I mentioned to my boss this morning that my back was kinda twingey, and that turns out to have potentially been a mistake, because it got me bundled off to the doctor’s office that the district uses for worker’s comp, which led to a diagnosis of a sprained back and a genuinely shocking pile of medications. They want me back on Monday for a follow-up, too, and they scheduled it (yes, they scheduled it) for 12:15, which might literally be the most inconvenient time imaginable in terms of a two-hour appointment completely borking an eight-hour day. It also meant that I didn’t get home until way later than normal, and then somehow making a couple of baked potatoes for dinner took like a thousand years, and here it is 8:30 and I still have a complicated, annoying job application to fill out before bed, so all my loyal public gets from me tonight is a one-paragraph stream-of-consciousness update.
In which I almost died but I didn’t so it’s funny instead
The shower in our bathroom is a two-piece affair, with an overhead rainwater-style showerhead and a second handheld one that’s mounted on a grab bar and fully adjustable. I generally keep both running for the entire time I’m showering, and the handheld gets used as a handheld quite a bit as well, because I am a fat man and as a fat man I have nooks and crannies and such a thing makes the whole hygiene process a lot more complete. There’s also a bench in the shower, which technically was put in there to be sat on but which I mostly use as a way to make my feet and legs easier to wash.
Well, today I was finishing that process up and managed to somehow drop the wand, and a lot of things went wrong very quickly. The first thing I did was to look straight down, as one might expect from someone who had just dropped something. Unfortunately, and I don’t think I could have done this again if my life depended on it, I managed to drop the thing in such a way that it landed pointing directly up. Which means that, while balancing semi-precariously on one foot, I dropped the shower head, started a little bit at the loud noise when it hit the tile floor, had time to think oh, shit, I hope I didn’t break anything, then looked down, to be surprised by a rather intense blast of water coming up from the floor and directly into my face.
Telling this story, I feel like it shouldn’t have surprised me to get water in my face while showering, but the direction was unexpected, y’know? You don’t expect the floor to spray you when you’re showering, unless you’re in a much more complicated shower than I was in.
And my surprised reaction to that led directly to being flat on my ass in the shower a second or two later, wondering what the hell had just happened. I then, in rapid succession, went from ow to did I break anything to did I break part of the shower to it would be super to explain what had happened if I’d landed on the shower head, because no one would ever believe that story, ever.
And that led to a mental apology to my wife, because if I had managed to break a bone on the way down– I’m not quite old enough to be worried about breaking a hip in a fall or anything but who the hell knows– my son was in the house but it was going to be several hours until he noticed he hadn’t seen me in a while, and my phone wasn’t going to be reachable without crawling across the shower, and one way or another there is no way I’m allowing any EMTs in the bathroom with me until I’ve managed to put some underwear on, which was also not especially reachable, so I’d probably have just decided to die instead.
But none of that happened, so I thought Okay, there’s today’s blog post sorted, dragged myself up to my feet and finished my shower.
The end.
Basement update
I’m not showing you pictures of the actual basement until it’s done, but this is what we did to our garage today:
If, uh, you happen to spot a wedding present in there, I promise it’s just the box. Really. Honest. My car is also completely full of cardboard– any cardboard still in this picture is going to get dropped off on Tuesday– because my son is attending something called Cardboard Camp for the next week, unless it gets cancelled because the roads between here and Hogwarts have melted. The one really bad bit of decision making here is that since we’ve filled the garage with stuff we’re going to get rid of in the garage sale we can’t put our cars in there, and as a result my car is going to have to be outside during the impending heat wave, which means if the boy’s camps aren’t cancelled for those two days transporting him there and back is gonna be super fun. I’m psyched about it. Honest.
Also, my knees hate me right now, and there’s still more work to be done downstairs. My wife and son hit the pool for the first time since we put it up after we were done working, but I didn’t because I didn’t trust myself on the ladder. Two days of too much up-and-down on stairs have got me hobbling more than I’m comfortable with at the moment, so I’m not going to put myself in a situation where I’m gonna land on my ass. I think I’ll be living there for most of the next few days, though.
No basement talk tomorrow; there are books to be reviewed!
In which I am falling apart
I had my first dentist appointment since before the pandemic started yesterday morning, and while I don’t have any new cavities or anything worth talking about– it was just a cleaning, after all– it was a cleaning after about a year and a half when normally my hygienist likes to see me every three months so that she can keep an eye on my gums. She did not quite resort to a circular saw to clean my teeth, but it bloody well felt like it, and then I fucked around and had a chicken sandwich for lunch that ripped up the roof of my mouth, so I spent all day yesterday with my teeth and the inside of my mouth aching in a way that wasn’t necessarily bad— like, on that 1-10 scale they like, it’d have been a one or a two– but in terms of sheer persistence was making me absolutely nuts. I had cottage cheese and some loose deli meat last night for dinner last night because the notion of eating anything I’d have to spend much time chewing just seemed entirely unacceptable.
Today I had an eye appointment; those I’ve stayed current on, since they don’t require people to stick their hands in my mouth, which seems safer, but I’m starting to think that I need to go back in time and prevent myself from getting LASIK. The punch line is, at least according to my eye doctor, who was the person who did the LASIK, this was probably coming anyway, and at best might have been faintly aggravated by the LASIK, but I’m having annoying issues with keeping my tear films properly hydrated, despite the fact that I spend half my day every day pouring liquids into my eyes. She flat-out admitted that she doesn’t quite understand what’s going on with me right now, because my vision is varying widely depending on, well, something, but we don’t know what. Like, on one visit I’ll be corrected to 20/10, and then on this one I was at 20/40, and I was at 20/30 on the last one, and the only things that seem to be consistently different are the tear film thicknesses. Today ended with me walking out with two new sets of eyedrops (one medicinal in a fashion that I’m not 100% clear on, another simply an upgrade to the artificial tears I was already using) along with a heat mask that I’m supposed to wear for 15 minutes before bed every night and tiny little plastic plugs inserted into my tear ducts, which were supposed to help me in some way that she explained perfectly clearly at the time and I can no longer repeat. So all day today my eyes have been bugging me.
She was also horrified that my insurance company turned down the sleep study, which … yeah, that’s a whole separate other thing. I feel like I’ve got enough medical issues going on right now without tossing sleep apnea on top. (And suddenly I’m wondering if you can just buy a CPAP, and how expensive such a thing is.)
Anyway, my point is that my everything aches right now and maybe spending all day staring at screens isn’t the smartest move I could be making with my life right now, but, well. We all know how good I am at making decisions.
In which fun is hurty
In general, I’ve been really pleased with the PS5 so far. I’m enjoying the hell out of the Demon’s Souls remake, the new Spider-Man game hasn’t gotten a lot of attention yet but I’m expecting to really like it, and I keep discovering new little quality-of-life details that I enjoy, like the fact that it notices and puts itself to sleep if I turn off the TV. It loads games so quickly that it’s honestly kind of ridiculous. I can sit down in the rocking chair I use to play in and be playing a game like twenty seconds later. All of that is great.
The new controller is exactly the wrong size, and it’s the wrong size in a way I didn’t notice until today. I love all the programming touches– the new haptics are awesome, the use of audio is fantastic at least the way it’s done in Demon’s Souls— things like sword swings and hit noises come from the controller as well as the TV and the end result is a lot more immersive. But it’s the wrong Goddamned size, and it’s potentially going to be a problem for me going forward.
This is the PS4 controller:
And yeah! At least on the outside, other than the colors they look damn near identical. But if you compare this to the new PS5 controller above, you’ll notice that the grips are just slightly more rounded on the outside, and I think the triggers, which you mostly can’t see, are positioned slightly differently as well. And while I haven’t measured to check, and I don’t see a lot of difference in the pictures, the four buttons on the right and particularly the circle button feel like they might be positioned slightly farther apart on the PS5 than they are on the PS4. That flat circle they’re set into rather than the slightly more curved surface on the PS5 might be making a difference too.
At any rate, the cumulative effect of the exact size of my hands and what is admittedly a small handful of tiny changes forces my right thumb into a weird position. I have spent maybe an hour today playing– probably not even that long– and I tell you right now that my thumb hurts, right at the joint where it attaches to my hand. I’m willing to believe that the control layout of Demon’s Souls isn’t helping– the two triggers on the right side are mapped to attacks so they get used all of the time, and I think it’s the combination of keeping my index and middle fingers on the triggers (or my index finger moving back and forth) and my thumb on the face buttons and the thumbstick that is causing the problem. I think if I wasn’t using the triggers as often it might not be as much of an issue.
Obviously it’s possible that I’ll get used to it, and I’ll limit my playtime until I know whether that’s going to be the case; if it gets better, we’re all good, and if it doesn’t, the fact that the PS5 currently doesn’t have any 3rd party controllers is going to become an issue. My ability to type is a lot more important than my ability to play video games, and I’m not about to start fucking with my hands. So, uh, “keep fingers crossed” might not really be the best available expression of well-wishes here, but if you don’t mind doing something on my behalf– ask Jesus or something, I dunno– I’d appreciate it.
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 