My watch claims I didn’t get enough REM sleep last night, but I still feel it was the best night of rest since getting sick. I didn’t really cough or sneeze at all.
This morning I am feeling mediocre. I am slightly stuffed up, but I can take a deep breath without coughing. Yay. I may be ready to run tomorrow, a regular run day. We’ll see.
I do have a possible new complication–a sore spot in my abdomen that is subsiding as I type this, but was notable in that I could poke it, and it did not like being poked. I’ve had this before, and it’s been a bladder infection, which would be about right for just getting over being sick to have a new ailment heroically leap in and take over.
But as I said, it seems to be subsiding for now. I will monitor.
An update from my perspective, having blogged on WordPress for just under 20 years:
I turned off the WordPress news widget in my WordPress dashboard, because it is now filled with unhinged posts from the co-founder of WordPress.
I am still actively looking for a place to move to, away from WordPress. It’s now a question of where I’ll land, not if.
To that end, I realized I had been consistently mistaking the name of a possible new platform as Blogtastic, when it is, in fact, Blogstatic. I am smart.
I have backed up everything on this blog, including all one billion images, of which 990 million are cats.
When you have an entire website (not hosted by WordPress) devoted to every time you have “lied, misrepresented or behaved in a questionable manner”, you may not be charting the best course forward possible.
Do you want to join in the new retro fad of blogging like it’s 1999? I have an important tip to make the experience better for you and your readers, be they actual people, bots, AI or perhaps hyper-intelligent farm animals.
An example of a hyper-intelligent farm animal. Also, you should watch Gravity Falls.
That tip is:
Never remote-link to images
I made it big because it’s important. You see, back in the olden times of badly-compressed JPGs and animated GIFs that were the size of postage stamps, there was this unspoken assumption that the internet (or more specifically, the World Wide Web1LanguageTool is insisting I capitalize this and I’m not in the mood to argue part of it) was forever. If something made it to the net, it stayed there. Everyone had a site or a blog or a page under construction, and it was messy and great.
Then the big companies moved in and basically paved over all of that. The do-it-yourself sites like GeoCities, Angelfire and others went away. Blogrolls turned into quaint relics. Algorithms and feeds took their place. And really, it seems a lot of people are happy today to just scroll through slop content made by machines others.
But the lesson for you, the brave new blogger, is this: Despite the Internet Archive (bafflingly the victim of an attack as I type this), and other efforts to preserve the web days of yore, there’s a decent chance that the witty image you link to in a blog post will be gone in seven years. Or maybe even next week. It could get deleted by the host, or moved. Maybe the site it’s hosted on vanishes into the ether. The point is, when you remote-link to an image, you are gambling that the image will stay put. And I am here to tell you it will not.
See the image above? I found it doing a search for “super smart Waddles”. But the copy you’re looking at is one I’m hosting myself. As long as I maintain my blog, the image will remain. The pig stays, because I brought the pig home.
Last night, my sleep score was so-so, but I didn’t have any coughing or sneezing fits. Progress! When I got up this morning, I had a mini coughing fit (<CF), so opted to take at least one more dose of cough medicine/ I generally don’t feel bad, though perhaps a tad worn from all the previous coughing, sneezing and all that.
It is Thanksgiving today and the forecast is kind of lousy, so I think I’ll just have a mellow day and urge my body to mend as I play video games, have a nice bubble bath and eat chicken, my favourite turkey substitute.
Yesterday was a whole lot of sneezing, and the tip of my nose is now sore. I bought a box of tissue and I’m pretty sure I went through half of it. There was increased coughing and by evening, it felt like I was “drying up” and shifting more to a cough.
I woke up around 4 a.m., had a coughing fit for around 15 minutes, then stopped, which allowed me to sleep for about three more hours. The coughing started again, seemed more stubborn, so I just got up to type this. I am now coughing intermittently, but will probably go to the store this morning to buy some kind of cough remedy, because I am already sore and tired from all the coughing, and it is not yet 9 a.m.
Once I am fully recovered, I am never going outside again. I’ll rig up some VR system and experience the world in a germ-free environment, as nature should have intended.
Yesterday was all about the runny nose and sneezing. Last night was much the same, which made for a less than satisfying sleep.
Today, a new development: Coughing! Not much, but more significantly, when I cough, I can feel the congestion in my chest loosen. This is actually good, because it means the virus/bug/hellspawn/alien is moving through my system relatively quickly.
Also, I feel better sitting up and standing than when I’m laying down, so I guess I’ll rest while in the chair and not the bed.
It’s somewhat ironic that I hardly got sick during the pandemic, but seem to be on a once-per-year pace since then (which admittedly is still less than what I experienced before).
Yesterday, my throat was sore and that was both annoying and exhausting. Today the throat feels better, but the bug has moved into my nose, which alternates between runny and sneezy. It’s also in my chest already, so there’s some coughing for good measure. This seems to be faster than usual, so I’m hoping I’m feeling back to normal relatively soon.
Yep, I did indeed have that funny feeling in my throat manifest into a full-on sore throat, and expect it to spread to my sinuses and chest in due time, because it’s never just a sore throat.
I have no idea where I might have caught the virus, because I am pretty anti-people. Maybe I touched something virus-laden, then touched an eyeball or shoved all five fingers into my mouth. Anyway, bleah.
This also means I’ll have to wait to recover to get a flu shot, which scores irony points, if nothing else.
UPDATE, The next morning: Yep, I have a 100% genuine sore throat. I'd like to hope it's just a sore throat, I'll deal with it, recover and move on, but I know the reality is more likely to be:
- Virus moves into sinuses - Virus moves into chest - Virus hits hard for 3–4 days, then lingers for a week or two after
I am resigned to my fate. At least my watch gave me a rest day.
Late this afternoon, my nose and throat began feeling funny in that, “You may be coming down with something!” way, despite not going anywhere or near anyone that would presumably get me sick. Viruses are funny things. I’m hoping this is just a passing whatever, and I’ll be back to being A-OK and healthy tomorrow morning.
If not, I will update and probably post a GIF of a cat sneezing or something.
View from Cariboo Dam, pre-run. Looks summery, felt like fall.
Two things I wasn’t as a teenager.
My goals today were:
Start a bit earlier
Pretty much maintain the same easier pace as Monday
Get back before possible showers
I achieved two out of three. But it’s not what you might expect.
I got my Garmin Forerunner 255 about two years ago (November 2022) and it has been tracking my runs dutifully since. Today I got two new records on it, one for fastest 1K and another for fastest 5K. How did this happen? I’m not entirely sure!
When I headed out, I mulled just doing the river trail, in a sort of “just get it done” way. Someone had a large dog off-leash, though, and though the dog seemed well-behaved, they can act differently/squirrelly when you are running, so I kept walking to the lake. I initially chose to do a short loop clockwise, but partly through it, and with the skies actually mostly sunny, I decided to just keep going and did a regular 5K.
My first surprise came at the 1K mark, with a pace of 5:33/km, much zippier than expected. My second km was 5:39/km, but the surprises just kept coming. I must emphasize that I was not trying to run faster at all. Conditions were obviously better (the performance rating for the run was +3) and temperatures were lower at 13-14C (which is perfectly comfortable for a run), but still.
The fourth km came in at 5:26/km, which made my eyebrows pop in surprise, possibly with a cartoon sound effect. I normally push just a little for the final stretch, and my last km came in at 5:19/km–the record 1K pace.
The overall pace was 5:30/km, which is 16 full seconds faster than Monday’s run. Which is a lot.
I obviously didn’t encounter any issues during the run. I did encounter other runners, including a topless guy (I mean, 13-14C is fine, but I’m not sure I’d want to do it topless) and the spitfire (technically post-run). My legs felt slightly stiff toward the end of the walk back, but seem fine as I type this. We’ll find out tomorrow.
For now, I will bask in this brief moment of glory.
For some reason it lists the pace here as 5:32/km, but it was totes 5:30.Still Creek, post-run, looking to the west(ish).
Stats:
Run 893 Average pace: 5:30/km (record with Garmin Forerunner 255) Training status: Strained1 Location: Burnaby Lake Start: 11:04 a.m. Distance: 5.03 km Time: 27:39 Weather: Mostly sunny Temp: 13-14°C Humidity: 82-80% Wind: light BPM: 153 Weight: 167.3 Total distance to date: 6,325 km Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Music, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation) Shoes: HOKA Speedgoat 6 (110/215/325)
Strained is defined as “Your training load is optimal, but your HRV status indicates accumulated fatigue. Be sure to give yourself enough time to recover.” ↩︎
UPDATE, October 10, 2024: I manually updated after checking this morning and finding the phone had not updated on its own yet again. I kind of wished I'd waited, though, because I'm curious if the phone would have never updated again without me forcing it.
For the past few days, my iPhone 12 has been sending me notifications about an impending iOS update. Just make sure the phone is locked and has enough power, and it will happen automagically, it says (this is the state my phone is in when I plug it in to charge every night as I go to bed).
It never happens.
But like a scene from Groundhog Day, the notification keeps repeating, promising an update tonight.
Maybe tonight will be that night.
Update Scheduled. I believe you, iPhone1I don’t believe you at all, you dirty filthy liar!
In previous times, I’ve always ended up tapping Update Now, but this time I think I’m going to wait and see what happens if I don’t intervene. I’m feeling adventurous! Updates on the update soon™.
Another excuse to post an old-timey typewriter photo. Photo by Min An.
Short: I still haven’t found one.
Longer: The ones I’ve tried so far don’t have the right level of flexibility and customization that I want.
There are a lot of blogging platforms out there and they all excel at letting you put words onto the internet.
But I want more than words. I am a visual person, so I like including photos, images and things. Some blogging sites focus only on words, some allows images with limits, but very few seem to just let you freely mix both with abandon.
I want abandon.
Ghost probably comes the closest, but it’s $9/month (US, so closer to $12 per month for me) and that’s the basic plan, which doesn’t even let you use custom themes.
There’s Blogtastic, which sounds good on paper, but there’s no way to try it out other than paying, and I have enough doubts about performance, etc. to hesitate.
Beyond that is the world of static site generators, but I don’t want to host, configure and deal with backend nonsense. I do enough of that now. I just want to post words and pictures, to do so at reasonable cost and in a way that lets me relatively easily export my work if I decide to pull up stakes.
Summary: I continue to ponder. I am feeling an urge to start some kind of more focused writing project, though. Maybe I should just write a short story. 😛
