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Tai chi
Back in late July or early August, I started taking a tai chi class with the Scientist and his mum. This all came about after I saw an offer to get four lessons for $19 on one of the new daily deal websites. The deal also offered a discount on the the remaining term should we continue on. We missed out on the first week of lessons last term but got right into it from week two.
I can’t say it’s been smooth sailing for me during the class. Some weeks I would go well in the class but others I found rather difficult. Mostly it’s been foot movements giving me the most trouble, although I found myself going blank quite frequently on the hand movements towards the end of the first term. I was seriously considering repeating the first level although the idea of starting at the very beginning didn’t appeal to me. My goal was to practice during the term break but then I had knee problems due to my subluxating kneecap.
I eventually did get in some decent practice the last couple of days before the new term started so wasn’t in terrible shape when we went back last week. I had purchased a dvd created by our instructor and while it has its problems, it did help with work on some moves. The first class for level two went far better than I expected. The last couple of moves that had really troubled me last term were suddenly feeling a lot better during the class. I still have trouble with moving my feet so that my body stays in balance but I guess I will get there.
The new move last week seemed quite difficult and complicated when we first started but didn’t seem so overwhelming by the end. I also found that moving from the previous moves into the new one was quite pleasing so maybe there is hope for some proficiency. I did find my knee was quite sore by the end of the class though. I hadn’t realised how much I use it during these movements until I’d put it through the paces for an hour.
The real test will come in the next weeks when we will be learning two moves each week. I’m hoping I am up for the challenge. Also, we now have four family members taking the class with the Scientist’s brother starting this term.
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A few odds and ends
My temporary job finished a few weeks ago and a Kenyan-born Indian woman invited everyone to lunch at her house. She cooked a lovely vegetarian meal with a dry potato curry, a mixed dahl soup, rice, chapatis, papadums, raita, and a carrot halva for dessert. It had some beautiful spices that just burst forth as you continue to eat. It was all quite delicious although it was a bit heavy on the carbohydrate with the rice, potatoes and breads. It was a pretty healthy meal but the dessert was rather rich and filled with butter.
I got home late in the afternoon feeling a bit sleepy so decided I should do at least a bit of exercise. All was going pretty well until the last part of my personal training routine when I had to do an exercise where I lifted my knees repeatedly. Towards the end of that I think my left kneecap popped off track, causing some pain and discomfort. I took a short break and managed to complete the last couple of minutes of the program although it I had to modify one of the exercises a bit to complete it. At the time I thought it was just a bit sore but hours later I notice that knee is quite swollen and this after taking anti-inflammatory painkillers. Hopefully the swelling will go down tomorrow but I will probably need to switch to some other exercise for a few days as most of the exercise program includes lots of knee movement.
Last week Lego Lover and I went to see a doctor with regard to taking part in a medication trial on low-dose Prozac to treat certain autistic behaviors. I met this doctor many years ago when I took Game Fanatic to see him about anxiety issues. He still remembered us after all these years even though we only met him once or twice. He thought our boys had some interesting neurochemistry going on. We have to go through three pre-trial interviews and assessments before it starts so we are still in the early stages and don’t know for certain if Lego Lover will be eligible.
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Moving the body
I had been exercising kind of regularly when we got the puppies but that kind of stopped once they were in the house. Their pen/crates/other stuff rather took over the games room space where the Xbox and tv are and shifting things around was a rather major undertaking. But I stopped using that excuse a couple of weeks ago and spent half an hour clearing the space, rolling up the cheap piece of linoleum and vacuuming the carpet. This endeavor was made easier by the fact that we extended the space they inhabit as they both could easily jump the pen.
So once I got a bit of a workout making space for a workout, I decided to use the Dance Central program for the first day and that went pretty well. I found I was a bit rusty on some of the movements but improved with a bit of practice. The second day I went back to the Your Shape Evolution program and ended up quite sore for a couple days afterwards. The same thing happened when I first used this program and it put me off returning to it for quite a while. I do find once I have used it once or twice that I am much better unless I overdo my workout.
I have discovered there are quite a few different workouts available on this program although I don’t think it caters to the overweight and extremely unfit users all that well. I am sure many would be totally put off continuing the program after a single workout. Before I got too far into it, I set up the program to connect with my Ubisoft Uplay account so that I can track information from my computer. What’s offered is still rather basic but I’m hoping this will be extended over time. I discovered a new version of this program is being released which includes warm up and cool down routines. I’ve noticed that none of the programs I’ve used so far have included this part of a workout so it’s about time this was included. How irresponsible to do a workout program and leave out some of the most important parts.
I’ve been using the program 3-4 times a week for a couple of weeks now and have started to notice some changes. The workouts I’ve been doing have focused a lot on abdominal and lower body with lots of squat exercises. I usually find the squat exercises really aggravate my knee problems but have gotten through this without any major dramas so far. I’ve already noticed that some of my muscles are getting stronger, which always feels like an accomplishment.
One really good result of the little bit of exercise has been a reduction in my fasting blood glucose levels over the past week. This has been the usual result with exercise most of the time I’ve been checking but I found they weren’t coming down very well earlier this year, whether I was getting regular exercise or not.
Aside from this exercise, the Scientist, his mum and I have been taking a tai chi class at the beach for the past term. The Scientist learned some tai chi when we were in Canada a decade ago but hadn’t returned to practice until now. It’s been an interesting experience to be learning this so far as it’s not something that can be rushed. We learned one move each week for the first eight weeks and the past two weeks have been consolidation of what we learned. But I am still rather unsure of myself and seriously considering repeating the first level of classes next term if I’m still struggling once we start back in a few weeks. I’m hoping practice will get me over a lot of the difficulties I’m having as starting right at the beginning is likely to be quite frustrating.
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Vertigo
Last Tuesday night I experienced an episode of vertigo where I felt everything was spinning around me. The initial spinning lasted all of about twenty or thirty seconds but it definitely took me by surprise. I started feeling a bit off earlier while still at work. There had been a variety of mishaps for me and one co-worker who stays late with me. I thought it might be the effects of spring pollen at the time as I’d opened windows for fresh air. I was feeling a bit lightheaded at that point but also as though there was a pressure around my head. Anyway, the first spinning episode occurred while I was still awake and I don’t really recall how good my balance was once I finally got up to go to bed.
I didn’t sleep well that night, being awaken numerous times by the spinning sensation. I think this is how I first experienced the vertigo the last time. I wasn’t feeling too badly the next day aside from being tired from lack of sleep. So I went into work where I dragged myself through the afternoon. But late in the day I suddenly felt like the pressure around my head had gone and was feeling good compared to the previous day.
There was no work on Thursday so I spent the day resting and wasn’t feeling too badly by later afternoon. I went off to a tai chi class I’m taking with the Scientist and his mum this term. And I didn’t topple over during the class even though there were a few times early on when it felt like I would.
I assumed the worst of this was over as an episode I had a few months back resolved within a day or two. But Friday I found I was feeling worse the more I moved around and ended up calling in sick as I didn’t think it was worth risking a drive to work. During the evening, I found myself getting nauseous and the vertigo was back so the Scientist insisted I go to bed. I took a Stemzine prescribed for motion/travel sickness problems last year and that seemed to help the nausea. Didn’t fall asleep until late but did do lots of reading on my iPad while in bed.
I found this weekend that I have had little of the vertigo and lots of the nasal congestion I get with spring allergies. This was highlighted when I went outside yesterday morning and found one of my ears had blocked up by the time I came back inside. Which again caused some balance issues…but these I’ve had in the past and don’t worry about quite so much. Today I was feeling improved and I’m hopeful I’ll be fine to drive to an appointment in the morning. Fortunately it’s only a five minute drive so won’t be stranded should any problems occur.
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Odds and ends
I’ve been to the airport twice in two days now. Yesterday we saw the Scientist’s mum off to Sri Lanka until next month at the international terminal. Today I picked up a friend from the domestic terminal. I find it interesting how rarely I’ve been to the domestic terminal in seventeen years here. I’m fairly certain that today aside, I’ve only been there when I’ve been flying. Also interesting is that I’ve never departed from the international terminal. We once did arrive back in Australia when returning from almost a year in Canada.
I was feeling pretty sore today after a rather overzealous exercise routine yesterday. It was the sort of exercise that sets me up for injury. Today I opted to go out for a walk in the afternoon. But I procrastinated so long I thought it would be dark before I got myself moving, which might have meant I didn’t exercise at all today. But I did get my feet moving in front of each other and started walking around 4:30, leaving about half an hour before sunset. I found it was quite chilly from strong winds as I began my meanderings but it was much calmer once I moved onto main roads where there is no wind tunnel effect happening.
I recently cleared out my 16gb mp3 player and added all the music I could think of, which has amounted to over 1300 songs from 50+ albums. I took this out with me as I walked today and had the music on shuffle, which provided a nice mix of songs while a walked. It’s always good to hear songs that I normally wouldn’t purposely play. Some of the fun was working out who was singing and/or which album the song was from.
I ended up abandoning my personal photo challenge project last month. I just couldn’t keep up the pace in the end and I lost momentum. I prepared quite a few photos to upload to Flickr and added tags, titles and other details to the photos. I pressed upload and promptly closed the program out before anything was actually uploaded So all the details were lost. Strangely I wasn’t as upset as I might expect to be at this mistake. I’d spent well over an hour on preparations for uploads and it was rather late at night. Maybe I was just too tired to be bothered about it. Unfortunately, I haven’t felt motivated to start over again since then. And now I have even more photos to add to the mix.
My computer finally gasped its last breath a couple weeks ago. There had been issues occurring for several months and we couldn’t work out the reasons. It was still mostly functional but often would reboot itself during the startup process. And occasionally I’d get a blue screen. More recently, the blue screen became a constant with every start up and we knew the end was near. One day, it just refused to start up so my system had an operation to replace the motherboard, and associated components that were incompatible with the new one. The Scientist went straight to work on it after completing a grueling day of his paid work. And I am very thankful for his effort as I have an almost new system now. And it wasn’t quite as expensive as we might have expected.
I still haven’t posted about our concert experience from late April but will finish it up soon and post it. It’s been mostly complete for a while but I wanted to add a couple things and just haven’t. I’d probably have given up on it except that I have already spent heaps of time on writing and editing it.
I think there were other odds and ends but I have forgotten. I have a post on family that I want to write in the next day or so with some happy news and some not so happy news but I want that to be separate.
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Go Red for Women update
I should be going off to bed but I’m going to write something since it’s been so long. I last posted about the Go Red for Women heart health challenge so I will follow up from that for now. It’s now the eleventh of the month and I’ve been exercising nearly every day so far. I missed one day and on another I only just managed to fulfill the thirty minutes of the challenge by walking when we were out earlier in the week. I wasn’t feeling well that day so I feel that I was doing well to get that far.
So far, most of the exercise has been indoors, using programs on the Kinect, which was a birthday present. I should backtrack a bit and say that when I first got the Kinect, it didn’t work particularly well on our tv in the living room as it’s such a small space. What eventuated was we got a new tv and moved the old one into our games room and the Xbox is now connected there, which allows the living room to be more lived in, so to speak. The games room isn’t that big but it’s far more spacious and the Kinect works quite well in the space.
One of the programs I bought was Your Shape: Fitness Evolved. A while back we bought a version of this for the Wii and it was a disaster to use. There was the space problem but it was really not geared towards the less fit or beginners. This program, however, does a far better job. It does have some problems with providing the right excercise, but it’s a vast improvement over the previous one. For one thing, it’s mostly doable at the lower end of the scale. I will say, however, that it’s a good idea to try out little bits of it at a time. When I first used it, I tried out several short routines and ended up sore and uncomfortable for so many days that it was about a month before I willed myself to try it again. I’m glad I did return to it because I think I’ve got a better handle on what I can manage each day.
Another program I bought is Dance Central, which is a pretty odd choice for anyone who knows me that well. I don’t tend to like dancing and I’m fairly klutzy. But I read that this program is good about showing you how to do the moves by breaking it down into smaller bits and providing opportunities to practice and get it right. There was a demo on the Kinect Adventures disk that came with the Kinect and it seemed like it might be useful as an exercise tool. So far, I am making some progress. The first song is a Lady Gaga song, which drives me a bit batty…but I’m kind of used to it now, at least while I’m using the program. It’s taken a while but I’ve managed to get through all three levels of the song and I’m pretty competent on the hard level. It’s a rather startling feat since I honestly didn’t think I’d ever conquer some of the moves. Anyway, once I got to the medium level I added a second song that I didn’t know at all and dislike far more than the Gaga song. I’ve kind of got used to that one too…can’t say I’d ever be happy to hear it on the radio. A few days ago I added the third song and I seem to be progressing a bit more quickly.
I knew dancing to be a very good exercise but I am finding this out first-hand as I practice the different dances. Even when I am using the break it down mode, my heart gets pumping and I work up a sweat. I find that mode is good for warming up and also serves to remind me of the moves I need to use for the full song. I have been in a habit of doing this program for a little while, then moving on to the Your Shape program. Today I think I might have gone just a bit overboard by trying out an interval training program which lasted twenty minutes. I’d already worked out for quite a while and was pretty sore by the end of it.
A third Kinect program I bought was the Sports program, which I am not using for exercise at the moment. It’s fun for playing with the family but I find some of the activities are a bit harsh on my feet so don’t want to depend on it for regular exercise.
The challenge goes for ten weeks so I am hoping I will be able to stick to some regular exercise in that time. And hopefully I will manage to avoid injury that creates stumbling blocks in my efforts to be fit again.
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Different sort of challenge
I signed up a couple days ago to be part of the Go Red for Women heart challenge sponsored by the Australian Heart Association. I don’t seem to be able to maintain the better eating and exercise habits so I’m hoping this will help keep me motivated for a bit longer. It starts on the first of next month but I’m not necessarily waiting to start working a bit harder on my goals. I’m mostly looking just to improve my fitness and my eating habits since experience has shown the body shape and size will adjust quite easily with those changes in place. It’s possibly a bit risky with the seasonal change towards wet weather ahead but I’m planning on using walking as my main form of exercise. And just maybe I will get my bike into a shop and get it serviced so I can feel safe while riding again.
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Broken
The monitor for my computer died yesterday. One minute it was working , then the screen went white and that was it. The Scientist did some tests with other monitors and computers and it had definitely called it a day. So we went out and now I’ve got a bigger and hopefully better monitor. It was interesting to note that all of the monitors at the shop, bar one, were bigger than the one that just died. That one was a pretty big one when I got it no more than a couple years ago. Now the standard seems to be 21 inch or greater. So I’m the first in the house to have a 23 inch monitor and also the first to have an HD monitor. Here’s hoping this one will last a bit longer than the last one.
In other news, my left  foot has been in pain since early yesterday for reasons currently unknown. Although I did some exercise for a couple days, I wasn’t moving in any way that should have caused an injury and my feet were on the floor throughout. The pain covers the top left side of my foot, going up to the ankle and got worse after I continued walking on it. By last night it was throbbing and I ended up taking paracetamol (Tylenol) and later on, naproxen, to get some relief. I ended up falling asleep early last night and woke up without the throbbing pain, but it still hurts when I walk on it. I guess I will stay off it as much as possible today and hope for improvement by tomorrow or I’ll have to see further help.
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2 weeks
Today marks the magical two week point after surgery where life supposedly returns to normal. While my surgery now seems like it was a long time ago, I don’t feel totally healed yet. I imagine that once I’m allowed to do heavy lifting/work  after six weeks I will feel like I am healed, at least from the outside.
I do feel as though I’m able to get back to most of my activities but I’m aware that some still tire me a bit more easily than I expect. Obviously the two weeks is a very general marker and each person’s experience will vary a bit. I ended up driving quite a bit yesterday to help out a friend who is currently without a working vehicle and I was tired by the time I returned home a couple hours or so later. Of course it might be just a matter of forgetting how tiring driving is too. :)
I’m thinking I might try starting back into exercise today. My appetite seems to be back and I’ve found I’m eating too much and too often right now. A couple days ago we had fish and chips from a local shop. I did order grilled instead of fried fish but then gorged on the chips. I also added a couple bites of an extra piece of fried fish, which I regretted almost immediately. Fortunately, I’ve not suffered any big digestive problems so far but I did feel pretty awful afterwards due to overeating. Anyway, getting back to regular exercise usually helps me manage my eating habits so it’s now one of my priorities.
The bills from surgery have started to trickle in. I’ve already received ones for pathology and fluoroscopy which should be mostly refunded by our government-funded Medicare service.  I expect a bill from the anesthetist and another one from the hospital for surgical supplies (TED stockings and DVT-preventing intermittent pneumatic leg compression sleeves). These surgical supplies are  the items that really bug me because we have the highest coverage of private health insurance available and yet, this isn’t covered.
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Getting out
I found I was a bit more tired yesterday than I realised. I ended up taking something akin to a nap in late morning but “woke up” feeling more tired than I’d been all day. Not exactly a good rest. I did eventually get out of the house on my own in the afternoon for a couple of hours when I went off to the library and then to the grocery store. Driving felt a bit alien and tired me out more than I would have expected, especially since I didn’t venture that far from home. Â I’d had visions of making dinner when I got home but was too tired. I’d also had to deal with an unexpectedly heavy grocery bag when I’m not supposed to be doing heavy work or lifting until six weeks. Fortunately I only had to get it into the shopping cart and then into the car. The Scientist brought that one inside for me and told me off for lifting it in the first place. The worst part of going out is that I had expectations of really enjoying myself but it was mostly disappointing. It was like I was dragging myself around, even at the library. In hindsight, I probably wouldn’t have spent so much time wandering around the library because I was on my feet the whole time I was there.
I again woke up too early this morning, thanks to my bladder, and it took a long while to get back to sleep again. There seems to be a pattern here…Anyway, I finally did get back to a pretty solid sleep for at least one and half hours. What a difference a proper sleep makes! Last night I was feeling quite hesitant about going out again today. But I was feeling well enough that I did go out and it went pretty well. I went to a local shopping center and wandered around a few of the shops then stopped at our local grocery store to get something for dinner. This time I wasn’t ready to crash when I got home and was able to handle cooking the dinner, which didn’t require too much effort. I’m still a bit tired but not exhausted like yesterday. While I still had little satisfaction from wandering through the shops, I did feel pretty good about being able to cook dinner, which was appreciated by all.