life

I have been on a lengthy crusade against the evil that is sugar, but must confess to mainly being on the losing side. The summer has been quite stressful and where once I lost my appetite when stressed now I seem to feel constant hunger. Part of that hunger is down to the amount of sugary food that I was eating – for some reason sugar makes me feel hungrier, not less hungry.

Anyway, various schemes to cut down on the number of times I was popping to the corner shop for a Coke and Wispa have failed. I’m not great at willpower and have even less of the stuff when stressed (although that’s because, as I’m sure I’ve said before, you only have a limited amount of willpower, although you can increase it with practice). Going cold turkey failed. Simply trying to cut down has failed. So time for some creative thinking.

Kev and I have joined a new gym which is larger and closer to our new flat than the old one was. It’s a 10 min walk through the park each morning, which is a most pleasant way to bookend one’s work-out. This new gym has machines that weren’t available to us in the old gym, including a crunchie machine (for your abdominals) and a lower back resistance machine.

My new scheme combines and reinforces gym and a reduction in sugar intake and it’s really very simple.

I can only buy treats at the shop when I have burnt off their calorific equivalent at the gym.

It’s very simple and so far it seems to be working. It encourages me to work harder at the gym and gives me some idea of how many calories you actually work off. It turns out that I have been burning relatively few calories at the gym, which would explain why I’m fitter but still getting fatter. In our morning workouts, which are only half an hour long, I spend half my time doing resistance work and the rest on the recumbent bike, treadmill or cross-trainer. In that latter 15 mins, I tend to burn only about 75 kcal.

If you’ve ever tried to find a sugary treat that comes in at under 75 calories you’ll know that it’s basically impossible. A can of Coke is 139 kcal and a Wispa is 210 kcal. People have advised me to go for dark chocolate because it’s less sugary. That might be so, but a large bar of Green & Black’s 70% Cocoa is over 500 kcal.

This means that it takes me two workouts during the week to earn enough kcal to have a Coke, and three to earn a Wispa. Erk! I don’t think I’d ever really realised how much effort I need to expend in order to work off one of my favourite treats but now I know it really has changed the way that I think about them. I always knew that these were empty calories – there’s no nutritional value in them at all. They’re stupid calories. But, well, a kcal is bigger than I thought it was!

The nice thing about this is that I can still have my treats, but only when I’ve earnt them. So I don’t need to go cold turkey and I don’t really need willpower. I just need to make sure that I get up early enough to go to the gym and that I work hard whilst I’m there.

I really do hope that this will result in the loss of a few *cough* pounds because I’m heavier now than I’ve ever been. Trousers that were really loose on me once now fit snugly. I really can’t let that go on otherwise I’ll be a blimp before you know it.

So wish me luck and here’s hoping this tactic really does work.

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I’ve been meaning to write this blog post for a while, but I’ve been a bit busy lately and have barely had time to pause for breath.

Several months ago I started working on strengthening my shoulders at the gym – lots of machine work to try and improve the strength of my whole upper back. I’d noticed that some nights, I’d wake up with pins and needles in my hand and find my shoulders had sorts of ‘collapsed’ in on themselves, and I suspected that maybe that wasn’t helping things. I’ve always had weak shoulders, so figured it couldn’t hurt to do some work on them.

When we moved into our new flat I finally had space to set up a proper office, so I now have my old desk and chair, brought up from Dorset and no longer have to work from the sofa. That, in itself, is a joy. It’s so good to have a door to close at the end of the evening! I’m again pretty sure that my lack of a proper desk and chair have contributed significantly to my RSI. Sitting on the sofa didn’t so much encourage bad posture as force it upon me.

On the advice of my friend Sydney, I bought a Wacom Bamboo Fun graphics tablet and pen, which I now use instead of a mouse/trackpad. Although at the lower end of the graphics tablet market (Sydney has the Cintiq, which is gorgeous but way too expensive for me!), it does me very well. It took me a while to get used to using it instead of the trackpad, but now that I am used to it, I’d never go back. It’s much, much easier for editing long documents because you have much better control of the cursor, plus it encourages larger movements than the tiny, fine motor control movements required on a trackpad. It is, in short, fabulous. And sometimes I even use it for drawing!

Kevin bought me a laptop stand, so now I have my office exactly as I want it: Laptop on stand, Wacom tablet to the left (I’m left-handed), and my lovely Apple bluetooth keyboard in front of the laptop. It works incredibly well as a set up and I’d highly recommend anyone who’s working with a laptop as their main machine to experiment with it as a set-up. I also no longer feel the need to get myself a new screen, as having the laptop screen at a decent height also makes it feel somehow like the screen’s not so small! Not quite sure why…

I’ve been following the exercises in Robin McKenzie’s 7 Steps to a Pain-Free Life, which has really helped me to sort out my own back pain – particularly when I put my back out three weeks ago and could barely move. I usually would have gone to a chiro but I rather lost faith in my chiro in London and didn’t feel I had time to find a new one. As it turns out, McKenzie’s exercises are incredibly helpful and have really given my back a new lease of life.

About a month ago, I went to see a consultant physiotherapist at the University College London Hospital. She did a variety of tests – including a nerve induction test which confirmed that I had mild carpal tunnel syndrome. I explained what I’d been doing and she was very pleased with the changes that I’ve made. Indeed, she said that I’ve done pretty much everything she would have advised me to do.

She also told me to expect all my RSI symptoms to vanish within three months. As they had already subsided considerably, I was ready to believe her. In actual fact, I’ve barely had any problems at all over the last month and have trouble the last time remembering when I had a serious attack overnight.

I still have a way to go in terms of improving my shoulder and back strength, and retraining my posture, but I feel pretty confident now that my RSI is under control.

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Dear me, it’s been ages since I last wrote a blog post here. How things have changed since I first started Chocolate and Vodka seven years ago!

Mainly, the problem has been one of time and energy. The last few years seem to have been an almost constant sequence of events and projects that have taken all my attention and left me little time to blog, and even less inclination. I think being on Twitter has rather decreased the desire to write here too – if I have something on my mind I can tell everyone via Twitter and get pretty much instant feedback. In the years BT (Before Twitter), if I got myself some sort of brainworm, it would just wriggle round in my head until I finally found time to get it out into a blog post. Now that happens a lot less often. Mostly, I think to myself “I must blog that some time” and then promptly forget it.

Back then I also had a life that I really wanted to escape from. When I started this blog, I was living on my own in Reading, knew no one there, rarely socialised, and was stressed beyond belief trying to get my business to work. When it failed, I used my blog and my online network of friend to keep me sane. The blog then wasn’t a luxury, it was a necessity. Without it I would have felt intolerably isolated and unhappy.

Then I started consulting, moved to London, started the Open Rights Group, met my husband, got married, moved house twice, and generally got myself so busy that half the time I barely knew which way to turn. My underemployed days were over. And when business wasn’t doing great, I busied myself trying to plump up my client list, and blogging then felt like the ultimate indulgence.

I wonder too if I shouldn’t have kept all my writing here, on Chocolate and Vodka. My other blogs, notably Kits and Mortar, Lost Yod, and Finding Ada could, I suppose, all have lived as categories here, but for some reason that didn’t quite feel right. I wonder if perhaps I shouldn’t amalgamate them, bring them all in under Chocolate and Vodka’s roof and at least then there’d be a bit more blogging going on.

I’m not sure why I create a new site every time I have a new idea. I think part of it is because I worry that those of you who come here to find out about me, or my writing, or whatever it is that draws you here, would be put off by an influx of posts about cats or self-build, or women in tech, or jewellery-making. But even having created, say, Kits and Mortar to be home to my thoughts on moggies and house building, even there I worry that the balance is wrong, and that those who go there for building ideas would be pissed off if I write too much about cats.

To be fair, I did think that Kits and Mortar might become more commercial than it is. Yes, ok, it’s got advertising on it, but I don’t have the time or the wherewithal to really make it work as a pro-blog. I think in the year and a bit it’s been live I’ve earnt probably about 20 quid from the ads, so it’s hardly worth it. And although lots of people told me when I launched it that it was a great niche idea and that I could make a killing, the only thing it killed was time.

Part of the fear of being as much of an intellectual magpie – ooh! shiny! – as I am is that people will view me as a generalist and will think less of me because of it. This is a theme that both Stephanie Troeth and Stephanie Booth have discussed in recent days, and I feel that both of them have hit the nail on the head.

But the truth is that I have always had what might these days be diagnosed as ADD. I don’t think that it’s a disorder – I think it’s just curiosity. I am curious about everything, from what makes cats tick to how to have large windows without wasting huge amounts of energy through them to the jewellery styles favoured by the Elizabethans.

So I find myself seriously considering migrating all the content from all my other blogs to here, and shutting them down. I’m paying quite a bit, yearly, on hosting fees that perhaps I don’t need to. Certainly I’ve given up on the idea that I’m ever going to have time to focus fully on Kits and Mortar or Lost Yod, or even the ill-fated Fruitful Seminars. Finding Ada I’ll probably keep as a separate entity as it may one day grow up to be a bigger organisation than it currently is, but the rest of it really is just me exploring whatever takes my fancy. And what is Chocolate and Vodka for if not for me to take my fancy wherever it wants to go?

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I’ve just 40 minutes of battery life left on my MacBook, and nowhere to plug it in. I might well be sitting in United’s “Economy Plus”, but they haven’t seen fit to install plugs for anyone wanting to, y’know, do work on an 11 hour flight.

Things have been utterly insane of late. It’s hard to know where to begin. Ada Lovelace Day was a smash hit, but I’ve barely had time to even think about how amazing it was, because Kevin and I have been house hunting. Kev took two weeks off work to find us somewhere new to live, and he did a damn fine job. We now have a spare room, more space and more of a sense that we’re going to enjoy the flat, rather than feel like we’re invading our landlady’s personal space. We boxed everything up, with much needed help from friends, and moved over the Easter weekend. We haven’t gone far, just to the Arsenal side of the train tracks, but our new neighbourhood is much nicer. We might be further away from the supermarkets and the gym, which is a bit of a pain, but we’re near two parks and there are a lot more nice restaurants and pubs nearby.

The move has also taken us away from the scene of Ahmet Paytak’s murder. He worked at our corner shop, and I must have seen him nearly every day for the few months that he’d been working there. Then one night, as he and his son were closing up, a couple of chaps on a motorbike decided to shoot him and his son, for reasons that remain unclear. Ahmet died, his son Husseyin was shot in the thigh. I felt such sadness for Ahmet’s family. He was a lovely chap, quite quiet and shy but always friendly. Then one day he went to work and never came home.

More positively, I have been insanely busy with work. Last year was an almost total wash-out where work was concerned. I was busy up until the wedding, but summer and autumn were dreadful. Partly it was because I tried to expand my business, instead of focusing down on what I’m good at; partly because I was utterly rubbish at marketing myself (I’m not a natural when it comes to sales and marketing); and partly because I think businesses were waiting for the economic shoe to drop. Now everyone knows how bad the situation is and the truth is that you can’t just put business off forever. Some stuff just has to be done, and thankfully that includes the sort of stuff I do.

This year is shaping up to be much better. Not only am I having a whale of a time with Book Oven, who have to get the award for Most Fun I’ve Ever Had With A Client, but I’m now working on a research project for Carnegie UK Trust on the role of social (and ‘new’) media in civil society. I’m going to be blogging more about that on Strange Attractor. That sees me busy through til mid-July, then off to Prague before collapsing in a heap.

I’ve been writing a lot more. Not the fiction recently, but over the last few months I’ve done long piece for .Net magazine, and more for The Guardian’s tech section. I’m doing better at researching and writing quickly: it’s taking about 2 days for me to research and write 800 words now, and I’m learning not to over-report which helps a lot. But I want to get much, much better at writing effectively this year, so expect more from me.

Now I’m on a plane to San Francisco, primarily to attend O’Reilly’s Social Web Foo Camp, but also to do a bit of research for the Carnegie project. When I get back, I’m looking forward to focusing on my main two projects and to spending more time relaxing with my husband. We’ve barely had a chance to catch our breath the last few months, but hopefully, now the move is over, we can chill out a little. Hopefully!!

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In early November last year, I had steroid injections in both wrists to try and treat my carpal tunnel syndrome. After some initial side effects, the injections seemed to have done the trick. Instances of pins and needles in my hands over night decreased to nothing and I pretty much forgot that I’d had RSI. Until mid-January, when it all came back with a vengeance.

I had nine nights during January where I was getting pins and needles almost every night, and not just once, but two or three times, and it’s been like that, off and on, ever since. Now, don’t underestimate these pins and needles – it’s like a non-painful type of pain. It wakes you right up, and it keeps you awake until they’re gone. I discovered that if I stretch my neck in a certain way (away from the affected hand) the pins and needles would vanish almost immediately, almost all the time. Good trick – it helps me not wake up too much when an attack comes on.

So yesterday I went back to the physio to see what he had to say about it. Apparently, the steroids wear off in about five or so weeks, so I mine worked for about nine, which isn’t bad but not all that great either. The physio is reluctant to give me more steroids, as you can only have three injections a year and if they only work for nine or so weeks, it won’t help long term. Instead he’s referring me to the surgeon for an assessment for, well, surgery.

I’ve already had a number of tests, which have taken the form of flexing my wrists in certain ways, and pushing hard on certain points in my neck and shoulders, and I come up negative for all of them. My physio did them all again yesterday, and despite the fact that I had concluded that it’s all in my neck, he said that the tests he did proved it wasn’t.

So the first thing the surgeon will do is a “conduction” test:

In a nerve conduction study, electrodes are placed on the hand and wrist. Small electric shocks are applied and the speed with which nerves transmit impulses is measured. In electromyography, a fine needle is inserted into a muscle; electrical activity viewed on a screen can determine the severity of damage to the median nerve.

Then they’ll decide whether surgery is a good idea or not.

Now, I used to be a big gung-ho about surgery, until I actually had some. Having a naughty mole removed (twice! (with pics)) made me think a bit harder about what surgery actually means, and now I’d really rather avoid it if at all possible.

I’m not actually suffering any pain or discomfort during the day. Occasionally I get a strange sensation in my hands, but it’s not pain, it’s more a physical feeling of something wrong. It’s hard to describe accurately, but you’d know it if you felt it.

I am, however, having a lot of back pain, and I have a long, long history of some quite serious back problems. I’ve had chiropractic treatment for years, and without it I would be in a right mess now, so my first instinct is to go back to that. I had been seeing someone in Islington, but like all these things, quality varies. I lost faith in her after she suggested that the pins and needles in my fingers could be diabetes, but failed to spot that it was more likely (given my general health) to be carpal tunnel.

So that means I need to find another. I’ve had a chiro and a physio recommended to me, but they are both out of London and it would be a bit of a trek for regular consultations. A London clinic recommended by someone I don’t know looks rather expensive, and I’m not exactly what you could call rolling in it right now. I’ve had acupuncture before and that worked well for certain types of problem. I’ve been told that for some people with RSI it can work, but to be honest, I’m willing to try it regardless, because having tiny needles stuck in you is better than having your wrists slit open.

My chiro down in Dorset, who’s very good but too far away for regular visits, has told me that carpal tunnel syndrome isn’t something that she can fix. That may be the case, but I’d like to rule chiro out through experimentation. My spine needs attention anyway so I’ll benefit from getting it all sorted out and put back in the right place. And if I still suffer the pins and needles, I’ll move on to acupuncture. Surgery has to be a last resort.

But it’s important to say that this is not like the mole, where there was a danger it would turn cancerous and where it was important to move swiftly and excise every last bad cell. If I had another mole go bad, I would not hesitate to get it removed. There are some things that alternative therapies such as chiropractic can do, and there are things that they can’t. Right now, I don’t know which category my RSI falls into, so I’m just going to have to find out.

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Last year, psychologists discovered that humans aren’t really all that great at “willpower”:

The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others.

Another key discovery last year was made by Kevin, who found that if you overwhelm your body clock with exhaustion at the end of a trip, you get over jetlag much quicker.

This year, I’m planning on combining the two discoveries to attempt to rework certain aspects of my life. Rather than having one little New Year’s Resolution that attempts to change one behaviour, I’m going to totally overwhelm my brain’s poor willpower circuits by doing lots at once. I know that’s the opposite of what you’re supposed to do, but what the hell, it’s worth a shot.

My basic plan for 2009 is “Do a little, every day”, and I’ll be applying that to pretty much everything. I’ve already started with a new email regime, which involves putting all of 2008’s outstanding emails into a folder (which I will sort through during January), and vowing to keep my inbox empty. I’ll be more batchy with my email checking – four or five times a day, and I’ll process them rather than just read them. That’s going to be quite a big new habit to get into.

I’m not the only one trying to change my email ways – Bill Thompson and I put together a pledge on Pledgebank:

Pledge “tidyinbox”

“I will ensure that my inbox is empty before I go to bed each day in 2009 but only if 25 other online peeps will do the same.”

— Bill Thompson, of andfinally.com

Deadline to sign up by: 30th January 2009
9 people have signed up, 16 more needed

More details
Suw and Bill believe that inbox cleanliness is as close to godliness as atheistic net users get. We’d like our friends to join us in our quest for virtue and salvation.

If you want a new start to your email year, come and join us!

I think my basic problem is that I tend to hoard things up and then feel that I need a huge chunk of time to get anything done. Of course, I never have a huge chunk of time, so nothing really gets done until it’s urgent. It’s not just email, it’s everything. You name it, I can procrastinate it!

So for 2009, my aim is to just do a little bit of big tasks on a regular basis. I shall be applying this to:

• email
• blogging
• paperwork & administrivia
• jewellery making (this is especially important – I can’t make lots of jewellery in one go without knackering my wrists)
• writing
• tidying up
• cleaning
• going to the gym
• putting clothes away
• quitting sugary drinks and snacks
• preparing for our house move in Spring, e.g. recycling clothes, shredding documents

…and pretty much anything else I can think of. I’m hoping the fact that I’m attempting to change an underlying attitude rather than lots of different behaviours will help me succeed, but feel free to keep me honest and ask me via Twitter whether I’m keeping up with it or not.

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My physio warned me that the steroid injections would come with side effects, and he wasn’t wrong. To start with, a strange sense of tension in my wrists (that’ll be the extra fluid within the carpal tunnel, then) and then very faint pins and needles in my hands (that’ll be the extra fluid aggravating the nerve, then). My advisory information sheet suggested that I “rest the area for at least 24 hours” and that I “not undertake prolonged, vigorous activities for 48 hours”.

That’s all well and good, but how do you define “rest” for your wrists? Luckily for me, there was the small matter of the American election to provide me with a little distraction, and so that evening I went off to west London to a friend’s house for an Election party. I Twittered a little bit, but mainly was just clicking between various different news outlets’ election maps to see how things were going. And I gave up even that when my wrists started to get a bit antsy.

Wednesday, the aching started for real. Although not what you could consider pain, I really didn’t want to make things any worse than they already are so decided to err on the side of caution. I’d been up until 3.30am, and had only had four hour’s sleep, so a nap helped both restore a little functionality to my brain and give me an opportunity to truly rest my wrists.

Now, four days later, my wrists are very much improved and, although there is still a little discomfort, I don’t feel that I need to rest them as much as I have been doing. This means, hopefully, that I can now resume pre-injection levels of typing and writing, although I’m not going to go back to pre-CTS levels of typing until I am sure that everything is ok. Which means that Kits and Mortar is still on ice for the moment.

The other side effect of all this is that it means I haven’t touched The Revenge of the Books of Hay since Monday. In a way that’s disappointing, because it’s rather interrupted the momentum that I had built up, but in another way it’s given me a chance to think about a small problem that was turning into a bit of a roadbloke. Hopefully I can have a good run at it tonight and tomorrow and, perhaps, the climax might hove into view, and then it’ll be all downhill next week.

Of course, once the handwritten version is done, I need to type it all up, and I already know that the second draft is going to be substantially different to the first. But then, you know what they say: Writing is rewriting. It’ll be nice to be at that stage, though.

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I had my injections this afternoon. Let’s hope this is the end of things!

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