(no subject)

[tylik]

...so I suspect that a national initiative process might not in fact be a very good idea. (I think of all the Eyman idiocy... on the national stage. Hm. Or perhaps I wouldn't really notice a difference...) But this weekend I've been kind of wishing we had one, merely so that we could start collecting signatures to end daylight savings time. And I'm a morning person, and I've already made the adjustment. But then, I am a morning person - dawn is now three an a half hours after I get up, which is lame. Though I could roll with it if we were actually saving energy, money, sanity... y'know, anything, really.

Don't you think that just from the great disdain in the geek community we could probably run a shoestring campaign and get enough signatures using mostly internet resources? (Okay, that paper would have to be involved probably hurts. A lot.)

On an unrelated note, I had a major biomechanics session (er, I mean my body biomechanics, not slug biomechanics) this weekend. I've had this recurring set of problems with my upper thoracic - not really major as per my old scale, but annoying, and hitting my focus*. Finally really sat down to not only try to work it out for the moment but to try and figure out what is going on.

So, a year and a half ago I fired my physical therapist. For any number of reasons. (She was very good at what she did, but we had near-terminal communications failures, leading to some interactions where she kept telling me to stop moving like a martial artist without explaining what she wanted me to do... well, and then there were the repeated assertions that ending up crying uncontrollably during our sessions together couldn't be because I was just in that much pain, it had to be because I was depressed. After I ended up spending the afternoon and evening in the ER after one of our sessions... yeah. And my yoga teacher was giving me better feedback anyhow.) But one part of our problems were that she'd get mad at me when I insisted one using specific anatomical terms, and particularly when I pressed her for details on muscle activation. (I've always been good at muscles isolations, and I like anatomy.) No, don't think like that, she'd say. Just make these spots on your scapulae move here. Your body will just take care of the rest.

Apparently I really should have insisted that no, really, I have a custom hacked manual control system and I need that level of granularity. Well, no. I doubt that would have worked any better. But apparently it is true.

So I've been working on rebuilding and relearning to use a number of muscles that stabilize my scapulae and my mid/lower thoracic spine. And that's generally been going great, and hey, bonus, I have a bunch more muscle mass there. The last several weeks though I've been having a lot of instability in my upper thoacic spine - not terrible, but annoying and my normal maintenance stuff wasn't improving stability. So I finally sat down and worked through it (which is tedious, and meant I didn't get my new board design done, but then I was getting enough nerve compression I had to get off the computer). And eventually I worked out that yeah, from about T4/5 down, I have beautiful support - which is exactly what I'd been working on. Good movement, too. Above that, nothing. BTW, this looks really weird. One's thoracic spine should not be S-shaped. (Seriously.)

The good news is that these muscles are not atrophied and otherwise messed up like the subscapulars, As long as I stay focused, I think the re-training should be relatively short. But... bah. So, I did this to myself. But that PT is not the only person who has reassured me that I didn't have to worry about doing something like this, because bodies don't work that way.

Really, I am only grumpy because while stability is already better, everything is a little irritable, and I haven't been able to find a good angle for working on my on the tablet that doesn't annoy things. (This might resolve itself with a little time. K suggests picking up a wacom tablet to decouple the surface I'm writing on from where I'm looking... which is exactly right, but doing so to the lenovo tablet annoys me.)

* Oh - and not just focus. In the middle of a relatively bad bit of this I drove K to the Apple Store (lab machine that failed). And hit sensory overload in a ways that I haven't in ages. (Probably in part because usually when I feel like that I go somewhere quiet and work on my back until I feel better.)