Category: Life

That tremendous sigh of relief that you heard this morning occurred when I managed to convince our router to talk to the nameservers of our new wireless broadband provider. Although our installation as originally scheduled for yesterday, the installer got snowed in at his house and he didn’t get here until this morning. I was trying not to get too excited about the appointment to get installed this morning: when we got our first wireless installation it took several weeks to get it working properly.

During our enforced hiatus, I did discover that the local library system machines allow one to access files on a USB plugin, which was rather handy. I also discovered that I really, really prefer Firefox to Internet Explorer.

We have a sinking suspicion that our previous broadband provider has gone out of business, so another vendor is coming to the house to install on Monday.

We lost our broadband connection on Saturday night, and have just managed to get them to open up a trouble ticket, so I don’t know when we will be connected again. I am writing this post from a friend’s house.

Lunarpages is our webhost and mail service provider. According to their forums, they are suffering from a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. Although this weblog is working right now, our email service is not. I am still receiving email at my gmail account, if you have that address. If you need to contact me, leave a comment.

I seem to be on the mend from my case of shingles. I think I have a fairly light case: only one or two days of excruciating pain. Today I have almost no pain, though I am still having a lot of tingling and pins and needles feelings. At least these are far less bizarre than the weirdest sensation, when I felt invisible insects crawl on my arm. My various patches of rash seem to have reached the point where I should no longer be shedding chicken pox virus, so that is a relief.

I have been trying to get stuff done in the early part of the day, because when I get tired I notice the pain a lot more. Then all I want to do is read while resting my arm on a hot pack. The worst times have been in the middle of the night. Half asleep, I will toss and turn trying to find a comfortable position for my arm, when there are no comfortable positions.

Shortly after my arm hurt so badly last week, I thought it coincidental that I had an outbreak of eczema on the same arm. In addition to the eczema failing to respond to home treatment that usually works, it stopped looking like any eczema I had ever had before. Also, although my arm was never quite as painful as that first day, it didn’t quite feel like past episodes of overuse either.

I went to see the doctor today. I had started to think that I might have shingles, and, unfortunately, so does the doctor. I’ll be taking one of the antiviral drugs, and ibuprofen does seem to help the pain, but shingles seems to be one of those wildly varying complaints that can take a long time to heal. It is good to know that all the weird symptoms in my right arm probably has the same cause. In the space of ten minutes, I will have throbbing pain, shooting pain, tingling and itching. The weirdest feeling is not painful though: occasionally I feel as though I have a drop of liquid on my skin, but it is dry when I look at the area. It is like the stupid little nerves in my arm are just firing at random.

I have been trying to minimize keyboarding and mousing since I have had a flareup of some RSI symptoms that plague me from time to time. Today is better: my right arm is not actually throbbing. More to follow soon, I hope.