I seem to only come here when things aren’t looking so great, which is unfortunate as I honestly need to write more, and about less muggy topics.

Issues with my leg have gotten to a point where they’re good, but not great, and don’t seem to be improving anymore. I’ve recently been deliberating with myself on the notion of having the titanium removed from my leg all together. What I’ve heard through my doctor and friends is that this might help with the remaining pain and possibly give me more freedom to move with that leg. If asked a few months ago if I would be willing to go through a similar amount of recovery from the accident, I’d say no. However now I feel like it’s the only option.

And so I’ve been hyping myself up on how easy this surgery would be and not to worry about it.

About two months ago, while visiting friends in Minneapolis for the Northern Spark art festivals, I woke up one morning with some uncomfortable pain in my testicle. A day later the pain hadn’t disappeared and so I started poking around and found a lump. Long story short the lumps weren’t cancer and in most cases aren’t harmful, except mine were painful and needed to go.

Whatever hyping I had been doing about potentially getting my leg all fixed up, was depleted earlier this week when I went in to a surgery center so a doctor (a funny one at that) diddle around inside my scrotum scraped out things with a grapefruit spoon. I’ve been at home since on my back rubbing ice packs into my crotch, which at one point was actually about the size of a grapefruit. The silver lining (not my stitches) is that I got a vasectomy in with the procedure, something I’ve been planning to get for a long time.

Due to all this my life has more or less been on pause since June, and I think this’ll also affect my plans for long term traveling over the end of the year. Poot.

During the painy months, I decided in my infinite wisdom that I should go out to Camp Tipsy and help some good friends construct a moon. While there I regretting making it over, as the meds my doctor gave me to potentially fix the testicle problem (it didn’t) was causing me pain on its own, and I the re-dawning realization I just don’t like being in large bodies of water. If I was to go again I think I would like to focus my efforts onto some sort of land based installation, maybe more of a night time space sort of thing.

My choice to go to Tipsy meant that I was also skipping out on Toorcamp up in Washington state. More recently I feel like I’ve been losing touch with the hacker bit of me, which I’m finding odd and I don’t know why. For the month of July, some very awesome and ambitious people decided that Noisebridge needed to get cleaned up and in action shut the space down for 30 days. I’m now again finding myself be drawn into the space, maybe it’s worth working on again, maybe people are interested like they were before.

I’ve been trying to come up with some new photo projects to work on during this time, and am thinking of possibly restarting the photo postcards thing again. I liked it, other people liked it, we were all mostly satisfied.

I’ll try to be a little bit more updatey here again, and not only when the vicodin happens to run out.

I’ve been a bit of a hermit regarding my site over the past few months. The last post coming from my first day in Tokyo, then abruptly stopping. I’m going to try to make a post here once a week from now on, let’s see if I can stick with that.

A silver lining to breaking my leg/hip has been that the couple of months of recovery involved me not really taking any photographs. As much as that sounds sad, it’s been great for catching up on my backlog. I’m only 5 months behind, as opposed to 1.5 years.

So I did go to Japan. That was all interesting and I should have some (many) photos from that trip on the net soon. I was traveling in parallel with some good company and may link to some of their photos too.

Before the trip I was partially gifted with a new toy, a Canon EOS 6D, which is the little brother to the 5DMIII. I haven’t been shooting more often with it, but when I do shoot I’m taking more photos than with any of my film cameras. Additionally the built in GPS has been a life saver. The wifi integration leaves a lot to be desired, but you can do some neat things when it does decide to work, such as this photo. All in all I’m happy to finally have a full frame camera, and thankful to the gift giver.

I’m currently looking for new work. If you know of anyone seeking an engineer of many traits, QA, pythony stuff, please poke me.

Just another normal night at The House of Shields.

Audio: OGG

Playing with this notion of making posts happen through my pocketputer.

Wrote this a few mornings ago but my pocket computer barfed, and so here it is a little late.

It's been easily over six months since the last time I achieved some sort of satisfying, sound sleep.

The night prior to breaking my leg, for one reason or another, I didn't actually get sleep, and had a very very short nap before hopping onto my steed and riding off to confront that ill fated event. I suppose I slept like a baby the following night in the hospital, strung out from all that had happened and pumped up on morphine. They finally left Al and I alone enough to attempt to sleep around 02:00, only to be woken up at 06:00 to begin prep for surgery. I started to shake uncontrollably in my bed, at which point I looked up at the nurses, very puzzled and informed them that I had no idea why I was shaking. They seemed more alarmed than I, providing a solution of additional morphine, which worked rather well. I suppose that sleeping through the surgery counts too, to some extent. That was the last time I had woken up to seeing a very comforting male bodied face, my general doctor who had heard what happened and come by to check on me post operation. He told me they did a good job sealing me back up, everything would be fine and to go back to sleep, and so I did after mumbling a thank you to him.

All in all the next morning I was able to get up and walk to the bathroom (mostly) on my own. Thank my lucky stars, thanks to those wonderful human beings who dedicate their lives into medicine and the craft of reassembling others whom attempt to live life outside of everyday fear.

After that sleeping in the hospital was obnoxious. Different nurses checking in on me through all hours of the night, the IV needle poking the pit of my elbow, kinking the IV tube, too cold, too hot, needing help peeing, some machine I can't see is beeping, trying desperately hard not to think anything at all about how much of a financial cluster fuck this will all eventually be. They gave me drugs, pain killers, liquids, and a slew of substances I will never be able to recall again. It helped, but with only one specific thing, to make me ignore the pain generated from the trauma that hit my right femur, hip, and ass. It wasn't until the 2nd or 3rd night that I realized sleeping will never be the same for me again. What I didn't understand at the time was how much more the lack of sleeping will effect the rest of my waking life, than the minor fact that it'll be a good year or two before my right leg will feel remotely like it used to.

To help with coming off of one of the drugs (either of the Oxies), my doctor prescribed Ambien (in addition to an anti-anxiety pill, because withdrawals suck). I tested it out for a night, thought it to be amazing, and shared that revelation to a friend. He in turn told me an Ambien story of his own, where he woke up (sleep walking) in the middle of the night at his girlfriend's, walked to the corner of the room, decided to relieve himself, did so right there, then crawled back into bed with no memory of doing so (his girlfriend however was more than willing to remind him). Even after hearing that I decided to try Ambien again a few nights later, and when I found my cane the next morning sitting somewhere other than where I left it before going to sleep (no pee puddles though!), I put the drug away and haven't touched it since then.

I'm (mostly) off the meds now, taking supplements to help my bones and joints. Doing stretches and PT at home to rebuild the leg. Walking more than a few blocks is a little bit of a stretch, but on a good day I'm pretty much up to my old cycling self again (can't wait for Spring time actually). The range in that join (femur to hip) is still a little bit limited, trying to sit cross legged is not possible, and generally I need to fidget after a few minutes of sitting in the same position.

Sleeping is another story, I didn't really realize how much I tend to do so on my sides. Laying on my right puts pressure on the hardware in my leg and the muscles that are still healing. Laying on my left brings the weight in my right leg into an odd spot that induces cramping. Every night has turned into this dance of switching positions, attempting to sleep on my back or belly, pretzel configurations with my limbs trying to find some sweet spot that will take something longer than half an hour to become agitated, prompting me to toss and turn again. This has caused me to avoid having other close ones over for the night as I simply don't want to them to get woken up constantly by my rotational marathon, and also avoiding staying with others elsewhere since I'm very much used to the firmness of my mattress and all others I need time to adjust.

Recently about two months ago it's gotten a little better. I can deal with sleeping on a sleeping pad while camping just fine. Fighting less in an office chair. Not waking those sleeping next to me as much. I am more ignorant of my leg cramping up. However even though my physical agony is turning into something tolerable, sleep still doesn't welcome me. I find myself being up till past midnight working on projects and other things, reading the far reaches of the internet. Going to sleep exhausted, waking up somewhere between 03:00 to 06:00 most nights and not really being able to get myself back to sleep till around 08:00. Even now, as I write this, I've been awake for three hours starting at 05:00. Went to pee but was fine, was hydrated, not hungry, mostly warm, no real leg pain. My body just decides that about 4 hours of sleep is all I need and that it's time to wake up.

I turn into a zombie for the rest of the day, waking up late, having an extremely hard time getting myself out of bed. I feel more short tempered with friends, my eating habits turn more cut back, going through my day with less energy than I want to. Surprisingly though most of the time I don't feel anymore sleepy or wanting a nap, which is strange, my body simply tells me sleep isn't a now thing.

I've (re)instated a no laptop in bedroom rule, which has sort of worked but mostly failed since the rest of the house has been so horribly cold. I've been trying to cut back on acidic foods after 18:00, but that's been rather hard as I haven't been cooking for myself much lately. Dropping back on my alcohol intake. Showering before bed. Herbal teas. Simply avoiding the internet and only reading fiction. Getting into bed earlier than midnight and doing nothing till I fall asleep. None of it seems to help in any sort of significant way.

So after laying in bed for thirty minutes right now, staring at the ceiling for another forty minutes and wasting some other amount of time flicking through my RSS feeds, I thought it best to write all this down. Maybe doing so will give me some new insight as to what's going on. Because without sleep, my waking days feel more like dreams.