Gentle Readers,

Another Coronation has come and gone. We're currently pausing in our journey home from the far south of Ealdormere as we retrieve our daughter from her first best friend's house where she escaped for the weekend. Thus she was saved from a day filled with boring courts and much less children than I was expecting.

Some elements of note included Quill's knighting which was very popular and filled with all kinds of love for this young man. It's a good thing that he has so much upper body strength so he can deal if it starts going to his head or resting on his shoulders. In addition to this, A&R gave many truly heartfelt awards where it was clear that they were thanking people who touched them. I always appreciate seeing people do things from their hearts.

The coronation ceremony that brand came up with based on a danish ceremony was pretty cool. It was also really nice to be invited to be a part of the ceremony. Other than helping carry the rock at Roak's ceremony just before we stepped up, this is the first time we've really had a role to play.

Watching how these things go gives me all kinds of fuel for fantasizing about when I become a Knight and then King. However, given how my fencing has been since coming back it's clear that I'm going to need a lot more practice. I got to have a fencing date with Kestra and I was really unhappy with my fencing. Not that my opponent was slack in any way. She got some really beautiful touches against me. I am not maintaining control the sword which is not unusual. Weirder though was the lack of follow through so I would come forward with the blade and then just not make the touch. No follow through. Not sure what the reason for that was. Some weird mental block it seemed.

So, it seems like I'm going to have to build up everything from scratch.

Gentle Readers,
Note: my apologies to those of you who have to deal with chronic pain, I hope that my whining is not seen as trivializing what you have to deal with. I'm still trying to figure it out.

Here I am, lying on my back having maybe pushed a little bit too hard this morning. The back is getting better, but it's not perfect and pushing too hard does still make it cranky. After an excruciating Thursday afternoon things seemed to make a dramatic improvement. Dinner out last night to celebrate the birthdays of Cortejo and Lydia was quite bearable.

One of the many things I've been thinking about while lying here is Google+ and the Nymwars. I've been trying to figure out what it is that appeals to me about systems like google+ and facebook and what it is that encourages me to interact more there than here and also why the google+ experience is so unsatisfying.

The big thing that both Facebook and Google+ allow me to do is to easily share links (be they to articles, pictures, videos or whatever) and also to associate my friends with my messages with @pat or +lee.Sure, the rich text editor here does allow for some of that but not nearly as trivially as the other two.

On the other hand, both of them have fairly cryptic ordering algorithms for their reading pages which annoy the fuck out of me. The lack of ability to tag my posts (although I suppose I could use Circles for that in google+) or really any way to search through my history in Facebook is also really frustrating. Then there is the issue of the nymwar which is astonishing me with google's stubbornness regarding "real" names.

Sadly there are too many friends on both to abandon them completely. What I really need is an application that can pull in the content from my LJ friends, Dreamwidth reading page, facebook news feed, google+ stream, various email accounts and the mailing list therein as well as RSS feeds and present them to me in a big long list starting with the last thing I saw and adding newer things below it.

Hrm, that looks remarkably like a requirements list. Let's see, it would need to have plugable modules for each source that I wanted to pull data from so that I could add sources and associate accounts with them. It would need to be able to reorder incoming content. Responding in place would be nice, but not absolutely necessary.

I'm going to wonder if such a thing exists as it's probably safer than starting to wonder how hard such a thing would be to build.

Gentle Readers,

I didn't realize it's been almost 2 months since I posted last and that post was about my stupid lawn. The lawn's been dealt with and so far it's been a pretty good summer. Even the major heat wave that's currently happeneing (37 plus humidex taking it into the high 40's) isn't something to complain about as I've been mostly inside.

I was going to write a bit about transformation. Partly as a result of weight and muscle changes and partly as a result of just being full of positive, extroverted energy and receiving way more adoration than I'm used to. Sadly, I wasn't able to figure out how to word that and now I've got something else to talk about.

You see, a couple weeks ago, I did something to start my back complaining. It wasn't a lot, but it was there, so I was being careful and taking it easy. Monday, that changed. With a pop, it moved from bearable constant twinge to a tiny viking berserker with a spear living at the base of my spine. I worked from home tuesday and wednesday and to day I saw both a chiropractor and a physiotherapist.

The former tried to be helpful, but his efforts came to naught and there were no changes either positive or negative as a result of his cracking. The fact that my back had no real problems even by chiropractic standards didn't really leave him much to work with. The physiotherapist was much more thorough and really left an overall better impression with me so I decided that I'd go with him. Especially since he was far more cautious with his diagnosis.

The downside is, of course, that I've lost Fencing. I'm not allowed to do it. Well, I'm also not allowed to sit for extended periods of time either, but that's likely to change sooner. Still, no fencing, or other martial arts, for the foreseeable future. I'm really not sure how to deal with this mentally. Right now, I think I'm in denial and thinking that maybe reading will be enough, but I'm wondering if that will be the case. I'm wondering if that will even be possible.

Losing a month plus of not just fencing practice, but of any training of any sort is not really going to help me prepare for my Dean's prize either.

The whole "no sitting" thing doesn't bode well for our vacation plans either. Can't do a 17 hour drive or even a 1.5 hour flight if you can't sit for any length of time.

I'm sure I'll find a way through this, but I'm feeling pretty grim at the moment.