Walking Through Pain: Spurs, Heartaches, and Healing
For most of December, all of January and the first weeks of February I’ve had this terrible pain in what felt like the “peak” of the arch of my right foot. It felt like there was some sort of rubberband in there that wanted to snap. It was a terrible pain that I feared would somehow get worse whenever I approached a flight of stairs. Then one day the painful sensation just went away. I was grateful. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, a sharp, direct pain shoots up the back of my heel the moment my bare foot hits the floor. I don’t know what I thought it was, but I rolled back onto my bed and threw my foot into the air and felt around on my heel. That’s when I felt what seemed to be a large pointy piece of something very hard sticking directly out of the bottom of my heel. It was on this day that I learned extensively what a heel spur was. There is no cure for heel spurs. I don’t know if it is just twenty years of working on concrete floors without the use of anti-fatigue mats or my wearing barefoot shoes for the last two years, but I know I had to get rid of about 7 pairs of shoes that are now impossible to wear without a bunch of pain involved. What luck!
I have been avoiding posting anything here because when I come here to do so, I’m presented with the ugly ass energy my last post had, and I’m firmly reminded of how quickly my mood swing can take place. When I read that line "You’re a fucking piece of shit. Keep your fucking head down!" I know exactly how I was feeling when I was typing those words and it seems almost dangerous to linger on it too long because my barriers are so weak that I feel the momentum of that recalled memory is strong enough to cave my walls and put me back into that dark place.
My Step-Father received some terrible news from his doctor. It turns out his biopsy didn’t go as well as we all had hoped it would. He must resume treatments again. There is a dark cloud forming over my Mother’s house and it’s sad to watch a much more stabilized version of what afflicts my being take its toll on my Mother. I think it’s so easy to let the quirks and traits of our loved ones get under our skin. For not everyone is close like my family is but when people in my family get under my skin, it’s not because of what they do necessarily. It’s because it is also what I do in the same situation and I am very upset that I don’t have the power in me to change that, and want nothing more than the power to do so, and then I’ll see my relatives to the same thing and it irritates me because it makes me feel like these are hereditary traits that I cannot shake off or change. None of that matter right now tho, because keeping my Step-Father’s mind in a good place is all that really needs to matter right now. Supporting Mom in ways we normally do not have to because she is there on the front lines dealing with the situation in real-time. My Step-Father is part of that generation that rubs dirt on problems and walks it off. While this proves to be an excellent solution for most things, there are moments where it serves the opposite purpose and amplifies problems.
We had some pretty strange weather patterns here lately. Yesterday it was 71° and this morning it was 17°. I don’t know how the future generation plans on growing crops to feed themselves. I spent a majority of the day taking photographs in and around Delafield. The night prior, I had gone to Best Buy to pick up an external keyboard for my MacBook because my gorilla hands don’t really work well with the keyboard on the MacBook for extended periods of time. The MacBook resembles more of a desktop with its external mouse, external keyboard, constant AC power connection, and perpetually attached external hard drive. Lightroom has been fun, and I’ve been on it now for two months, and today when it would have renewed I switched plans to the one that also offers Lightroom Classic and Photoshop. I haven’t used Photoshop since the 90s but I definitely needed to get my hands on Lightroom Classic. It’s UI leaves something to be desired, but I feel like this is intentional to keep the people happy who think Lightroom CC is a joke. At least that’s how it feels from a complete outside. There seem to be some hard lines drawn in the sand on forums, discussions board and comment sections regarding how the world feels about these two incarnations of Lightroom. Lightroom CC’s initial Sync to the cloud took almost a literal week of letting my computer just do its thing, but we’re only 1306 photos away from having that import done in Lightroom Classic. I’m fairly certain I got all sorts of duplicates on the external hard drive, and I could probably sit down and work out something better for a cloud storage solution, because I’m already on SmugMug. To be honest tho, I just wanna start getting after it regarding editing. The admin stuff is getting tedious. The muse sure takes up some time.
That’s it then, for now.
Random Web Links
If you used to use 12ft ladder to get around paywalls on websites, you probably know that it doesn’t work as good as it did back in the day. This “unofficial” plugin for Chrome and Firefox really checks all the marks like 12ft did back then. Check it out if this is something you use.
Fluidr is a minimalist approach to browsing Flickr. I like Flickr’s keyboard shortcuts too much to use this as my primary method, but it showcases how great Flickr was for third-party developers.
If photography is your jam, I watched and got great value from these two videos by Sean Tucker
LofiGirl launched two new stations. Peaceful Piano and Dark Ambient. I can’t say enough good things about the Peaceful Piano stream, but I can tell you I haven’t given Dark Ambient enough time to have an opinion about it. I thought at first the Piano stream was lofi music with pianos in it but after extended exposure it would seem they are playing legitimate straight piano for a lot of the tracks. It is sooo good.
They also released two compilation albums:
Peaceful Day (LofiGirl)
Lonely Night (LofiBoy)
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Disclaimer: I have decided to let ChatGPT provide me with suggested names for the titles of my blog posts here. I have created a “MyGPT” for this purpose. I write all the text in the body of the posts. I have also started to actually use a spell and grammar check through ProWritingAid to make me not sound so ignorant.