http://www.factoryofinfinitebliss.com/?p=1026

An Alaskan perspective on why she quit. Essentially, she quit because she’s an incompetent, narcissistic weasel.

We already knew that, but it’s nice to read an Alaskan account, with details.

http://www.factoryofinfinitebliss.com/?p=1026

An Alaskan perspective on why she quit. Essentially, she quit because she’s an incompetent, narcissistic weasel.

We already knew that, but it’s nice to read an Alaskan account, with details.

http://viv.id.au/blog/20090710.5625/femmostroppo-reader-july-10-2009/

Items of interest found recently in my RSS feed. Please share what you've been reading (and writing!) in the comments.

• No Is Not a Mixed Signal « How to recover lost marbles

- Awesome rebuttal to a post made of manure: “I wish I could say that the fail in this post stopped here, but alas. Much like a used diaper dropped from a height, it just keeps accelerating until you reach splat. In this case, right now, splat is merely a smudge on the horizon.”

NB: As noted in comments, the post that I linked to was at a wordpress.com blog, which was just a test crosspost, and which has since been deleted. The link above has been changed accordingly to point to the original post.Similar Posts:

• Femmostroppo Reader - June 22, 2009 by tigtog
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• Femmostroppo Reader - July 4, 2009 by tigtog

Last night’s time trial didn’t look like it was going to be a good night personal bests. There was a very strong breeze coming from the north, and there were 2-3 foot waves on the bay. With no hope of setting a new personal best, Tom Murn and I decided to race head to head.

In the excitement, I forgot to hit the start button on my GPS, so no graphs this time. Tom is lighter and in a fast sprint boat, so he came off the start line ahead of me, and lead under the bridge. After the bridge, I was starting to pull ahead of him, so I cut over in front of him and relaxed for a couple of strokes yelling for him to get on my wake. I can’t really turn around and see behind me comfortably, so when I thought I saw him coming up on my stern in my peripheral vision, I started hammering again. My speed going up into the wind and waves kept dropping and dropping, and was hovering around 5.4 by the time I started to turn. At the turn, I got my first look back and saw that Tom was now 20 or 30 yards behind me. Oh well, too late to worry about that. Turning around, I expected the wind to push my speed up, but it seems that I could really only go the speed the waves wanted me to go, so I was barely going 6.2 mph on the way back in. 6.2 is pretty much my normal no-wind speed, so it was almost as if I was getting no benefit at all. My split at the half was 9.50, which is 0.12 minutes slower than my previous fastest split, or 0.07 minutes slower than last week when I set a personal best overall.

Coming up the creek, the tail wind without the waves helped and so my speed was up. I was passing people, and felt good. I didn’t make the turn all that well in spite of having practiced it before hand, but I was soon accelerating out of it. I saw Tom again, and he looked like he was fading a bit. On the way down, it was all a matter of trying to find maximum advantage from the current while minimizing the disadvantage from the head wind.

My final time was 18.97, which is only 0.02 minutes slower than my personal best. Now I know *exactly* how Lance Armstrong feels being 0.22 seconds out of the yellow jersey.

More significantly, it means that my second half was actually faster than the first half. Either my fitness level is getting better, or the surfing downwind on the bay helped me rest a bit.

Originally posted at Rants and Revelations

http://viv.id.au/blog/20090709.5623/thursday-cheezburger-deadly-sins-1-sloth/

http://viv.id.au/blog/?p=5623

Post your own favourite In-Theme Cheez here, and wait for admin image magic to make it appear.

Please post a link to a FULL webpage, rather than a direct link to an image only - that is, no URLs with .jpg, .png, .gif (etc) on the end. This makes our admin image magic quicker and easier. Just copy and paste what’s in your URL bar, and we’ll go fetch the embed code. **If you post the embed code, it will be automatically stripped out.** Thanks!

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http://www.factoryofinfinitebliss.com/?p=1025

As melodramatic as I just was, things seem to be improving. My diagnosis might be more complicated than just straight Lyme, but my heart rate is up, which has been of real concern to the doctors. The heart block is the target for action, but a tenuous conclusion about the past 24 hours has been that my heart rate has gone up as I’ve received my antibiotics. Hopefully that progress turns into a heart unblock soon. And then elimination of the other, less important, symptoms of illness, and I can get back to life and work. Here’s hoping.

http://www.factoryofinfinitebliss.com/?p=1024

Several folks suggested I write letters to my family, as a way to cope with my frustrations with this illness. I just wrote a letter to Mona, and have not cried so much in a long time. It’s crazy, how maudlin the things I really want to say are: Be good and happy. Love yourself and others. Forgive yourself and others. I love you and am proud of you.

It’s funny how, when you want to convey what you see as the essential things to communicate, you end up sounding completely unoriginal, with the same message that billions of other people have given before. But when you’re writing that letter to your kid, on the chance that things go badly, unimportant messages become really unimportant, and you see what’s left, and how important the truth of it is.

I’m crying again. Fuck.

http://www.factoryofinfinitebliss.com/?p=1025

As melodramatic as I just was, things seem to be improving. My diagnosis might be more complicated than just straight Lyme, but my heart rate is up, which has been of real concern to the doctors. The heart block is the target for action, but a tenuous conclusion about the past 24 hours has been that my heart rate has gone up as I’ve received my antibiotics. Hopefully that progress turns into a heart unblock soon. And then elimination of the other, less important, symptoms of illness, and I can get back to life and work. Here’s hoping.

http://www.factoryofinfinitebliss.com/?p=1024

Several folks suggested I write letters to my family, as a way to cope with my frustrations with this illness. I just wrote a letter to Mona, and have not cried so much in a long time. It’s crazy, how maudlin the things I really want to say are: Be good and happy. Love yourself and others. Forgive yourself and others. I love you and am proud of you.

It’s funny how, when you want to convey what you see as the essential things to communicate, you end up sounding completely unoriginal, with the same message that billions of other people have given before. But when you’re writing that letter to your kid, on the chance that things go badly, unimportant messages become really unimportant, and you see what’s left, and how important the truth of it is.

I’m crying again. Fuck.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreekRunningNorth/~3/65j5foIrMMc/

http://viv.id.au/blog/20090709.5621/rainy-day-compensations/

http://viv.id.au/blog/?p=5621

Taken this morning immediately following the station drop-off run.Similar Posts:

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http://viv.id.au/blog/20090708.5620/femmostroppo-reader-july-8-2009/

Items of interest found recently in my RSS feed. Please share what you've been reading (and writing!) in the comments.

• If it’s a tribe, how come you can’t be born into it?

- “Despite possessing all the stated markers for being a member of the salt-of-the-earth tribe, I doubt Douthat would consider me a member like he does Sarah Palin, even though I think I beat her on many counts, including the fact that neither my parents nor some of my exes even have college degrees.*

[...] The reason is obvious, if politely unstated: I’m not in because I’m not a believer in sexism, racism, or American imperialism. “

• Rape Defendant Commits Suicide While His Trial Underway

- portrait of a control freak to the end

• What We Missed.

- some links from Feministing

• Perfect

- how to refer to people who are not disabled. ?

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- “When it came to the events where men worked the room, everyone performed just as expected: The men were less selective than the women. But when the usual speed-dating routine was turned on its head and the women made the rounds, the guys were more selective and the ladies were less picky.”

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• QUICKLY, HAROLD, SHE HAS BICEPS! CATCH HER IN THE ACT OR SHE’LL NEVER LEARN!

- It’s the attack of the dreaded biceps woman!

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• Lose-Lose. As Per Usual.

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreekRunningNorth/~3/DvPdr9TnKnI/

http://www.factoryofinfinitebliss.com/?p=1020

So I’ve been in the hospital for the past 34 hours. You ever notice how time sort of doesn’t mean anything in a hospital? It’s all just one long, boring event, that doesn’t have days or times of day attached to it that are particularly relevant. Nurses and doctors bug you at whatever random hour, there’s always activity and noise. You go in, you’re bored for a long time, and you come out and reinsert yourself downstream into the Gregorian calendar.

I seem to have Lyme disease, and it’s affecting my heart. Lyme can mess up the electrical signals of your circulatory system, particularly the sinoatrial (SA) node and its friend, the atrioventricular (AV) node. The SA node is this cluster on your heart that dictates the synchronization of your heart, and the AV node is this nerve that runs across your heart, that delivers the orders from the SA node that keep your atria and ventricles in sync: each chamber pumps at the right time, and everything goes smoothly.

When the AV node is, in strict medical parlance, fucked with, you have what’s called a heart block. There are different degrees of heart block, and I have the third degree, complete heart block. No signal is being transmitted across the AV node, so no synchronization is taking place. The ventricles have their own backup system that tells them to pump, so the heart doesn’t shut down completely, but they pump a lot slower than the atria do, under these circumstances. This is what Lyme disease can do for you.

So if you want to feel exhausted by walking a few steps, acquire a heart block: your heart will not be able to increase its activity to match your current needs, so you get to pass out and stuff. If you want to risk heart failure, heart blocks are fashionable. But if you want to live, dammit, live, then avoid heart blocks.

Heart blocks have a solution: pacemakers. Yay, surgical insertion of current technology into your body that must work perfectly to keep you alive. Knowing as many programmers as I do, I love that idea. But the good news is, there’s one kind of heart block that doesn’t need to be solved with a pacemaker. It’s a heart block caused by Lyme disease. Cure the Lyme, cure the block.

So that’s what I’m trying to do right now, and we’ll know soon enough if it’s working. In the meantime, I’m vaguely afraid of falling asleep, and my mind races about what the kids’ lives would be like without me, and how fantastically frustrated I am by the thought that there is no way I can possibly convey to them how much I love them. These are the thoughts that keep me awake until 3:30am when I should be resting. Even though the prognosis for a completely fixed heart is pretty good (knock wood), tell that to that most vicious bastard, my subconscious. Fuck that guy.

http://www.factoryofinfinitebliss.com/?p=1020

So I’ve been in the hospital for the past 34 hours. You ever notice how time sort of doesn’t mean anything in a hospital? It’s all just one long, boring event, that doesn’t have days or times of day attached to it that are particularly relevant. Nurses and doctors bug you at whatever random hour, there’s always activity and noise. You go in, you’re bored for a long time, and you come out and reinsert yourself downstream into the Gregorian calendar.

I seem to have Lyme disease, and it’s affecting my heart. Lyme can mess up the electrical signals of your circulatory system, particularly the sinoatrial (SA) node and its friend, the atrioventricular (AV) node. The SA node is this cluster on your heart that dictates the synchronization of your heart, and the AV node is this nerve that runs across your heart, that delivers the orders from the SA node that keep your atria and ventricles in sync: each chamber pumps at the right time, and everything goes smoothly.

When the AV node is, in strict medical parlance, fucked with, you have what’s called a heart block. There are different degrees of heart block, and I have the third degree, complete heart block. No signal is being transmitted across the AV node, so no synchronization is taking place. The ventricles have their own backup system that tells them to pump, so the heart doesn’t shut down completely, but they pump a lot slower than the atria do, under these circumstances. This is what Lyme disease can do for you.

So if you want to feel exhausted by walking a few steps, acquire a heart block: your heart will not be able to increase its activity to match your current needs, so you get to pass out and stuff. If you want to risk heart failure, heart blocks are fashionable. But if you want to live, dammit, live, then avoid heart blocks.

Heart blocks have a solution: pacemakers. Yay, surgical insertion of current technology into your body that must work perfectly to keep you alive. Knowing as many programmers as I do, I love that idea. But the good news is, there’s one kind of heart block that doesn’t need to be solved with a pacemaker. It’s a heart block caused by Lyme disease. Cure the Lyme, cure the block.

So that’s what I’m trying to do right now, and we’ll know soon enough if it’s working. In the meantime, I’m vaguely afraid of falling asleep, and my mind races about what the kids’ lives would be like without me, and how fantastically frustrated I am by the thought that there is no way I can possibly convey to them how much I love them. These are the thoughts that keep me awake until 3:30am when I should be resting. Even though the prognosis for a completely fixed heart is pretty good (knock wood), tell that to that most vicious bastard, my subconscious. Fuck that guy.

http://viv.id.au/blog/20090708.5618/here-have-a-puppy/

http://viv.id.au/blog/?p=5618

Because the unrelenting ghoul-fest in the media today is getting me down, I want to see something cute and fluffy. Who’s found something else interesting to watch/read/talk about today?

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreekRunningNorth/~3/5xB66ywe68c/