Bowels should not go click, and other anomalies

The last little while a lot more of my joints go click, especially getting out of bed in the morning. Most of them aren't alarming, and most of them are not a surprise. At least not now. The other morning I was lying on my back, thinking about getting up. I twisted a bit to start moving my feet towards the edge of the bed, when there was an enormous click from my midsection. Nothing hurt, but it sure startled me. In my world, guts don't go click. A few other cautious motions convinced me in fact it was my back, and it was a good click.

I tried taking a photo but it didn't work out. (New para, change of topic, keep up!) I've been wondering why my left foot has always needed a bit of sock tugging to be comfortable. It always feels like there's a ridge of sock. Well, it turns out there's a ridge, but it's not a sock. It's a bone. My right foot is a smooth curve of bone on the top. My left has this point of bone sticking up, about a third of the way down, between my ankle and big toe. It's really quite pronounced, and I don't remember it being that way.

Lately I've been thinking about communication. I've always liked email, right from the start. I've long since lost count of how many email accounts I've had. Even now there's probably 5 different ones that I'll end up reading. But people don't do emails so much anymore. Except at work, and I wish they'd get the email on that.

There isn't much email at home anymore. I'm much more likely to get messages from friends through a text, through Twitter, or through Facebook. Rarely through LinkedIn but it happens every now and then. People always said email was bad because there was no way to judge emotional context, but that's just poor writing skills. Sometimes people use it to avoid communication, but that annoys me. It took a long time to realize that many people don't like email because they either don't know what to say, or it takes too long to type it out. I've always said that the single greatest productivity booster companies could invest in is teaching people how to type. Even old geezers that think they'll be retiring before they have to learn this computer shit. When I was doing software training, watching someone log in told me everything I needed to know about how my day was going to go.

I once had a boss who would only read what was on his blackberry screen. He might scroll one page, but not two. It took talent to keep a message short enough for him to read, or compelling enough to make him scroll, and yet easy enough to respond with a yes, no, or most likely, I'll talk to you about it.

I was out for a run on Saturday while it was still nice. If I'd called it at 5 K it would have been a beautiful nice run. As it is, I started getting a bit of a cramp in my right calf, again, just where it thickens up into the big part of the muscle. This is a very popular place for me to get a cramp or a muscle strain. I tried to stretch it a bit, and changed my gait to see if I could make it to 6 K, but no way. It started to really hurt about 5.5 K and I called it a day and walked it in. Gentle stretching and some rolling have helped, and I can almost walk normally again.

I was part of a pretty good NaNoWriMo writing group. Of the six of us, two thirds were a winner! Congrats to Janice, Cori, and Gerald. And me, but you guys knew that already. Funny how none of them are particularly pleased with their work, and had their struggles. There has been discussion of a manuscript burning party. I'm actually pretty pleased with mine, so I don't know I could do that. Maybe I'm hopelessly deluded and in love with my own characters and writing. Linda calls it quite readable, so maybe all hope is not lost.

We are supposed to get the first major snowstorm of the year, starting sometime tonight or tomorrow morning. Who knows what the traffic will be like. To make you all feel better about that, here are some cat photos. I had to take a dozen or more of Curtis, but Celina was a sweetie pie about the whole thing and posed like a model.