On thinking about how I tweet

I just wrote a post for our company blog contest about the language of social media, and how it’s being perceived.

Okay, really I tied together a bunch of links and quotes by other bloggers because I procrastinated with great skill and toss the post together at the last minute. At least it drove me to finally post on here again.

What really struck me was a Boston Globe column by lexicographer Erin McKean.

McKean talks about twitter, and all it’s associated tw- words (tweet, tweeple, twitterhea). But what caught my attention was this:

...it's not just the twords that make Twitter interesting, it's the character limit, the implicit constraint of being interesting, witty, informative - in short, of being worthy of the limited attention of your followers. The best tweets of Twitter (some of them collected on the occasionally not-safe-for-work site Favrd.com) are more epigrammatic than newsy. Twitter demands writerliness in a way that instant messages, text-messaging, and even blogging don't.

This made me think about how I use my own twitter account. For the most part I retweet company tweets and various links and tweets that interest me. But maybe I should do more. Maybe I should be using these small chunks of text to practice my writing skills.

How much imagery can I fit into 140 characters? How much meaning? I think I may start to throw out the occasional test post, and stop worrying about how useful, or logical, it is to other people.

Cheers

Back to work

The mono is done with, and I'm finally beginning to feel like a living, breathing person again.

I didn't have a particularily bad cast - no fever, to sore throat. What I did have, however, was a couple months of feeling like the air itself had gotten heavy. I was exhausted halfway through my day through the sheer effort of getting up, getting work and just breathing.

A note - no, my company did not expect me to work through my illness. I went a couple weeks feeling brutally exhausted before going to the doctor (no fever or sore throat - I honestly just thought I was "tired") and two more weeks before getting my test results. As soon as I, and they, knew I had the mono I was given leave to work from home for a week. After that I spent two weeks on vacation in BC.

But yes, the mono seems to be gone, judging by the lack of need to sleep 10-12 hours a day. I am however, still extremely anemic.

In my day-to-day go to work, go home, intarwebs, possibly eat dinner and use the rower life, this isn't much of a problem. Last night, however, I returned to martial arts (number one on my list of "things that make me not-crazy) after over a month of being unable to work out at all.

For the record, I'm an endurance person when it comes to activity. For some reason, and against the apparent norm, endurance works cause far fewer asthma problems than shorts, intense burts of activity.

Add a class that was almost completely comprised of short, instense bursts with anemia (and the resulting difficulty of getting enough oxygen into my system) and you get a tiring night and a the need for a couple puffs off the inhaler.

It was also a hell of a lot of fun.

Checking the knitting-bag

I learned something on my recent flights to and from BC: If you decide to carry a knitting bag you will be searched.

In fact, the young gentleman tasked with finding that elusive 1mm crochet hook (used for placing beads) will not only search your bag, but will just not get it.
The lunch is fine, as are the two containers of beads and six balls of yarn (wool, camel and linen). It’s with the needles that will give him pause.

“Questioning” is the kindest way to describe his vaguely disconcerted expression as he tests the tip of the first pair of knitting needles. The cable needles (37 inches and bedecked with in-process lace, beads and all) will be met with disbelief – and tested for sharpness.

By the time he reaches the sixth pair of needles, tucked away inside a secondary bag, he’ll have started avoiding eye-contact and will zip your bag up without a word before letting the x-ray attendant know it’s fine.

He’ll wave you on, wishing you a safe flight and hurriedly turn to the next, more usual passenger – the one who went through advanced screening with a three year-old.
He never will find that needle-like steel crochet hook.

The lady to check my bags returning to Ottawa was a little less perturbed and found the hook no problem. She then gave me the requisite funny look while I smiled and said it was for placing beads on the shawl I’m knitting (in my best cheery voice) and wished me a nice night.

Let us eat cake

I’ve been working my current job (as a temp) for somewhere in the area of two months. It says something about the atmosphere of the workplace then, that in that time period we’ve had three or four cakes, sweets, and three free lunches.

The lunches come with the lunch-and-learn meetings I (a temp) have been taking part in. The cakes and sweets, well there are more to come next week. A cake is eaten for every birthday, of course. But there’s an office rule that anyone buying something new and expensive has to also buy a cake for the office. (We’ve gone through one new car so far. The new house, new bike and wedding are yet to come).

While I appreciate the goodies, it honestly does wreak havoc on me the days my lingering stress issues kick into full gear. I still don’t fully believe the doctor who keeps telling me it’s merely stress. Stress and anxiety are lifelong companions of mine and they’ve done this before; especially not for this long – going on month five now.

My most recent ‘prescription’ has been 40 minutes of running every day - this from the same clinic (read: overworked) doctor who leaves me feeling like I’m part of a patient assembly-line and told me to take iron supplements without testing me, or even asking the rudimentary questions. I’m cutting that down to 20-30 minutes most days in light of my other activities and the havoc that promises to wreak on my feet. I have three more weeks to see if this works, in which I need to get on the ball.

I’ve been trying to at least exercise every day, but I’ve been experiencing chills and fatigue all week so I’m trying to give my body a rest to fight whatever is threatening my health. Perhaps the gym tonight and a quick run tomorrow.

I’ll start getting up early to work out again when eight hours of sleep goes back to feeling restful instead of woefully inadequate.

Other than health (I really, really just want to feel healthy again) I’ve been back dancing, which does put me in much better spirits. I’ve also found time to dye some more roving, and just spun up the singles. Plying should be done tonight, while I watch..something. Hopefully the most recent episode of Bones (I love campy TV) will find its way to my macbook.

I should also reinstall my copy of adobes CS3 and get some time in playing with the photoshop ideas in my head. I lost all of that during a recent hd failure (next time, backups). Hopefully I can still get some of the data recovered.

I’d toss in some pictures of what else I’ve been up to (A new knit vest and a scarf) but alas I have yet to get pictures.

Surreal Skating

I had a surreal experience last night. I was out on the canal with friend after a party (worlds longest ice rink, right here in Ottawa). After getting comfortable enough on my skates to tone down the near panic and explaining to said friends that grabbing and pulling me (especially behind a bike, on the ice) is out of the question due to how uncomfortable I am on skates, we set out for the lake, planning on walking home for there.

As an aside, I know. I'm an embarrassment to Canadians everywhere with my poor skating ability. It's not just that I skate badly (many of my friends claim that they do as well) but that I skate badly by Vancouver Island standards, which are much lower in that respect than the rest of the country. Growing up on the Wet Coast, skating was for hockey players and figure skaters, the rest of us learned little aside from going in circles and hitting walls.

Since moving to Ottawa I've learned how to turn and stop.

Moving on from that digression, we skated a ways down the canal, and dropped our friend with the bike off at his exit to ride home (yes, in the snow), and continued on. That's where it got surreal.

As we skated, at 3 a.m. we passed a succession of guys, dressed in black and holding hoses spraying the canal down with streams of water. The way they worked, it was as if we were invisible - they didn't stop, didn't acknowledge us, simply avoided spraying where we were until we'd passed.

3 a.m. skating outdoors, through clouds of mist, with black-clad figures hosing down the ice. The water froze quickly, but left the surface with an odd, dragging feeling, like skating through a layer of butter.

There is, of course, an explanation. The canal is plowed regularly and on cold nights the NCC (National Capital Commission) sends workers out to flood the canal. This fill sin the smaller divots (though not the larger cracks) and keeps the surface from being destroyed over the skating season.

Still, it was awesome.

It's been a rough week.

My parents came in from the West Coast for Christmas and it was, as always, a blast. Unfortunately, seeing them never fails to remind me how much I miss my family, living here.
I've spent the past few days wanting nothing more than to return to BC and cheer up. I can't leave Ontario for that reason though - not because I think moving across the country (again) will solve my problems.

One day I'll return home. Hopefully before the nephews are too grown and under my own will, because it's the right time to do it, not because I've crashed back into a level of depression I haven't felt since I was 16 (Not that I'm depressed, just that I'm depressed this week).

Part of my trouble, and the reason I've been an emotional wreck today, is a visit to the doctor yesterday. I rarely go to the doctor, as I'm generally in good health, but yesterday I went to ask about stomach problems I've been having for a few weeks. All the symptoms of reflux (minus pain), including nausea after eating. Include, when I lie down, a feeling that I can only describe as being the same as a head-rush, but in my stomach, and I've been losing out on a fair amount of sleep.

I've been feeling better, but went to a doctor to get it checked out, and see if my ongoing anxiety (unreasonable, reason-less anxiety) could be effecting this discomfort.

So again, I rarely go to a doctor, but when I do I expect to be treated patiently, and with as much care as health-interest.
Instead, I had a doctor who told me outright "You cant feel like that, describe it differently," a couple times, insisted I had to have a reason for crying (I always feel like crying at the doctors, no, I don't know why). She gave me pills and told me to come back in two weeks (a good point for her, actually..more than I expected from a clinic) but ignored my concerns about anxiety.

That was the kicker..I was already distraught, talking about feeling anxious always makes me feel horrible, and upon it finally getting bad enough that I talked to a doctor, it was brushed aside.
I left feeling like suppressing symptoms and getting me back out the door was more important that my actual well-being.

I'm trying not to blame the doctor, even if she did lack a degree of bedside manner I'm also well aware of my own tendency to overreact to negative social cues (and completely miss the positive ones. Yey).

As it stands, if I don't feel better either stomach wise (as the visit to the doctor actually made it much worse) or emotionally, I'm going to wander to another clinic and speak with someone else, which I hate to do as it will just tie up resources for other people. I take the new surge in stomach unhappiness to mean this is stress-related, so I plan on doubling up on cod liver oil and getting as much exercise as I can, ie. daily.

It's upsetting. The majority of experiences I've had with doctors have been good..but the few bad ones have been absolutely horrible.

Goal accomplished, if a bit delayed

I haven't been updating. I'm horrible at updating.
I start out with the best intentions, I work and rework posts in my head while I'm on the bus - sometimes I even write them down. Unfortunately, most of what goes on in my head never makes it into the blog. There are far too many distractions in my life for me to keep up with blogs it seems (when I have children, I forsee myself living in complete organizational chaos).

But, for the updates: I finally made it into my first half marathon.
I gave up on the winter run, it turns out I'll have to do a lot more work on overcoming my asthma before I'll be fit to run that long a distance in the cold. Right now, it cuts into my lung capacity too much - I've even started noticing a disturbing trend when swimming. Cold water (as in a lake) makes my reathing far more laboured than it should be. Jumping into a lake last weekend sent me into a spasm of dry, heaving coughs. I can only be thankful I'm a strong enough swimmer to collapse coughing and still keep myself comfortable afloat.

But, I digress, as always. The half marathon was part of Ottawa Race Weekend, held during the May long weekend each year. I planned on running it, but couldn't get into training seriously, as I discovered I was becoming unable to keep up with school. So, I took two weeks off running completely* then, six weeks befopre the race worked on bringing my distance up from 10k to 18k. I decided that would be my longest run beofr ethe race - the final 4k, after all, is just a bit of extra shuffling.

Training was hard, but running and training in the spring proved to be far easier than training in the Ottawa winter - especially with all the snow we had (added, of course, to my distaste for treadmills).
Despite continued problems with time, training progressed well despite the recurring blisters (same place, every week).

The run itself was amazing. Not because it was a good run, but because I've run with such a large group before. I noticed a fault in my training plan only 30 minutes into the run - I had been training for distance, but not hills, and the first half of the course had a lot of inclines. I also joined a pace group I was unable to keep up with, but that worked out in the end.

The spectators were amazing; with names printed alongside our numbers it was heartening to have so many people cheering for me by name, though for most of the race I simply assumed I was running near someone who shares my name and has a lot of friends.
By the end of the run, the course was crowded with people cheering us on and I was able to push myself in an honest run to the end.

With a goal of simply finishing, and hoping to make it near the 2:30 mark, I finished at under 2:25 by my chip time (it took us nearly 10 miutes to simply reach the start line from my place in the pack).
I'm thrilled with the time, though I do think I'll put more into training for the next one. I nearly collapsed at the finish, not out of exhaustion but out of the inability to breathe - the final run killed my overworked runs. I think I also worried one of the volunteers, who was kind enough to walk me to the recovery station where I grabbed a bottle of water and spent some quality time with my ventalin.

After that was a nice, if delayed, breakfast with friends, along with a couple bottles of water, and some time spent japping pins into my various blisters until the toned down enough for me to walk again.

Now, after some time to recover and a few short runs, I think I'll start back at one-hour runs and work my time and distance up from there at a slower rate.

*The two weeks I took off were due to health, not time. I planned on a week off, having had my wisdom teeth removed. Unfortunately I came down with a nice little infection that left me, for a few days, in too much pain to sleep, much less do anything more active than shuffle around the house. I took an extra week off, as I refused to run before I could get back into something resembling proper food again - I spent a week unable to either open or fully close my mouth.