I’ve now been stuck in this brace and on crutches for over a week. So far it hasn’t been too bad, but it’s real difficult to do a lot of things that I took for granted before. I’m not sure how I’ll be able to get along at school by myself — I can’t carry anything but a backpack and it’s a real chore to shower and to get food by myself. I’m hoping that I’ll become more adjusted to this and be faster — it takes me an hour to get ready in the morning compared to about 15 minutes before. I’ll see how things go on my own on Thursday and into Friday when I have to go back to have the stitches removed. Driving is going to be interesting and hopefully I’ll be able to get my leg in the car with the minimal amount of movement the brace allows.
I started a weight routine for my legs and upper body which is the best I can do since I can’t run or bike. It should help some when I eventually am allowed more range of motion in the brace. The brace has done wonders for my hamstring flexibility though. I have been putting some weight on the left leg since the doctor and PA said I am allowed to, but I stick to the crutches when I move around. I’m real paranoid about screwing up the healing process and knocking out that clot in the knee that’s supposed to form new cartilage. There’s still a few times each day where I’ll move and I can feel the knee pop right in the area where I had the microfracture. I really hope that’s not the kneecap destroying part of the clot that’s in there. I’ll have to ask about that on Thursday.
There really isn’t much else I can do except work on the school project during the day and watch the Olympics at night. The stuff I’m working on still has problems and the conference submission deadline is at the end of the week. Each test case in the experiment takes about 5 hours of CPU time so each time I change something it takes quite awhile until I see results. And there are a lot of test cases, so I need as many as 20 or 30 processors running simultaneously to get results as fast as possible. I used to wonder why there was a need for systems with so many processors, but now I know. Each group of tests also spits out about a gig in raw data which also illustrates the need for a large amount of storage space.
I really hadn’t watched that much of the Olympics before whenever they had it, but I don’t really have that much else to do this time around. I always watched some of the track stuff, but that was about it. Personally, I didn’t think the coverage was all that great since there seemed to be an insane amount of commercials. Also, since there were so many sports, they couldn’t show everything, so the time was broken into small chunks of each. I didn’t get to see some of the stuff that sounded interesting, like the sailing or whitewater rafting stuff, shooting, or the modern pentathlon (which has cross country). There were a lot of things that I didn’t find as interesting, like diving and gymnastics, which seemed to last forever and require a palate akin to a professional wine taster in order to distinguish between a good and bad performance.
With the entire world watching, you would think that all the athletes would be on their best behavior as a representative of their country and as the best in their sport. Despite this, there seemed to be a bit of showboating and poor sportsmanship. One guy in taekwondo kicked a referee in the face after being disqualified. A wrestler threw his medal down on the mat after being angry over a judge’s call. In the qualifying heats of the 4 x 400, Great Britain’s anchor taunted the Jamaican runner behind him as they finished. And of course, there was all the showing off for the camera by Jamaica’s Bolt in the 100 and 200 — this was so bad there is even a YouTube video mocking it. There were many cases in the qualifying heats of the sprints where those in the front would pretty much slow down and walk across the finish line. Before the championship season every year in track, our head coach always said if we did that we’d never be wearing a uniform again. Of course, these instances were probably the exceptions rather than the rule, but it only takes a few bad apples.
Now that the Olympics are over it’s now on to the hype of the conventions and the fall election. I’m getting sick of a lot of it especially since Virginia is considered a “swing” state. There are tons of ads on TV, most of which are really annoying. There are too many attacks on the other guy and not enough emphasis on the good qualities of either candidate.
Maybe by the time all that is over I’ll be back on my feet again and things will be more or less back to normal. Maybe I’ll be crippled for life, but I’m trying to do everything I can to avoid that.
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