assorted grumbling

Bit of a wasted weekend, here. This is the first of the two weekends we have back in Eindhoven on this trip, but instead of seeing any bits of Europe we might have missed, yesterday I unsuccessfully attempted some shopping, hobbling around the Centrum looking for a Princess Bride CD for Rudder and some plain long-sleeved T-shirts for me. For some reason they don’t seem to have the former, even though it’s just been rerelased on DVD. I’m trying to decide now whether to wait and try to buy it in Taiwan or order it from Amazon. I’ll probably try to buy it there, since I need to go to an electronics store anyway.

His big Christmas gift, which I haven’t gotten yet, will be one of those little DVD viewers that he can take on airplanes. Those fourteen-hour flight every month or so come seem to show too few movies he actually wants to see. (Also, when the Dutch office books our flight they keep sticking us on stupid KLM, whose airplanes are all 747s, with tiny little screens over the aisle instead of the nice individual ones at each seats. Also their food sucks (worse than other airlines, I mean) and I don’t think much of their safety standards. I’ve seen them let people fly a few too many times with minor seat damage – ones that won’t lock upright, or whose food trays keep flopping down for instance. At least we both have Elite status by now so we get slightly more legroom.)

I did find the T-shirts, but they were all low cut or see-through or very tight in unflattering places (I don’t care if Interweave’s Knitting Daily refers to it as “gifted with bellylisciousness”, I don’t like it and I don’t want to put it on display) and sometimes all three, for a Euro-hoochie triple-slam. All I want is a basic long-sleeved jersey T, slim-cut and dressy but not see-through, to wear either under a sweater or on its own. Is that so hard? I wish Gap would spread out a litle farther.

The rest of the day was spent with my foot up on the bed and ice on it. That seems to have helped; it’s much better today. This morning we went to the boathouse, for Rudder to erg and for me to watch my former teammates in a small local race they had today; I walked along the coarse for a bit (only 500 m or so) without too much trouble, and now I’m back to keeping off the foot since that seems to have helped. I didn’t bother with ice today, but did get some Advil. Ironic realization: I tweaked my neck on the plane, because that’s the sort of thing that happens when you have to sit in one cramped spot for 14 hours. It didn’t bother me for the first few days, then started hurting again midweek. That seemed odd, but then I realized: midweek was when I finished the painkiller prescription. I tend to think of drugs as applying only to the problem they’re prescribed for, but they must have masked the stiff neck as well. I’m getting tired of this injury bullshit, not to mention the public display of walking with a cane. The foot and the neck can just fix themselves anytime now, please.