Hillside Meditations

Archive for January, 2006

100 days

Posted in regular, strange, depressing, on blogging, Health and Disease, Learning Spanish on Tue, 31 Jan 2006 22:45:45 +0100 by Marchal

It wasn´t really 100 days that I spent without posting to my blog - but almost.

I am not quite sure what kept me away, as I do like my blog and blogging, liked the contacts I had found, had really grown into a habit of regularly writing entries.

Somehow I had a bad time: those last months I felt spent, lacking energy, everything seemed too much (a state that started as early as early October ). I had a bad cold in December with weeks of coughing and sneezing, and I had a very bad back ache: for almost eight weeks I had great problems and pains when making the slightest moves, pains that went from my buttocks down to my very feet with my left foot at times slightly numb. Radiological examination showed a slightly slipped disc at my lower back. There were many days when putting on a sock was a major enterprise and getting out of my car in the morning always connected with a loud gasp of pain; turning round in bed took thinking about how to best achieve it and at work I developed something I called “helicopter gait”, meaning that getting up from my chair and walk to the next room and patient (which at work I have to do about every five minutes) started in a bent position with several steps necessary to get my back in an upright position (just as in movies you see people walk and move when they get out of a helicopter whose rotors are still whirring). When I had my cold I really had to be very brave, for every cough or sneeze sent a spasm of pain down my legs. For a few days now I have been better - without yet having to be operated on or - which I “feared” more - having to see a physiotherapist - those back problems have been recurring now for over two years, though, so the latest recovery may be only temporary if I do not a) loose weight and b) start training my back muscles to get better stability for my spine (both of which seem tedious, hard to achieve and connected with physical activity which unfortunately is not my favorite pastime).

Anyway: It is not possible for me to decide which was hen and which was egg - constant pain is bad for your mood, believe me, but a bad mood can do things to your back, as well, I think, and what finally got better first is equally hard to tell.
At least that is the current state of affairs: mood better, back better, work better, blog entries getting written again (I hope). (BTW thanks to Logtar and Wuseldusel for their encouraging emails and comments!

Other things (beside suffering and feeling bad) I did in those past days:

“attended” Christmas :->
constructed my income tax declaration for 2004 (add some extra points for pain and suffering, please - I HATE going through all those old papers!)
got a Sony RDR-HX 910 DVD- and 250 GB-harddisk-recorder which gave a new dimension to my TV habits
watched lots of old Star Trek Voyager episodes with the help of said Sony device
stopped following all the wonderful blogs in my blogroll - something I had grown very fond of, but which had also turned in a task consuming quite a lot of my time every evening (I think I must find a more balanced approach to blog reading).
attended two courses on dyslexia diagnosis and treatment in Munich
met a nice colleague at the first of said courses, who, after a few exchanged emails, mysteriousky disappeared and did not show up for the second course apparently having suddenly moved to an - to all other participants of ths course - unknown destination (Tanja, couldn´t you just drop me an email with your new address, please?)
dropped out of my Spanish class ((( because “it was all too much for me and so on”, which I am sorry about (and all my plans to muster enough energy to learn on my own with the help of all the remarkable equipment I have got for studying Spanish on my own failed due to a lack of exactly that - energy)
took a few photos (very few due to lack of energy - I guess by now you have got it, haven´t you?)
hardly read anything worth mentioning though (or because of) starting on several books at the same time
wasted lots of valuable lifetime without achieving things that “will remain when I have gone” (major desire these days).

End of the list - by now this posting has lost quite a lot of steam - what had I been setting out for in the beginning? - making me realize that my prose writing abilities have gone all rusty over the blog-abstaining-period. Give me some time, will you?