A Health Update

To my horror, I turned 40 last month.  What the hell?  Wasn’t I supposed to be 25 at some point?  What the hell happened to my 30’s?  Is there a single man out there who does not ask himself these questions upon hitting the 4th decade of life?

At any rate, conventional wisdom says that this is the time when one’s body starts falling apart, so I decided that I would go and get a physical, to sort of establish a baseline from which to track my descent into decrepit senility.  Overall, though, my doctor told me that I was actually quite healthy, given my pre-existing conditions (gout, asthma, migraine, etc.), and in no real danger of massive systems failure anytime soon.  She did tell me that I have a minor viral infection in my throat, which is why it’s been hurting (ever so faintly) for about two weeks ago, but not to worry about it.  And apparently I have dermatitis on the soles of my feet, which is kind of disconcerting.  Other than that, my lungs and heart are fine, and my blood pressure… well, it’s under control, at least.

I really like my doctor.  She’s friendly and approachable.  She’s Indian, which helps keep my interest when she talks to me ((I confess to a weakness for Indian women.  And smart women.  Smart women in general are very, very hot, which is why my wife will always be hotter than yours.)).  We’ve had some good conversations about life in the US as opposed to life in India.  But sometimes she’s sort of like a broken record.

ME:  I know I need to lose weight.

SHE:  Yes.  You do need to lose weight.

ME:  Other than that I think I’m in decent shape.

SHE:  Yes, you are, but you need to lose weight.

ME:  I know that I need to lose weight.

SHE:  Yes you do.  You need to lose weight.

ME:  My lungs are pretty clear.  Haven’t had to use my inhaler in almost two weeks.

SHE:  That’s great! Do you think that it will get better as you lose more weight?

ME:  And I think my blood pressure is under control.

SHE:  It would be under better control if you lost weight.

ME:  So considering I just turned 40, I think I’m okay.

SHE:  Yes, but after 40 it’s much harder to lose weight.

ME:  Look!  A chicken!  On the shelf next to the latex gloves!

SHE:  Yes, it is a chicken, and you need to lose weight.

Notice her subtle hints?  Apparently a number of patients at her practice have requested other doctors because she’s so very adamant on this point.  I’m not going to do that, though; I’d much rather have a doctor who kept harping me on this point than one who pretended that everything was fine until I collapsed under a mass of my own flesh and who would only then say something like, "How do you feel about losing some of that weight?"

So she wants me to keep records of my blood pressure and my weight and my exercise routine so she can look at them when I return in two months.  I can do that.  I hope.  I’m not too keen on being scolded by her.

Next up: the ophthalmologist.  Then the dentist, who I’m afraid will really be excited about the prospect of setting me up with a root canal.

The King of Oblivion

"The King of Oblivion" is an awesome song by Seven Nations, a Celtic rock group based in Orlando, Florida.  It’s one of those songs that makes me go, "Hmmm," whenever I hear it; I love the lyrics, but I have no idea what the song is about.  The one or two other people I’ve spoken to who know the band and love them are similarly baffled by the song and its strange imagery.  I’ve looked online (not very intently, I admit) and found no references to any mythical, legendary, or folkloric entities called "The King of Oblivion"; in fact, almost all of the Google results for a search on the title are about the band.

So since I love the song so much, and because there’s so little associated with the title, I’ve decided to co-opt it and use it as the title of Book Three of The War of Dreams.  Part One, The Return of Deacon Dread, I wrote for National Novel Writing Month in 2006.  Part Two was The Lord of Nightmares, written for NaNoWriMo 2007.  And just with those parts, I’m going to be putting The King of Oblivion on line for your reading pleasure.  The plan for now is to post a piece of it each Friday night.  You’ll be able to find it here.  Be warned, though; like the others, this is NaNoWriMo quality fiction; that is, any quality you find in it is purely accidental.  And there will be times when storylines change randomly, without warning, and the reader will have to assume that some things will have always been as they are now, if that makes any sense.  If Zoe and Adrian suddenly start acting like a couple in love, for example, then just assume they were in love from the beginning.

Anyway.  Enjoy.  Or whatever.

The Penguin and the Python

For my birthday, the CWW (Coolest Wife in the World, which is how Jennifer will be referred to in my journal from here on out, if I remember to do so) got me one of these:

It’s one of these, a Tux Droid from Kysoh.  Basically it sits next to your computer and Does Things.  Its eyes can blink and glow, its wings flap, it can spin.  It hooks up to your Linux computer via USB, and your system will even see it as a USB sound device, so you can play music through it.  Of course, the sound quality isn’t that good, so its sound card is much more fun when you run a voice synthesizer through it.  In brief, it spins, talks, glows, flaps its wings and moves its beak.  Oh, and it has sound sensors, light sensors, and a number of push buttons on it, so it be more or less interactive as well.  Bring some voice recognition software onto your computer, hook up a microphone, and you can even have a conversation with it.

You program it in Python, which is a programming language I don’t actually know.  Remember how I said that this year I was going to focus more on my geekery?  Well, here’s the perfect opportunity.  I did a little reading and picked up a book and this morning I wrote up a little application that I’ve been intending to build for awhile now: a little timer that tells you to get off your computer for ten minutes every hour.  So it counts down for fifty minutes (during this time you can poke its head button to make sure it’s still awake — it says, "Yes, I am awake, stop hitting me!"), then spins around and flaps its wings and tells you to go play outside.  In ten minutes you get to come back, though during that ten minutes you can press the button on its head to get another five minutes.  It’s a pretty simple program, but for my first Python project, I think it’s pretty cool.  I’ve got some ideas for extending it, too.

At some point I will take a video of it doing a little dance that I programmed, but that requires a little more time, and I’m feeling pretty lazy this morning.

Resolved

Actually, I don’t make New Year’s resolutions.  I’ve always sort of thought of January 1st as a pretty arbitrary date for making Big Changes in your life that you’re going to forget about a few days later anyway.  So I just haven’t bothered.  If pressed, I’ll happily say that I only make March 25th resolutions, because March 25 is no less arbitrary than January 1 in my opinion.

Still, this year I’ve decided that there’s definitely some room for improvement.  So I’ve made a list of four "Opportunity Areas" (a delightful term I picked up from my workplace’s HR division, a euphemism for "weaknesses") in my life that I want to work on.  In no particular order (and this is just a preliminary draft), here they are:



Richard’s Opportunity Areas for 2008

Geekery. Focus on building my programming, web development, and technology skills by taking classes, playing with geeky toys, taking on projects, and so on. This will enhance my productivity and flexibility at work and at home. This will also involve improving my project management skills.

Sociability. Focus on building, rebuilding, and rebuilding bonds with friends, family, co-workers, and so on, both online and off. Do this by going out of my way to talk to new people, returning calls and emails, and generating new calls and emails, as well as making and keeping commitments to spend time with people and keeping lines of communication open.

Writing. Keep up with my various writing projects, and find ways to spend more time and commit more fully to my writing. Produce more finished works, and submit more often. Read books on writing, read more fiction in and out of my genre, as well as nonfiction of many different subjects, from science to politics to history and so on.  In 2007 I had a goal of maintaining five active submissions at all times, and I did pretty well at that until close to the end.
 
Health. Improve physical health and fitness by exercising regularly, keeping a careful diet, sleeping regularly and good hours, and so on. With my various doctors and family helping out, I can get this issue licked. Also Weight Watchers.  Also dressing spiffy, because I’m not sure where else to put it.

That’s all I got.  There are a couple of great things about this list; first, these are all areas of opportunity that I enjoy anyway, so none of them will be a stretch (well, except for the last one).  These are just areas that I want to focus on more, and I’m pretty sure I can find the time for them by, say, spending less time staring blankly at brick walls.  Or whatever.

Secondly, there’s so much potential for cross fertilization, quite a bit of which I’m doing already anyway.  I hang out with friends who are also writers, and my writer friends and I help each other out with our writing skills, for example.  And I suppose that I could improve both my programming skills and my overall health outlook by building some Java based tools to help keep track of my weight loss.

But these aren’t really resolutions in the true sense of the word, I think.  If anything, it’s a resolution to "stay the course".  On the whole, I like who I am, and feel little need to change it.