health – Page 3 – dangermouse.net

Double sick Saturday

I’m slowly getting better form my week of illness, but today my wife started getting similar symptoms to how mine started. I really hope her case isn’t as serious or long as mine.

We went out at lunch time to take Scully for a walk, and I just felt like some hot chips, not even with any fish, and my wife agreed. So we just got a large serve of chips from the fish & chips shop and took them to the lookout over the harbour to eat them. Mmm… hot and oily and salty…

It was a beautiful sunny day, but very cold. The overnight temperature was the lowest recorded in May for 24 years, at 7.0°C, and the maximum in mid-afternoon didn’t even reach 19°C.

I postponed the final lesson in my game design class again, for the second Sunday morning in a row. At the moment I’ve decided to keep my Sunday evening ethics classes scheduled, but if I’m not feeling any better by this time tomorrow I’m going to have to do a last-minute cancellation for those.

Oh, if my wife isn’t back to full health by Friday, I’m going to have to postpone my next Dungeons & Dragons game session too. And I’ll have to postpone it at least 6 weeks, because of my upcoming trip to Japan.

New content today:

Have I turned the corner?

Last night was awful. I managed to fall asleep soon after going to bed, but I was awake around 3am and the rest of the night was spent coughing horribly, blowing my nose, and racing out to the bathroom to spit out horrible chunky phlegm that the coughing brought up. At one point I felt like I was going to vomit, but I managed not to (maintaining my vomit-free streak since 2001).

By a bit after 5:30 I couldn’t handle it any more and just got up. It actually helped to be up and puttering around the house rather then lying in bed and trying to rest. As the morning progressed I felt better, and for the first time since I got this last Friday I can say that I felt like today was better than yesterday. So hopefully I’ve turned the corner and things will only get better from here.

I was fine during the day, and I took Scully on a long walk to the Italian bakery where I got a slice of pizza for lunch. I also got a pistachio and chocolate snail, but felt full enough that I decided to bring it home for dessert this evening.

I spent time at home marking more university assignments. I’ve dne them all now, except for one final video, which the students had placed on Google Docs as a slide show, with small individual videos embedded in the slides. I can see a few of them, but most I don’t have permission to view, so I’ve contacted the professor to get him to see if he can get the students to grant me viewing permission.

This evening my condition is deteriorating again, as it has every night. Fortunately I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow. I suspect the throat thing might be a secondary bacterial infection, so some antibiotics will hopefully help it clear up faster.

In other fun news, my webhost attempted an automated update from PHP 7.4 to 8.1 overnight. Most of the stuff worked okay, but there was a small issue with a custom WordPress theme on this blog. That was easy to fix. But now I’ve discovered the new version of PHP breaks my private MediaWiki installation, which I use for note taking and sharing stuff with my circle of friends.

Checking, I found out I’m running MedaWiki 1.24, which was deprecated in 2015. The latest version is 1.39. So… I have to brace myself to try to upgrade MediaWiki from an 18-year-old version. And it has custom mods for security – I’ve set it so that nobody can see anything but the front landing page unless they’re logged in. So I’ll have to upgrade, hope it works, and hope I can redo the custom mod successfully. Otherwise I’ll have to run PHP 7.4 until I can… migrate everything off the wiki to some other solution. Yuk.

I’m gonna save this load of fun for a day when I’m not dying of flu.

New content today:

OMG this flu

I checked and apparently my symptoms are consistent with a particularly nasty strain of flu going around Sydney at the moment. It is utterly miserable. Today was the worst day yet – it just seems to get worse every passing day. A few days ago I’d been feeling relatively okay in the mornings and deteriorating later in the day. But today I’ve been feeling messed up all day. barely got any sleep again last night, up with constantly blocked and dripping nose and coughing.

I was thinking it would be bad if I cancelled a whole week of Outschool classes and was feeling better by Tuesday or Wednesday – I could be teaching kids later in the week. But now I’m starting to feel like I won’t even be in fit shape to teach a class on Sunday.

I marked another couple of university assessment reports and videos. It turns out the Beatles break-up team did in fact submit two separate reports. I had to ask the professor to send me the other one. The two halves of the team seem to have worked almost completely independently, because even though they started with the same project idea, they went completely different directions with it and used different datasets.

But in good news, I got some new roleplaying games! I was thinking about the store credit I still have at the game shop, and what to spend it on, and decided to look at some recent games that have been well received, and also browse through what else they had available that struck my fancy. I ordered them by email, and my wife was in the city so I messaged her and she dropped in to the game shop to pick them up on her way home.

I decided to get:

The One Ring RPG – the third of the four roleplaying games based on the works of Tolkien.
Blades in the Dark – a heist-based game set in a fantastic Victorian era city, acclaimed because of its innovative mechanics.
Monster of the Week – a game using the other recent acclaimed “Powered by the Apocalypse” mechanics, reproducing an X-Files/Buffy style monster hunt in the modern day.
Mörk Borg – a real outlier; an award-winning dark, gritty, fantasy game inspired by heavy metal.

The last one, Mörk Borg, has made a real name for itself recently, so it was the first one I cracked open. It’s a short book, and… flipping through it is an experience. The graphic design is all over the place – it feels like your brain is being ripped out as you read it. But it works. The text is dark and disgusting and strangely compelling. The PCs in this game are not heroes. They’re doomed to die, as is everyone in this bleak world, and soon! When starting a campaign the GM basically sets up a world-destroying apocalypse that will end the game at some random time in the future. And unlike heroic games, the PCs can’t do anything about it – the world will end. Their only job is to make their short lives more comfortable for themselves at the expense of everyone else. It sounds awful, but you can’t take your eyes off it. I’m not sure if I’ll ever run this game, but it’s definitely one for aficionados of RPGs to absorb and mine for dark ideas.

How dark? Let me just say that I think what I have is the Mörk Borg of flus.

New content today:

Flu or bad cold? Who knows

I’m no longer sure this is a flu I’m suffering. It feels now more like the worst cold ever. It’s a sore throat, painful swallowing, blocked sinuses, coughing, sneezing, and runny nose. There’s no fever or muscle soreness which is what I usually associate with flu. I’ve booked to see my GP on Friday if I’m still unwell (and will cancel if I’m recovered by then). Although apparently there are some weird and nasty flu strains going around here at the moment. I’m seeing stories on Reddit about people in Sydney having similar symptom smörgåsbords that last 2-3 weeks! I really hope it doesn’t go as far as the weekend. I don’t want to have to cancel another week of Outschool classes.

Today I started the chore of marking the final assessments of the university Data Engineering students. I have 5 reports to read, and 6 videos to watch, because one of the teams apparently had a Beatles-esque break-up and the two halves refused to work together on a video, so each sub-team made a video of their own.

Not much else to report. I only took Scully on a couple of short walks, because I didn’t feel up to walking very far.

New content today:

24 hours of flu

The past 24 hours have been mostly about me being sick. I went to bed before 11pm, but was still awake at 3am, not having managed to fall asleep due to the sore throat, dripping nose, and sore sinuses. I decided to get up and have some sinus medication, with a glass of milk. I also liberally rubbed Vicks VapoRub on my chest, hoping that would help clear the nose. It all worked a bit, because I got maybe 2-3 hours of sleep before my wife got up at the alarm to get ready for work.

Symptoms were less during the morning, but have progressively got worse again as the day wore on, as has been the pattern so far. This evening I think I feel even worse than last night.

I cancelled all my Outschool classes for the remainder of the week to Friday. That means a full week skipped, so I can push the topics up a week and no students will miss a topic due to their class being cancelled while I do others in the same week. It’ll also give me time to rest.

And mark university assessment reports… I have a bunch of reports and video presentations to mark.

New content today:

Ongoing flu and windy weather

I did a RAT for COVID and it was negative. So I’m fairly sure what I have is a flu. Despite getting the latest flu vaccination just two weeks ago. Well, hopefully that is taking some of the edge off it, since I don’t feel as bad as some flus I’ve had in the past.

I got up this morning and cancelled my Outschool classes for tomorrow morning. Tomorrow I’ll make the call whether I feel up to teaching again by Tuesday evening.

Today was cold and very windy. My wife and I took Scully for a walk in the early afternoon and it was just awful being out there, with autumn leaves and street dust swirling around everywhere. I had to stop a couple of times to rub grit out of my eyes, and that was while wearing tightly fitting sunglasses.

Apart from trying to hammer out some more Darths & Droids scripts, I didn’t do much today. My wife even cooked dinner! Pasta alla norma, with roasted eggplant. Really good!

New content today:

Ninja Grandma, and a ninja flu

I did a second playtest of the Ninja Grandma board game design with my wife today, after iterating on the first design and changing some of the rules. I went for a modular bard instead of a fixed one, and changed from worker placement to a movement mechanic, which increases interaction and strategic decisions.

The potions are now more powerful, so it’s worth making them, and there are also poisons. And animal costumes so you can disguise your ninjas as other animals. It might be a bit too much, as this iteration required a lot more analysis to decide on a move. But such is the nature of design!

In other news, I had a bad sore throat yesterday. I was able to do my classes on Zoom, but by the end of the fourth one my voice was breaking and I couldn’t have done another one. I had real trouble sleeping overnight and am very tired today, and feeling some other symptoms of what I think is the flu. Hopefully it’s not COVID again, since I had that only a bit over a month ago! I’ve cancelled all my Outschool classes for tomorrow, because I really don’t think I’ll be better, and I need to provide 24 hours’ notice.

Hopefully tonight I’ll be tired enough to fall asleep and sleep through the night.

New content today:

Eye check-up day

I did health stuff today! I got up, ate muesli with fruit and yoghurt, then went for a 2.5k run. I had to work on my ethics lesson for the older students (13-15) for the class tomorrow morning, but in between I did a couple of other things.

I went with my wife to our optometrist for an annual vision and eye health check-up. We both wear reading glasses these days, and we’re a bit competitive about the eyesight tests. I won the distance vision battle handily, blowing away the optometrist, who was impressed that I could read a certain line of the eye chart. And then she said, “Just see if you can try the next line”, and I amazed her by reading off the letters flawlessly. My reading prescription hadn’t changed since last time, so I don’t need to update my lenses, which is good. The optometrist did fundus camera shots, a glaucoma test, and also had me do a visual field test to check my peripheral vision, which she said was a precaution because of my family history (my mother has macular degeneration). I passed that with flying colours, which was good to know.

Later in the afternoon we went up to a local doctor to get flu shots, in preparation for the impending southern flu season. Indications are the the flu season here will be a bad one, so we wanted to make sure we got our shots.

After three ethics classes this evening (younger kids), I finished off the older kids’ topic on Creativity, ready for first thing tomorrow morning. Phew!

New content today:

COVID completely better

In good news, it appears that the lingering COVID cough I’ve had the past few weeks has completely gone. I was still coughing a little a couple of days ago, but today I’m completely free. So that’s great!

Good timing too, as I had 4 ethics classes today, starting at 9am, and then three in a row in the afternoon. In between I picked up the groceries from the supermarket, and took Scully for a couple of walks. The weather was very unsettled again today, with intermittent sunshine and heavy rain showers. I managed to avoid getting caught in any rain though, unlike yesterday.

In other weather news, Cyclone Ilsa made landfall last night in Western Australia, and preliminary measurements are suggesting it set a new sustained wind speed record for Australia. So it’s possibly the strongest tropical storm to hit Australia in recorded history. Fortunately the region it hit was very sparsely populated and there are no reports of deaths yet. The Bureau of Meteorology is saying the remnants will likely combine with a cold front and bring heavy rain to south-eastern Australia, where I live. We’ll see in the next few days.

In other random news, today I learnt that the word “polecat” is not a synonym for “skunk”. Apparently it’s a completely different animal. I don’t know where I got the idea form that a polecat is the same thing as a skunk, but I’d been convinced of that fact for decades.

Tonight is online board games night with my friends. I’m playing games right now as I type, doing this in the down time between turns. We’ve played some Jump Drive, Ticket to Ride, and are now doing Just One.

New content today:

Almost over COVID?

Last night during my ethics classes I was still coughing a little bit. I had three more classes tonight, and I don’t think I coughed once during them. It’s slowly been improving day by day, but has always been worse later in the day, and also when I’m talking a lot. So to get through classes in the evening without having a coughing fit was really good, and I’m taking it as a good sign. I do still feel a little clogged in the sinuses though and slightly muzzy-headed, which makes it a little difficult to concentrate on things, but I think that’s also improving.

Today I went out with my wife and Scully for lunch. We did a bit of a drive across a few suburbs to a nice park where Scully can run around. It’s usually empty on a weekday at lunchtime, when I’ve taken her there before, but I forgot it’s school holidays and there were several kids playing various types of football and basketball and also exercising dogs. Scully’s always a bit nervous around strange dogs, but they were far away enough that she could chase a ball and not get too close, so she got some good exercise.

Apart from that I’ve really just done a bit of comics work and taken it easy kind of goofing off and browsing stuff on the net in a time-wastey sort of way.

New content today: