(written on the 13th)
Well, the pulled muscle that I didn’t think was very bad turned out to be super bad. 😬
Just moving around my bed and trying to find a comfortable position was painful.
The delayed pain reaction to injury is an interesting phenomenon. I remember when I tore my labrum in my shoulder way back in 2009. I didn’t feel any pain whatsoever in the actual event of the injury. I didn’t feel any pain until I had gotten home, taken a shower, sat down to eat dinner, and then raised my arm.
And then the pain was super sharp.
😶
Yesterday, as I was coming up for that last dip, I felt a definite change and unnatural movement of one body component or another back there. At first, all it was was just the distinct sensation of something unnatural.
I was like, “oh crap.”
But no pain.
Then over the next several minutes, the pain started getting worse, but it felt like soreness. I even went to different exercise machines to try and stretch out what I had just messed up.
But by the time sleep time came around, it was pretty painful. Not crazy painful, by any means, maybe a little more painful than some impressing on a pressure point, and though a deep pain, movement would make it sharper.
Definitely uncomfortable/painful to move my arm and adjust positions while trying to sleep.
Anyway, so that wasn’t so nice, and now I’ve got to be smart about how I exercise.
It’s not easy for me to take it easy. I’m a mover and a doer, despite the fact that I drowned my sorrows in front of my cell screen these days. 😕
Oh, one more thing about last night: ever since I started with JustAnswer, I’ve only been getting notification messages on maybe 10 to 25% of the questions that I start (as in emails to let me know that the customer has responded to my previous message).
This means that I either have to login and check my inbox every 5 minutes, all day everyday, or customers don’t get timely responses.
It’s been a huge issue, and one of the complaints that my customers have about me when they give me negative feedback–responses take too long.
Well, they take too long because I don’t know that they’ve even responded, and I don’t know they’ve responded because the system is so full of bugs that it’s less effective for us as experts to use, in general, and this is one of the biggest areas where it’s a problem.
I’ve sent the messages for about a year, i think, complaining about the problem, and they finally asked me if I could come up with any patterns.
I think maybe I mentioned this in another post?
Sorry if it’s a repeat… The new information in the saga isn’t a repeat… Anyway, so I was trying to find patterns, but the links that are used in the emails that I actually do get don’t take you back to the question that they are supposed to be informing you about. The links are broken and take you to different places but not to the actual question.
And if the links do contain the individual identifier for the particular customer, you can’t be certain that those identifiers will show up on the payment report, as only maybe 20 to 50% of the line items, each one being a customer, actually have the customers unique identifier. So even if you copy and paste that customer’s unique identifier from the few emails that I do actually get, and then do a search for it in the list of customers I’ve been working with, you might not get any response at all.
So quite regularly, the only way to know who needs help is to go in and open up the list of people who’ve replied, which is fine, but that isn’t definitive as an identifier unless there’s only one person who’s replied.
And so you can’t tie every email to a particular customer every time.
Hope that all makes sense.
Well, last night, just before my mom came over to meet me at Wendy’s, I noticed on my profile that JustAnswer had me listed as an expert in maybe eight different categories (eight different vehicle makes). Well, there are at least… 30 categories/makes they have listed.
I wondered if maybe I was only getting notification emails for the ones that were specifically listed in my expert profile, and
Ding ding ding ding!!!
That was it!
I went through every notification email I’d received for the month of February, and they all corresponded, only, to the categories listed in my profile that I was an expert in.
So I sent them an email with an update on what I found. Hope they get it fixed soon!
And I wouldn’t mind being paid for doing their job for them, troubleshooting the issue, and figuring out what was going on. 🙃
Doubt that’s going to happen, though.
So those were the updates for yesterday that I didn’t include in yesterday’s post… I don’t think.
Anyway, back to the day at hand…
I forgot to set my alarm, so I accidentally slept in until like 9:00 something, which was good because I haven’t been getting much sleep. It makes me a little nervous because I was in that parking spot longer than I want to be there, but apparently nobody really cares here because semi trucks park here all the time and stay well longer than I do, so it might be a non-issue.
🤞
Anyway, my mom asked me last night when I was talking about my goals for how many questions I want to answer each day for work, if I would get burned out… Well, today was a bit of burnout. 🙃
I couldn’t really get myself going, and by the time the entire day was done, I had answered a grand total of five questions. 😅
So that means I’ve got quite a few I need to answer today if I want to stay ahead on my financial goals.
I’m definitely behind on the original goal for the month, but I’m still on track to have it be my best month, which would be good, given all the money I lost last month being an idiot.
Anyway, I spent a bunch of time in the parking lot of the local thrift store, called The Samaritan shop, just as a new place to park to try and draw less attention to myself.
I don’t even remember what I did, because clearly I didn’t work much. I probably just wasted time on my cell phone. 😕
Somewhere around noon, I went into the gym that’s just two parking lots over, and gratefully, it was leg day, which doesn’t really require anything from my rhomboids, so I worked out my legs, did a whole bunch of stretching on a piece of equipment that I never thought I would ever use ever, but it turns out it might be one of my favorite pieces of equipment because you can do so many different stretches on it.
I didn’t have nearly the issue today doing legs that I did last time. I sort of felt back to normal, and I moved up in weight on the hamstring curl machine, so I don’t think I’ve ever really gotten to my real starting point on that machine anyway, so the gains are probably not real yet.
But I went to the gym, so I’m helping to get that habit back, and I forced myself to do cardio again today, moving up 1 minute to 31 minutes at level 7 on the stair stepping machine.
I’ll move up one minute every day until I get to 45 minutes, and then I’ll try and move it up to level eight.
It’s amazing the difference. Going from Level 5 to level 6, I didn’t even really bat an eyelash, and went straight to 45 minutes just about, without the one minute increment, but level seven… 😶. I got super sweaty and tired and am ready to be done right away.
My brain can’t focus on audiobooks, or I would listen to books. Sometimes I can focus on YouTube videos, but it’s hard when I’m dripping sweat and out of breath.
There’s a USB port on the stair stepper machine, and I’m thinking about buying a USB-powered fan to blow in my face while I climb the stairs.
Still haven’t got my eating under control, though, so that’s not helping in the weight loss department. 😅
It’s hard to let go of the comfort foods when they are one of the few enjoyments I have in my life right now.
In other news, I had a notification come through my email that round trip tickets to New Zealand are $638 right now from Kansas City. 😶
Holy. Freaking. Crap!
I so want to go back!
But I hesitate because the good that I want to do come if I can ever break out of this depressive place, is stuff I want to do here in the United States right now. Being in New Zealand would be amazing, but it would just keep me away from doing that stuff.
I’m not doing it anyway right now, still unable to dig out of the pit I’m in, but being half a world away… certainly isn’t gonna help either.
After the gym, I went to the Walmart Supercenter because I keep forgetting to put my water shoes in my bag to take a shower with at the gym, but I don’t like using those water shoes everyday like that because they are not quick to dry out, so they start to smell because it’s a humid climate, and it’s winter, so they don’t just evaporate dry.
So I went to the Supercenter to buy some of those crock type sandals that are basically just plastic and don’t absorb any water at all.
Then I went back to the gym to take a shower because I was soaking wet from sweat. I ended up spending more time stretching, and then taking a shower, and then enjoying the little hydro massage bed.
I wish we got more than 10 minutes. At least… 20. 🙃
One great piece of news, body wise, something that I did during my stretching massively relieved the pain from the pulled muscle, so I’m wondering if maybe in addition to a mild strain, it actually pulled my spine out of place? Or maybe it was spasming?
I don’t know, but something seems to like click into place, and immediately I had relief. There’s only a very very mild left over soreness, but the deeper, sharper pain is gone.
🥳
I started to do a test dip exercise, not a full one, but I didn’t have any pain or issues trying to do it, so… Maybe I just pulled my spine out of place and only very mildly strained the muscle?
I guess I’m repeating myself. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I am much much better now than I was last night, that’s for sure. 🎉
So I went from parking lot to parking lot. I finally answered a few questions, like I said, for a total of five for the day, but that’s not going to cut it over the long term.
What else… I’ve been looking into getting my nonprofit type business going, trying to figure out what state to incorporate into. Maybe I just don’t for now?
How does a homeless nomad run a business if he’s going to be in a gazillion different states with no home address?
I don’t know the answer to that.
Anyway, I went to the neighborhood market on 8th Street and bought some comfort food. Then I was back at the gym parking lot for a while. And then finally back over to the Walmart Supercenter parking lot for the night.
It’s cold. Low is going to be I think 14°?
Toes are cold, but hopefully they’ll warm up overnight.
Love and hugs!
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 