Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.
Archive for the ‘health’ Category.
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Today when meeting up for a wintery bike ride my friend Bob (seen here with a mustache full of condensation) gave me this book, What’s Your Poo Telling You?. It reminded him of when I informed him of the (very useful) Bristol Stool Scale and is a collection of stories and information about poop of different sorts. I imagine it’ll make for a good bathroom read, and thus far amuses me greatly.
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Using a spare aluminum plate†, some leftover cheap cardboard‡, a chair, and a ruler I was able to measure my sit bone spacing. This was done by sitting on the assembly with my legs bike pedal spacing apart, then grabbing the metal plate and pulling it against myself to ensure good dent formation in the cardboard. I then looked and felt for the dents in the cardboard, marked the centers with dots, and measured. Both measurements were ~122mm, so I’m happy with the result.
Some research into how sit bone measurement should translate to saddle size uncovered the Specailized Body Geometry recommendations for saddle widths, which are supposedly as follows:
· 130mm saddle for sitbone center to center width of 100mm or less.
· 143mm saddle for sitbone center to center width of 100mm to 130mm.
· 155mm saddle for sitbone center to center width of 130mm or more.
The WTB Rocket V saddle which came with my new bike (post forthcoming once it is complete) felt a bit narrow in the few test rides I’ve taken, and at ~130mm measured width these measurements confirm that it likely is the wrong size for me. The Specialized OEM saddle that came on my old bike is ~140mm and matches the aforementioned recommendations. As it has been comfortable for two years now, I think I’ll be looking at a new saddle somewhat along these lines.
Now to figure out which one to try…
† Former Power Mac G5 and Mac Pro stand.
‡ Twelve South BackPack box.
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Danielle had her wisdom teeth removed this morning and is currently in the living room napping. While all four wisdom teeth were impacted, three were removed intact, which impresses me. In particular I find the one on the right with the twisty root to be neat.
Click here or on the image above to see all the detail, including the yet-to-dry-out pieces of her gingiva.
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The most recent stage of the cold is an exceedingly runny nose. Danielle experienced this yesterday and purchased the box of Target-brand (up & up) pseudoephedrine hydrochloride, which helped her but kept her from sleeping well last night.
Knowing that this drug makes me feel overstimulated I resisted taking any, but by mid-afternoon when my nose needed to be emptied every five minutes or so, I relented. Since twenty minutes (or so) after injecting the pill I’ve felt twitchy, shaky, and slightly nauseous, the same as if I’d just ingested a few hundred milligrams of caffeine. This is not very much fun, and hopefully it won’t keep me from sleeping, as there’s a bunch of things that I want to get done at work tomorrow.
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The aforementioned cold was hitting me a bit harder than expected today; so much so that I didn’t go to the Alton Brown lecture. Thankfully someone had found my blog post and was wanting two tickets. While I originally only had one ticket for sale, his need for two made my decision not to go all the easier.
After meeting up with Kate to get her ticket to her I ended up grabbing some carry-out Indian food, then sitting at home and overeating while sitting on the couch. I then fell asleep on and off while watching TiVo’d episodes of Good Eats and How It’s Made as the Netflix streaming of Man on Wire that I’d initially tried to watch kept pausing.
Boring night, eh? And I’m still not feeling any better.
Please have photos of things found in a (separate) parking lots within the past few days: Teabag Without Tag, Baby’s Shoe Without Laces. Found within a parking lot-sized place, Costco, the photo above is my face on a broken camera in a cheap karaoke machine.
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Last night both Danielle and I started to feel a bit run down, and this morning I found myself feeling heavy and sluggish, with a bit of a headache and stomach ache. Since both Pandemic H1N1/09 is going around and my coworker Tom just got back to work from being off with strep throat, I opted to go to the doctor this morning. The doctor tested me for strep, then determined that I likely just have an upper respiratory infection and prescribed me a course of Azithromycin, as seen above.
Made by the same company that brought us Delysid, this serious antibiotic has worked well for me in the past. I hope it does this time – and does so rapidly – as I’d like to be feeling well before Massive Fallout, which is scheduled for this Saturday.
I’ve read a few things hinting that artificial sweeteners such as Aspartame (NutraSweet) and Saccharin cause an insulin response, leading to blood sugar drop and often overeating. While I don’t know enough to say how true it is, these three articles seem to support this:
Effects of artificial sweeteners on insulin release and cationic fluxes in rat pancreatic islets.
[...] Sodium saccharin (1.0-10.0 mM), sodium cyclamate (5.0-10.0 mM), stevioside (1.0 mM) and acesulfame-K (1.0-15.0 mM), all of which display a bitter taste, augmented insulin release from islets incubated in the presence of 7.0 mM D-glucose. In contrast, aspartame (1.0-10.0 mM), which is devoid of bitter taste, failed to affect insulin secretion. [...]
A role for sweet taste: Calorie predictive relations in energy regulation by rats.
[...] We found that reducing the correlation between sweet taste and the caloric content of foods using artificial sweeteners in rats resulted in increased caloric intake, increased body weight, and increased adiposity, as well as diminished caloric compensation and blunted thermic responses to sweet-tasting diets. These results suggest that consumption of products containing artificial sweeteners may lead to increased body weight and obesity by interfering with fundamental homeostatic, physiological processes. [...]
[...] In these cells, artificial sweeteners such as sucralose, succharin, and acesulfame-K increased insulin secretion and augmented secretion induced by glucose. [...]
When I was rather young, eating anything containing NutraSweet would give me a pretty bad headache. While this doesn’t happen any more, I do wonder if it was related.
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Please excuse the poor quality photo, but it’s hard to take a macro photo of one’s own lip.
Today while riding back towards Rochester along the Paint Creek Trail with Bob, Erik, and Kristi, just before getting to the Tienken Road crossing I crossed paths with a large insect. While hitting, inhaling, or simply swallowing bugs is pretty common during late-summer riding, this was different. As soon as the bug hit my face I instinctively closed my mouth, which apparently trapped it between my lips.
In between that time and when I was able to pull it off my face (seconds, really) three quick bites or stings were applied to my lip. I’m not completely sure what it was, but the spindly, leggy feeling between my fingers and multiple punctures in such a short time leads me to believe that it was a wasp. It could have been a black fly or deer fly but I’ve never known them to bite so quickly.
At first the pain was like a sharp, stabbing cut, bothersome enough that I needed to stop for a few moments. After that it went down a bit, and now is sting a deep ache, similar to both the pain of split open chapped lips and having bit one’s lip quite hard.
At least the ride tonight was really nice. We started out at Rochester Mills, then headed up Bald Mountain South Unit, rode most of the mountain bike trails, then (due to my misdirection) didn’t quite find the connector to the Lake Orion High School mountain bike trails before sunset threatened.
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Today I took a ride from my house up to Stony Creek, around the trails, into Downtown Rochester, then over to Bloomer. Bloomer is a bit convoluted, and the only trails that I could find are the rather intimidating ridge trails, which are a bit riskier than I prefer to ride. (See this photo, which shows where I stopped riding as I prefer to not duck around chest-height trees on off camber bench cut trails with steep drop-offs.)
Right as I began heading towards my house, something wasn’t going right in the drivetrain. Every couple pedal strokes or so I was getting a bit of ghost shifting, particularly when in physically smaller gears. A quick look showed that it was likely a stiff link on the chain, so I headed back towards home. En route to home things became worse and worse, to the point where I could only ride in the big ring and somewhere above the middle of the rear cassette. Regular ka-chunk sounds were heard as the derailleur jumped around a bit.
By the time I got home there were 34.37 miles on the odometer, in just about 2:49. I was rather wanting to ride more, but the chain was saying otherwise. This is a pretty new chain, and prior to this ride (at about the 120 mile mark) the factory lube still seemed to be doing its job. Everything was moving very smoothly, there was no noise from the chain, and everything was shifting well. Right now I’ve got the chain soaking in degreaser, and then post-cleaning I’ll give it a bunch of (physical) attention to try and loosen up the link. At least a new chain isn’t particularly expensive if that doesn’t work.
(The bandage is from cutting a good slice mostly off of my finger tip yesterday while slicing limes with a bent, dull knife. Doing this made me very mad at myself.)
UPDATE: Problem found! It’s a damaged inner plate.
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With injuring my knee and rain through most of the week, I haven’t been able to go for a bike ride in a while. So, after washing my bike off and checking the wheels over for damage† I headed towards Shelby Township’s River Bends Park. After stopping at the post office to ship a package I headed into the park and ended up doing two laps of the two track-type trail there. Normally I would have also continued along the paved path to Ryan Road, but the recent rains had the paved path under more than a foot of water, and I wasn’t in the mood to get wet. Both the bike and I got a bit muddy, but nothing terrible.
While on the unpaved tracks I ended up riding down anything that looked remotely like single track that went somewhere and ended up getting a much better feel for the land around there. The more I think about it, the more I think that River Bends could host a couple miles of nice single track.
The photo above was taken after I rode through some of the existing single track-like stuff, all the way to the far southeast corner of the park, where it goes down a ridge to the river’s floodplain. What is normally some trail for another 200′ was completely under actively flowing water. Looking towards the river showed what is above, with newly downed trees and a logjam. I love looking at this sort of transient river.
Also, during the whole time I was riding my knee had no problems. It’s still a bit sore at times, but all the aching seems to be coming from the outside of my kneecap in the area where the wound is still healing. This is good, I think.
† Interestingly, I’d somehow fitted both tires backwards last time. I also found that while falling I managed to get a whole bunch of dirt between the bead of the tire and the rim’s bead seat, leading to a bit of a wobble in the tire. The wheels themselves are fine.
