Elbow Update

It is now one month since my surgery. I thought it was time for an update.

The scab tissue has all fallen off the incision site, and over the last week I've shed a whole bunch of layers of skin from the surrounding region. The area surrounding the incision is still slightly swollen, but it seems to be healing.

The outside of my elbow is somewhat numb. It's not completely without feeling (which I think means this is getting better), but it's definitely less sensitive to, say, scratching lightly with a fingernail than the opposite arm.

Flexibility in my elbow does seem to be improving, though at a slower rate than I'd hoped. I can now reach maximum extension (for me) with only minor pain. Flexion is worse; it looks like I can get to about 80°. I can touch my nose with only minor discomfort, and can put my hand on top of my head. Reaching the base of where my hair gathers at the back is a stretch, but doable. Reaching the nape of my neck is impossible. I don't think I have quite enough reach to start braiding my hair yet, unfortunately; I'm really looking forward to being able to take better care of it.

I'm noticing my shoulder seems to have also become extra-stiff at some point. I'll have to start working more actively on stretching it out as well as the elbow, and I think I'm healed enough to try to start up general exercises again.

The remaining pain and numbness make it tough to really think about whether this actually helped anything or not, but I'm at least cautiously optimistic that the surgery won't have any lasting negative effects.

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This post submitted with two monkeys and no formatting to test if that has the result I'd hope; but I should probably switch to JerryWiki or learn and install Markdown.

Answer: monkeys don't have any apparent effect.

Testing Markdown: Take V

Please feel free to ignore this message; it's an attempt to get JLJ's Markdown support working. If it works correctly, this message won't be completely ugly. In the likely event that it doesn't, this is going to look really weird, and I'm going to have to delete it and mess with things a bit.

I will say, this Markdown thing seems like a pretty decent approach, if a little weird; may take some getting used to, but I think it might work for me.

NTS: Change setup for ft='jlj' in vim as follows:

• set wrap
• set linebreak
• set nolist
• set up body portion to highlight as markdown rather than html.
• • This may require finding or creating a syntax for markdown.

[The first three together will turn on nice line wrapping at window boundary like I was commenting on looking for in an earlier message; I may want to do this for ft=text as well. Unfortunately, I like the features of 'list', and will miss them in text mode, but I think it might be worth it.]

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Cool, that works. Now I just need to find a way to use markdown when editing LJ comments.

JLJ Markdown Support

As I alluded to in my last post, I've configured JLJ to format my posts using Markdown for conversion to HTML. Getting it set up was a little trickier than I'd expected, due to a flaw in the JLJ documentation.

To get JLJ using Markdown, you must add the following to your .livejournal.rc:

format: external preformatted none jerry
formatter: /usr/bin/markdown

Obviously, you should replace the path if your markdown is installed elsewhere. In theory, I expect one should be able to use an alternate processor; I may try multimarkdown sometime.

Laundry Etiquette

You live in a multi-family house with a single washer and a single dryer in the basement. You need to do laundry, but an unspecified person has left loads in both the washer and the dryer, which have run to completion and are sitting there. They have left a single small laundry bag sitting atop the dryer.

What do you do?