Coping with a broken foot

Here I am 24 hours after having broken my foot. Quite simply achieved by rolling my ankle down a kerb in the dark at 6.15 in the morning. I would have soldiered on to work but my wife suggested I should stay at home and within a couple of minutes I was inclined to agree, feeling somewhat unwell.
I have learnt over the years to look after myself. I always know where my finger repair kit is ( an old shoebox with all the plasters, tapes, finger dollies and everything else you would need to repair cut and damaged fingers). Since my butler is currently on leave, I settled down with my foot raised, an ice-pack (in the form of frozen peas) on my ballooning ankle, and some ibuprofen down my throat to tackle the pain systemically and reduce some of the inflammation.

A thorough examination by my GP gave rise to a visit to the local X-ray department. When the doctor said “Come and have a look at your X-rays.”, I knew it was not going to be the news I wanted to hear. A plaster cast, crutches, and no weight-bearing on my left foot were going to be my sentence for the next 10 days.

A discussion with Gwyneth about how I would tackle shaving and washing on the first morning gave rise to her suggestion that I should take a height-adjustable swivelling bar stool into the bathroom. I had already decided that I would have a strip wash each day. The stool reduces the danger of falling over and a child’s hop-up is a good way of steadying myself when I am standing on my good leg without the risk of me putting any weight on the broken foot.

Early morning lessons learned

• Don’t try to shower
• Sit down when you can
• Make sure you have a clean flannel by the basin for each new day
• Always insert the bad leg first into underwear and trousers

Using the crutches

• Take it easy the first few days.
• Keep the crutches close in to your body and close to vertical.
• Your hands will get sore. Get some cycling gloves to relieve the pressure.
• (I didn’t feel confident enough the first 24 hrs to tackle the stairs, and went up and down on my butt.)
• Going upstairs start with the crutches next to your feet, push your body up and lift your good foot up one step in a smooth motion with your bad leg trailing behind.
• Coming downstairs start with the crutches one step below you, bad foot out in front and support your body weight as you transfer your good foot down one step.

Day 3
Turned a corner today. The swelling (and consequently pain) went down overnight. I’ve been told to support my leg on pillows at night but the bedding was too heavy (or tight) and I’ll need to find a better arrangement tonight.
I could go stir crazy sitting around all the time and so I took myself off shopping in the late morning. In the supermarket I asked for a carrier bag so I could sling it over the handle of the crutch. At the green grocer’s they carried everything out to the car for me, including a sack of potatoes. I sat in the afternoon sunshine, reading although I had to change the setup on my Kindle app so I could read the words in the bright light.

JR’s recipe for Tarka Dahl

I’ve had so many requests for this recipe I’ve decided to post it. It’s based on a recipe from the Natco website, but you might find this easier to follow. The ingredients are in the order you’ll need them. I am somewhat generous in my interpretation of teaspoon quantities. You can substitute different types of lentils.

• Red Split Lentils (200g)
• Yellow Mung Dal (200g)
• 1 Litre of Vegetable Stock
• Ground Turmeric (2 tsp)
• Ground Coriander (½ tsp)
• Salt to taste (2 big pinches)
• Ground Black Pepper to taste

For the tarka

• Rapeseed Oil (2 tbsp)
• Butter (1 oz)
• Cummin Seed (1tsp)
• 4 garlic cloves (roughly chopped)
• 1 medium to large onion (roughly chopped)
• 1 or 2 finger chillies (chopped into small rings)
• Dried chilli seeds (up to 1 tsp)
• 2 tomatoes finely chopped

Added later

• Garam Masala (1 tsp)
• Fresh Chopped Coriander (up to 3 tbsp)

METHOD

I soak the lentils in cold water for 5 or so hours, changing the water hourly. Overnight is okay but change water last thing before bed and again when you get up. Rinse the lentils through until the water is reasonably clear then transfer to a large saucepan. I make up the stock with boiling water. (You can choose here whether to use gluten-free stock mix). Pour into the saucepan, add the turmeric, the coriander and bring to the boil and simmer very gently for at least 20 mins. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Whilst the dahl is cooking prepare the ingredients for the tarka. This is how you introduce the interesting flavours into the dahl. Heat the oil and butter in a medium frying pan and briefly fry the cummin seeds (15 secs) then add the onion and the garlic. Cook gently over a medium heat until the onions start to brown. Add the chopped chillies and dried chilli seed. Cook for a minute or so then add the chopped tomatoes and cook for up to 5 mins.

To make sure I get every trace of the tarka into the dahl, I ladle some of the dahl into the frying pan with the tarka, stir it well and transfer everything back into the saucepan. Add the garam masala and continue to cook on the stove for as long as you like or transfer to a slow cooker. If leaving on the stove be careful it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan. Twenty minutes on the stove is sufficient for a very acceptable tarka dahl. Cooking longer makes it softer. You may need to add boiling water. Don’t let it get too stodgy. Add the coriander a few minutes before serving. Serve with naan bread, baked potatoes or plain rice. As a main meal it will serve about 5 people.

J102 Census Team; stand down

Like deputy sheriffs we’ve had our badges forcefully removed. My trusty holster which carried my bar-code reader into every QT gunfight hangs mournfully on the study door. My trusty steed languishes on the driveway awaiting a good scrub-down and possibly a service. Thrashed as the posse raced into the wilderness of Conniburrow, its joints are creaking.

The OK-Saloon @ Willen has been our watering-hole. A barista who knows her business; double-espressos, the whisky of the cow-hand. Saddle-sore we’ve consoled each other and spoken sanity into our statistics-fuddled brains. Unable to chew the filthy weed, we’ve chewed the cud until forced to spit out HC1’s. The local jailer was unwilling to provide evidence of any prisoners. Some say they’re so hungry they ate their I1s.

I’m told the sheriff roams Aylesbury Vale bareback. Who knows? She mysteriously appears in one of three states (AV, MK, SO) without seeming to spend any time on the trail. She too frequents coffee-bars but is strangely drawn to dusty town centres. Neither the fields of Willen nor the field of Netherfield attract her. She’s horse-whipped her deputies into a counting team, and against the odds they’ve counted. Now we count for nothing as we return to the prairie. Where will our next bonanza be? The gold rush is over. At the time it made perfect sense, sense to us; a census. (click on photo for full-size)

The Sheriff and her MK deputies step down

Nearly missed the Windows 7 pre-order offer

If you live in the UK and do all your important shopping via Amazon, you may have been disappointed to find that the initial price of around £79  for the Professional edition is no longer available due to demand.

Do not despair. There are one or two other sites offering discounted copies well below the price of £179.97 that Amazon are now asking. I googled ‘windows 7 pre-order’ and found that pcworld (not my favourite retailer) among others are still doing it at a decent price. So don’t be sad. Get your skates on!

Only half a run is enough

It was more than enough to go out with Anna on a 5km run (please wait while the map loads) from home this morning. I nearly died but we did it only 1 minute faster than I’ve ever previously done.

Why all the grief? Well I haven’t run since coming back from New Zealand last October, and I’ve not done any regular exercise. It just goes to show. I certainly miss the Boxercise each week.

On Sunday I went for a 23 mile cycle ride in the rain with Simon, my son-in-law (one of). That too was exhausting, but the torrential rain certainly didn’t help. On arriving at Emberton we found ourselves in the middle of the National Sprint Triathlon Championship. Those guys were really cycling, and they’d already swum in the lake. The following day I discovered that a number of them had to retire with hypothermia. So there you go. I was wearing my onshore sailing jacket, recommended by Roy Pink. I still had trouble climbing the stairs for a hot shower when I arrived home.

Carried away with spam deletion

Not having done any maintenance or left a post for a while, I was surprised to see five items of spam – except they weren’t all spam. Someone had commented on my safer driving blog and left some detail about water-fuelled cars. It didn’t occur to me that it wasn’t spam until I’d deleted it. Unfortunately there’s no ‘delete undo’ and so all I can do is apologise.

The fate of so many blogs

You might get the impression that I haven’t done anything since I lasted posted to this blog. The truth is I have done loads. Some of what I’ve done has been projects, but I’ve forgotten to document them (photograph them), and as I’ve neared completion I’ve realised I don’t have a before image. But also the business of just doing stuff has squeezed out the journaling of what I’m about.

Of course, blogs by their very nature tend to be self-centred; and that’s not what I’m about. I’m not into navel-gazing. Rather it is an opportunity for me to reflect on what I’ve been getting up to so that I do stuff better in future. Is life just about living or leaving a legacy? That’s a big question.

So by typing this I’ve now overcome the inertia I had gotten into, and hopefully it won’t be such a struggle to commit thoughts to paper (metaphorically) in the future.

A passport to safer driving

I really didn’t intend to write this entry, but I have spent a disastrous evening trying to update my TomTom with the latest UK map, which the TomTom site lists rather grandly as “Great Britain and Northern Ireland”. Anyway, I’ll come to that later.

It is my belief that there are 4 components to safer driving:

1. an automatic gearbox
2. a talking satellite navigation system (satnav)
3. air-conditioning
4. cruise control

An automatic gearbox. Years ago my employer sent us all on a course entitled “Drive and Survive”. It wasn’t that they particularly wanted us to survive, but rather that the company car insurance premium would be reduced by about 20% which represented a significant saving. One of the key things that we were taught was to abandon the (old) practise of changing down through the gearbox when approaching a hazard. (You’ll not find that it’s taught in any driving school these days – hooray.) The old principle arose from the early days of motoring when brake pad technology was not really that brilliant; brakes weren’t particularly efficient and pads wore out quickly – hence use the gearbox to slow down. The drawback is that at exactly the time that you need to be focusing on what’s happening outside the car (i.e. approaching a hazard) you are busy dipping your left foot up and down, and one hand is off the steering wheel as you stir the gear lever like crazy down through the gears. When I voluntarily moved to a car with automatic transmission, I suddenly realised that what we had been taught was the closest you can get to driving an automatic. You should make one gear change into whichever gear is appropriate for negotiating the hazard, and concentrate solely on braking and steering, which of course is what an automatic lets you do.

A satnav system.There is nothing hairier than negotiating a fast unfamiliar roundabout, or complex road junction when you don’t know where you’re going and you can’t even see a relevant sign. In the very place when you need to be concentrating on what all the other ‘idiots’ are doing, you may be craning your neck upwards to read a sign that is just about to disappear from view. Now, I’m not saying that satnavs are perfect, but you do get some idea at least of where you are meant to be going, and often it gently coaxes you through confusing situations. (I was coming back from a client meeting at Ealing Hospital on Tuesday, and TomTom said I had to do a U-turn in 350 yards. Normally this is reserved for when you have overshot some previous instruction, but sure enough the way home was to do a U-turn across a dual carriageway because there had been no right turn allowed at the previous junction. Bizarre!) A word of warning. A satnav is an ‘aid’ to motoring. It is not a substitute for the human brain. Remember the Stephen Covey principle from “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”; between every stimulus and a response is a decision. You still need to evaluate what your satnav is saying to you. Does this make sense in the context of what I can see outside my vehicle? Finally a satnav keeps you constantly updated as to when you are likely to arrive and so you stop racing in the belief that you are going to be late. Hold-ups generally have very little effect.

Air-conditioning. Particularly when driving alone, keeping yourself in the chiller cabinet (18.5C) certainly cuts down the nodding head. But if you do find yourself nodding off,  remember that your loved one would probably prefer you late for dinner than the juicy insurance payout (strange as that may seem), and that appointment for a round of golf can always wait another day. There is rarely a good reason for pressing on.

Finally cruise control. It’s strange but true (imho) that concentrating on keeping your right foot on the throttle (a strange name for something that makes the engine go faster – or does it?) to preserve a certain speed is actually very tiring. Let cruise control do all that boring stuff. Stretch your legs, move them around, and concentrate on keeping as far away from everyone else on the road. There’s less chance of bumping into them.

And finally-finally back to TomTom. I decided to upgrade my map. I duly paid for it in the on-line shop, but when I came to download it the TomTom manager (called TomTom Home) refused to acknowledge that it was available for me. The help instructions (which I had read before I started the upgrade) said that if the system suggested an upgrade to TomTom Home I should accept, as it might be needed to complete the upgrade. But it never suggested! In the end, after about 4 ‘wasted’ hours of fiddling, I decided to go and look for the latest version in the support pages, and after installing it, it all came to life, except that my TomTom ran out of juice just as the download completed, and I had to go search for a suitable 5volt, centre-pin positive power supply. Oh the joys of being a techie. But I love it really.

If any of this is helpful, stimulating, or you have something to share or disagree with, please leave a comment. (You can get access to leaving comments by clicking on the title of this post.)

PS This post was actually started on the 23/7/2008, but I didn’t finish it until 2 am the following day.

Happy Father’s Day

What a brilliant Father’s Day I shared with my family and others this year. There were 5 Dads present and 9 children for a barbeque. Sadly one daughter was over 11,000 miles away. But isn’t it a strange world? Anna is living in Wellington, New Zealand. Not wanting to miss out on the celebrations she decides to buy me a present. It’s something to complement one of my projects; a camera case for my new (to me) DSLR. She reaches out across the world and purchases it in Germany. It is duly delivered (and left unopened) two days ahead of time. It is really appreciated, and I’m so glad I didn’t make do with a Lowepro backpack which I thought about buying in Edinburgh airport the day before.

A friend of mine wrote to his kids (all adults) explaining that Father’s Day is just commercial exploitation and not to be celebrated with cards and the like. What a shame! It was a quality day. We met up with friends and family and Jenny and Sally barbequed for the first time ever. Just to see them engulfed in smoke made us realise that it’s a bit of a blokes’ thing. There were grandchildren sqawking and Gracie trying to join in the games.

You might be interested in the cards I got.  Inside the first card it said “Have a rest from building steps, making websites, and all your other “projects”! Well I’ve just started another project! It’s called “A Man Must Have a Project“.