Category Archives: Amsterdam II

Arthrosis

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Last week was kind of hectic, health-wise. I went to see a different masseuse because the Ayurvedic therapist is abroad to study for half a year and gain more professional knowledge. The new masseuse is very good and I had a nice though painful massage. She treated muscles that I thought were ok but the moment she touched them I could feel the tension. There were tiny little knots all over my back, mostly the shoulders and lower back and along the spine which she treated with care. Yes it was painful but I could also feel the tension slowly release with each stroke and applied pressure.

The following days I could hardly move again because my whole back felt extremely sensitive. I also had a cold so I decided to stay in bed most of the weekend to stay warm, sleep and relax as much as possible as I’d had a few bad nights where I fell asleep around four in the morning. Of course I had to work again on Monday and carrying a bag full with computer equipment, weighing about 5 kilo isn’t helping much either. When Wednesday came around I was in pain again, not as bad as the previous weeks but still. That day I had to visit my GP to discuss the results of the x-rays.

I’d had the x-rays done on Thursday but my GP doesn’t work on Fridays so I had to visit her the next week. Whilst there she told me that I have arthrosis which affects my spine between the shoulderblades and the lower back. It wasn’t clear that this was actually caused by the accident I had in 2005 whilst snowboarding as it had been some time ago when it happened and the x-rays didn’t clearly show. Though my GP suspected I’ve had a vertebral fracture at the time based on what I’d told her. Right after it happened I couldn’t breath for a while, couldn’t stand straight and was in excrusiating pain.

So what it comes down to is that I’ll have to live with this pain for the rest of my life… It made me wonder about a lot of things and got me into deep thinking again. My GP wanted to give me painkillers as I’m allowed to take 4 times a day two paracetamol tablets, but I’m only willing to take those when the pain is really bad. Over the last four weeks I’ve taken two tablets twice because I prefer not to take them daily if I can get thru the day without. Yes I will experience pain but I don’t want to run the risk of getting dependent on painkillers for the next 30 years eventhough the pain will come and go.

As I mentioned deep thinking earlier, I’m very aware that I might have to make some drastic changes and decide what I’ll do job-wise. Carrying that heavy bag each day isn’t gonna help. Having a two hour commute door-to-door either. And that’s just two work related facts. Others are related to household issues and having to climb lots of stairs because I live in an old fire tower with six floors and a bedroom at the top floor whilst a kitchen is at the second floor. Just not very practical situations that I’ll have to think about along with more life-changing issues that I have to take into consideration as well.

Today I went to see the masseuse again and she used the ‘cupping’ method this time where she puts cups on your back to create a vacuum. The blood is drawn to the surface of the skin in specific parts of the body that need healing. It was like a giant octopus got stuck on my back. After the treatment and massage I walked home in the rain, enjoying the day which was quite relaxing. I’ll have to see what kind of affect this treatment will have over the next couple of days but hopefully it will work out fine. I’ll keep my fingers crossed and try to refrain from injuring my back, whilst thinking about my future.

Time-consuming Backups

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It was bound to happen one day, I couldn’t trust my backup system anymore as it was giving errors. So I’ve been busy for at least a week sorting out my digital footprint. Just like I’ve been busy sorting out boxes for months it keeps surprising me how much stuff a person collects over time. I have two external hard drives in raid that I’ve been using to make backups for years now, but the time had come to change to an upgraded version which I bought a couple of weeks ago, a NAS with two 4TB harddisks. Copying over the network seemed to come with some hickups as well but I’ve managed tonight to sort all the information (2TB of ‘stuff’) on the new NAS.

In the past I’ve made use of TimeMachine but I stopped using it a couple of years ago to manually make backups instead. TimeMachine keeps making copies of the same files over and over again and since I had a couple of crashes over the years I ended up with several copies of system folders and copies of a folder structure of things that I wanted to keep. I’ve been going through each and every folder to delete duplicates and arrange a new filing structure. Some months ago when I started to sort out those boxes I’ve thrown out each and every item that I nolonger used, either giving it to charity shops or putting it in bin bags to have it collected and destroyed.

I was surprised by the -insane- amount of ‘stuff’ that I had managed to collect over time as I wasn’t using most of it anymore or I simply nolonger needed it. Cleaning out each and every box made me feel better and better as it was lifting a weight from my shoulders. Decluttering is the most effective thing to do to me, making space around me and also in my head. But I didn’t expect the amount of digital clutter and I found out that I felt less comfortable deleting system files and backups I had made because of crashes, tho I’ve managed to delete about 180Gb of dublicates by manually comparing files. Yes a total drag but I kept in mind that I only had to do this once ;)

I always got the impression that all my photo archives would take most of the disk space but boy was I mistaken. It was good having to go through each and every folder to see what was in there and if I really ‘needed’ it still. Most of it I got rid of anyway and the largest folders where the ones containing software and those system backups. Folders with 200.000+ files in them, old system folders, folders that nolonger had any use since I’ve bought at least four other computers after making the first backup and changed OS about three or four times as well. I guess the largest is my music collection but since I’ve started buying from iTunes this issue has become more organised.

Sorting my digital history was a total pain but I’m happy that I’ve managed to finish it within a time span of two weeks on and off. It was something that had been dragging my heels for years. I was extremely reluctant to act on it because of the time-consuming copying and checking, but as the other backup system slowly became unreliable I was forced to do this after all those years and I feel relieved now the job is mostly done. I still have some really old IDE disks to check but these are so old, I don’t expect to find anything spectacular on these that is worth saving. Still… I need to see what’s on them before I will use brute force and destroy all the sensitive data ;)

The challenge now, is to keep things organised and tidy… but when I think back of all the aggravation caused by having to go through many folders containing 200.000+ files I’m pretty sure I can keep an eye on that to make sure!