Month: January 2021

Feelings

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

I feel weird lately and I don’t know why. According to my watch my resting heart rate has been higher than normal for the past week and a half and my stress levels too. I keep doing some breathing exercises to try to calm things, but I don’t think that’s it.

There are other things too. I’ve had some nausea. I woke up in the middle of the night a few days ago feeling hot and nauseous. Maybe it actually was hot, but I doubt it. My stomach has been really unhappy as well. The noises it’s making today… And I think it was Monday afternoon my head felt weird and cloudy when I was working. It’s all a bit vague but it mostly fits with anxiety symptoms I’ve had before.

But I don’t feel like I have a lot of stress right now. Work is plodding along and I haven’t made any more moves towards finding another job. I feel quite content at the moment, so it’s a bit confusing.

Projects

~ e.v. ~ 3 Comments

So I did launch my wellbeing app, after all. I think it was about a week and a half ago. Since then people have installed it. I think we might be up to two now. Amazing. That’s OK though, I knew that it will take a while to pick up users initially. These things are a slow burn unless you spend money advertising.

I am now spending some effort on trying to market it. I have tried to make it look like a company’s product rather than an individual’s hobby. It’s a sort of two pronged thing where I want it to be its own thing, but I also have big ideas about being self employed in the future and this is the (as-yet non-existent) company. It gives me a head start if it looks like a company before it is a company.

The non coding side is simultaneously interesting and infuriating. I have a website for it and am writing a few blog posts to try to get Google to notice me, which is teaching me things about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) I didn’t know. The infuriating parts are the arty bits. I tried to create some promo images using GIMP, which was a million times harder than it should have been. In the end I used a free online image editor called Photopea which turned out to be much easier. I can’t believe it’s 2021 and GIMP’s user interface is still the unfathomable disaster it used to be when I was first introduced to it via Fedora Core Linux 4 all the way back in 2005.

Anyway, this is keeping me busy but it’s slowing down now. There is more coding I can do but it’s mostly relatively small features for relatively large amounts of work, and at the moment it makes more sense to focus on trying to get people to notice it.

Dream stress

~ e.v. ~ 5 Comments

Do I have stressful dreams because I am stressed, or the opposite?

Last night I dreamt that I was at school or university or something and had to pair up with someone to do a presentation of some form. The person I was paired with was the person I used to sit next to in GCSE English, which was, errr, 17 years ago? I think the teacher may have been my geography teacher. Anyway, it wasn’t going very well. Neither of us had any ideas. So we just kind of sat there and waited for it to be our turn to present our non-existent presentation.

According to my watch my stress levels were high overnight and my resting heart rate is up. Which way around is the cause and effect?

I felt really depressed yesterday. This is actually a good thing, because at one time “I feel really depressed today” was something that happened multiple times a week, whereas this is the first time it’s happened for a while. I think what set it off was that I was running yesterday and my toes started to go numb. The neuroma is upset again. That is depressing. This happened over the summer too but I’ve caught it much earlier this time so hopefully a few days off will be enough.

The neuroma is difficult because it’s not really that bad. My toes going numb sometimes is not really a big deal. It’s just that if I keep damaging the nerve it could get really painful, and then it will need surgery. I would like to avoid that. But the first step will be to go to a specialist running physio first to see if they can see any issues with my form. There is a specialist running clinic a few miles away which looks pretty good. The physio I saw for my hip was helpful but they didn’t have the facility to actually watch me run.

But hopefully in a few days it will feel OK again and I won’t need to. I think I probably irritated it by doing a bit too much speed work recently, after having done pretty much none for the last few months. I think my left ankle needs a bit more strength and stability to handle speed.