health – dangermouse.net

A new dental era

My dentist is retiring. I got a text message today announcing this from his office. Which reminded me that I’m overdue for a checkup and clean. So I immediately phoned the office to book in for one, but they informed me that there were no appointments free until after his retirement at the end of November. The hygienist is still going to be working there but a new dentist will start and take over the practise in December. So I won’t get to see the old dentist again. I’ve been going there for many years now and really liked his work. Hopefully the new dentist will be as good.

In language learning, Duolingo has decided that it’s going to block my progress in learning vocabulary and grammar until I master katakana. I have to complete 25 lessons just on memorising katakana before it will let me continue with the vocabulary exercises. Which is annoying, as I suspect my vocab and grammar will decay a bit before I can resume.

I did all of the hiragana memory exercises, but they haven’t really stuck with me, unfortunately. So I’ve now also started using Anki flashcards to learn the hiragana characters properly. So Im currently memorising both hiragana and katakana at the same time. And trying to do it quickly so I can get back to the vocabulary exercises.

Also today I marked one of the university image processing assignments. This was a very interesting one that is very different from the usual object recognition or image segmentation stuff that most students attempt. This team decided to try generating images, namely camouflage patches to match various photograph scenes. They implemented a generative adversarial network, with the generator using a neural network to produce candidate camouflage image patches, and the discriminator attempting to detect the patches when overlaid over the original landscape source image. The goal of the generator is to produce patches that the discriminator can’t detect. Their results looked pretty impressive. They mainly get marked on the layout and writing of their report, so it’s not all about performance.

Scully was a bit off-colour today, not eating her breakfast or any treats at all during the day. She wanted to go out a few times to eat grass, and eventually threw up late in the afternoon. After which she hungrily ate her food and wanted more, so she seems better now.

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Sore back recovery

I slept poorly, because I was trying hard not to injure my back more during the night as I rolled over in bed. I think I got about two hours sleep before waking to roll over and deciding to get up and stretch out and walk off the stiffness and pain. I put an ice pack on and did stretches before getting back into bed. Then I only kind of half-dozed for a few more hours without really falling asleep, and got up again to do more ice and stretching. I spent about an hour doing that before returning to bed again around 5:30am, and half-dozed again without moving.

But it helped! I was tired, but my back survived the night without getting much worse. During today I continued the ice and stretches, and we went on a big walk with Scully which gave it some natural movement. And this evening it feels a lot better. I can tell it’s still a bit tender and stiff, but it’s not painful at all. I think experience with this issue means I know how to attack it quickly and effectively to reduce how serious it is. Hopefully by tomorrow it’ll be close to normal again.

Mostly today I worked on comics. I did a Darths & Droids strip, and also photographed and assembled a week’s worth of Irregular Webcomic! to cover the upcoming week. I’d intended to do a full batch of several weeks worth, but abandoned that when I hurt my back yesterday.

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Online games and a sore back

On Friday I had a bunch of ethics classes about the Witch Hunt topic. I’m also asking the kids about their Halloween plans and the differences are interesting. Most of the kids not in the US/Canada don’t really have any big plans. Most of the ones there do, but not all – there were a couple of immigrants who don’t do anything, and one kid said he didn’t do anything for Halloween because it was his mother’s birthday.

I joined in online board games early in the evening because my wife and I decided not to go out for dinner. I just made some pasta at home, which gave me ore time to play games with friends. We played some Jump Drive, and one guy won all three games handily, which was okay as he doesn’t normally win that game, so he was pretty chuffed.

Then inspired by the upcoming US election, we tried Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game as a bit of fun. It’s actually an interesting abstract strategy game and I thought it was fine, but I think you’d need to play it a bit to get the strategy. Then we played Draftosaurus, which I won, and Vaalbara, which I never win because I haven’t figured out the strategy yet. We finished with a classic, Settlers of Catan, which we hadn’t played for ages. That game took a while, but I managed to win that one, so had a pretty successful night overall.

This morning I got up and had breakfast while my wife and Scully slept in. I planned to go out for a 5k run, but when I went into the bedroom to wake my wife up I bent over and hurt my lower back. I’ve done this a few times before and knew the horrible feeling when the muscles spasm and the pain shoots through the nerves. I quickly went and laid down on my front to calm the muscles down, and my wife got me an ice pack. I felt okay after a bit, but when I moved to try to stand up I could feel that it was going to be tough doing it without overwhelming pain. So I had to take it very slowly and struggled up after several minutes of tiny shifts.

Once standing, I could walk around and do some very gentle stretches to loosen up. The main problem is doing anything that might cause the muscles to spasm again, so I had to be super careful, all day. We’d planned to got out driving for the day, but had to nix that as I didn’t want to risk folding up in the car. I basically spent the day walking around slowly to relax and stretch the muscles and just avoid anything risky. Which made it hard to get much done in terms of things like writing comics or whatever that I’d wanted to do.

We went for a few short walks with Scully. Walking is the one thing I could do that works to help the muscles calm down and recover. For dinner we decided to go up the street to a local Szechaun place that we like, but where we haven’t been for a long time. I tried the sweet and sour pork for the first time (I usually get chilli prawns), and it was very good.

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Learning about hair conditioner

This morning I finished up writing some new comic scripts for the new batch of Irregular Webcomic! Then I photographed them after lunch. I only managed half of the batch, but that will be enough to last through this week. I assembled some and uploaded them to the server, just in time for the automated update!

At lunch I walked Scully up to the Greenwich shops. On the way we dropped off the last of a series of novels that my wife wanted to get rid of at one the small street libraries. Each time I’ve added more, the old ones have gone, so someone is obviously appreciating them, and probably keeping an eye out for more of the same series.

For dinner I made some roasted cauliflower, cauliflower leaves, and brussels sprouts. I found out a while back that all the green bits of cauliflower are edible, and have been cooking with them. Roasted in a bit of oil and seasoned they’re delicious. Some of the thicker stalks are a bit tough to chew, but the small tender ones and the leafy bits are great.

In other interesting events, out of sheer curiosity I tried using my wife’s hair conditioner a few weeks ago. I’ve never used conditioner before in my life, and didn’t really know what to expect. When I was growing up we only ever had shampoo and I sort of assumed that conditioner was a fancy thing that only rich people used. So I’ve spent my whole life ever since washing my hair daily with shampoo and never using conditioner.

After trying it once, I could feel that my hair was less squeaky clean and more moisturised and silky soft. That seems to be a positive thing, so I’ve kept using it. But just now I decided to do some research and find out if I really need to use it or not. After all, if I’ve lived this long and my hair has never given em any problems, maybe I don’t need conditioner?

Turns out there’s a lot of very conflicting advice on the net. Ranging from “If you shampoo, you have to use conditioner. Everyone. Every. Single. Wash.” to “Anyone with hair less than ear length doesn’t need conditioner.”

Digging a bit deeper, I found some explanations of what conditioner is really supposed to do and how you’re supposed to use it. This old thread from the subreddit r/haircarescience was very informative.

So, apparently conditioner is meant to rehydrate and physically smooth hair strands after shampooing, because the shampoo strips away natural oils and causes the strand surface to roughen. However, It seems to be advised to use conditioner only on the hair strands themselves, and not get any conditioner on your scalp, because the product can build up there, even with rinsing, and cause skin irritation, itchiness, and flaking. The hair strands within “a couple of inches” (five centimetres or so) of the scalp will naturally be more oily due to the proximity of the skin, and so the best method of using conditioner is to apply it only to the hair strands more than 5 cm away from the scalp. This avoids getting any on the skin itself.

Okay, so this is definitely not what I’ve been doing. My hair is not even that long. So… from this research it seems like I should actually not be using conditioner at all. I’ve been using it the past few weeks, but now I’ll go back to not using it and see if it really makes much difference outside of the immediate aftermath of a shower. I’ll report back here, if I remember.

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Flu shot time

Today my wife and I were booked in for our annual pre-winter flu shots. We also booked a COVID booster, but when we showed up at the pharmacy after my wife got home from work in the evening, they said we weren’t due for a COVID booster yet. I thought we should have them at 6 month intervals, but they said we weren’t supposed to have them until 12 months after the last one. I guess they changed the recommendations about it recently.

Anyway, we had our flu shots. So far we’re both fine, no negative effects at all, apart from the slight dull pain in the arm.

This morning I wrote a lesson plan for this week’s new critical thinking and ethics topic, on “Dreams”. I think this should be an interesting and fun one. First classes are tomorrow evening. Some sample questions:

Do you think dreams are a part of everyday reality, or visions of something else?
Why would some people think dreams can predict the future?
Have you ever had a dream that inspired a story, artwork, or an idea to solve a problem?
Could dreams be part of our creative processes?
If you do something bad in a dream does that mean you could be a bad person?
Could you be dreaming right now? Why or why not?

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Annoying back pain

The past few days I’ve had a bit of a shoulder strain. It hurts, but I’d been thinking at least it’s not lower back pain, I should feel lucky.

Then today, for no reason at all, as I bent over to put something in the kitchen tidy bin, my back muscles spasmed and I ended up collapsed on the floor in pain. Argh!

From experience, this takes 2-3 days to get over. I’ve been icing it with an ice pack intermittently all day, putting it back in the freezer to chill down again in between. And doing some of the careful stretching exercises my physiotherapist taught me to manage and reduce the strain.

Apart from dealing with that, I did some comics stuff and had three ethics classes tonight. I’ll stop there since I want to get away from the desk and relax now.

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Games and eye tests

Friday was board games night at a friend’s place. It was a new venue as he’s moved recently, and he cooked an Indian style beef curry with rice for dinner for us. I arrived in the middle of a game of Last Message.

This is a game where someone has been murdered and one player has to give the solvers clues as to who it was, by drawing their clues on a small erasable whiteboard. Then another player, who is trying to prevent the others from solving the murder gets to erase parts of the clue before anyone else sees it. The whiteboard is divided into 9 squares, and in the first round the obfuscater can erase I think 5 of the squares, leaving the other 4. Then the solvers have to try to interpret what’s left of the clue to identify the killer… from a large Where’s Wally-like drawing containing hundreds of slightly different characters! So it ain’t easy!

If they fail, they get another clue, and this time the obfuscater gets to erase one less square. You continue for four rounds, and if the solvers haven’t identified the killer with four guesses, they lose and the obfuscater wins. We played a few games and it was tricky, but we always managed to identify the killer in time.

After that we split into two groups since there were a lot of people, and I played a game of The Guild of Merchant Explorers while the other group played Heat: Pedal to the Metal. I’d played this game once before and liked it, so it was good to give it another go, even if I came equal last of 4 players. Then we played a game of Through the Desert while the others finished Heat. We finished those two games almost simultaneously, so everyone joined together for a game of Codenames. I was a spymaster, but despite valiant cluing and guessing we lost by just one card.

Today, Saturday, I did a 5k run in the morning. The weather being cooler meant I could go a bit faster, and I recorded my third fastest time: 26:33.

Mid-morning I went with my wife to get our annual eye checkup at the optometrist, to see if our glasses prescriptions need updating. The optometrist also took fundus photos and optical coherence tomography (OCT) cross sections of our retinas to check for any abnormalities. We came out with a clean bill of eye health, which is good.

After this we grabbed some lunch from the nearby shops (I got sushi) and sat in the park and let Scully run around a bit, before heading home. This afternoon I worked on writing several new Darths & Droids strips.

For dinner I made okonomiyaki. We ran out of seaweed flakes last time and I tried to find more in the Asian grocery store, but I couldn’t find it pre-flaked, so I bought a small pack of seaweed sheets, thinking they’re brittle enough that I could quite easily crush them into small flakes. But they turned out to be tougher than I expected, so we had rather large flakes. Oh well.

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An intense game of Root

Yesterday was board games night at a friend’s place. We started with a game of Codenames, which my team lost when my partner and I guessed the assassin word. Always a terrible way to lose.

Then we split into a game of 4 people playing Root, and 3 people who played some Jump Drive and possibly other things. I was in the Root game, playing the Eyrie. The game progressed steadily until we were all about 15 points, halfway to the wining score of 30. Then the Woodland Alliance player suddenly made a big series of gains in one turn, putting him within striking distance of victory. Then the Vagabond player did the same, also scoring over 10 points in his very next turn, setting up potential victory next turn too. And then the Marquisate player played a Dominance card, removing his point score and setting an alternate win condition of controlling two clearings in opposite corners of the board. And then he moved 8 cat warriors into one clearing and 10 into the clearing in the opposite corner!!! This would easily win him the game at the start of his next turn, and it would be basically impossible for the rest of us to stop him.

I took my turn, meekly doing pretty much nothing, as I didn’t have the potential to do anything dramatic on this turn. And then the Woodland Alliance scored the final few points to hit 30 and win. Basically, just a turn ahead of the Vagabond, who could have won next turn, and the Marquisate, who would have won right after that. So all three of my opponents had victory in sight within a turn of each other, while I was stuck languishing in very obvious last place.

Just look at all the cats in the two corners of the board!

Also yesterday I walked past the construction site that is a few blocks from our place, where a slew of apartments are replacing the old houses that were there. It’s making progress, although still in the digging and moving earth around phase.

This morning I went for a 5k run, but I noticed as I ran that I had a bit of a pain in my side. I completed the 5k, then had my shower and also cleaned the bathroom and shower while doing that. Then sat down for a while, and a few hours later my side had tensed up terribly. It’s a muscle strain, and quite painful I’ve been putting an icepack on it to reduce inflammation but I suspect it’ll take a few days to calm down. Which means probably no running tomorrow.

For dinner tonight my wife and I took Scully for a long walk over to the Flat Rock Brew Cafe, which is a really nice place for a late afternoon drink and meal. It has shady outdoor seating. I had a dark ale and a pulled pork burger, which was really good.

Back home this evening we watched the Australian movie The Dry. Excellent film – highly recommended for anyone who likes mystery/crime investigation. I won’t say any more – just see it.

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New neighbours and old ankles

Friday was board games night at a friend’s place, so no post yesterday. I arrived just in time to join a game of The Guild of Merchant Explorers, which was new to me. It was a fun game of exploring across a personal hex map (each player had an identical map), establishing towns and trying to connect trade routes to earn coins. I liked it, but I ended up significantly behind everyone else, finishing with about 130 coins while all the other three players were within a few coins of each other around 150.

After this we played a game of Mysterium, at the medium difficulty level. I was going really well, guessing my character and location quickly, but I got stuck on the weapon, guessing wrong 3 times and ultimately being the only player not to correctly get all of my information! Being a cooperative game, that meant we all lost, alas.

Then we finished off with a game of Just One, which I’ve played a lot online, but never with the actual boxed game equipment. That went pretty well and we scored a lot of matches.

Another thing that happened is I met one of our new neighbours, who moved in this week. It’s an older couple, retiree age, and they’re from South Africa. I met the woman and she met Scully, and was delighted to meet her. She said that they had a Maltese terrier and a cat, but they are in quarantine after arriving from South Africa and wouldn’t be moving in until February. When they arrive we’ll have to make sure Scully meets the dog and becomes friendly.

Today I slept in a bit and then went for a 5k run in the relative cool of the morning. Unfortunately at one point I had to step off the footpath to go around a clump of pedestrians and I twisted my ankle on the grass. It wasn’t bad at the time and I finished the run, in better time than my last couple of runs. But through the day it’s gotten more sore and swelled up a little bit. I’ve started putting ice on it to reduce the swelling and inflammation. But I doubt I’ll be doing a run tomorrow. I can walk okay, and in fact we did a couple of long walks today with Scully, but I don’t want to risk running on it.

We went over to Naremburn after lunch for a sweet treat from the bakery – I got a cinnamon roll. And then we went out again for dinner, to a seafood restaurant that we really like. I had mahi-mahi, which was really nice.

I spent a few hours today refining an adventure for next Saturday’s Scum & Villainy game that I’ll be running at the local science shop. I’ve found a one-shot adventure outline for Blades in the Dark, and I’m reskinning it from fantasy to science fiction in the Star Wars setting. It’s coming along nicely, and hopefully should be a lot of fun.

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Spinal update and heavy rain

This morning I worked on some more Darths & Droids writing. It never ends!

After lunch I had an appointment with my neurologist, following up on the spinal injection procedure I had before Christmas. The numbness in my left leg seems to have been partly relieved by the injection, improving slowly over the past few weeks. I’d say it’s about 50% back towards full sensation now, so a noticeable improvement, but still not back to normal. I told the neurologist this, and she said that this showed that it was indeed the L3 nerve causing the issue. Which is a good thing, because it’s not something else that might indicate more severe problems. She said at this stage the most sensible option is just “wait and see”. It might slowly deteriorate again over the next few years. She also said that if I notice any other symptoms like tingling or numbness anywhere else in the body, I should get it checked up straight away. But for now it seems there’s no serious ongoing issue, as it’s simply minor loss of sensation, with a pinpointed cause, and no effect on any muscles.

And as a bonus, she didn’t even charge me anything for the consultation!

I walked back home via my wife’s work to pick up Scully and take her home. I wanted to hurry a bit because there was incoming rain on the weather radar, to get home before it hit. We made it, and it’s a good thing because it really set in. It’s been raining steadily, sometimes heavy, for the past several hours. It won’t be fun later when I take Scully out for her pre-bedtime toileting. I use a big umbrella and try to stand over her to shelter her from getting too wet, but inevitably there’s some towelling off when we get back inside. It’s been a ridiculously wet summer so far, and seems to just be rolling on. All over Eastern Australia – there are ongoing flood issues both north in Queensland and south in Victoria, but we seem to have missed most of the major floods so far.

I made fried rice for dinner. We were out of the usual vegetables like broccoli and carrots, so I did it with a lot of celery and some chopped Brussels sprouts, which seemed to work okay.

And tonight was the first three classes of my “Minor Laws” ethics topic. I had some interesting discussion with some of the kids, and quite varying opinions on whether it’s okay or not to break laws that thousands of people break every day without caring about it.

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