Aaron's Status

5:54 am

Get off my sidewalk

We have a fairly large construction project taking place a couple of houses up the street, which happens to also be exactly at the kid’s bus stop, so I’m standing there for a little bit every morning.

That was where I was yesterday when I observed some contractor pull his wide-body work truck fully up onto the sidewalk, blocking both the entire sidewalk as well as filling the entire shoulder.

We live on a busy road; it’s what you might call a “regional arterial” because it is one of two primary routes to points south. Rush hour will see our street filled with cars driving mostly too fast, mostly too distracted, etc. None of this is great to begin with.

With this truck consuming the entire sidewalk and shoulder, pedestrians would have to walk in the lane. Well, I cannot stand for that.

I marched right down there and faced off with the dude, who emerged from his truck a balding, cigarette-smoking tradesman with an entirely unamused affect. I asked if he’d be there long and he said “a little while yeah,” and I explained quickly that you can’t block the entire sidewalk, that we have people who walk here, and what are they to do, walk in the street?

With a grunt of complete and thorough annoyance, he conceded, and spent the maybe one whole minute to move the road cones blocking the driveway of the site and pull his truck into it.

Oh gosh thank you kind sir for taking literally sixty seconds to park your truck in the construction site where you are working to avoid probably murdering people.

It was a big win for me, though.

Science!

As predicted my dentist visit was uneventful, at least with regard to the health of my actual teeth. There was a new hygienist and my read on her is that she must have graduated from dental school like 45 minutes ago; she was tentative, careful, over-communicative, and a little awkward. But all in a good way. That part was great.

I made the mistake of offhandedly joking about my back pain to my dentist, and he proceeded to go on a 15-minute lecture circuit about the “kung fu master” I should consider seeing in his home where he does (I gather) some kind of chiropractic type shit and acupuncture.

Before you jump down my throat, I know there is some reasonably good data on the efficacy of acupuncture for a variety of things, so that one is in a bit of a gray zone for me, though I’ve never personally felt desperate enough to experiment with it.

But spinal manipulation? What my dentist calls “cracking your back”? No, I don’t think there’s any objective evidence that any problem is solved by forcing your back to make cracking noises. As far as I am aware, all of the cracks and pops that a body can make are mainly superficial.

Should we talk knuckle cracking? Sure, let’s do. I crack my knuckles all the time. There is a myth that doing so is bad for you, which is untrue. It’s also not good for you, either. Cracking a knuckle is just creating so much negative pressure in the sac of “synovial fluid” that buffers the joint that gas bubbles from it. At least that was what I was told.

It can feel good, and maybe chiropractic can be that for some people, but since the whole field of chiropractic is not real medicine you’re on your own to figure out who is making you feel better versus selling you snake oil.

Another solid climbing session

I went into our Tuesday night climbing session feeling about 95% about my back and readiness, but somehow ended up bouldering the entire time. The kiddo sent his first V4, which is completely insane considering he just sent his first V3 like a week ago. His limiting factor is his height right now but he’s crushing it.

I got pretty stuck on a low-set V4 entirely made of slopers and committed myself to working on it to just improve my sloper work, and I did ultimately send it!

The big learning from that one, though this is perhaps obvious to any experienced climber, is that one person’s beta may not help you at all. The wife had flashed that V4 and just effortlessly sent it right in front of me, but she did it in the opposite way that I had to do it.

We have about a six-inch height difference and that made her approach entirely impossible for me, but I was able to do an almost mirrored version and sent it twice in a row to be absolutely sure (“two to make it true,” as our head setter says).

Felt really good to be able to send a sloper problem, though, as I’m typically quite bad with them. I have to work on my crimps, though.