Website Woes November 2019

My main author website has been hacked and I'm trying to fix it and finding the phone support at my web hosting company has gone way, way downhill in the past couple of years. This morning's support person has a raspy, sleepy voice as if she was out all night and is trying to make up for her lost sleep by curling up under the desk.

Anyway, I didn't keep up the blog posts and now it's the last day of November, so here comes the litany of excuses. I have much more to say but I'm still getting distracted by further research on the internet, and other things I might do with my life. I've also written a stack of articles for the local newspaper, which always seem to take up whole days of my writing life at a time. Meanwhile I had some kind of cold/bug that kept my brain running on a very low gear.

When that let up I have been trying to get my feet back on the ground at aikido. I'm about two months back into it after over a decade mostly away, and I'm trying to figure out a bunch of things... some of which actually relate to the health theme here.

  1. How much time can I realistically devote to practice, etc.? I used to practice about 5 days a week. With changing, getting there, etc., that added up to about 10 hours a week or more, which is a lot of time for me these days.
  2. How do I recover my past skill level and begin to improve? Re-learning how to fall is part of this, and relates to...
  3. Avoiding injury. So many people who train hard wind up with trashed knees, shoulders, etc. My weak point has been my lower back. I'm looking at a lot of resources about the kind of complementary workouts that I never really did when I was younger. I also need to figure out a way to practice that includes enough aerobic exertion while not leading to too many stupid injuries.
All of that does not fit neatly into a blog post yet. 

I'm also onto a kick of reading a lot about circadian rhythms, which has made me more firm about making my kids get outside every day. 

As I finish writing this, the web hosting support people have emailed back, throwing their hands up. They are not good at their job.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Creating a Home for Body, Soul, and Spirit by Bernadette Raichle rating: 4 of 5 stars I borrowed this book from the local Steiner playgroup. I've enjoyed the parent-toddler group, and have picked up a lot of ideas about education and childrearing from its Steiner/Waldorf based activities, but I've always been a bit uneasy about its philosophical underpinnings. Here, at last, was a book which was explicit about how Anthroposophy informs the operation of a daycare centre, and man, is there some whacky stuff in there! The anthroposophical jargon about creating a "penetrated" environment and the four sheafs (Physical, Etheric, Soul/Astral, and Ego) would turn off most people I know, but it does explain why Waldorf kindergartens are organized the way they are. I gave this book four stars because it was exactly what I was looking for, and because I think it is useful, but it is not particularly well-written. Some sections are less well-developed than others, and as I
Read more

Spanische Windtorte

Image
When I was young, my mother had a nearly-complete set of the Time-Life Foods of the World cookbooks. Although the recipes in these were not, as a rule, very good, I was much taken with the photo on the cover of The Cooking of Vienna's Empire -- a Spanish Windtorte. I told my mother that I wanted one for my birthday cake. I had not grasped quite how difficult they were to build. I think we wound up with more of a Pavlova instead. The thing is, a Spanische Windtorte is almost exactly the same thing as a pavlova, only with a fancier-shaped meringue. So, when I set out to make one again yesterday, I used a combination of this Pavlova recipe and these Spanische Windtorte instructions . I increased the quantities in the pavlova recipe by about 1/3, and, in the final step, did not macerate the fruit but rather mixed it with sugar immediately before adding it to the whipped cream mixture... but I'm getting ahead of myself. Making the meringue was fairly straightforward, except that
Read more

Transatlantic Baby

Nova is about to embark on her fourth transatlantic flight since she got out of the womb.  I wish we didn't have to go back and forth so much, but that's just how it's turned out. The first flight was on New Year's Eve, when she was just over a month old.  She surprised me by sleeping almost the whole way from Newark airport to her grandmother's house in Galway.  On the next two flights, I traveled alone with her, and honestly it wasn't so bad.  The flight attendants on Continental pretty much ignored us, and offered me no extra help.  Aer Lingus was a different story, with the flight attendants all offering to hold her and walk up and down the aisles, or sit with her if I needed to go to the toilet.   Each time, I've brought a little less with us.  This time Nova's equipment will consist of a stack of disposable diapers, a small towel, a blanket, a change of clothes, some cotton wool, a teething ring, baby tylenol and bum ointment just in case, maybe a
Read more