This and similar posts are just going to be me moaning about a minor tumble I took the other day and are mainly presented only for others to take amusment from.

Day 1 ^

On the morning of Tuesday 26th I was crossing the railway level crossing at Feltham when I did what I always reflexively do and looked both ways to see if a train was coming (which I know is a bit silly because the barriers wouldn’t be up if there was, but still). I saw a train in the station and as I was staring at it wondering if it was my train, I tripped up.

I had a bottle of orange juice in one hand and the remote control for my iRiver in the other and before I could decide what I was doing with those, my nose had smacked into the ground with a bit of a crunch. My vision went black for a second and I thought I had broken my nose. Touching it produced a lot of blood (both from the bridge and from the nostrils) but no blinding agony so at least I knew it wasn’t as bad as that. The image to the right is what it looked like by the time I’d got to dayjob and washed up a bit.

I also found out that the expensive sunglasses I bought about 10 days ago have a massive scratch across one lens, and my iRiver remote is even more broken than it was already.

In hindsight it was probably lucky that I was on the level crossing as most of my nose went into the groove of the track. If I hadn’t been and had smacked the flat ground I’m thinking it would be far more likely that it’d have broken my nose.

Day 2 ^

By Wednesday the throbbing in my nose had mostly gone away, but the bruising really started to show and it began to look a bit uglier. I must have landed on my left little finger as well, as that started to swell up during the night and by the morning was making it difficult to type properly or get the God-forsaken on-call phone out of my pocket.

More to come!

Today I was in Sandhurst for the dedication of Ava, my friend Paul’s daughter. I didn’t really know what to expect other than “it’s a bit like a christening”, which it was.

Of course I was really there just to catch up with Paul and to see Ava for the first time, so I’ll skip the religious bits. I think she was really very energetic and surprisingly happy to perform for people’s cameras, resulting in a number of very cute shots.

It was also great to see old work friends Chris and Simon to catch up with their lives over the last ~2 years, some good, some bad.

I would see all of these people more often if I could drive; that is getting a little irritating now, so I really should try to find the time from somewhere. Either that or Berkshire needs to get a transport network a little more like Greater London.

Oh and not forgetting the bonus appearance of my favourite domesticated animal, the greyhound!

On Saturday I was invited over to Jenny’s dad’s open day for the narrow gauge railway he has in the garden. Yes, a train track in his garden that you can ride on! Except there was no way I was going to ride on it myself and risk looking very silly. I just took a bunch of photos and made myself useful as a teaboy. A fun day though, and it was good to meet most of the family for the first time.

There’s some pictures of previous open days too.

Since I needed to go to Sandhurst the next day, I ended up having to get home that night using a selection of trains and night buses from Beaconsfield via Northolt Park and Heathrow. On the upside the 3g dongle with the Eee PC is working quite nicely for email/irc in the middle of nowhere.

(OK, the Gogol Bordello guy is from Ukraine not Poland but I am lacking in inspiration at this time)

At mbm/Mel/Tom‘s triple (yeah, really) leaving drinks Friday night, I was talking to Kvik about his forthcoming wedding. It went a bit like this:

Me: When is it you’re getting married?
Kvik: August
Me: Wow, not long to go…
Kvik: Yeah! I asked everyone if they wanted to come but only mbm replied…
Me: What!? I never heard about this. Where did you say this?
Kvik: In [obscure IRC channel]
Me: People go days without looking in there!
Kvik: Meh.. you want to come?
Me: Yeah! Of course!
Kvik: Excellent!
Me: Great..! Well, as long as it’s in London..
Kvik: No, it’s in Poland!
Me: [pause] Ah.

Today I’ve examined this to be sure it wasn’t just the effects of alcohol but, well, why not? So I guess I am going to Poland in August.

Text message from a relative:

hi andrew need to ask you a question when we open the laptop the screen goes all funny with lots of coloured line all over it any clues what up with it. And how are you

$ find /home/andy/Maildir -type f -wholename '*/new/*'| wc -l
123156
$ find /home/andy/Maildir -type f -wholename '*/cur/*'| wc -l
24244

If it’s not obvious, that means I have 123k unread emails and 24k read ones. I archive off read emails older than 60 days, but still, that’s pretty pointless and stupid. It’s time to have a purge and unsubscribe from all those lists which I always think I’ll get around to reading at some point.

Update: Just over a week later and with some ruthless pruning, things look much better:

$ find /home/andy/Maildir -type f -wholename '*/new/*' | wc -l
2234
$ find /home/andy/Maildir -type f -wholename '*/cur/*' | wc -l
16774

Day 3 of the conjunctivitis saga (Day 1 · Day 2).

Much improvement:

Hardly red at all, and no gunk. I have to keep using the eye drops for 2 days after the redness is gone. I’ll be working from home until the redness is completely gone (because it’s contagious until then).

Day 2 of the conjunctivitis saga (Day 1 · Day 3).

Today’s photo might look worse than yesterday’s to some people. I think that’s just because it’s a more detailed photo — it turns out that being able to see enables one to use a camera more effectively.

The whites of my eyes are much more white today. The gunk level is much reduced (if that’s not obvious it’s only because yesterday’s was so blurred you couldn’t tell where the gunk stopped and the eye began). In fact most of the visible gunk is actually from the eye drops I’ve been given.

I think I can avoid a trip to hospital today.

Day 1 of the conjunctivitis saga (Day 2 · Day 3).

This entry is just going to be me complaining like an old man about my various illnesses in a long rambling manner, so if that is of no interest to you I recommend you stop reading now.

I’m so sick of colds and associated illnesses. I feel like I’ve had a cold for months. A few weeks before Christmas I had proper flu, the kind that makes you stay in bed simultaneously sweating with fever and shivering with a chill. That lasted around four days but with sniffles lingering on right up until Christmas.

Just as I was over it I travelled up to Birmingham to spend Christmas week with family, and everyone there was ill with some coughing and sore throat thing as well! I spent a week surrounded by the walking dead, wondering when it was going to be my turn. I thought I’d got away with it: I returned to London on the 28th still feeling okay, and walk in to the sound of my house mate Phil having a coughing fit.

A few hours later I could feel my throat going.

On the 29th I met up with a work colleague to take the on-call stuff from him, for I was to be on-call over the New Year period, handing over on Wednesday 2nd. The throat/cough thing was getting worse, but it was just an irritation, I could handle it.

By New Year’s Eve it was fairly miserable. During the day I’d been in dayjob’s office as it was a normal working day I’d not booked as holiday. I struggled through, not being very productive and got out of there about 6.15pm. I did have somewhere to go that would be on-call-friendly and still sociable, and I could have forced myself to get into the spirit, but due to a miscommunication that didn’t work out anyway. By 10pm NYE I’d had enough of it all and went to bed. Woken at 1am by the on-call phone, I ushered in the new year by rebooting things.

New Year’s Day was spent mostly under the duvet occasionally reaching for snotrag.

I was meant to be back in the office on Wednesday the 2nd, but the cold had become a lot worse and I took a sickie. Not a great way to start the new working year, but I wouldn’t have been up to much anyway. By this point my body clock had given up any semblance of coinciding with working hours and I was finding myself unable to sleep until past 5am, then waking up a few hours later with the alarm. When this happened on Thursday morning I was actually feeling a lot better, just completely exhausted and sleep-deprived. I emailed in another sickie and settled down for some sleep, content that Things Can Only Get Better.

Remember the on-call stuff? I was meant to hand over on Wednesday but because I’d pulled two sickies I still had it, so I was still on-call. This is not ideal of course, but was doable in the face of mere man-flu.

Some time later it was dark and my eyes wouldn’t open. Welded shut with eye-goo. And itchy, so incredibly itchy. Feeling like I’ve got glass under the lids. With some pain I force them open, discover it is Thursday evening, and visit the bathroom mirror to check out the damage. My eyes were a bit red but it didn’t seem that bad once I’d washed my face. But the itchiness wouldn’t go away, in fact it only got worse as the night progressed.

By late Thursday night the whites of both my eyes had turned deep red, goo was continuously leaking everywhere, and I’d have to unstick my left eye every few minutes. My eyelids felt like weather balloons, the whole area around my eye sockets was painful to the touch. What the hell is wrong?

I had it once before when I was a little kid: conjunctivitis. My cold’s parting gift.

It got so bad that I decided I must take a picture of it just so that people would believe me. It turns out that taking a picture of your own eyes without a tripod when you are a crap photographer is really hard. Every shot was just too blurry to make sense of. What follows is the best I could do, and it does not do justice. You can’t really see how red my eyes are, nor how encrusted with gunk. You did want to see that, right?

That was from this morning. Time to visit the doctor!

Last year, some people mistakenly got the impression that I do not like my doctor. This is completely false; I think he’s pretty good actually. He seems very efficient, seeing me and most others in mere minutes, yet in the few times I have seen him I’ve never felt that he was trying to rush me out the door. He always takes the time to discuss treatments, and doesn’t get too exasperated when I bring up other things unrelated to my appointment.

Of course I had to get past the usual hurdle of the demon receptionist when I called at 8.45am, her trying to persuade me that I don’t actually need to see the doctor today, but with my eyes doing that I Do Need To See The Doctor Today and wasn’t going to accept any other outcome. They warned me that because of this vomiting bug thing I’d probably have a long wait but it turned out to only be about 20 minutes.

As soon as I walked in to his room he looked at me and said, “My God, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen conjunctivitis that bad. I’ll give you something for it but if it isn’t any better by tomorrow then you must go to hospital.” Hey, at least I got my diagnosis correct. While I was there I got him to give me a flu jab as well.

What I did next was a bit silly. I still had the on-call stuff you see, yet I’m obviously not fit to carry out that duty. I’d emailed work before setting out for the doctor’s to explain what was wrong with me and that I’d be bringing the on-call stuff in to hand it over to someone else. Even before seeing the doctor I knew that conjunctivitis can be very contagious, but I was feeling guilty for my time off and didn’t feel able to call them up and say “yeah I’m not coming in today either, and I can’t do on-call, and I’m not bringing the on-call stuff back, sorry.” I should’ve though. I do not recommend doing what I did, which was to go straight from the chemist to the office.

Walking about with one eye gunked shut is interesting, if unpleasant. Using public transport and crossing roads etc. is quite nerve-wracking with limited vision. Also people staring and making comments about my encrusted eyes was a bit embarrassing. When I got into the office, the youngest of the many goths we breed there said, “Dude, didn’t you see the email saying Don’t Come In?” “I’m not seeing a lot of things at the moment.” was the best I could come up with. The rest of the team kept their distance as I unpacked the laptop and phone, and the person I was to hand over to looked extremely nervous about taking possession of these potentially-infected items. In fact she told me to “just leave them on your desk and we’ll.. do something with them.” Ace. I left.

Once again, I do not recommend walking about in public with contagious infections. It was irresponsible and stupid of me and entirely due to my own lack of backbone to just say “no” at key moments. In this case it was even just the thought of having to say “no”, since in reality my employer urged me not to do this anyway (only I didn’t see that, as it happened in email while I was at the doctor’s).

Anyway, I’m feeling a bit better now. The eyes still look pretty bad but they’re not leaking much anymore, and are a little less red, so I have hope that I won’t be going to hospital tomorrow. I’d probably just get the vomiting bug and MRSA as well, anyway.

I’ll try and take another photo of the eyes tomorrow. I bet you can’t wait.