We Rise Again.

I’m fairly confident I made the right call with my shoulder. I’m just over two weeks in and I can take my sling off for periods and quite easily put my hand on my head now. I put the sling back on as soon as I have to move about, or I forget and, for instance, grab the handrail going down the stairs. That is definitely not a good thing to do. The way it’s going I’m fairly sure the doctor will sign me fit for work on the 10th. My shoulder droop is no longer so pronounced. I’ve still got a lump and my poorly shoulder is a bit lower than the other one, but now it isn’t so sore I can come to attention and the difference isn’t massive.

In other good news my sister’s sciatica seems to be on the mend. She’s got a hospital appointment with a specialist in Liverpool on the 10th of February as well. Hopefully they’ll be able to numb her up while she fully mends. She wants to get back to work. She’s been stuck at home since November, until recently too done in to get out. I’d have gone mad. She says her back isn’t bothering her anymore and the electric shocks up her leg are really improving. She said her leg is 50% now. That’s good. I’ve told her I’ll go running with her to build up her back muscles. She wasn’t enthusiastic.

I’ve been keeping up with my bike training. It’s not fun, like The Sufferfest. They were shouting at you, encouraging you and making in-jokes. Trainer Road is just a bunch of boring blocks.

The blocks are the power, or more accurately, the resistance. The horizontal line is my maximum sustainable power (FTP). The yellow line is the power I’m putting out, the red line is my heart rate. So you ride along for 2 minutes at, say, 120 watts, then it goes up a step and the trainer moves the resistance up to 140W etc. The big blocks are 95- 98% of my FTP, the spikes which are only 5 seconds on this particular workout, are 150%. I looked at this one and thought “That looks do-able. 5 seconds!Ha!” Another one that nearly killed me. The 5 seconds burns your legs then you have to carry on at more or less your maximum for 2 minutes then do it again. By the final block I was hanging on by a thread.

But this is how you improve. And how I stay sane while I’m housebound and can’t do anything with my arm.

We’ve been getting weird symptoms again. We went for a Covid test, but it was negative. It could be Long Covid, or some weird other bug. It keeps on giving us sore throats and bits of weakness, with the insatiable hunger. Though the last could just be my bored gluttony. On the bright side, it’s nothing like the wipe-you-out bouts we were getting. It’s just weird and unpleasant.

I’ve read more books in the last two weeks than in the 2 years prior. It seems it’s not the internet shortening our attention spans, it’s badly written books not engaging them. The one book that was really good I got at dinner time and had finished the next day. The other was meh. And the one I’m 450 pages into is OK, but it’s aged badly. It was only written in 1982, but they say nothing ages faster than the future. The tech is obviously sub par, but it’s the attitudes that really date it. I thought it was a ’50s book. Women are there to cook and mend, for the men to protect, and to be a romantic interest. It’s a bit creepy. Before these books I reread The Lord of the Rings. It feels wrong to say it about such a great story, but all that forelock tugging, knee bending, king worshiping, and purity of blood stuff was hard for me to bear this time around.

This is a generally strange time. I can’t do anything, but as soon as I’m well I have a bunch of time sensitive jobs that all need doing at once. Which makes the waiting around, doing nothing, even worse. Ho hum. That’s tomorrow’s problem.

The plus side of being bored witless is I’ve not missed a thing on Twitter.

The Trump / neo nazi coup attempt rumbled on.

Back home the Tories got tough on Covid.

But sadly too little too late.

But the home schooling parents took it well.

Another Tory scandal was the free school meals for the most desperate of kids who would otherwise have to do without. The Tories stopped giving out vouchers and gave one of their mates a contract to supply the kids with food. The company promptly stole 80% of the taxpayer’s money and left the kids to starve.