When life gives you lemons…

You throw those lemons at people you don’t like.

Just kidding.

The other day I was in the grocery store, buying groceries, as one does, and I was in the pie filling aisle. I can’t actually think of the proper name for the aisle. Baking goods, maybe? Anyway, it’s where the cans of pie filling were and it made me sad because while they had many expected flavors (cherry, blueberry and the yuckfest known as mincemeat), the best one of all was missing: raisin.

I love raisin pie. But I can’t remember the last time I had raisin pie because they have become like a unicorn. When I lived downtown, I used to buy these “individual” sized raisin pies at Super Valu for $1.99 or something. They were so very yummy. I also by coincidence weighed close to 200 pounds.

Since those halcyon days, I have found it increasingly rare to find raisin pie and today it seems to have vanished entirely. Sure, there’s apple pie, and it’s good, but it’s not the same. There are no raisins in apple pie.

Even if I wanted to make my own, stores don’t seem to sell premade raisin pie filling, as noted above. I suppose I could make raisin pie from scratch. I could also wash my clothes by beating them on stones at the river, too. There are some things I’m just not likely to do.

So for now and perhaps forever, I shall lament the loss of the raisin pie.

My life as a plank of wood -or- Another trip to the emergency room, November 2019 edition

This past Monday was Remembrance Day. While others were out paying respects to those who fought in all those great wars, I was at home, sitting on the bed, getting ready for a run. When I hopped off the bed, I felt a strange and unpleasant twinge in my lower back. I had spontaneously pulled a muscle. I’m pretty sure this is the same one I’ve spontaneously pulled before. I’m also pretty sure I know why this happens, but more on that in a bit.

The pain was immediate and my mobility curtailed just as swiftly. No bending, no stooping, no anything without being reminded that my back was no longer operating normally. I decided to take a Robax and suffer quietly. I went to work the next day. My suffering became less quiet. I took the following day off to actually give the back time to recover.

Fast-forward to Friday afternoon. The lower back is still a bit sore, which is annoying, but tolerable, and it’s not stopping me from doing things other than lifting heavy items, which I generally don’t want to do, anyway. I am planning to do a run on Sunday.

Before dinner I prop myself on the bed and color some of my sketches on the iPad. This is very soothing and relaxing. As I am doing this, the back muscle starts talking. At first it’s a murmur, but it becomes more insistent. I finally get up and now instead of feeling a little sore, it feels more like a pinched nerve, radiating waves of constant pain. This, I think, is not a good start to the weekend.

Apparently laying on the bed was a very bad idea. Who knew beds were so bad for you? (Our bed is kind of terrible, really. You almost need to leap to get onto it, for one thing.) I muddle through dinner. I take some Advil. I later take a T3. When I finally fall asleep I dream that I am flying, which is not entirely inaccurate based on my current medicated state.

By morning the pain has not diminished, and while I don’t think it’s an actual pinched nerve, there is no doubt it is hurting a lot more than before. I have breakfast and go to the nearby walk-in clinic. They tell me they can see me at 3 p.m., which is four hours hence. I imagine even the worse case scenario at the Emergency room won’t take that long, so I cross the street to Royal Columbian.

The triage area is curiously quiet. There are no injured people there spouting blood or holding out mangled hands. No one is barfing. An old man seems confused and I show him where to stand to be called forward. I am next after him. I answer all the questions, they take my blood pressure, temperature and tag me. When asked for allergies, I say, “Penicillin, sulfa and another antibiotic I can’t remember, but would recognize the name if I saw it.” The nurse consults my file to check. It describes my allergies thusly: “Penicillin. And more.” We give each other a look.

A young guy paces past saying to someone/no one that he is positive he is having a heart attack. He looks surprisingly hale for someone having a heart attack. I think I see a band on his wrist, so he’s already checked in, or has already been seen and is back, possibly due to the alleged heart attack. He wanders out again.

I am told to go to the Zone 2 waiting area. This is new to me, but it’s just another waiting area around the corner. There is a door to Zone 2 that requires a keycard and a sign that says a nurse will let you in shortly. I wait.

There are a few other people here, but I am again struck at how quiet it is for a weekend. The entrance where I came in is in view over to my right. I look out on the soggy gray day and the heart attack guy wanders in again, talking about the heart attack he is having. An intern and two security officers arrive and they all go through the sliding doors outside to discuss the heart attack. The heart attack guy leaves at the end of the discussion. Or maybe he goes around the hospital and sneaks back in through a different entrance.

A nurse takes me into Zone 2. I wonder how many zones there are. I again sit and wait, but this time there are no others in the chairs beside me. Conveniently there is a sign that tells me exactly where in the process I am and what steps lie ahead. Across the hall from me is an exam room with a number of beds and the curtains that provide a modicum of privacy. Another nurse waves me in to the leftmost bed, and tells me to take off my clothes, emphasizing that I do not need to remove my underwear. I can only imagine the stories. I put my clothes in a provided bag, put on the always-stylish hospital gown, have it sexily slide off one shoulder, gingerly try to make it fit better (remember, nearly every movement at this point is causing pain), then finally sit on the edge of the bed and wait for the doctor.

On the other side of the curtain is the old man I was directing earlier. He talks about burping a lot. I can’t quite tell what his issue is, but it seems related to not pooping because the doctor is telling him to make sure to drink lots of water and put some bran and green vegetables in his diet so he can go regularly. He mentions Metamucil as a last resort. He asks the old guy if he is feeling better now, and the old guy says yes. I am perhaps relieved (ho ho) to not get the exact details on why he feels better now. They then seem to repeat most of the conversation for reasons unknown.

The doctor comes in, asks me a bunch of questions, including if I have difficulty peeing or pooping. I say no to the former and that I hadn’t done the latter. I think he thought I hadn’t done the latter since Monday, which would be alarming. I assured him that I was “irregularly regular” (whatever that means) and that seemed good enough for him. He then did some pulling and prodding on my hands, arms, feet and legs. The left leg pull nearly caused a technicolor explosion to go off in my brain, as apparently the afflicted muscle directly connects to whatever muscles were being stretched in the left leg.

He said I had muscle spasms and gave me a prescription for an anti-inflammatory, and a pain reliever. He told me if I moved a lot, it would hurt more. Very logical. He told me to avoid laying down, as the muscle would stiffen. Also logical. I thanked him, got dressed and bumbled around for five minutes, walking into various rooms before finding my way back to the entrance. Some of these rooms were very close to people-holding-out-mangled-hands but I averted my eyes to avoid mental trauma to go with my physical trauma.

I headed to Save On Foods to get the prescription, and cookies.

While waiting at the pharmacy counter, a guy came up to me and asked a question.

It was the heart attack guy. He pointed to a shelf and asked which aspirin was the correct type to take if you were having a heart attack, because he was having a heart attack. He was actually pointing at the correct aspirin, so I confirmed this, he said thanks, gave me a fist bump and presumably paid for the aspirin and will go on to live a fruitful life.

I got my drugs and cookies and went home.

At home I discovered the pain killer is an opioid and it comes with a full sheet of dire warnings and precautions that basically amount to “BE CAREFUL WITH THIS KILLER MEDICINE, PAL.” The sheet mentions horrible side effects, addiction and uses the word “death” multiple times. I took one of these deadly opioid pills and my brain mushroomed through my skull and I saw the universe as I never have before.

Actually, nothing happened. It took awhile to kick in and now that it has, the pain is muted a bit, though that could also be the much less scary anti-inflammatory. I vow not to operate any heavy equipment, though, out of respect for all the dire warnings. We’ve hidden the keys to the bulldozer.

As I type this, I feel better than I did this morning and am cautiously hopeful that tomorrow will not be too bad, though there is no way in heck I will be running. I might look at treadmills, though. I’ve also promised to revive this year’s resolution to start stretching. I will be setting a stretch goal, if you will, because as the title suggests, I am as flexible as a plank of wood, and these sorts of muscle pulls/spasms are likely due to how inflexible I am. I need to stretch out. Literally. And I will.

Soon™.

In the meantime, I am quietly grateful that this emergency room visit was so surprisingly not bad. And I hope heart attack guy is okay.

Is it time to officially lose lose?

Seriously, I think I can count the number of times someone used “loose” correctly (instead of “lose”) in the last 20 years on one hand.

“I’m afraid I will loose my keys.”

“If you loose something, go to the Lost & Found to find it.”

” I can’t risk loosing any e-mails or data.”

The last one I actually saw today. The battle is over and lose has lost. Loose is the new lose. Time to update, Oxford and Merriam-Webster!*

* at which point people will start using loose and lose correctly again

Book review: We Sold Our Souls

We Sold Our Souls

We Sold Our Souls by Grady Hendrix

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Funny, gruesome, breathlessly paced, and with a loving, near-reverent tone toward its subject matter–metal–We Sold Our Souls chronicles what happens when a little known metal band signs away more than it bargained for on a fateful night in 1998.

The protagonist is 47 year old Kris Pulaski, one-time lead guitarist and writer for a metal band called Durt Work. Kris and the other members of the band are enticed into signing a contract late one night by their lead singer Terri Hunt, aka The Blind King, giving away a lot more than they suspected in the process. The night’s events end in tragedy and the dissolution of Durt Wurk.

Jumping forward to 2019, the story picks up when Hunt decides to reunite with his successor band, Koffin, for a final tour. Intrigued and unsettled by the tour, Kris begins putting together what really happened on that fateful night in 1998 and the story kicks into high gear, barreling relentlessly toward an inevitable but entertaining conclusion.

Ending each chapter with an epistolary snippet that uses radio shows and news reports to foreshadow or chronicle events, Hendrix presents a story in which the power of metal and music in general is literal, and which can be used to fight against evil, or to at least to hold it at bay. In this case, the evil is something called Black Iron Mountain, an entity Kris wrote about without understanding its implications on Dürt Würk’s album Troglodyte. As forces array to stop her, Kris tries to warn and then enlist the members of her former band before Koffin completes its shows and very bad things happen.

Kris gets pulled through the ringer and there are scenes featuring gory action that recall the pulp horror of the 70s and 80s–a subject Hendrix explored at length in the delightful Paperbacks From Hell. I found one scene (minor spoiler) in which Kris works her way through an increasingly claustrophobic tunnel to be especially vivid, perfectly capturing the suffocating despair one might feel in such a space.

We sold Our Souls is both a love letter to heavy metal and the freedom and power of being in a band, of doing your own thing, of having an axe and using it to make your mark on the world, and a perversely funny take on “What if every conspiracy theory turned out to be true?”

The prose at times is laid on thick, but it fits perfectly with the over-the-top, larger-than-life world of metal (and seemingly demonic forces) it depicts. Kris is a hero you will want to cheer for and see succeed, and We Sold Our Souls is a terrific old school work of horror.

View all my reviews

Bad Design: Apple’s iOS Photos app

The Photos app Apple has is roughly the same on all of its devices, if you are on the latest version of the device’s OOS–in this case I refer to iOS 13.x, iPad OS 13.x and macOS 10.15x (Catalina), but for this post I am specifically referring to the iPhone version.

Generally for looking over your photos, sharing them with friends, cursed social media or other apps, the Photos app works well enough. iOS 13 even adds a surprisingly robust set of editing tools, so the typical user will never need to use another app to apply hideous, Instagram-style filters. Smiles all around, as they say.

But let’s say you want to do something like duplicate the photo, because you want to keep two copies–the original, and the version you have applied hideous Instagram-style filters to. Let’s take this image of me holding a bottle of delicious Clubhouse La Grille Signature Steakhouse marinade. This marinade is so good I want to, I don’t know, add stars to the image or something. So I tap on the square with the arrow pointing up. This opens the share sheet, which gives you options for sharing the photo (and lots of other stuff).

And here you can see some share options (I have obscured two AirDrop contacts in keeping with Apple’s much-ballyhooed privacy). This is mostly a list of other apps. Where’s the ability to copy, duplicate or do other things? They are not here. I am very sad.

But wait, those options are actually here. Do you see the sliver of white at the bottom of the screenshot, with the rounded corners? That’s the rest of the interface, almost completely obscured from view. In fact, if you wiggle the page slightly you can make that small visible portion completely vanish, while still showing everything above it. This is bad design.

If I swipe down I get so many additional options I have to swipe again to see all of them. This is what the first swipe gets me on an iPhone 8:

This is a perfectly clear, usable list of options. Apple has listed everything in plain text with a little icon for easy visual scanning. This is all really nice–if you actually scroll down and find it.

Obscure UI is something that has been discussed a lot with the touch interfaces used on phones and tablets. Without the “traditional” scrollbars, arrows and so on, a lot of the options you may have at your disposal are effectively hidden like treasure, waiting to be uncovered by swiping or long-pressing or tapping x number of fingers on the screen, or something else entirely. Some suggest that Apple’s own 3D Touch (or Force Touch) was removed on the 2019 phones (replaced by “Haptic Touch”, which is just a long press with a bit of vibration attached to it) because no one knew it existed. Most discovered it by accident–by pressing harder than needed for a long press and invoking the 3D Touch pop-up.

3D Touch is pretty handy once you know to look for it, but even then it’s not a system-wide feature. Apps don’t have to support it, and since Apple always sold phones that didn’t include it, a lot of app developers ignored it. And now it’s gone, with a lot of people never knowing it existed.

But back to the Photos app–burying a long list of options at the bottom of a page is not a bad thing in itself. Where Apple fumbles here is not giving the user any concrete visual clue that the options are even there. A few obvious fixes come to mind:

  • Add a “More options…” button to the initial photo screen. Currently there are three choices: Share sheet, Favorite and Trash. They could squeeze in another icon here.
  • Another choice would be to add it after tapping the Share sheet icon. And look! Do you see at the top where it clearly says Options already? You might think that’s where you would find all of these extra options. But instead it’s where you find exactly two options concerning sending the photo as “automatic”/an individual photo/iCloud link and whether to include location/all photo data. The additional options could simply be added here. But this has two problems of its own: it adds an extra tap to get to the options, and it doesn’t necessarily address the original issue, which is the options not being clearly visible.
  • A third choice, then, is to make the additional options more obvious. One way would be to turf the AirDrop contacts, since there’s already an AirDrop button and I suspect people are not AirDropping photos all over the place, anyway (I could be wrong). This would leave enough room for the list of other options to be more visible.
  • A fourth choice would be to provide a visual indicator that there are more options available if you swipe up. This could be done several ways:
    • Adding a scroll bar. This will never ever happen.
    • Adding a floating arrow pointing down to indicate you can swipe to see more. This has the advantage of being something that could be used universally, much like scrollbars.
    • Some other visual indicator that I haven’t thought of. Let’s face it, I’m not a UX/UI designer, I just know bad design when I see it.

I have no expectations that Apple will move away from the “obscure gesture” interface. One need only look at iPad OS to see how, if anything, they have embraced it even more. There are now large swathes of the iPad interface that most people don’t know about–and never will. This is in part due to obscurity, but also in part due to questionable interface choices. But that’s a whole other post. Soon™.

Promotions gone horribly not-quite-right

Two I’ve seen lately.

First up, Microsoft wants you to get a Surface Laptop 3…maybe never? As of this post, trying to order some Surface devices from the Microsoft Store site still gives Invalid Date for when you might receive them. This seems to be related to new Surface devices, so maybe the store is just reflecting the general glitch level of the new Surface devices.

Next is this promotion to get a flu shot. Every time I look at this it reads to me as FU season is here! Which, if you end up getting the flu, is perhaps not an inaccurate way to describe it.

Run 642: Two weeks later, two seconds slower

Run 642
Average pace: 5:52/km
Location: Burnaby Lake (CCW)
Start: 10:33 am
Distance: 10.03 km
Time: 58:47
Weather: Sunny
Temp: 6-7ºC
Humidity: 84%
Wind: light
BPM: 160
Weight: 169.1 pounds
Total distance to date: 4820 km
Devices: Apple Watch Series 5, iPhone 8
Shoes: Saucony Switchback ISO (180 km)

I did not run last weekend for various reasons that I sum up as runner ennui, a term I just made up now. The weather was nice, I just lacked any motivation at all. I can’t even say I was feeling lazy, I just felt a total lack of ambition.

This weekend, the weather was again nice, but chilly, so I donned my layers and headed out, taking advantage of the (still dumb) switch back to Pacific Standard Time. Although I left around 9:45 a.m. it felt more like 10:45 a.m., which worked to my advantage.

As it was sunny, the lake was packed full of people, including a large number of runners, many running in pairs or small groups. I generally navigated most of these groups fine, but there were a few near-misses thanks to the ever-baffling lack of situational awareness that some people exhibit, even though they have functioning eyes and presumably functioning brains. In one instance two girls stood off to the side of the trail. A half second later I would have passed, but one of the girls, even though she saw me, still chose to step out into my path rather than wait that half second, then seemed confused about what she had done. Baffling!

A group of four runners were running abreast of each other, taking up the entire width of the trail. The one on my side moved very slightly in, giving me barely enough room, because falling back for a moment is apparently an inconceivable horror. I don’t understand people.

A family of cyclists were camped out on the Still Creek bridge with one of the kids having some issue or another. They were close to the trail exit, so I said nothing and just moved around them. Another cyclist, riding fast and not paying much attention, caught me by surprise at a corner and left me sufficiently stunned by the near-collision that I didn’t even know how to react. I finally turned my head around and mumbled something about no bikes allowed. He was long gone.

But enough about the weird, crowdy people. As mentioned, it was cool, but I wore two layers and warmed up quickly. I chose a modest pace, stuck to it and only felt a bit of a stick in my lower-left side for a few minutes early on, before it went away. My fastest pace was the final km, at 5:41, edging the start by one second. Generally I felt good and the trail was in good shape, other than the marshy area past the fields, which was filled with puddles and generally damp despite no recent rain. Maybe the swamp is backing up. This is one of the last areas that really needs to be resurfaced.

The best part may be my BPM dropping back to 160, which is a full 21 beats lower than the previous, rainy run. I can’t say for sure with only a single data point, but it would seem cold + rain = heart works a lot harder, where cold alone doesn’t have as much effect.

Overall, a solid effort and about what I was expecting. I am actively looking at treadmills, so here’s hoping I can continue runs indoors now that the standard time perpetual dark mode™ has been enabled for the next four months.

NaNoWriMo 2019, Negative Day 2

Here it is, the second day of NaNoWriMo and I haven’t written a thing.

It feels great. So much time to do other stuff. I went to Costco today and bought a 20 liter jar of mayonnaise.

I am thinking I should keep up on the drawing now, because it’s fun and relaxing. But what to do? Possibilities:

  • Finish that book on learning how to sketch
  • Go back to one of the earlier Inktobers and do all of its prompts, either one per day or following whatever whimsical order I decide
  • Go back to my 2019 prompts and fix/rework the ones I’m not happy with or just try coloring all of them like Ted Turner
  • Start a gum gum person comic
  • Something else
  • Or maybe write something, just not something for NaNoWriMo

A lot of possibilities. I will choose by…tomorrow.