decidedlyodd

First, my decidedlyodd.com email addresses seem to be working again. I noticed this morning that I was once again getting notifications of responses to my comments on LiveJournal.

My second meeting with my advisor yesterday went well. We talked about what I’m going to do for the rest of the semester (the same thing now, except I won’t be taking the lead, but rather following Vivek) and possible job opportunities around here and further away. She also encouraged me to take a one year leave of absence instead of just up and leaving. I got the paperwork from Janet afterwards too, so I’m probably going to take that approach.

Last night, I went over to Jason and Sarah’s for a night of pizza making and Spanish speaking. Originally, we had intended to watch Jamón, Jamón, but we never really got around to it. There was some good pizza though. Beforehand, I ran over to Ross in search of a pizza stone. Jason thought they might be able to use two to cook more pizzas faster. I figured since I wouldn’t mind having one anyways, I’d just pick one up for myself on the way over. I actually found a 38cm/15 inch one at Ross for $9. It’s pretty big though and it doesn’t really fit anywhere in our kitchen well.

Today after class I went swimming for the first time since I’ve hurt my ankle. In general, it went pretty well. Butterfly doesn’t hurt at all and the injury doesn’t seem to affect it. Front crawl hurt a little at fist, but over time the pain went away. It’s still sorta weird though, because I can feel that the joint is looser as I swim (my foot flops around a bit more). The danger with crawl though is doing flip turns. I had to make sure to push off totally straight and when possible tried to avoid using my right foot to push off at all. This made for some fairly bad turns. Backstroke hurts a bit more than front crawl, although the kick is actually similar. It’s still very tolerable though as long as I take it slow. Breakstroke hurt quite a lot and I stopped after doing about 2 strokes of it. So for now that one is off my list. I think it’s because the motion has a certain horizontal component to it (unlike the other kicks). I also made use of a pull buoy some of the time while doing front crawl and backstroke in order to take all stress off my foot. All told, I did 1200m trying to keep things on the less intense side until I see how that workout affected my ankle later today.

In general, my ankle is doing a lot better though. If I focus, I can walk normally without much of a limp at all. However, I have to concentrate and it makes the muscles in my lower leg a bit sorer than usual. Still, it’s definite improvement from the very serious hobbling I was doing on Saturday and Sunday. Similarly, the swelling has gone down quite a lot. Today while swimming, I felt around my ankle to see how the swelling was and it hardly felt swollen at all. The swimming probably helps in general though because it’s done in a horizontal posture.