Wednesday, August 25, 2021

Inbox Purge

I've been getting notices from gmail for a while now, informing me, oh so politely, that I am getting close to my storage limit, and would I like to purchase more storage now or later? 

Keeping a clean inbox has not been a priority for me in the last... ten years or so. Maybe twelve. So I finally started clearing things out. I started with the social folder, full of Twitter updates that I rarely glance at and even more rarely click through. Purged that completely. Then I purged the promotions folder. That was harder, because there's a part of me that always wonders about saving something for future use. But I did it. Bye bye all you old promotions. 

Of course, the promotions section is a relatively new feature. So, my original inbox still has a ton of "promotions" related emails, especially in the older section. Oh, yes, to give some context, I was over 17,000 unread emails in my Inbox, and there were even more unread in the promotions folder. Inbox Zero is not my style. 

I was reluctant to wholesale delete even old emails in the main inbox, and so I have been going through them, oldest to newest, 100 emails at a time, to make sure I only delete crap like old receipts and adverts, and keep the good stuff like pictures of my nieces. It's a slow process, but I made more progress than I thought I would in just half an hour, so it's not hopeless. And it will give me the breathing space to rearrange things. See, I need to move this blog onto my website, and then I'll be hosting all the photos over there instead of inside my gmail account. That's another one of those things that is going to take a large investment of concentrated effort, but that will pay off in the long run. 

I just need to carve out the time to actually get that done, and then put a redirect post here and boom! No more uploading pictures to my gmail account in order to post them. Instead, I'll start putting pressure on the storage limits of the website :D

Wednesday, August 18, 2021

Hockey!

The other day, I opened up my NHL app on my phone to see what other roster changes the Blackhawks had been working out besides the big Fleury deal. I hadn't opened it in quite a while, and I was surprised to find a notification that the streaming service for out of market games had changed. No longer would I be paying NHLTV for the privilege of watching most out of market games; instead, the new option would be to subscribe to ESPN+.

At first, I felt a touch of dread, because my husband has an aversion to subscribing to new streaming services. He figures between the ones that we've got, we should have plenty to watch. And that's true, but there are some times that I'd like to watch shows that aren't available on our services. At any rate, my dread proved unfounded. If ESPN+ is how we get hockey, then we subscribe to ESPN+. 

I went ahead and bought a full year's subscription, since it would be at a discounted rate over the month to month. And either way it would be cheaper than the NHLTV subscription. Not only because it was a lower dollar amount, but because we would be getting more than just hockey. Sure, most of the sports also available don't particularly interest us, but there will probably be occasions where I find something cool. 

Now, if only they'd just realize that I don't actually have any local teams and stop blacking out Colorado and Las Vegas. Or at least don't block Seattle for the inaugural season. I think it's ridiculous that teams over 500 miles away are considered my local teams for the purposes of blackouts. I know the rationale, with the regional sports networks needing to be sold on satellite and cable, but it's annoying. 

And I'm definitely curious about how the Kraken are going to do. I didn't see as many big names on their draft as I did on Vegas'. Especially concerning was the lack of a capable veteran goalie. I'm thinking the other teams learned their lessons from Vegas' aggressive approach and made sure Seattle didn't get similar largesse. 

I've checked out the live streaming quality on ESPN+ with soccer. I figured baseball was too slow to give a comparison for hockey, but soccer should be close. It seemed to get a little choppy when the shot zoomed in on fast action, but I had to be looking closely for it. Next up will be the preseason. I sure hope the Delta variant doesn't create problems for this year's hockey season. 

Wednesday, August 11, 2021

It's a Pain

I've been feeling off for a while now. Off enough that I did go to the doctor's office, and I will be getting some diagnostic stuff done, but that won't be for another few weeks. In the meantime, I'm just trying to deal with it. 

It's more difficult to deal with than usual, because I don't know what's wrong and I don't know how to fix it. I feel like my brain is not operating at its normal speed. I'm losing track of things that I don't usually lose. I fumble and bumble. There's a near constant lump in my throat and pain behind my sternum. My abdomen is a basket of random pains that strike on their mysterious whims. 

Part of the abdominal pain is premenstrual right now, and that makes things even worse, because I'm emotional and I know it. And it's perfectly normal for me to be in pain during my period, right? 

One thing that bugged me when I went to the dr's office was that I mentioned easing myself back into eating a bit more fiber, some fruits so I'm not going totally fiber free. And she said, essentially, that my IBS and gastroparesis were permanent and I needed to keep that in mind. 

At the time, I didn't reply, but later I wished I had. I wished I had looked at her with incredulity and asked if she had, unbeknownst to me, discovered the sure cause of my condition, and proven that I had IBS. And, since she now knew this for a fact, I would most certainly be interested in how she came to this miraculous conclusion. 

Probably for the best that I didn't say anything. 

If anything, doing the experiment with the laxatives has shown me that my body does not react like I expected, based on what I'd read about IBS. They should have just worked, but they didn't. I've stopped them for now, though I'm still drinking a can of old fashioned prune juice each evening. It seemed like the right thing to do after I had a bout of diarrhea. 

I went to work on Monday even though I really didn't want to. I wanted to stay in bed. Instead, I went in and spent a very active day moving my office. It doesn't seem right to take a sick day when I don't know what's wrong, and when I couldn't do anything for myself other than rest in bed. I rested all weekend. I slept over 10 hours Saturday night! 

I'm trying to troubleshoot this, but I'm not finding anything that has a particular affect on how I'm feeling. Caffeine, pain killers, antacids, more sleep, rest, exercise, more water... My head doesn't feel quite right, but I'm capable of doing everything I need to do. I can drive and work. Ride my bike. Run. 

So I'll need to find and try different things since the things that I've tried have had no effect. Always good to get it out on the page. To write out the problem often brings the solution into greater clarity. For me at least. 

Wednesday, August 4, 2021

The Time for Writing

I've got two books now that I'm working on. There's this year's Hike with Me, which will be called Idaho Centennial Trail Frank Church Finale. I figured calling it Part 3 would imply that more parts could follow, so I settled on Finale as the best indicator of triumphant completion. Then there's my other book that I've been chewing on for nearly a year now. Kind of self help, kind of philosophy, mostly about creating a framework for self improvement. 

I haven't made much headway on either of them in the last month. I've been writing in fits and starts. Mostly fits. My mind is getting easily distracted by my body's woes. I use my willpower to focus enough on work to get that done, but then I hardly have any left to focus on my personal writing work. 

My tummy has been rough for most of the summer. I got a new issue of throat gunk, which turned into tonsil stones while I was hiking through the Frank, and then cleared up briefly only to return, along with something like heartburn, despite a course of Prilosec. The sensations are painful, but during the day I can ignore it in favor of doing other things. It's at night that I run into problems, because I'm trying to empty my mind and relax and the painful sensations just get louder as my mind gets quieter. 

I have a pretty good writing set up at home now, and I need to actually utilize it. I need to carve out time and energy for getting my butt in the chair. Otherwise, I'll never read Ambrose's or Bill's accounts of the trip! See, I don't want to read theirs before I write mine, lest I steal a turn of phrase or forget something important to me. Also, it serves as a bit of an incentive to get to writing. 

But I don't expect that I'll finish my writing before November. That's my typical schedule. I will need to start focusing on it at some point to get that done, but there doesn't need to be urgency yet. If I'm not making headway by September, I'm going to have to institute a minimum word count per day. That usually does the trick of getting my butt in the chair for enough time each day to do the work.