I was hoping to do my dusting last week and give you an interesting article this week. Well, the last two weeks got the better of me. Last week I had to go for an ultrasound to check on the status of my kidney stones. This week I went to the doctor to get the results. The good news is that there are no more kidney stones, or at least it’s too small to show up in the ultrasound. This is after an extraction in 2021 but one was still left in there. I vaguely remember having a forced “go” that I thought might have been the stone but it didn’t hurt…I promise there’s only one more icky part to go…so maybe that’s when it went. Point it the last obstacle to my life, medically anyway, is finally no longer an obstacle. Well, that doesn’t leave me out of obstacles though.

So this week I got a little dusting done in my bedroom, but I paced myself and just did the one area. It’ll take me a few days to finally get everything dusted, and then I have other rooms I need to work on. I’ll get more into the problems why that’s taking so long in a moment, but as you can tell from the title there’s three discussion topics. The dusting part I mostly already finished discussing. It’s dusting. All I have to talk about there is why I need to pace myself more. The other problem this week is that we’re changing television providers…again, meaning I also have to work around getting everything watched before we change over later next week. So I’ll talk a bit about that as well. It’s not decluttering per say, but it is cleaning and you have to keep the stuff you’re still holding onto tidy after all.

I still have a problem that has resulted from all I’ve been through lately. For those of you new to this site and I’m kind of tired of thinking about by this point, 2016 was an…event. While people were worried which idiot to vote in as President my biggest worry was not dying. This included two surgeries that left a hernia, which was also dealt with in 2021, granting me a hernia mesh, which is not a replacement for the area of colon I had to lose in 2016 from diverticulitis, but it’s better than the blood clot I got recovering from the first of those two surgeries (one to remove the inflamed part and the other to reconnect six months later so I didn’t need a colostomy bag…okay, NOW I’m done with the icky parts). My point in bringing this all up is my body has been through a time these past few years, and the combination of hernia and kidney stone was restricting what I could do. Now both problems are gone and I can start being more active again.

One problem: my body isn’t used to being active. I was shown that when it took me two days to clean our little bathroom, something I used to be able to do in one. It was this month that confirmed it though. These past two weeks sent me to a medical facility about 20 minutes away, and then I did some shopping. It took me two days to recover from all that because I’ve been mostly inactive since I couldn’t lift much of anything. This was after a colonoscopy but my dad drove me to that and I came right home to sleep and eat something so that’s just a normal reaction to the prep and I did say there were no more icky parts. Point is the Crohn’s Disease is in remission but I have diverticulosis and I want to keep it from becoming another bout of diverticulitis, but that has nothing to do with holding me back physically.

That years of being mostly inactive might though. I was never a huge exerciser but I used to ride my bike, go clubbing until I realized I was the only one not into one night stands and then the Crohn’s hit, and was mostly active at my job until I lost that in 2013 before all the 2016 stuff began. I lost a lot of weight because I didn’t want to eat because of the diverticulitis (and no, I’m not sure what the difference is between “-losis” and “-litis” is outside of the former leads into the latter and more surgery) and I still remember how fast and scary that was to see me that thin. I’m worried about that causing some psychological concern. Between all of that I gained a lot of the weight I lost and that’s not a good thing when you’re trying to get your stamina back, and that’s not even getting into getting older. Then again Jack Lalanne was pulling boats in his 70s. and his wife is still working out in her late 90s.

Yeah, I’m not doing that. I’ll be happy not taking a nap in the middle of the day, fixing my sleeping schedule so I can get work done and maybe find some way to make money doing it, or at least be able to clean a whole room in less than a week. I’d also like to be able to go out someplace and not be deenergized for two days. So getting some stamina-building workouts in now that I can work out is a goal I have.

So where does the DVR come in? Well, the service we have now we aren’t happy with. Our previous service seemed to be shutting down one station at a time and we’ve heard they are planning to eventually do away with being a TV provider and just do phone and internet. Our current one isn’t that great. The closed captions are off to the side, there’s this weird system with “tuners” where you can’t record more than one program at a time without being unable to watch anything if someone is watching TV on a third tuner like a satellite box or the app. In fact today I was going through a bunch of stuff on the DVR, went into live TV while my dad was recording a couple of shows at the same time, and all three tuners ended up taken up just as my dad was watching something. I’m afraid to try to watch anything at the moment in case I do it to him again. It’s ridiculous, and it doesn’t help that the channel lineup is almost half informercial and selling channels, the layout of all the channels make no sense, and the menus are kind of funky. The only good thing about the remote is the voice activation but we barely use it anyway.

That means that this weekend I have to go through all the TV shows and movies I recorded, and my dad has to do the same, before we’re scheduled to get the new provider in. It’s one we had before but we hear they got better and now we all have HD TVs so there shouldn’t be any installation problems like last time. There are shows I was hoping to see once I cut through my YouTube backlog but that’s going to have to wait, and movies I’ve wanted to watch for a while to the point that I have an article series on my other site called Finally Watched, which is about getting me to review those movies so I can make myself watch them and decide if it was worth the wait. One of those movies I recorded during an HBO preview weekend so I really have to watch that before the change. It’s annoying and I’m hoping it’s the last time I have to do this.

All of these things have eaten into my week and my weekend plans. I couldn’t dust last week because I was too tired and had my ultrasound just before the weekend. I even had to miss out on a family gathering. The DVR I watched while dusting, taking the time during commercial breaks to go into the next room and get some dusting in while sometimes stopping the video if I needed to focus on one part of the dusting and reorganizing task or just watching the show when I took a break. I got the one section I wanted done finished and ready to go, while only completing one TV show I had multiple episodes of. With luck I’ll find a way to go through the other shows while still working on the other site in time for the change over. I’m prioritizing what I want to see at the moment. On top of that I have two other areas of the room that need serious dusting–I didn’t even mention the vacuuming–and I don’t really want to reserve that for the next two weeks because I don’t have the energy to do it all in one day, and I still have the studio to dust, which I want to finish before the bathroom needs cleaning again.

Welcome to my life, folks. It’s a bit crazy but at least things are looking up. No more hernia and no more kidney stone means I can do stuff again, but I have to get used to doing things again. Meanwhile we’re still stuck in a game of musical TV providers, somebody is interested in one of the Transformers I have for sale so I have to get that ready and find out what shipping will be, which means leaving the house again and going to the post office, then doing so again once I have an address and payment, and I have a lot to do that I want to make into a career that’s not getting done. God willing this will all work out…but it’s frustrating I’m not already further ahead.

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