Tuesday, November 13, 2007

You are the Brute Squad

I've had a flareup of carpal tunnel in my right wrist/thumb in the last couple weeks. My previous flareups were overcome by making sure my keyboard is always lower than my elbows, my mouse is joystick shaped (an issue with the home 'puter still due to the "sleek" 1 button mac mouse), and the keyboard is split so my boobs don't cut off blood flow to my lower arms. I also slept with wrist braces until I stopped folding my wrists 90deg and jamming them into my face while I sleep. (Overcome by now jamming my knuckles into my face.)

But this flareup is weird. It's mostly in my thumb where the lowest joint is. If I just stand around, it's fine. If I try to cap a glassblowing pipe or grip a twist off cap, not so much. I've started wearing an ace bandage on it during the day because the rigid overnight braces irk me. Since I started wearing the bandage, I have gotten the following queries about why:

5Did you punch somebody?
3Are you okay?
2carpal tunnel, huh
1oooh, that's not from glassblowing, is it?
1What does your boyfriend's eye look like?
1Didn't you have a black eye last week? What's going on?


Why do most of those have to do with me inflicting violence? I didn't think that was my vibe, really. I'm a big girl, but not a boxer. And the "black eye last week" comment was because I was wearing prescription sunglasses one day. I did that because I can't wear contacts at work and both my regular glasses had nose pads that landed directly on a GIANT, painful zit that was well nigh unconquerable. The sunglasses were less painful. That's it. But I did get asked about the black eye, hangover, death in the family, etc.

One good sign was that my boss asked the most tactful question each time - something along the lines of "are you ok today, is there something I need to know?" I showed her the zit from hell. I'm supposed to tell the safety guy about the wrist, just in case. I don't remember what day it started hurting or if it was glassblowing related or ergonomic mouse related. Or if I crushed it in my sleep.

Other good things:
  1. I asked some of our consultants to have dinner with me since they eat out anyway, they said yes and we had a nice Thai dinner at a new place for me. I also asked how they go about orienting themselves in a new place when they'll be there semi-longterm. Then I had a little verbal vomit because I still need people to talk to in person on a regular basis. But overall, a nice dinner.
  2. Our SWE chapter had a lunch meeting where 3 members presented their engineering experience. One lady makes live fire targets for military testing and couldn't contain her enthusiasm for the job. I might get a tour.
  3. I got my FMEA uploaded into the new database and the import feature worked the first time.


PS. That's not spoiler space above the table - do you see a giant gap there? Does blogger not support tables? Or is it my mac or the fir.ef.ox? I don't want the giant gap, but can't figure out how to make it go away. Advice welcome.

Edited to Add:
PPS. Turns out I'm not the first to have this problem. All line breaks in the table code are translated to (invisible) "br" commands placed before the table. Blogger does this automagically for you. So taking all the line breaks out of a table post fixes the "spoiler space" issue. Now if only I could get the same line breaks in my paragraphs after lists and tables as before, life would be grand.

3 comments:

Up My Mind said...

Sorry about the carpal tunnel. My mom got that really bad on her hands at the base of the thumb. But that's because she was a seamstress for years and years (owned her own business) and it was from pushing material/fabric through the sewing machine, pinning stuff, etc. :(

As for the spaces...do you ever click on the html tab while composing? Sometimes I have to go in there and delete extra line breaks when I've imported stuff. Extra lines drive me crazy...I'm a bit OCD and probably spend a minimum of 15 minutes tweaking each post so it appears perfectly

Unknown said...

Ouch on the CTS. I haven't had it (yet), but I fear it will come someday soon, as much as I type at work.

Anonymous said...

Mom had carpal tunnel surgery last month. Just on her right hand. She put it off for a long time finally had it done. Haven't heard what she thinks yet. You're away, they just put holes in your hand/wrist now.

I have never done a table in blogger but every time I put in a picture it doesn't wish to put in an extra space btwn paragraphs below the picture.

I don't know enough about html code to fix it.

S