Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Pain is weakness leaving the soul, Challenge is not being dead





Sunday I went glacier dancing. Monday was ridge running.

Full disclosure -- the glaciers were simply frozen snow drifts and there was zero dancing. The ridges were ridges indeed, but there was zero running.

However, the two excursions were dedicated workouts -- my first in 197 days.

So I was fighting being out of condition and fat. I was also fighting nerve pain.

Just details.

Working the heart and lungs and legs felt great. The nerve pain did not feel great, but I was able to fight through it. Importantly the affected nerves seem to be 99+ percent sensory and only a very tiny bit motor. So lots of hurt, but no effect on how the musculoskeletal system is functioning. Well, just a transient touch of dropfoot on the left side. So far I can walk that off in 50 steps or so.

Sunday night when I went to bed my legs ached. Monday night they really ached. Sleep can be quite elusive when pain is present. Monday night was essentially sleepless.

It's all okay though. I know why the legs ached -- my body was rebuilding bone scaffolding. Osteoclasts were demolishing weak structure and osteoblasts were building a new, stronger bone scaffolding. It's a robust process and it can be a painful process, especially if the stresses applied sneak right up to the edge of injury. Gain comes with pain. Rapid gain can be pretty ouchy. Over the last 200 days of reduced use and stress my leg bones didn't need to be daily workout strong, so extra bone tissue was freed up. Now comes new stress and increased use and my body doesn't hesitate or wait for it to be convenient. It charges ahead with demolition and new construction. Pretty amazing. If you took all of Earth's doctors and scientists and put them to work on mastering this simple process, at the end of a million years they couldn't begin to make such a thing happen.

It's a form of embrace the suck. Hard challenges harden the body and harden the mind. It's a win-win.

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My plans for Tuesday did not include most of the stuff I actually found myself doing. I was able to get morning chores done and a three mile walking fence inspection out of the way early. It was more breezy than forecast, and the winds remained mostly southerly, but air temps warmed pretty quickly and it felt good to be out and working despite the pesky wind. I got a text about a problem late in the morning though and by 11 a.m. I was heading south on Highway 71 in Mom's Lincoln MXC.



I've grown to loathe Mom's car. For all its modernity and technology, for all the "Lincoln" name and associated high price, the thing is a morceau de merde. No one here speaks or reads g-French do they? Good.



As irritating as the unexpected chore was, it was a very pretty day for a drive. And the chore wasn't really that irritating. Just unexpected. But unexpected stuff is what makes you know it's not 10,000 years of groundhog day, right? Besides, I had the unexpected opportunity to show off another Minuteman III silo and make fun of the Air Force.



Before I knew it I was in reefer madness land. They got big wind turbines down there to blow the reefer smoke around.



I turned around in an olden rest area to avoid C-DOT reefer salesmen.



Another look at the reefer blowing machines.



And just like that, I cheated drug addiction once again. Whew!



At that point I put down the camera and got to work. I took the Lincoln in to the garage where they tested the battery and ran a diagnostic. The battery was fine. The other thing I found out was perhaps less fine, though there's not anything to be done about it. This particular morceau de merde mobile apparently does 37 separate self checks each day, and each check sucks down the battery. Theoretically it's got plenty of juice stored in the battery, however, as a practical matter if you don't drive it every day it's liable to piss away all of its onboard stored energy and leave you hanging. It's a real escroquerie de merde légalisée.

So I'll be driving it each day. Irritating. But it's just a thing.

Driving it home from the garage I noticed a couple of reefer-blowing windmill blades parked alongside the road. Interesting.



Then it was time to get stuck into generating a blog post.

Be well and enjoy the blessings of liberty.




16 comments:

  1. I loathe wind farms. They are one of the biggest scams of all time. Praying on the gullible, and the virtue signalling.

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    1. The merkins are good at perpetrating swindles upon themselves. The merkin playbook seems to be HCA's epic tale about the president's new suit.

      Thanks for stopping by and commenting Scott!

      Delete
  2. Could you keep a trickle charger on it?

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    1. According to the tech, yes, but it has to be one of those $8,000 diagnostic charges with all the right interfaces and codes. The self diagnostics have to be deconflicted with trickle charging else the system dumps charge and locks up to protect itself. Or so the story goes. Me, I'm going to start buying up old Rangers.

      Delete
  3. Technically speaking it's the SUPT-57 Mark 5 Sticky Uppy Pointy Thing, other than that, spot on. (I tried looking the damned thing up, no joy. So I made up a name for it.)

    Your command of French is magnifique!

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    1. I found the nomenclature (iirc) once upon a time on the interwebz but I can't find it now. Seems like a cool system. The Air Force always has lots of SF's out on patrol.

      As for the French, my computer can look up the words but I have to trust the translation. I only know enough French to get slapped in Toulon and Marseilles bars. I was pretty good at that once upon a time.

      Thanks for stopping by and commenting Sarge!

      Delete
  4. 6 years of french in grade school, 3 years in high school. Naughty Shaun.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Well, at least I got the naughty part right!

      Thanks for stopping by ans commenting Marc!

      Delete
  5. Those videos remind me I don't miss driving the medical courier route 3 days a week. Regarding Smokey, the 14 miles from I-80 to the CO line was the one place my co-worker and I kept to the speed limit. About once a month there was aerial surveillance, mainly after dope users coming from CO. They didn't discriminate against speeders in either direction. Other than investigating accidents I never saw a CO Trooper on 71 but from time to time a Weld County Deputy. CO 14, and 71 or 52 south of 14 was a different matter.

    ReplyDelete
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    1. That drive must have gotten old. The legal dope in Colorado shook a lot of things up. Some of the Nebraska oinkers even had to put the doughnuts down a couple of times! Funny how that stretch from 14 north to the Nebraska line is so empty of CO law enforcement.

      Thanks for stopping by and commenting!

      Delete
  6. Not a fan of wind farms here or anywhere. They cause way more problems than they solve.

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    1. The big windmills are kind of attractive in a way, but they're also eyesores. And a boondoggle.

      Thanks for stopping by and commenting Brig!

      Delete
  7. I usually see windmill blades traveling in packs of three, presumably new construction. They might pull two over while number 1 gets unloaded at the job site, and then end another one in. I doubt if they replace many blades unless there is a mechanical failure in one. Bet they are carefully balanced and kept as "sets".
    But, you sure do see a lot of them, all over now. Helps reduce the need for oil, I guess, but only a fool wants to go all wind and solar, unless they like sitting in the dark when the wind dies and the sun don't shine.
    JB

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    1. I don't know if it showed up in the videos or not but there was an idle one close(ish) to Highway 71. I wondered if those two parked blades were part of a new set for the idle one. Hard to say. Guess I could always investigate.

      The numbers I've seen have convinced me that the things simply can't generate enough electricity to pay for themselves over 50 years, which was the mark trumpeted back in the beginning. Now they say they'll easily pay for themselves over a 100 year lifetime. The seven they installed near Kimball in 2005 lasted 11 years, and were recently replaced with 13 new ones "guaranteed" to last longer. Not holding my breath.

      Oh well.

      Thanks for stopping by and commenting John!

      Delete
  8. Is that the wind farm you can see from I-25 up near the WY border? I'm sure there's others around, but that's the only one I know of.

    BTW....didn't know you were recovering from Something That Sounds Bad, apparently involving broken bones. So a belated but sincere Get Well Soon!

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    1. That's the one. Goes east about 150-200 miles.

      I should have 'splained the bone thing better. I was just describing how bones naturally reconfigure themselves depending on load stress. If you're idle for six months as I was they go all lightweight and efficient. Add some load and some stress from running or climbing and they tear out their own lightweight version and rebuild with heavy girders. If you go from not much to a lot of exercise overnight, the process hurts. Which is okay, not my first rodeo. It's a lot like the leg aches kids get when they have a growth spurt around puberty.

      My nerve pain is something different; nerve root impingement down in my lumbar area. That's a work in progress.

      Thanks for stopping by and commenting drjim!

      Delete