Handy Excuse

You may have noticed that the number of posts here have dwindled down to almost nothing. The reason for this is not a lack of interest in providing entertaining distractions, but one medical in nature.

For years, I've experienced a numbness in my hands after long periods of repetitive use -- driving, typing, turing the pages in a magazine, etc. I've always assumed it was a carpal tunnel problem, and no surprise, it turns out I was right. It had never interfered with work before, so I learned to live with it. then, starting last December, excruciating pain began to accompany the numbness, and the onset of both began to occur more and more quickly. Now, I can manage about an hour of typing before I need to take a break of at least a couple of hours. Using scissors or an x-acto knife usually allows me two hours of productivity before I have to quit for a few ours, if not the entire day.

On the plus side, I'm working with my doctor to get this corrected, and it looks like it will be through outpatient surgery. Of course, since there are a number of specialists I need to go through to get to that surgery, it could be a few months before that surgery happens.

In the meantime, because my productivity is so diminished, I'm trying to put the bulk of my efforts into work that generates income. That isn't to say I'll be abandoning my blog. I still have Robert Pope's question to answer this month, the long promised annotated Xombi to finish (I'm half way through, but don't want to post any of it until all the work is done) and some other things. In the meantime, I have some long overdue posts that are mostly visual in nature that I'll put up here periodically.

I don't need any sympathy, just patience. This is more inconvenient for me than debilitating, and I'm still trying to navigate working around the problem while waiting for it to be corrected, but I'm still moving forward on a variety of projects -- just at a slower pace than usual.