helen-louise's journal

Richard & I have been really emo this evening. When it's one of us that feels bad, the other one can comfort them; but it seems to be almost impossible when both of us feel bad to simultaneously provide comfort.

Basically - Richard invited me to come with his paintball team to Florida next month, but where they will be staying is the arse end of nowhere with no public transport. So if I went, I'd either be stuck in the villa all day every day, or having to take taxis everywhere - which will cost a small fortune and greatly limit my movements. If they were staying in Orlando, it would be fine - but they stay in "cities" like Davenport and Polk City, which have 1500 permanent residents and then thousands of holiday homes. And Orlando is in the total opposite direction to where they need to go for the paintball tournament (which is literally in the middle of nowhere), so they couldn't even drop me at a bus stop on the way there.

We then proceeded to have a mutual meltdown about how broken I am. Bluh. ( It got long... )

Current state of the h-l: Much the same. Don't have period pain any more, thank $deity, and my gallbladder is behaving itself perfectly well as long as I behave myself perfectly well. (I can eat food with fat in, but not food with very high amounts of fat in or several fatty items in the same 24 hour period. *shrug*. This restriction never bothers me overly much - as long as I can still eat Chinese food with boiled rice, lots of vegetables and juice, I'm fine. I only get annoyed when I can't eat Chinese!). However my chronic fatigue thing is bloody awful. Tired all the time, can't get to sleep at a sensible hour, wake up feeling like I haven't slept at all. Still decidedly snotty. And my knees hurt.

Today I decided to try something a bit different. On the basis that my knees hurt like hell even if all I do is sit around in the house, I decided to give them some gentle exercise by cycling into town instead of getting the bus. Even though it was dark and raining (pitch black at 4pm! Gods, I hate December), I feel distinctly happier. Cycling really is the only exercise I've ever found that gives me an endorphin buzz and it's a useful means of transport as well, wow! And my legs certainly don't hurt any more than they did, and *may* even be slightly better. Please keep prodding me to cycle even when the weather is crap because it does actually make a difference to my moods.

Tomorrow I am going to BU with a "random" person. She is a friend from college who was bemoaning the lack of queer events that are friendly to bisexuals (or to lesbians who sometimes date men). So please be nice to her if you're there, because she wants some more friends.

Still stressed about Christmas. A bit less stressed than I was. Yay.

Lately I've been spending a lot of time in Richmond Park. On Sunday I went cycling with Richard, going from Kingston Gate to Broomfield Hill, then came back via the Isabella Plantation. We saw a Sequoia sempervirens and a Liriodendron tulipifera, recognising them both as "non-native trees". Actually, I even recognised the sequoia as a sequoia, but didn't believe it could be one so far away from home. We stared at the tulip tree for a long time because of its weird leaves. Most trees grow according to the Fibonacci sequence, and I'm used to seeing leaves with 3, 5, 8 or 13 lobes on them. Four is... strange.

Yesterday, artremis came over and we took the 65 bus round to Petersham Gate to see the bunnies and the fallen-over-but-still-alive trees. We walked through the Park to Ham Gate, then a few roads over to get the 371 back home. The bus takes far longer than cycling for some reason.

Today I went cycling, got a bit lost and ended up doing around 9 miles (according to Richard, anyway). If you look at the PDF map of the park, I went from Kingston Gate up Queens Road, then turned right at Ham Gate onto the yellow/red-dotted cycle path until the car park just under the P in the middle. On the way I found the proper cycle entrance to the Isabella Plantation where there are racks (rather than the back entrance we found on Sunday). Then I meant to go on the blue dotted path through Pen Ponds to Pembroke Lodge, but instead carried on the red dotted path past White Lodge until Sheen Cross, then up Sawyer's Hill. I was slightly surprised to end up at Richmond Gate, but it only took 20 minutes from there back to Kingston Gate down the road (instead of the cycle path - it's safe enough, as it was after 9 pm so the car gates were closed). The whole thing took 1 hour & 20 minutes, which I didn't think was bad considering the hills.

I wish more of my local friends were into cycling, because the Park is beautiful and there are lots of car-free paths. Some of them are even properly tarmaced over, so are easy to ride on. Today, they were full of "serious" cyclists who ride all hunched over for streamlining and speed - I suppose it's good for them to have car-free roads to practice on, but it seems sad that they never get to look at the scenery. I was riding deliberately slower than usual because there were too many interesting trees and animals.

The more detailed update from this post. This evening has sucked.

On my way out to a student's house, I noticed that my tricycle tyres were a bit saggy. I had 20 minutes to do a 10 minute journey, so decided to pump them up. However, I managed to rip the inner tube of the first tyre - I think the pump is faulty, as Richard managed to do the same thing some weeks ago. I'd thought he was just being incompetent or didn't know how to use the pump properly, but I do know how to use it. The amazing "selecter" valve that automatically selects Presta or Schraeder is all stripped out. This means I need to write a letter of complaint to the pump company and ask them to replace it, as it's only a few months old and has been used all of 5 times. Bah.

Then the 13cm spanner that Richard had was not long enough to multiply my maximum force enough to budge the nut to change the inner tube. He had longer spanners, but not of the right size. The nut appears to be corroded with some sort of white oxide layer, although it "should" be stainless steel. So I couldn't get the tyre off to put a new inner tube in. This meant I had to walk to my student's house instead of cycle, and walk when I was late and in a hurry. There is nothing that burns through my spoons faster than having to walk a longish distance quickly. I can walk a long distance slowly, or a short distance quickly, but if I have to do both at once I find it exhausting. Also, because cycling is a much more efficient use of muscles than walking, I can cycle at 3-4 times the speed I can walk, and many times the distance. (I have cycled around 10 miles before, and was awake enough afterwards to consider teaching.) Thus a fairly pleasant 10 minute cycle ride becomes 25 minutes of hurrying & pain, not helped by the fact it was relatively damp weather and my bad ankle started screaming at me before I was halfway there. I really do need to consider having some sort of emergency plan for Unexpected Tricycle Failure - except that this type of tricycle failure shouldn't ever occur :/ Fortunately, that student wasn't having a coursework emergency, and was happy to have a shorter lesson this week with the time added on for next.

Then I got home only 10 minutes late for the student who was having a coursework emergency. After deciding she should ignore all the results from the gas syringe, I wanted to print out the graph of the upturned burette results so she could draw tangents against the curve & calculate the initial rate (rate of reaction at time = 0 seconds). The printer was refusing to print out the graph. I've since discovered that this is some sort of bug in OpenOffice - nothing from Sheet 2 in a multisheet document will print, though Sheet 1 is fine. I can fix this by copying the contents to Sheet 1 of a new or existing document. Weird.

I'm pretty sure something else also went wrong, but I was so very short of spoons after all the earlier stuff that I had no ability to cope whatsoever. Bah.

I am a million, trillion, zillion years behind with livejournal. Or about 10 days. Same difference :)

Stuff in my life is generally "ok". Richard had a birthday! We went out for delicious curry at Joy with hatter, mjl, otterylexa and rowan_leigh & fluffymormegil, who we don't get to see enough. Sadly, the sekrit surprise guests hiddenpaw & sangluna couldn't come due to stock issues. I bought Richard a The Sun Is Trying To Kill Me sweatshirt from J!NX, and also their Disobey hoodie, and my mum got him the most excellent heavy metal t-shirt in the world ever. To my disappointment, it does not feature hexavalent chromium, but many other heavy metals are represented in true metal font.

Had an asthma & allergy review which was spectacularly boring. Apparently I do absolutely everything right, and there are no other drugs they can give me, so I'm going to have to live with my current level of chronic snot forever (or at least until they invent something new). This is really quite depressing. People without chronic snot can almost certainly not understand how debilitating it is (it's like having a cold or hay fever, with all the head stuffiness and confusion, and itchy nose and ears and sinus pain, and irritability due to itchiness; only it never goes away, and never gets any better). I'm ridiculously allergic to dust mite faeces and sulphur dioxide, and also slightly allergic to pollen, mould spores, various scents, generic PM10 and ozone... there is no season in which I am not constantly snotty, and I'm sick of it :X

I have a new printer which is revolutionising my work environment. It's an HP Officejet which can print and photocopy in full colour double-sided, and has a sheet feeder. It takes less than a minute to print a quantity of material which would take my crappy HP home printer over 15 minutes. It is very sexy. Bizarrely, I bought it through PC World's business division, and got to pay £70 less for it than it would have cost me to buy it from the regular store. Apparently businesses are heavily subsidised compared to home users. New HP-branded ink cartridges were around half of the home users' price (or about what I normally pay to get my existing cartridges refilled). I wish I'd known this - ooh, four years ago when I started being self-employed :P

The tricycle may actually be ready to ride tomorrow. Hooray. Have been exhausting myself walking everywhere. Excitement will be postponed until I know if the repair worked.

I've known for years - nay, decades - that I am Not A Morning Person. I only realised how serious the issue was when I attempted to go back to full-time work. I am so very Not A Morning Person that it is impossible for me to maintain a "normal" sleep-wake cycle. This is a statement which no one else has the right to argue with, by the way. Believe me, I've tried absolutely-effing-every piece of advice from sleep specialists, several modern pharmaceuticals, a bunch of herbal stuff and home remedies, and it still doesn't work. The fact is, my natural sleep-wake cycle is for me to wake up around midmorning, and fall asleep around 3am. If I stay on this cycle, I can maintain it indefinitely. If I attempt to get up at a "normal" time, I still don't fall asleep any earlier. So if I try to get into work for 8.30am, I can manage that for less than a week before I collapse in a terrible heap of physical and mental exhaustion. No drug with a Z in the title has ever made me sleep. (When I was prescribed Zolpidem, I once, in desperation, looked online for the maximum safe dose. I proceeded to take 4 tablets, and was still utterly wide awake wondering why the hell I couldn't sleep 5 hours later.) The healthiest thing for me is to say "sod 'normal', I'll have to work for myself at the hours I choose". Just like my fat activist friends who believe it is safer and healthier for themselves to maintain an active body at a higher weight rather than going through a constant cycle of dieting followed by weight gain, I believe it's safer and healthier for me to have a regular sleep-wake cycle rather than a "normal" one.

So I was ridiculously amused when rowan_leigh found this link: The A-Team and the B-Team (warning, post contains artistic nudity). I agree with almost everything the author says, except that his B-ness is nowhere near as extreme as mine. (Falling asleep at 1am & waking at 9? Luxury!). The thing that I've noticed though, and have never actually documented, is how much I'm Not A Morning Person. I'm sure it's entirely normal to be brain-fogged and bleary for a while in the morning. But my Not A Morning Person-ness extends to far more than my brain.

This morning (yes, it was before 12 noon): I woke up. 45 minutes after waking up, I cycled to my first student of the day. Slowly, in 3rd gear.

After the lesson, an hour later: I cycled along a road with more bumps in it slowly, in 4th gear. Then up the Hill That Used To Defeat Me (copyright epi_lj) in 1st gear, puffing a little.

Came home, sat in front of the computer for a couple of hours before going back out to the shops to buy all the things I'd forgotten existed, because I'd been too sleepy earlier in the day to remember that I needed to eat more than one meal. Cycled along the road at high speed, in 4th gear. Considered switching up to 5th, but didn't as my tyres felt like they could do with some attention. Came back up the Hill That Used To Defeat Me in 2nd gear, easily, despite noticing the existence of photochemical pollution due to the sunny afternoon & its effect on my lungs.

It seems that as well as mental "not being awake yet", there's a physical factor too. Though I tend to get out of bed feeling rested, my body has no stamina when it's the morning for me. It aches and gets tired far more quickly. By my mid-afternoon, this has eased, and I have more strength with which to turn the pedals. Also, by being more awake, I have the confidence to ride more quickly, knowing that I'm in full control of the tricycle, and that I need only a fingertip touch to stop or redirect the trike if some obstacle occurs. By the evening, I'm properly awake, and I can enjoy long periods of exercise - an hour or two hours. Or I can start creative work in earnest, knowing I'll have several hours of my brain working at its peak capacity before bed. My most awake hour is 10pm, and I try to schedule serious brain-work for then.

The realisation that it's a whole-body thing goes some way towards explaining why I'm so impatient & easily annoyed by those freaky mutants who leap out of bed with the most energy they'll ever have in the day.

What is it about my tricycle and Wednesdays? Two weeks ago the chain flew off at speed, today I have a puncture in the front wheel. It's a conspiracy, I tell you. It's the sort of puncture where you put 150 pumps of air into it and it seems almost firm enough, but by the time you've removed the pump and put the cap back on the tyre is completely flat again. Bah.

Sadly, I have no idea how to mend punctures (and even if I did, I'm probably allergic to the glue or the rubber or the plasticiser in something, so it would be a bad idea for me to randomly try), so I'm stuck at home waiting for Richard to get back and be an engineer for me. This is annoying because I wanted to go to the supermarket and stock up with stuff for the weekend... more about that in just a moment.

I am having a very bad day.



I don't know much about cycle maintenance, and I don't even know what this part of the trike is called (a chain guard, maybe?), but common sense suggests that the chain is supposed to go round the spokey bit, not cut across the middle of it... :/ More pictures.

( Read more... )

Edit: it's fixed.

I cannot get over how strong my legs have got in the past few months.

When I started cycling, my right leg was doing almost all the work, and my left leg was just being taken along for the ride. Over the past few months, I've noticed my left leg taking on more and more of the effort, and now it's split almost 50:50 between them, like it "should" be. And it isn't just stronger for cycling, it's better for walking on, too - more able to hold my weight as I go down the road, less likely to roll at the ankle or buckle at the knee.

The other day I went for a ride for pleasure, and was in fourth gear on the flat road in Ham. Today I went up The Hill That Used To Defeat Me - in second gear, not first.

I like cycling because I can see improvements in my strength and stamina almost instantly. In a week of just riding to the supermarket & back, I see more changes than I did in two months of going to the gym three times a week. (And that was a specialist program devised by a trained professional in accordance with my body's quirks.) Unlike the gym, if I have to stop for a week because of busyness, it's no problem: I just pick up where I left off. More importantly, this doesn't feel like exercise - it's not boring or pointless, it's just a way of getting places, and fits into my normal life. The only specialist equipment I need is the trike and the helmet, and a lock.

You know, after all the "fun" and "excitement" of Friday - I totally forgot that I'd posted pictures of my tricycles online!

	Pashley Picador This is my old trike - a Pashley Picador, probably about 25 years old. Still in good working order though the seat's not very comfortable.
	Di Blasi folding tricycle This is my new trike - a Di Blasi R32. Unfolded and ready to ride. dino is there as a size reference point.

The rest of the gallery is here. I'm sure all the engineering geeks will love the pictures of the folding mechanism - which does work just like a music stand!