cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- My stupid fucking tendons in my stupid fucking elbows The pain has gotten bad enough that I wake up often at night and have trouble getting back to sleep because of it. I woke up last night at what was probably about 4:30 am and lay there awake until the alarm went off. I think what is happening is that I'm rolling over into natural positions while I'm asleep that would normally be fine but are now causing stress and pain to the inexplicably ruined tendons in my elbows. No hope of medicine until my next trip to Europe in September. I have a layover each way in Paris. Codeine is legal over the counter in France, so I can pick up a few boxes at the pharmacies in the airport each time I'm there. I am starting to wish I'd chosen a schedule with a 6-8 hour layover at CDG so that I could take the bus to the Opera House and hang out in Paris for a few hours between flights. It is entirely possible that such a thing could be arranged at the counter on my return flight and I will have to remember to try. My accomodations in Munich are entirely settled and budgeted for as of yesterday. There has been a change of plans. I had a furnished apartment across the river reserved from one of those palces that caters to people visiting on business for a few weeks at a time. But then this woman, Deborah, who I'd been talking to a month or 2 ago got back to me out of the blue and said that the spare room at her place is available. Rooming with her and her husband for a week is only 220 Euros, wheras the apartment is something like 550. It was kind of a tough decision to make, because the idea of having a whole apartment to myself for a week is very tempting. But converted into dollars, its a difference of something around $450. And that pretty much decided it. I had assumed that the room had been 'suddenly unavailable after all' because she had googled me and decided that I'm a nutcase. Which is the risk that one runs when one's hobbies include fixing old rifles and butchering one's own meat. Now I have to bust ass and come up with $1,000 cash by the end of the month in order to meet the deadline to get my tag for the bison hunt in October. No idea how I'm going to do that, but I always seem able to pull a rabbit out of the hat when I really need to. Oh pain. Lately I cannot fucking do anything. Can't use a machete, can't split wood, can't swing a hammer, can't use a weed eater for more than a minute at a time. I hate this. I am supposed to be the sort of person who does these things. And tasks like swinging a machete, splitting wood and hammering nails normally add up to comprise my personal exercise regime. Tomorrow I'm going over to my parents' place to go fishing again and the plan is to make a small retaining wall on the steep bank where I sit by the water. Right now it is way too easy for objects or small children to roll down into the water. This should be pretty easy; take 2 pieces of a 4" to 6" cedar log, being about 2 and a half feet in length each. Cut one end of each into rough points with a saw and pound the big stakes into the ground about a foot away from the water. They will serve as posts, spaced about 4 feet apart. Then I will take other sections of cedar log, possibly split in half lengthwise, and stack them up against the backs of the posts. Probably tacking them in place temporarily with nails or maybe just lashing them with a bit of jute twine. Then I will carry a few buckets of gravel down the hill from the pile that has been sitting in the woods near the house since it was built. The gravel will be poured and packed against the logs for drainage, and then over that I will fill in the remaining space with packed dirt. The weight off the dirt and gravel together with the magic of gravity should keep the lengthwise sections of wood in place against the posts. Voila! A nice level place to sit with one or 2 kids while fishing. I figure the whole project should take me no more than 2 or 3 hours, including the time to cut and drag some standing dead cedar out of the woods. Unless my stupid fucking tendons in my stupid fucking elbows get in the way. If so, I suppose I will hav eto recruit someone else to swing the sledgehammer and drive the posts in. 9:47 a.m. - 2009-07-17 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||