Yay?

Starting today I can order off the Special Menu at International House of Carbohydrates, so...yay?

I don't even know where the nearest IHOP is, and I haven't eaten in one since...2012? Wait, that was a Denny's.

The sort of restaurants enjoyed by pretentious hipster foodie douchebags like me rarely have senior's menus, alas.

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I can't put my finger on why, either.

A friend remarked on Facebook that this is the Monday-est feeling Wednesday ever. Having pondered on it a bit, I can't say I disagree.

Yesterday I left the house before lunch, rode the bus up into Broad Ripple Village proper, and sweated out the remainder of an article that had been giving me fits for more than a week. I got it sent off, made it home, and mowed half the lawn yesterday evening.

This morning I was just drained and didn't feel like crawling out of bed, but had to drive a friend to a medical appointment, which probably added to the Monday-ness, but certainly doesn't account for all of it.

And now it's back to the word mines for this afternoon.

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Upside, Downside

On the upside I'm not celebrating my birthday at SHOT this year; I'm actually home instead of on the road.

On the downside, it's on a Monday.

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I'm not speaking to me.

I missed my fifteenth blogiversary. I didn't even get me flowers or anything.

I haven't even changed the page layout since then and, to tell the truth, I'm afraid to at this point for fear it will jack something up horribly.
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Another day, another...

It's trite to say that "Depression lies."

In my experience, depression doesn't lie, it's just that the truth is depressing.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) November 8, 2019

Mobility

So, when they gave me a sling in the ER after I broke my collarbone back in May, I figured I was going to be the best sling patient ever. When they gave me a better one at the orthopedics clinic, I strapped that thing down tight and even slept in it.

When I finally got to the ortho doc and told him this on my four week visit, all beaming with pride, he looked pained. Nobody had told me that after the first few weeks I was only supposed to wear it when I was out of the house, to keep people from bumping into my healing flipper. Instead, I had essentially immobilized my elbow and shoulder joints for a month and a half and now was going to have to rehab those.

All my life I have put jackets and coats on with the right sleeve first and then fishing behind myself with my more dextrous left hand for the other sleeve. Since May, I've constantly had to remind myself to do it the other way 'round.

As of this past week, I finally have enough mobility and lack of pain in my left shoulder joint that I can put my coat on normally again. Yay!

General Gripes...

• Collarbone still hurts plenty, although it's a more manageable level of pain than initially. It's still enough to make me pretty grouchy.


• Those spots on my Battleship Cove photos actually mean that I am about to learn how to clean the sensor on my Sony a7 II.


• The doctor cleared me for two-handed pistol shooting again, and said that there was no danger of re-fracture, and pain would likely be my only limiting factor. So...yay? Back to work. I'm going to consider it as rehab for my shoulder.

A Farewell to Carbs...

Well, while I was all jacked up with my arm in a sling, I figured I'd make the experience a little more tolerable by allowing myself to enjoy some of the things that I'd missed most on my new diet. So allowed myself to have some IPA, an order of fries here and there, the occasional hot dog bun...

Also, I didn't pay much attention to my calorie intake. Well, that's not accurate, actually. I still recorded everything I ate, but didn't care if I blew over the calorie limit every day.

Yesterday was my first day out and about without wearing the sling, since I wasn't planning on going anyplace crowded where my shoulder was likely to be jostled. (I might have overdone that a bit, 'cause my clavicle was hurting by nightfall...)

Anyway, since I'm gradually working my way back to light duty, I figured it was time to step on the scale and see how much damage I'd done, between lack of physical activity and indulging my every dietary whim. Fourteen pounds in two months and a week.

No worries. That's still twenty-six pounds lighter than I was this time last year.

Back to work, then.
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Writing Problems

The problem with having a bunch of writer friends is that we've all heard the same piece of advice a blue jillion times, and in turn we dispense it almost reflexively:

"I'm having difficulty writing right now." 

"Well, you know the solution to that! Apply ass to chair in front of the keyboard and just write."

Yes. I know how to write, thanks. The problem is that I seem to be experiencing difficulty doing it at the moment.

This is the equivalent of being told, when you're having difficulty walking, to:

"Just put one foot in front of the other!" 

"Thanks. I'm familiar with the mechanics of walking, yes. I've been doing it since an early age, but what I'm trying to say is that I appear to be having difficulty doing it right now."

And what chaps my ass is that the writing I do is the easiest, lowest, meanest sort. I don't need to come up with plots or characters or even story ideas. I don't need to have 80,000 words on an editor's desk in three months.

I write short little non-fiction columns and articles on dry technical matters, and I write them on request, rather than on speculation. All I need to do is spit out my opinion on the requested topic when my string is pulled, and I seem to be experiencing great difficulty doing that at the moment.

This is where some writer friend chimes in with "There's nothing special or creative about writing. It's just a job and you do it like any other job."

Hey, people find themselves unable to deal with their job...face burnout...all the frickin' time. I know people from accountants to auto mechanics to dentists who found themselves unable to deal with the thought of one more stuck spark plug or nasty cavity.

I don't think I'm burned out on writing, but it's like there's a magic force field around the MS Word icon on my desktop that manages to deflect my cursor someplace else, like Safari or Lightroom*, every time I get near it.

I'll bust out of this like I have every time before, but dammit, if you can't vent whinily on your own blog, where can you vent?


*And yes, before someone suggests it, my work computer doesn't even have games on it. I have a Mac mini desktop that only has MS Office, Adobe Creative Cloud, and whatever bloatware came with this version of OS X. The games are on a Dell laptop that doesn't get booted up before 6PM.

Pocket knives...

I have a bunch of pocket knives, and I used to rotate through them but for the past several years now I'd pretty much settled on a plain ol' Spyderco Delica, albeit one with the Emerson wave opener on it.

At some point in the last few days, though, I lost it, either at the movie theater on Saturday or at Fat Dan's for lunch on Monday.

So I spent some time this morning pawing through my knife roll, trying to decide what to put in my pocket to replace it.

There were some unexpected memories in there, too...

I've had this CRKT K.I.S.S. longer than any other. Back when I first got a job in a gun store, I bought a Spyderco Delica Clipit that I wore around the store hanging from a belt loop and used for opening & breaking down boxes and such. When I started commuting on a motorcycle, I traded the Clipit for the K.I.S.S., because the Clipit would scratch the tank on my GPz.

That means I've had this knife something like twenty years or more.

Those scratches on the pocket clip are from the asphalt of Peachtree Street, when I had my catastrophic wreck in the summer of '00.

I was carrying this knife at my very first Blade Show, and I met Ed Halligan and chatted with him for a while. He was a kindly old dude, and we compared wreck stories. He rode his bicycle some sick distance every day, like thirty miles or more. One day, a couple years before our meeting, a hit-and-run driver knocked him off his bike and he rode home, a dozen miles or so, with a busted clavicle. Guy must have been tough as nails.

Marko got me this Kershaw Blackout as a "welcome to Tennessee" present when I moved up to Knoxville, late in 2000. I think having the K.I.S.S. and the Blackout at the same time was the first time in my life I'd ever owned more than one half-decent pocket knife at the same time.

I've got knives that are a lot fancier these days, but these have seniority.

As far as what knife to carry now, however? Well, I might as well just carry the waved Spyderco Endura. I'd only switched to the Delica from it because when I put on all that weight, the bigger Endura was uncomfortable in my pocket. Having lost the weight, I can carry it comfortably again.
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Thinner.

Out in public w/o a gun burkha for the first time in probably fifteen years. Yay losing weight and AIWB.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) May 14, 2018

So, purse dump time.

It was easy to be rail thin in my 20s. I led a pretty active life and, even though I didn't exercise, I was generally poor and didn't have a huge appetite.

By the time I was in my thirties, a sedentary lifestyle and improved income saw me gain a little weight, but not enough that it bothered me much. I lost a bunch of it while working at CCA, but gained it back after moving to Indy.

When I quit smoking, I gained a bunch of weight, enough to actually bother me. For at least the last five years or so, the long-sleeved "gun burkhas" I wore were worn to cover more than just the gun.

Having lost enough weight to carry AIWB under an untucked t-shirt was handy, what with today's high temperature here in Indianapolis smashing a record dating to the 1880s.
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I don't want to grow up...

Let's see if I can hold off doing so for another year.
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Verklempt

I got a notification from my friends at Indy Arms Co. that a package had arrived for me. A reader had sent me a birthday gift, and would I like to come and pick it up or should they hold it 'til after SHOT?

I allowed as how I had some shopping to get done at the local Meijer store just across the street, and I'd swing by on the way and get it.

I found myself standing in the middle of the gun store with eyes full of tears...

Thank you very much!

I took a minute to get my $#!+ in a sock before heading over to Meijer's for groceries and sundries. While there I swung by the magazine rack to see if the new RECOIL was in. It was.

The first issue of RECOIL with my byline in it. I do wish Pat were here to see it, even though I know what his reaction would be...

I'm not as big a loser as I planned to be.

According to the scale and my little weight loss app on my phone, I'm down 17.8 pounds since I started using the app in late September. While this is the equivalent of no longer having to carry Huck the cat with me everywhere I go, I still didn't quite hit my target.

Unless I lose six pounds between now and Sunday, which seems unlikely without using a Stryker saw, my SHOT Show weight goal will not be met.

No matter. Onward.
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I'm happy. For now.

The Casino Drill, it's called.

You stand on the five yard line with a holstered, concealed pistol and two concealed reloads. The pistol and both spare mags all each loaded with seven rounds for a total of twenty-one rounds on your person.

At the go signal, you draw from concealment and shoot one round into the triangle with the number "1" on it, then two rounds into the red circle bearing the number "2", then three rounds into the number "3" triangle, four rounds into the square labeled "4"...et cetera, reloading every time you hit slidelock.

The idea being that you are drawing from concealment, firing twenty-one shots with two mandatory reloads, keeping track of where you are on the target, and finishing this all under a twenty-one second par time. Each missed round, or round engaged on the wrong target, adds a second to your finishing time.

I've scooted under the par time barely on previous runs, but only when shooting by myself in a pistol bay, and not shooting from concealment, at that. I've blown into the nineteens in classes...but only in raw time. It always involved a couple dropped shots that pushed it over the 21 second mark.

But today in the EDP class at BDC Gun Room in Shawnee, Oklahoma, with the introvert's nightmare of being the only one shooting while Tom Givens stood there with a timer and the rest of the class stood around judging watching, I managed a 20.26 clean. That's a personal best, and I'm stoked.

Now to get better than that.
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Shrinking...

So, for the XD-E launch event back in spring of this year, Springfield Armory's people sent a form asking for shirt and hat and belt sizes among other things.

When we got there, they had little backpacks with our names on them with logo-wear and belts and holsters and such to use on the range that day. This is pretty typical. They let you keep some of the tchotchkes, which is cool if you're into gun company logo t-shirts and ballcaps, I guess.

I was dumb and kinda fudged a bit and gave a vanity size for my belt.

Dumb.

In the backpack was a heavy leather Crossbreed gun belt and, after stuffing the holstered XD-E into my waistband, it was all I could do to suck my tummy in enough to get the belt to close on the last hole. Even at that, it was so tight that sitting down was physically painful and I only picked at lunch and probably risked dehydration to avoid 'sploding that belt.

Out of curiosity, I wore that belt today instead of my usual Galco Instructor's Belt, and I'm using the fourth hole on the belt. Even after a biggish lunch and a steak dinner, there's still enough room to get both hands between me and my waistband if I suck my tum in a little.

If I had known there was a legit booze and steaks diet like this, I'd have been doing it years ago.
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Downside, Upside

Downside: I have to work on my 50th birthday...
Upside: ...at SHOT Show in Vegas.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) November 1, 2017

Progress!

Not too many months ago, I'd get off my poor tired feet at night and my lower legs would be all narsty and swollen above the elastic of my socks. That doesn't happen anymore. In fact, I can actually see some definition of my calf muscles again.

Also, some time in the first week of October, my belt began taking on a very active role in keeping my current jeans from falling down to my hips, rather than simply being a means of strapping my holster on. Looking like it's time to bust out the next size down when I get home. If I lose two jeans sizes by SHOT, I will be positively ecstatic.
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So that's an upside...

Remember how one of my pastimes on this blog was whingeing about lower back pain? Turns out that the best medicine I could take for that was 25 pounds of Fatbegone.

Oh sure, I still can get some soreness started up with enough stoop labor, but it's not the near-crippling levels of pain that it was just six or eight months ago. Also, I haven't needed a Tums since the middle of July when before I was going through a bottle of sugar-free antacid tablets a week.

Maybe there's something to this reducing the carbs thing.

I'm about a month away from ECQC and hope to be in a lot better shape for it than I was last year.
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Copypasta from my Bookface wall...

"One of my projects for this week is to seriously get my friends list under control.

It's not a personal thing, it's just that having huge bunches of people I don't know from Adam's house cat on my personal FB timeline seriously dings its utility for me.

I keep a separate "View From The Porch" page for Blog-related stuff and try and stay active there, so it's not like I'm banishing anybody to the Outer Darkness.

But if we don't know each other face-to-face and/or haven't interacted a bunch online on forums and such over the years and/or are not both in the industry and need to know each other for professional reasons, then don't take it personally...

...and I say that knowing that each time a friend has done this, a bunch of people have taken it personally and weeping and drama and butthurt has ensued, and the desire to avoid that has caused me to put this day off for as long as I possibly could."

I originally got a FB account in 2010 because I needed one for a gig I took. I didn't actually plan on using it for anything other than that one work-related page, and so I accepted every friend request pretty much willy-nilly. It wasn't until I was a couple years into the FB experiment that I realized that this could have been a potent and useful thing if I'd had a bit more continence with my friends list.

I need to roll up my sleeves, "unfriend" a bunch of people (which wouldn't seem half so toxic an act if FB hadn't chosen to trivialize the word "friend") and then tag everybody left as "family", "close friend", "industry peeps", et cetera.

I'd like to have a way to let, say, my friends in West Dakota know "Hey, I'm in town if anybody wants to meet up for a toddy," without telling the entire damn internet "Hey, Bobbi's home alone this week and the house'll be empty during the day!" and Facebook is supposed to be exactly that tool.
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