Your guide to the perilous waters of the internet

7-26-10

Sue and I drove out to LaPush and then hiked out Rialto Beach for 2 hours to Elephant Rock/Hole in the Wall. I painted a nice one Saturday, and two bad ones Sunday, but Sunday was foggy so it was a circus of lighting changes.

I was quite the tourist attraction. I had a steady stream of gawkers, and as the painting progressed, was the recipient of a lot of kind comments. People are very supportive of a painter. It's almost as if they realize their $4000 camera and lenses are a poor substitute for real art.

Or maybe it's just very novel to see someone using a 600 year old camera. Why would anyone use an image capturing process that has been vastly improved on in the modern camera? I can't answer that, other than to say that painting makes me happy...when it goes well...less happy when it goes badly. Perhaps we are hardwired to recognize the 'hand of humanity' in our images. Think, cavemen staring in wonder at cave paintings 10,000 years ago.

Sunday we hiked out there again but just as I finished the line drawing, the fog rolled in. Ok, plan b...I got out another sheet of paper. I began drawing the same scene in the fog. It rolled in further. Pea Soup. I sat there and fumed. Oh wait, the fog is rolling out. Which painting to work on: fog, or sunny? Worked on the foggy one. It's sort of done, but is mostly a figment of my imagination. I will post them later.

I didn't have any dizzy spells at all. Sue got so tired driving she dented the bumper. I worked on the creekside website while she drove.

Monday at work I had a very brief dizzy spell of about 5 seconds. I like those. I mean, if I have to have them, those are OK. They don't disrupt anything, and come and go so fast they are more like passing indigestion. My new theory about why I relapsed into Menieres again was the rash. I got into some Poisen Ivy the same weekend the dizzies came back. My whole body broke out, Sue even got some of it. By getting all inflamed, maybe that swelled up the balance organ, which squirted out some excess pressure, then had aftershocks for a few weeks?

7-17-10

It's been 11 days since my relapse into dizzy spells, and I think it might be a false alarm. My life is going on as normal, I've not had any serious vertigo spells. Since the first one on the morning of 7-6-2010, I climbed that day. I even walked across a log over a boiling river. That was terrifying. But I felt that if my body was too cheap to handle it, I deserved to die. Clean up the gene pool and all that.

For about 10 days I had very short 15 second dizzy spells every 4 days or so. They all happened while I was doing unimportant things like sitting, or leaning on a wall. I think this relapse was triggered by either going climbing the weekend after coming back from a stressfull Yosemite trip, or the chiropractic treatment I got the Friday before the Monday dizzy spell.

I've never had any chiro work done, but my web design client offered me a free one after I fixed her office email service. She put a device on my spine, right up in my neck that vibrated furiously. Like bouncing along a bumpy road with your neck bone on a metal seat. I'm speculating that the vibration shook loose some fluid from my bad ear balance organ. It leaked out, as it does every few years, and caused some lasting dizzyness that will eventually heal itself.

Of course, as I've learned over the ten years I've had Menieres disease, my body doesn't need a reason to get dizzy, it can do it out of the clear blue sky. After a long absence though, I look for triggers, and the chiro treatment stands out like a sore thumb. I doubt if it was climbing, since I do so much of it and it is my normal environment.

Nevertheless, I did start driving the beater Corrola, and I stopped going to the gym for a while. Phil was working evenings anyway. Instead, I painted three nights in a row, creating this painting.

7-6-10

I was disappointed to have a relapse of Menieres. I was walking around the campfire circle Monday morning when I lost my balance and staggered. With a feeling of deep sadness, mixed with a little terror, I realized I was having a dizzy spell. In only lasted 30 seconds.

I am so bummed by this. I thought I was cured! I hate it when my body lets me down. I haven't been eating salt lately. I've not had anything but cod from costco that is at all salty.

I did have some cider and a beer the night before. And, you could argue that my vacation was all work…climbing every day. And the weekend after returning from my Yosemite "working" vacation, I was up climbing hard again.

Anyway, I was dizzy free all day at Pearly Gates cliff, leading a 9 plus with 4 hangs. In the evening at home I had a brief dizzy spell, but not long. Today I am trying to not let my relapse bother me but a part of me is tense, waiting for the ax to fall.

In other news, Randy R. and I had a blast all weekend. We climbed fault, catapult, bone, pitch one of canary and pitch 2 of saber before wind and the possibility of rain at 7pm sent us packing. I making awesome progress on the creekside rebuild, currently at 7 hours of time. I have her page working in all css, not tested in ie6 yet.

This should make the SEO work much easier, and I need the practice.

7-3-10

I got back on facebook. I genuinely missed seeing the trip reports from Craig and Fletch. No one has slideshows anymore, and several graduated students couldn't contact me anymore as they had forgot my web address. It's sort of a business/pleasure necessity. I'm going to restrict myself to 10 minute reading/viewing session, unless I am looking at a trip report. I refuse to get sucked into the "I live through other peoples lives" syndrome.

I had a great time helping one of my old web clients. I'd forgotten how much fun it was to go to a clients office and solve a bunch of problems that they had spent mucho money on. These were problems I sorted out in 2 hours. I was treated like a wizard. The doctor was so happy with my work she gave me a free chiro adjustment! I'd never had one of those. I was cool, kind of like a massage. I love that!

I'm going to re-do her website as all CSS. I need the practice and it will be the only way to get her SEO rankings up. She wants pages 5 and seven converted to html, with the sinewave image in the right side as a popup. I'm supposed to remove the link to the outside website about the spine stretcher thingy.

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