Aaron's Status

7:17 am

I know, I say this every year, but by the time a single snowflake falls I’m ready for it to be spring again. We’ve had two snows so far this winter and the first one was hardly a real snowfall, but what really gets me is the cold.

There is this arctic air thing descending on us, or something, and while it’s much colder elsewhere in the country right now, I still feel basically oppressed by it. I have undiagnosed Raynaud’s Disease, which basically means when it is cold my hands turn white and hurt; I think it’s not terribly rare but there’s really no treatment for it other than “don’t get cold.”

So when it’s like 0 degrees every morning and the high for the day is 20, I don’t even want to leave the house. It’s like a struggle just to go down the street, I dress like I’m going to Antarctica. It’s been fine, I’m surviving, but there’s something that it does to me psychologically that I don’t love.

I think that in general it’s good to have seasons, to have times you love and kinda hate, because it helps me appreciate the summer more. But right now is a hard time for me. Oh look it’s 7 degrees out right now.

I’m so grateful to work from home! I still walk out to the bus stop with $KID every weekday morning, but apart from that I can mostly cloister myself in my warm office and try to ignore the fact that everything outside is dead.

Physically I’ve been doing pretty well. It’s still a bit of a daily roller coaster with my lower back and whether it’ll feel great or not-so-great, but it’s been a while since it’s felt actually bad and I’m thankful for that. Maybe, hopefully, some day I’ll be able to wake up and hop out of bed and not feel like getting immediately onto my heating pad.

We had a pretty good topline send train on Tuesday, and now it sounds like my gym buddies are going to go this afternoon with some family visiting from out of town, so I’m planning to meet up with them and hopefully send some more stuff. I think after PT, I should be good to go for today.

Tomorrow we’ll have $KID’s climbing class so I’ll go again, and I guess we’ll see how I feel about it when we get there. I don’t think I’ve done two days in a row yet.

I’ve started introducing more cross-training or gap-filling exercise, aiming to do at least four or five days a week of something. This week, I did nothing special on Monday, climb Tuesday, yoga Wednesday, grip endurance Thursday, and a deck workout on Friday.

Yoga actually sucked, I need to find a better video. The one I chose I had done before and forgot that it sucked, but it just had too many positions I can’t really get into, which makes me feel like I’m not getting enough out of it.

Still, I feel fairly sore from the deck workout yesterday, so that’s good, it’s good to feel sore again and feel like I’m building capacity in a real way. The deck workout is good because it’s all bodyweight stuff and the movements tend to be opposite to climbing (e.g. pushing rather than pulling). It’s good to toss some push-ups into the mix you know?

Meanwhile I have a lot of other hobby and chore stuff piling up, and I sense that this tends to happen because I don’t really want to sit at my computer, I want to be on this heating pad. Maybe this is a problem. Maybe it isn’t, I don’t know.

I will start another shelf bracket print today, I’m still looking for some temperature setting at which it won’t curl off the build plate. This is kind of nuts for PLA, which almost never does this, but the default Prusa Slicer temperature was like 30 degrees hotter than what the Hatchbox spool calls for and I think that’s part of the issue.

I got really close last week and ran out of filament, so now I have two brand new spools and I can start going at it again.

There’s a chance I’ll do some soldering to wire up the Shelly switch for the cabinet lighting in my “coffee area,” but there’s also a chance that I won’t. Depends on how I’m feeling I guess!

Here’s to a weekend with few plans!