the peak heat-relieving swimming months.

On the other hand, I live in a big city and there are many gyms. Most offer a one-time-only free pass (as an incentive to lure people to subscribe), so perhaps I can string together enough free gym visits, interspersed with 25€/day visits and swimming at public pools and running outside, to meet my needs without using up my budget for food and rent.

Problems of privilege --- irritating, but I'm glad that this is the kind of worry my brain has leisure to contemplate.


This post's theme word is sook, "a timid or cowardly person, a crybaby." Ignore that overprivileged sook, visibly-bulging triceps are SO last season.

One year with a food scale and a spreadsheet

Let's take a brief jaunt into one of my most active spreadsheets: the one that tracks my macronutrients (consumed), exercise (performed), and weight (mass * gravity). I now have about a year of data, so perhaps we can see some trends.

The motive for the spreadsheet --- and the food scale which enabled me to precisely measure my food, for cooking, eating, and tracking purposes --- was mostly curiosity, an enjoyment of data points, and the interest to see if there were any long-term changes that were too gradual to notice on a daily basis.

Here's the chart, minus all labels because I don't have infinite time to wrestle with chart software to make something nice-looking, and also I don't have the expertise for what features a good chart should have.

X-axis: days in the past year (some data incomplete on some days)

Y-axis blue: kilocalories consumed (centerline is daily recommendation)

Y-axis green: exercise (goes from slothlike 0 at bottom to outrageously exhausting LAC day at top)

Y-axis red: mass ("normal" BMI cutoff is bottom 1/8 of scale; the rest is "overweight"; total span is ~6kg)

Obviously these clusters of blue/green/red dots are not super-easy to read. I have made your chart-reading life more difficult by stripping off all labels on the axes, for my own private reasons. It might help to interpolate some trendlines. Here are linear interpolations.

With linear trendlines, it looks like mass tends towards 0.

At various intermediate exponents between 2 and 10, the best-fit polynomials have weird corners or predict extreme blowup/decreases outside the range. This seems like a bad fit because my weight will probably not plummet to 0 in the next few years, and my exercise did not start at 8x my current effort just before the data began.

Here are some 10th-degree polynomial interpolations (below). I picked 10 because that was the highest available, and I have no idea what sort of trendline I should be picking to get a "meaningful" trend (visually interesting, useful, predictive). Notice that these polynomials predict crazy extremes --- my weight before the data was enormous, and my future weight is smoothly tapering down. I have fun watching how the best-fit polynomial changes when I add a new data point, as the relative flatness of the data means that it sometimes wiggles in an aesthetically pleasing way to accommodate the new point.

With degree 10 polynomial trendlines, the downtick in mass echoes the uptick in exercise.

This is not groundbreaking data analysis. Clearly. But I do enjoy playing with a spreadsheet.

Some very plain observations:

• kCals: I eat approximately the daily recommended kCals, with some reasonable variation. A few of the really low outlier days I had a bad cold or food poisoning. The high outlier days I was just hungrier, so I ate more. Some of the really high outlier days are missing, as I definitely ate more on vacation in BBQ-feasting Texas, but I didn't reliably measure those days and didn't worry about it.
• exercise: I'm using Fitocracy to turn my various workouts into a single number. Sometimes the number seems much too low/high compared to how much effort I felt the workout required. But at least it's a standardized measure.
  The trendline is helpful here because in any given week, hard workouts are mixed in with easy ones, so probably the average is more enlightening than the actual individual data points. (The chart has all that empty space at the top because high-outlier workout days occur at regular intervals, once or twice a week, and I wanted to visually include them in the chart.)
  The recent uptick in exercise reflects the fact that I have been going climbing once a week, regularly replacing a low-scoring easy workout with a high-scoring hard one. It's nice that the trendline shows this.
• weight: I lost some, but if you look at the data points you'll see that my daily weight varies. The trendline is useful here for seeing, well, a trend. Much more interesting would be my density measurement, but of course I don't have this historical data. Based on how my clothing fits, I have swapped some undense fat for some dense muscle, but the single-number mass measurement doesn't reflect this change in volume.

Your advice for what I should do with this data is welcome. What would be interesting? I should probably just take a few classes of the coursera data science sequence and figure it out myself. I also have the breakdown of kCal into fat/carbohydrates/protein for each day, if you can think of something interesting to do with that. (Mostly it shows that the decrease in kCal came from eating less carbohydrates, but keeping protein the same, which was a result of conscious intent on my part.)

A time-travelling version of myself from the 1920s. (Illustration from La Culture Physique de la Femme Elégante, as posted here.)

Some non-empirical observations about this time period and set of data. I did not feel particularly hungry or like I needed food during this data period, even though I observably consumed fewer total calories and expended more. I found that I felt slightly overall more comfortable in my body: warmer in winter, cooler in summer, and generally more flexible (a bodily sensation I enjoy). (Other possible factors there: different clothing, different climate, different locations, the weird hyperbole/discounting of memories of past physical sensations.) Flipping through my logged workouts, my incremental increases in strength and endurance continue. One big difference between the logged data period and, e.g., graduate school, is that I don't really nap anymore. But there are enough other factors at play here --- my postdoc work schedule, French cultural conformity enforcing a standard and synchronized pattern of wake up-commute-work-lunch-commute-dinner, etc. --- that I have no idea if my food intake has had a causal effect on my decreased napping, or if other confounding factors have combined, or if perhaps I just aged into an adult sort of schedule which my body finds comfortable.

May your green trend ever upwards!


This post's theme word is overmorrow, "the day after tomorrow." Can your model predict how much I shall exercise on the overmorrow?

Unfit bits

Fitness. The quantified self. Local eating, clean eating, health trends. We take a certain mental attitude to these topics, and it is almost always earnest and serious. Health is serious!

I like the idea of a fitbit, some tiny device which will quantify my daily physical effort. I like collecting and fiddling with such data. (Earlier this month I reached my 30,000th squat since January 2013.) But my brain is much more interested in picking at the weaknesses of such systems, and so the unfitbit appeals much more.

Unfit Bits from Surya Mattu on Vimeo.

Health and fitness may be serious, but sneakiness? always more fun.


This post's theme word is thewless, "cowardly; lacking energy." The unfitbit system is perfect for the quantified thewless self.

Seasons change, decades pass

Another couple months, another set of life experiences and retrospective thoughts about them, posted to the internet for all of noisy posterity to (send robots to read, process, glean, and) enjoy. The daylight is noticeably shorter now, we rolled our clocks back in the historically-inherited acknowledgement of centralized time-measuring standards, and tonight everyone dresses up as something else and begs strangers for carbohydrates.

Seems like a reasonable time to reflect on the past decade.

It involved me leaving a lot of things behind: several countries, my life as a student (never again!), relationships tried and broken, and between 10 and 20 pounds.* Oh! Also my original (birth) ACL, gone forever, consigned to history and oblivion (although its replacement's image is immortally online). Now I have a gauche unmatched pair of ACLs. Most of these changes require no special comment; I do reiterate, here as elsewhere, my strongly-held belief that knee injuries should be avoided and knee surgery is not a suitable pastime. (Exceptions possible for knee surgeons.)

Even my fellow crack-of-dawn gym women have commented on the kilograms, though ("Vous étiez ronde... vous avez maigri"). Two sides of the coin (as usual: ignore the metaphorically inconvenient edge). The nice: Of course it is always nice to receive compliments from humans. Robots, not so much. Second, the cool part about converting fat (voluminous) into muscle (dense) is that my skin nerves are closer to my muscles, so I can feel in my skin when I contract my muscles (as well as the normal nerve feedback from the muscles themselves). For some muscles in particular this sensation is novel and thrilling (intercostals!). The irritating: Buying all new clothes is a chore and so everything I've bought is stretchy, it'll fit me as long as I avoid supervillain shrink- or giganticize-rays. Also, now I am even less imposing, and so rush hour subway commutes are a continual struggle to evade crushing and obtain access to enough oxygen at my elevation. Maybe a subway snorkle? Then I could breathe, plus everyone would know there is definitely someone there in that spot-that-looks-like-it's-empty-space-between-tall-people.

I've retroblogged a little recently, but a lot is sliding because it is job-application season in academia.

• I cleaned some photos off my phone and reminisced about snowy winters past. Oh, Canada.
• Shaun the sheep is a clever and adorable schemer, but my true love for inventive scientist Gromit is unmatched.
• Japan trip: not a crêpe, burned down/fell over/sank into swamp.

I have a lot more photos from Japan, and the queue is full of all photos chronologically following that trip. Yes, I evilly withhold content from you while informing you of its existence. I am the gatekeeper of Lila-related ephemera, kneel before me! etc., etc.


This post's theme word is gloze, the transitive verb "to minimize or to explain away," the intransitive verb "to use flattery; to make an explanation; to shine brightly," or the noun "a comment; flattery; a pretense." His gloze glozes, but it is a gloze rather than glozing.

*As a theorist, I acknowledge that a factor-of-two approximation may dissatisfy others, but it depends if you measure from the maximum in the time interval or the average. High variance in the past decade, is my point. Yes, I have the data (much to my theorist shame).

An abbreviated list of unusual recent compliments

This summer has passed in a sleet of unusual compliments. ("A sleet" should be the collective noun for compliments. Or maybe "drizzle" or "deluge" or "cloudburst"? I like weather metaphors.) In a not-at-all-humblebrag, I inform you that I have been complimented on my powerful shoulders (oh yeah!), my hands (unspecified compliment), my "muscular arms" (great? although a stereotypically male compliment), and my knee definition. Yes, that's right, the definition and shapeliness of my knees, those gristly bits at the joint mid-leg. Cheekbone definition? What a common compliment. Collarbone definition? Passé. This season's hip look is knees.

Do you have the right number? (We asked these 10 celebrities, and they unanimously said that they'd be wearing 2 --- two! --- knees this season! Whoa!) Do you have good definition? Coming up next: youtube makeup tutorials for outlining, highlighting, lowlighting, and really making your knees pop.


This post's theme word is keloid, a descriptor of scar tissue, brought to you from Miéville's Kraken, p. 128. These comely knees carry certain keloid cicatrices!

[Update: I was also called "the first woman I've met whom I could believe is really a worthwhile top." --- a comment which incited a little flare of anger and revenge-plotting, which I guess is the whole point. I preferred the merry knee compliment.]

Tracking

I am as much a datavore as the next internet-inhabiting member of my socio-economic-educational cohort. Right now, with a few clicks, I can bring up a history of my workouts, personal mass, and grams of macronutrients eaten, going back months or years (depending on the quality of data desired), as well as how long I've worn each pair of contacts I've ever used, and the length of every menstrual cycle. No, this data is neither open nor freely available (at least until I get a good publication out of it).

I have thought about getting a fitbit, but it seems extraneous. At my current level, increasing my steps per day is a tiny factor of my overall activity. Plus I'm not crazy about uploading my data to some company's website, automatically. I want to control the data I generate, and I think this is reasonable.

But this article makes me want to run from the fitbit, for many steps. In fact, I think that I could probably be discouraged from most of my present activities by an article describing them in this light: as an obsessive, addictive, cult-ish fad, in which basic humanity (competition, socializing, merely walking) is suborned in order to commodify community and "brand engagement."

Eugh.


This post's theme word is thrasonical, "bragging or boastful." Linked fitbit accounts are thrasonical interpersonal spam of an unpleasant sort.

Heat wave

It's hot. I understand and endorse the Roman legions' decision to keep conquering north after this point; it's still too hot at this latitude, there must be a cooler spot somewhere on the continent; let's conquer that! Also, perhaps if we conquer far enough, we'll reach a country where air conditioning is invented, and not regarded as unhealthy.

There no air conditioning in my university building. HR sent an email advising that we visit public libraries, grocery stores, or movie theaters --- the  few locations with air conditioning. Certainly not work or home. Yesterday I found myself contemplating taking the (cooled) subway train to the end of the line and back, for the temperature control. My body has to be somewhere at every point in time, so I'd like to maximize the volume of time-space spent at a cooler temperature.

I got my hair cut. It helps shed precious BTUs. Apologies to Neal Stephenson.

I'll see you at the other end of this heat wave. Best of luck to us both.


This post's theme comic comes from AmazingSuperPowers:

Just when you thought that a pool party would be perfect...

Manhood and the gender-parity inflection point

Ack. Here's an article on manhood, with many not-what-I-expected statistics that women are out-earning men, adapting to new social and economic standards, and leaving them behind. Yes, that's right.

It's interesting and befuddling that, in low-income settings, women are so outperforming (and outnumbering) men, while in high-income/status settings (the technology sector comes to mind, as well as higher education) women are discriminated against and an extreme minority. Is there an inflection point,* somewhere on the socioeconomic scale, where men and women have achieved parity?**

I recoil at the suggestion that school needs to be made more "boy-friendly", probably because every other article in my inbox is about how science education needs to be made more "girl-friendly". Dissonance! Although I am soothed by the author's explicit mention that suggested changes to the classroom are "all helpful, and all things that might be appreciated by girls, too."

The article jumps all around, from broad and depressing statistics to accessible anecdotes and prescriptive suggestions from Sweden***. The takeaway message was bafflement, and the unusual and welcome thought that my worldview had been slightly widened to include a world with the statistics and anecdata of this argument. I'm also puzzled why the article is  framed as if gains for women equals (necessitates, requires, produces) losses for men.**** Why must it be a zero-sum game of employment?


This post's theme word is inosculate, "to join or unite." It's intransitive. Who would want to inosculate home, health, and fate with an unpleasant, violent, ill-mannered, uneducated partner?


*An intermediate-value-wish like this one seems unlikely, because the statistics probably aren't dense enough to be continuous. Big discontinuities at: high school diploma, college diploma, parents' socioeconomic indicators, etc.

**On the one hand, I'd like to live at that point, where men and women are equally employed, equally caretakers, equally-represented, equally successful. On the other hand, I probably don't want to move down the socioeconomic scale to reach that point, if I am currently above it.

***This is the parallel of Godwin's Law for articles on issues of economy, family, employment, education, health, or any other aspect of society: the article will, eventually, hold up Sweden as an example.

****On the other hand, the article illustration of a see-saw has a man on one side and no one is playing with him on the other side; yet he is still, inexplicably and in defiance of physics, up.

Parasite

Horror and tension do not appeal to me as fun leisure-time sensations. I don't like to be scared, and tense cliffhangers are unpleasant.

Nevertheless, I enjoy Mira Grant's books. I don't especially seek them out, but when they stray across my path, I consume them --- usually as quickly as possible, using the Band-Aid-removal strategy --- and enjoy them. Grant's Parasite begins her latest trilogy, this time on the topic of medical-science-advancing-enough-to-implant-beneficial-tapeworms-but-something-goes-wrong. My experience with the previous one (Feed / Deadline / Blackout --- medical-science-advancing-enough-etc-flu-etc-zombies) was positive, but tense. I read Feed over a few weeks; I read Deadline and Blackout in a single weekend. Immediately. Perhaps my lack of exposure makes me susceptible to the stress of cliffhangers, or the reasonably plausible zombies and well-used varieties of format drew me in.

I liked Parasite. Perhaps I am building up a resistance to Grant's authorial magic. She is consistently good, dependable for a cliffhanger at the end of every few chapters, and enticing "excerpts" from in-universe documents at the beginning of each chapter, a trail of misleading breadcrumbs which deepens and intensifies the unfolding novel.

There were certain structural clues, though, and parallels to the previous trilogy (in an unrelated modern-day universe). So many things did not catch me by surprise. Secret medical agencies? Check. Government-organized disease researchers? Check. A confluence of events (intentional? accidental?) which results in the protagonist, a young adult woman, being chased by zombies? Check. Cell phones, secret interpersonal codes, the feeling that an all-powerful Big Brother is somewhere manipulating things and shaping destiny/leaving a trail of clues, lots of scenes with tense emotional showdowns over trust and information-disclosure? Yep. And the book-ending climax? I saw it coming in the first chapter, it's hinted at everywhere. I can only imagine that books 2 and 3 must reverse this climactic reveal, otherwise it's... too straightforward, I think.

But to be clear: I liked it. I like Mira Grant's writing; it is unlike anything else in my experience.

You should read this book if you are hard to gross out, and not prone to medical nightmares or formication.


This post's theme word is curettage, "scraping", usually in a medical sense and applied especially to the uterus. The recommended removal procedure for tapeworms does not involve curettage.

Sequential timestamping

If you write your date in the American order (month-day-year) then today is momentous for its sequentiality: 10-11-12 (and even more momentous at 1:14pm!).

Today is otherwise rather unremarkable. I have lost my voice, swamped under work and viral bodies. The one pervades my mind; the other, my body. I am attempting to write a description of my research which simultaneously renders it accessible to the reader and emphasizes its broad applications and stresses its difficulty and level of mathematical abstraction.

Days like this make me wonder if I could support myself writing bodice-rippers. Well, it's a fall-back plan, way down the list.


This post's theme word is cerumen, "earwax." Is that cerumen, or are my ears congested?

"You look like a baby!"

I was making chit-chat with the nurse giving me the flu shot. She asked what program I was in. Attempting to be pleasant, I answered truthfully. She asked what year I was in. I answered truthfully. She asked how old I am. I answered truthfully. She exclaimed, "You look like a baby!"

All I could think was, "A baby with fully-developed secondary sex characteristics?" But luckily my filter caught that, so instead I said, "Thank you." And smiled. Keeping it pleasant and chit-chatty.

I'm glad I look young. Combined with the H-bomb, I have a handy arsenal of true but astonishing facts with which to floor most interlocutors. Pleasantly.


This post's theme word is taradiddle, "a petty lie" or "pretentious nonsense." I enjoy sprinkling taradiddles amongst the actual facts of my life.

The sky is falling!

This morning at the gym, a lightbulb fell from the 2-story ceiling and smashed onto the floor. Shards of glass flew everywhere. Luckily none of the glass hit me, or my fellow Saturday morning fitness masochists. But it did shatter spectacularly, spreading fine shards throughout the area.

This was not a hallucination induced by anaerobic exercise or the resulting oxygen deprivation. Truly, the menacing specter of overhead lighting looms above us all.


This post's theme word is bagman, "one who collects or distributes money from illicit activities, for example, in a protection racket," or "a traveling salesman (UK)," or "a political fundraiser (Canada)," or "a caddie hired to carry a golf player's clubs (golf)," or "a tramp; swagman (Australia)." Golf is not a former member of the British Empire, but maybe it should be. We neglected to pay the bagman, so the lights came crashing down. The bagman extorted the bagman at a bagman while the hired bagmen protected the venue from bagmen.

Corporeal suffering

Every muscle and soft tissue from my ribs to my knees hurts. My eyes are red and unpleasant. My right ankle feels like it's trying to turn into some fourth spatial dimension, and only tender tendons are wrenching it back into the standard three for walking purposes. I slept poorly, woke up at 5, and refused to get out of bed until the alarm, as if I could force myself to sleep.

This is what I get for (1) original sin, (2) lounging around yesterday eating ice cream, and (3) running this morning. I'll avoid two of those things tomorrow. (I might run.)

I cannot wait until we uplift-transmogrify-singularityize into incorporeal plasma energy beings.


This post's theme word is valetudinarian, "chronically sick or concerned with one's own health." Also available as a noun. The veterinarian wasn't the valedictorian of her class, but she was a valetudinarian.

Intolerable heat

It is HOT. The air is humid and uncomfortably close to body temperature. In fact, the adjective "close" is quite fitting -- I can feel the heat in the air, the atmosphere is close. I like a little more space between me and my environment; my atoms are hitting the air's atoms with uncomfortable frequency. (Make the air stop hitting me, please!)

In the spirit of cooling off and the long evolutionary tradition of sweating, I have exposed much of my own surface area directly to this malign miasma of summer. This has the expected positive effect of allowing me to exude and evaporate a water-based liquid of my own concoction (conocted right there in my pores and glands!), eliminating excess heat. The surprise, bonus negative effect is that much of my exposed skin is itchy, and, when I am morally weakened to the point of scratching, covered in hives.*

Summer is terrible.

I am hiding in my roommate's air-conditioned bedroom for the evening. Anytime either of us ventures outside the room, we ritually shout an obscenity when hit by the wall of hot air, followed by a quick obeisance: reverent closing of the door to protect the bubble of cool air.


This post's theme word: fug, "stale, humid, and stuffy atmosphere, as in a crowded, poorly ventilated room." As well as describing, it alliterates, scans, and slant-rhymes with a four-letter exclamation uttered about this weather.

*This includes uncommon patches of skin like the backs of my finger segments and the backs of my toe knuckles. My toe knuckles are hive-bearing, summer -- are you satisfied yet?!

Nervous healing

It has been three years since I had full sensation in my knee, but the nerves continue their slow repair. One spot -- one corner -- of my knee itches. Just above one of my surgical scars. It is just one nerve, itching, terribly. Intensely. Scratching does not sate it. I'm hoping that, having now reconnected itself to my nervous system, this nerve will now tone it down; maybe the rest of my nerves ("my brain") will tune this one out.

So itchy.


This post's theme word: quiescent, "dormant."

New apartment

It's okay. The search was long and tiring. It's bigger than the old place, and quieter. A bit cold. The oven is broken. The water pressure and heat leave things to be desired. And I seem to be allergic either to the dirt the former tenants left behind, or the cleaning products we used to remove it. I'm getting moved in, getting used to the longer walk to work.


This post's theme word: columbarium, "a vault with niches for storing urns" or "a dovecote or pigeon house."

Post-vacation

I returned to school, to find that I lost 5 pounds, probably of muscle. From the two weeks of lounging about and not exercising. Weirdly counterintuitive, since I adhered to the family diet of cookies, pie, and curry for the entire vacation.

Now, watch as I get that back! Grrrrraaaaaah!


This post's theme word: pugilism, "boxing" (the sport).

Medical imaging

Medical imaging is so cool. My twitter avatar attests to that. Last week I learned that my uterus measures 7.0 x 3.0 x 3.5 cm... and now you know, too!


This post's theme word: phlebotomy, "letting blood from a vein." I had to let them take a lot of blood to get those (unrelated) measurements.