Summit Fever

When you're doing a long climb, or even just a long hike, "summit fever" is a real problem. It's a pretty easy trap to fall into. You've been through so much, trudged ahead for so long, and you are so close, that you get it in your head that this is it, dammit, I'm gonna make it, no matter what.

That mindset leads people to do stupid things and take risks they normally wouldn't. The classic problem is being close to the top of a mountain, but knowing that storms are coming in. The rational decision is to turn around, but your brain has summit fever, so you can't even imagine turning around this close to the top. People die this way in the mountains.

My own personal summit fever is striking on my living room expedition. Since I can use the crutches more easily now, and even drive a car, I feel like it's time to get back to life. Specifically, get back to work. I am not allowed to drive while on Vicodin; technically, that's DUI. And it's a good rule, too, because Vicodin definitely messes me up.

So, all I needed to do was stop taking Vicodin, and I could drive myself to work! Simple! I did just that, and it turned out I wasn't quite ready for it. I was at work for five or six hours, got some things done, and then realized I really needed to head home and take some damn Vicodin. My leg was hurting and the lower half was numb. Evidently, sitting in a non-lazy boy chair is too much exertion for me.

It's sad, really. It's not like my job is physically demanding. I don't clock in and wrestle bears for eight hours. The vast majority of my day is sitting in a chair and typing. It's pretty humbling that I am not up to that level of exertion yet.

But I am close. Saw the physical therapist yesterday, and he wiggled my leg back and forth and had me do various stretches. My hip moves a LOT more than I thought it would, which was great. On the other hand, the very simple exercises we did left me desperate for the Vicodin again. Sigh.

The good thing is that I can do work from home. I actually got quite a bit done in the last few days. I have a connection into work and can do some programming and simulations, and I can work on presentations and whatnot. Tomorrow I have a couple of meetings, and I'm going to go in for them. But then I'm heading straight back into Vicodin land.

So, although I'm really close to the summit, right now it's time to hunker down in the tent and wait for the storms to pass. That summit isn't going anywhere...

A little too soon...

On Sunday I took no Vicodin, only ibuprofen. I felt well enough to drive myself (in a car with automatic transmission!) to the pharmacy for more ibuprofen, and then to the comic book store. It worked out fairly well, so I decided I could go back to work today.

Oops.

I guess sitting in a normal chair and doing the small amount of walking I was doing was still a bit too much. By 3 or 4 pm my leg was hurting fairly badly and my foot and lower leg, for some reason, were becoming numb. Got home, popped some Vicodin passed out for a while. Now I feel quite a bit better.

Okay, I'll keep working from home for a bit.

Tomorrow: physical therapy begins! Get psyched!

Reducing My Vicodin, Expanding My Horizons

I'm a bit more mobile now, so I've ventured beyond the living room. I actually walked (crutched?) a block to a little restaurant/coffee shop and got my own lunch for once. And last night Anne drove me to a bookstore where I walked around for maybe a half hour and bought some books. Quite the adventures. I may go in to work tomorrow!

This is good, because I am cutting back on my Vicodin as the pain wears off. All in all, this is a good thing, but it also means I'm awake and lucid more often. And that means I am starting to feel very very antsy and bored.

Spam email from my past life...

So this morning I woke up, as usual, because my drugs were starting to wear off. I very carefully pulled the covers off and gingerly lowered my legs over the edge of the bed so I could sit up. Making no quick motions, I leaned over to pull on my shorts. I have to lean in a strange, unnatural way to avoid bending my hip too much. Next was to pick up crutches, and use them to help me stand up slowly, in a way such that all my weight was on my right leg.

As I made my way slowly out of the bedroom, I used the crutches to keep no more than 10% of my weight from coming down on my left side. Moving this way is kind of glacial, but it's better than last week when I had to keep all weight off of it. That was awkward and jarring with each step, and took a lot of energy. The doctor yesterday told me I could start putting a little weight on the bum leg, and it's made life a lot easier.

In this fashion I slowly made it to the bathroom, took more Vicodin, and then to the kitchen. It's a bit awkward to carry things, but I managed to get a cold pack, some trail mix and a soda in my pockets; with just the baggie of trail mix to hang onto in one hand. That hand still controlled a crutch, but the baggie edge fit in there between the crutch handle and my fingers, so it was pretty secure. I was then ready to start out to my final destination: the recliner.

Taking tentative steps, I finally managed to finish this arduous journey; the total length of which, from bed to recliner, was perhaps 25 steps. It had taken me about 35 minutes to move about 35 feet. I was pleasantly pleased that this trek had made me only moderately tired. Because I can put 10% of my weight on the left hip, my crutching gait is much easier. Yesterday morning I reached the recliner totally exhausted. Now I'm just a bit tired.

Shooing a cat out of the seat, I set my things on the table, cautiously lowered my butt into the recliner, lay my crutches down within easy reach, put the cold pack on my hip, and picked up my laptop. There, at the top of my email list, was the most ironic message it would have been possible for me to receive at that moment:

"Subject: ****Registration for the 2010 Bank of America Chicago Marathon Opens February 1"

Video Gaming in the Low Sierra

I've found my Xbox to be pretty damn useful in keeping my sanity. It's not just an activity you can do with little brainpower, it's also a good social venue. I get to say hi to friends and interact with them without having to leave my convalescent abode.

There's also a nice thing to the physical separation. When I'm talking face to face with folks, they all know I have a bum hip and am in a sad state. Online, nobody cares. I can kick somebody's butt in Halo 3, even though physically I am a useless lump. Well, theoretically, at least. Mostly I get my butt kicked. But still...nobody feels sorry for me.

Journey to the Center of the Entertainment

Or, How I Cancelled My Cable And Got Way More TV Shows


Knowing I would be stuck in the living room for a long time, I set about to work on the key piece of survival equipment: the entertainment center. It was in desperate need of updating, for sure. I had a TV that was purchased in about 1997. It was so old that it only had one input: a coax cable connector. So everything I wanted to see on my TV (DVD, video game, cable) had to run through an old VCR that had coax output. Since TV watching was suddenly going to become a much bigger part of my life, it was time to update my living room electronics.

I had basically skipped over several technology revolutions in TV watching. I had never had a Tivo, Blu Ray, a flat panel TV, or any flavor of HDTV. While that may be kind of sad from a techno-lust point of view, it was great now, because it meant I would gain a gigantic leap in entertainment performance for a relatively small sum of money.

Because I was always either working late, climbing, biking or whatnot, I never watched TV during normal viewing hours. I had gotten used to watching TV shows on dvd or downloading and watching them on my computer; usually watching whole seasons that way in few days when it was rainy or I was sick. Since I'm way too impatient to wait a week to see what happens on the next episode, this was great.

Then I got an iPhone, and started using iTunes to download TV shows to watch while flying. Then my Xbox got Netflix online. All the stuff I wanted to watch was becoming rapidly available online. Then one day my brother, a much more serious movie and TV connoisseur, told me he had ditched his cable. He had netflix, and Hulu, and iTunes. He just didn't watch it much anymore. I didn't, either.

And then I read this article in the NY Times.

And then I found out I needed hip surgery, with the associated long recovery time on the couch.

It pretty much all came together. I needed better TV. I could ditch cable and just watch stuff on the internet, with a computer hooked up to my TV. The economics worked out great, too: I was paying $145 per month for cable plus internet. If I just had internet, I could save about $100 per month. In one year, that's $1200 to spend on the gear to build a nicer entertainment center. Integrate over two years, and it's $2400. Integrate over my life and...okay, best not to get carried away.

My expedition partner, Anne, was totally on board with this. But careful research was in order. We had a lot of different formats of entertainment purchased already, and our system had to play them all. We also wanted to be able to control it all a remote, while sitting on the couch. This was a little tricky. If you're using a mouse and keyboard, you can switch from Windows Media Center to iTunes, or activate Boxee or Hulu Desktop or whatever. The people in the NY Times article had given up and bought a fancy remote mouse to control everything. But I was having none of that.

So, what obviously would be best was one program that worked with a remote and could launch everything. Mac? PC? Linux? One of the many entertainment boxes suddenly appearing at Frys? Every option I looked at had problems. One of the biggest sticking points was iTunes. Apple's damn proprietary format would rarely play anywhere else but on iTunes. One of the best ever media center programs, XBMC, used to handle it, but couldn't anymore. This bummed me out, big time, because I had seen XBMC in action on a friend's TV and loved it. It handled everything but iTunes now. Ooh. So close!

And then, Anne's father showed her the thing he had. It was an application called "Plex," it worked on the Mac, and it could seemingly do it all. It could even launch FrontRow, so you could navigate your iTunes videos, and then pop back to watch other formats, and Hulu, and Boxee, all with a remote. Once I tried it out, it all made sense: Plex is XBMC. It's a version ported to the Mac, using the same Python code background, skins, etc.



Plus, it has ready-made apps to watch all the major cable news shows, comedy central, NBC, Hulu, Netflix, Boxee, NPR, PBS, BBC, and God only knows what else. You can control it with an Apple Remote (which is pretty stylish), the Harmony remote, or (and this immediately charmed Anne) via an app on your iPhone.

So now I have a little Mac Mini hooked up to a nice new TV. We ditched our cable, and discovered that Comcast will actually pay you $12 per month to keep the lower 32 channels. That's right; it's $12 more expensive to have only internet.

In the last week we've watched the latest episodes of Big Love, a couple of seasons of Dexter, Mythbusters, Top Gear, and, thanks to Netflix online, all kinds of movies and old TV shows. I've got the current season of House queued up and ready to go as soon as I finish this post.

None of it via our local cable company.

TV as we know it is going away soon. Companies are going to freak out and maybe go out of business. But me? I used to never watch TV. This new, on-demand, a la carte way of watching just what I want is perfect for me. The old joke about "a thousand channels and nothing's on" simply isn't true for me anymore.

Into the Mild

When I first began planning this expedition, I would say things like "I wish I could just sleep through the whole week and wake up with my hip healed." Unconsciousness would make this all easy. All of my preparations were based upon the idea that surviving being awake would be the biggest challenge. Boredom, pain, and frustration were the enemies, and I was figuring out how to deal with them.

Well it turns out I might have been too worried. Two days ago I learned that it was too soon to lower my Vicodin dose, so I boosted it back up. It is no coincidence that my blog output yesterday fell off to almost zero. I have been largely unconscious since then!

I had a visit from my friend Jen, and managed to be awake for all of that, but after she left I took pills, and since then I have basically woken up every four hours just in time to take more pills and fall back to sleep.

It's pretty great.