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Apr. 29th, 2018
getting old in the age of technology
Apr. 29th, 2018 11:22 amI kind of sink into myself when I get depressed and the early part of this year was a bit of a rough patch. Blame stress. Coming back out of it always feels like recovering from a blackout - I don't remember much about it. I just wake up one day and I'm months older and my house is a mess.
Since emerging from the dark room I've been working on my resolve to get off my ass more with some degree of progress. It helps that the weather is getting warmer which makes going outside more appealing. My sister was in town for a couple of weeks at the beginning of April and she is very much a "let's go for a walk" type, and I've been trying to encourage D to get out and stretch his lungs, so having somebody else who wants to get out of the house helps with my own resolve.
One of the days Dee was here we went and hiked around High Park for half a day. Our ostensible reason for being there was playing a scavenger hunt type of game called geocaching. I discovered I have very little patience for it. I will look very carefully and thoroughly around an area and if I don't see it I'm all "OK, fuck it. On to the next target." So I'm maybe not the best person to play this game with.
If all this extra walking has made anything perfectly clear, it's that my feet are a fucking mess. I have abnormally high arches with extra bones in my feet - or I should say "had" because they've partially collapsed and and I have a high degree of over-pronation. So all that walking really hurt. My sister has had flat feet all her life, so I talked to her about her orthotics and she told me how much they cost. Ha, ha, no.
What I did instead is next time I was passing a drug store I stopped in to look at the shoe inserts. They had a machine there where I took my shoes off and stood on a pair of foot pads and it would give me directions like stand on one foot and now lean forward and now stand on the other foot and now quack like a duck. I bought the set of inserts it recommended and a couple of days ago I got around to putting them in my boots.
And holy shit. They are awesome. Not only were they comfortable immediately, but since I've been wearing them my knees hurt a whole lot less - turns out that rolling inward with every step has been putting a lot of pressure on the tendons on the sides of my knees. I wouldn't be surprised if it will also help my lower back out since I'm no longer walking like a pigeon.
Of course in another couple of weeks Toronto is going to be a swillbox with no oxygen in the air so that will make things harder. I figure I'll be relying on the stationary bike a lot more when summer hits. So with that in mind, I went to the bike shop to get a more comfortable saddle, one that hopefully won't make me go numb from the hips down. And it turns out that they have a machine, one that I sat on and the guy at the console says lean forward, now lean back, now lift your feet off the floor, now quack like a duck. And they recommended a saddle and now the bicycle is also less painful and therefore something I'm much more likely to do.
So you know, better living through technology I guess.
Since emerging from the dark room I've been working on my resolve to get off my ass more with some degree of progress. It helps that the weather is getting warmer which makes going outside more appealing. My sister was in town for a couple of weeks at the beginning of April and she is very much a "let's go for a walk" type, and I've been trying to encourage D to get out and stretch his lungs, so having somebody else who wants to get out of the house helps with my own resolve.
One of the days Dee was here we went and hiked around High Park for half a day. Our ostensible reason for being there was playing a scavenger hunt type of game called geocaching. I discovered I have very little patience for it. I will look very carefully and thoroughly around an area and if I don't see it I'm all "OK, fuck it. On to the next target." So I'm maybe not the best person to play this game with.
If all this extra walking has made anything perfectly clear, it's that my feet are a fucking mess. I have abnormally high arches with extra bones in my feet - or I should say "had" because they've partially collapsed and and I have a high degree of over-pronation. So all that walking really hurt. My sister has had flat feet all her life, so I talked to her about her orthotics and she told me how much they cost. Ha, ha, no.
What I did instead is next time I was passing a drug store I stopped in to look at the shoe inserts. They had a machine there where I took my shoes off and stood on a pair of foot pads and it would give me directions like stand on one foot and now lean forward and now stand on the other foot and now quack like a duck. I bought the set of inserts it recommended and a couple of days ago I got around to putting them in my boots.
And holy shit. They are awesome. Not only were they comfortable immediately, but since I've been wearing them my knees hurt a whole lot less - turns out that rolling inward with every step has been putting a lot of pressure on the tendons on the sides of my knees. I wouldn't be surprised if it will also help my lower back out since I'm no longer walking like a pigeon.
Of course in another couple of weeks Toronto is going to be a swillbox with no oxygen in the air so that will make things harder. I figure I'll be relying on the stationary bike a lot more when summer hits. So with that in mind, I went to the bike shop to get a more comfortable saddle, one that hopefully won't make me go numb from the hips down. And it turns out that they have a machine, one that I sat on and the guy at the console says lean forward, now lean back, now lift your feet off the floor, now quack like a duck. And they recommended a saddle and now the bicycle is also less painful and therefore something I'm much more likely to do.
So you know, better living through technology I guess.