Definately a day of errands.

Hooray!!!!! The Teyuna website is live and nearly good to go. This involved a multi-hour call with support, and fortunately but 11 minutes were spent on hold. Most important was the move to a newer hosting plan and upgrading all the sites. This was because the Teyuna site requires PHP 7.1 and, prior to midday, we were on 5.6. Don’t you think about this all the time too? Plus, during the migration, I learned about how to pay a yearly fee to join a “club” or something so that domain name renewals would be cheaper. So we set it up so that the membership doesn’t auto renew and the domains are all good until 2022. We also changed the root domain to an active site and could thus stop paying unnecessarily for one along with cancelling another domain. I updated the plugins for the active sites too. And I bought a certificate pack so we’ll have the pretty green lock and it’ll be less easy for all the black hats to capture info submitted from the contact forms. (The Teyuna site still has a couple of bugs. Once error free I’ll of course share it and then all of you can make multiple, gigantic and fully tax deductible donations. Six month’s salary per is recommended as a starting point.)

Registering the bus in Illinois requires the color to be anything but “school bus yellow.” Azzan said “Call Maaco,” For those who don’t know, like me before yesterday, it is an ultra cheap auto painting service. So I called Maaco. Maaco, I was told repeatedly, does not give estimates over the phone. Or ballpark figures. Or no obligation price ranges. Or any information other than my needing to come in to get an estimate. I probably volleyed with the guy close to 10 times. He won, and off I went to drive 25 minutes there, patiently let the guy look over my most definitely not going to be repainted truck, explain why certain body work is complex, etc. and be shown a screen which had all the prices right there. Like, really bro? You really can’t say that on the phone? Anyway, it starts at $399 and tops off at about $1100 I believe. Certainly inexpensive paint jobs. To stay on the down low, I took a breath and, with all the calm I could muster, innocently asked, “What about a full size van? For the painting, same prices?” I was told there is a $150 surcharge for a large vehicle. 10 seconds to receive the info required about an hour and a quarter. Not cost effective.

I drove back to get Mme Awesome to head elsewhere as a Teyuna bank account needed to be opened. While that was in progress, I drove to Pit Stop garage to at last have the oil changed. Also new wipers and a belt needed tightening. I also asked the person helping me to look over the bus undercarriage rusty area pictures I took. Like everyone, he said “Bang on it. If you don’t go through it’s ok. Use a wire brush, take off what you can, put on a rust converter, then coat it.” He also walked me over to a sedan which had certifiable rust holes in the cross braces. That, he said, is when it is too late to salvage. He told me to replace the front brakes on the bus would be about $600. Apparently a regular car is $150. We then left for a grocery store and headed back. To do more stuff.

Speaking of errands, I went to a local Home Depot the other day to get some wood to help build a boat rack. I searched everywhere for the big cart I needed to hold the 4x4s. Where on earth are they? The wood is in the same, exceedingly manual to extract and impossible to drive in to get loaded up racks. And still no carts! Lo, they are neatly parked at an angle in one of the aisles. I mean tres organized. Not so in Emeryville. Not by a long shot. Often I have to walk away from where I park to get a cart. I wonder how quickly the wood turns over in the St. Charles store?

This house is a perfect storm for my ankles and feet: it is large, has multiple floors, no shoes inside, and contains lots of stairs. The years of that hip thing making me into a kinematic tragedy and simultaneous relative inactivity resulted in all kinds of weird muscle imbalances and weaknesses, and my ankles and feet are one of the consequence’s focal points. Steps are a big deal and I am not kidding around. We also do walk without shoes at home, mind you, though we traverse a mighty 2 steps to get to high ground in the shoes-required garage. The short of it is my feet are really getting put through the paces here in an atypical way and I need to respect their work capacity.

The truth is I spent many years (yikes!) stepping up curbs with my left leg and down with my right. Sometimes, the pain of walking up stairs was so great I went up step by step with only my left leg or stood on the escalator if possible; alternatively, going down was twice painful enough I thought I had a broken ankle and went to the ER. One of the lines on my “Do as often as possible to remember (medium priority)” daily things I would like to do is invert what I did. I thus now strive to step up curbs with my right leg and down with my left.

Looking for succor, I pulled out a small ball, a gift from, of course, Mme Awesome. I used to commute with it actually, as I regularly rolled my feet when I wasn’t dangling a leg over the back of a chair. It is hard, has small nubbies, is slightly larger than a golf ball, and is much less slippery. It turns out that many people with whom I worked also experience achy feet; I also kept a golf ball at work, what I originally used, available for my colleagues. They were free to take it to their desks and go to town. As much as I heard it helped, rarely did anyone keep up with the therapy. Love thyself and don’t be one of those people!

Thinking about such things inevitably brings up the question of why does massage feel good in the first place? Certainly spiders and clams don’t like being touched. Is there some greater awareness of the focal area which gets computated into some ok to relax thing? Why does being worked on by someone else feel better? Is that true for everyone?

A real puzzler is Pfrimmer, which is all about intense cross fiber. Apparently Mme. Pfrimmer cured herself of something and thus was born the technique. Now, was the ratio of benefits due to the physical torture or the exploration and attention she gave to herself?

You’ve no doubt read about “trigger points,” which are supposedly where to do anything from stick in a needle (acupuncture) to a TENS Unit to getting pulverized by some powerful thumb. While I do like some places better than others, my taste has changed from “harder is better” to preferring something more subtle. I strive to improve my posture / joint position as I am getting worked upon.

This posture / joint position is something I clearly do not get tired of talking about! Seriously, it doesn’t take much: improvements made via subtle changes will, given the appropriate level of consideration over time, result in mammoth improvements. Fractional bat wing rows done sitting with no weight without letting your scapula go forward or you shoulders rising bro. Is it a coincidence that people with forward sticking heads have forward rotated, rounded shoulders?