Thursday, July 16, 2009

Go – No Go days….

It seems that every time I get a certain kind of respiratory bug its takes me forever for it to run its course.  This time I came down with it at the same time as my #1 son, Smitty, got it. He has worried through it while on the road and got over it in about 2 weeks.

Me, I am still struggling with the residuals from this thing.

To answer the usual first questions… I do take massive amounts of Vitamin C, Zinc, Magnesium, Flaxseed Oil, Omega 3 fish oil, and a descend multivitamin. The downside is that some of these things change how I feel but don't really seem to shorten the lifespan of this bug.  Likewise, antibiotics don’t really seem to make any improvement but they do often make me feel worse while I am taking them.

All of this points more to viral rather than bacterial based infections.

The bad side of all of this is it kicks my immune system into high gear and that stress brings on the whole team of discomforts and depressors that come out when I am suffering from long term stress.

This is the “downers team” and when it gets control there is little more that I can get done than sleeping, eating irregularly and just trying to keep the minimum daily chores done. I can usually forget dealing with anything that requires engineering thought, power tools, or that involve some sort of conflict. The first will be wrongly done, the second is too dangerous to handle and the last will put me in a completely dysfunctional PTSD funk just waiting to explode unpredictably . That is not good for anyone around me.

So I have been plagued with this bug since June 3rd and though I have gotten mostly through the phglm, coughing, nose itching and dripping, ears plugged, raspy voice, lung whistling, stomach hurting, gut pains and nausea they still come back from air pollutants, and food sources. If I am lucky I will be over this before Labor Day.

There is still way too much to get fixed, completed, planned and financed before we leave at the end of October and a lot of it requires my brain and body working nearly flawlessly to get it completed without incident and or mistakes. This is getting really hard, right now.

I have started a workspace for designing and building the Smart car loader on Clifford. I put in an Excel spreadsheet that provides something of an index to resources of threads and pictures that describe key information and pictures of several bed and loader building processes to give some perspective of the overall process.

So far, most of this has been done during my last few non-sleeping nights so the time has not been totally wasted.

My next step is to decide how much to do myself and how much to contract out.  With the financial state right now, I think I am going to have to do a lot more of the work myself than I had originally planned.  Unfortunately, I don’t work well outside during the heat and humidity and biting insects of the NC summer months. I couple of chigger bites or mosquitoes bites and I am damaged for several days or more.

Another piece of work to do is to get the shore power hookups on Clifford and to put in the old Magnetek converter/charger to keep his batteries up. I would not trust it to do the job long term but they will get good peak charging from time to time when we are driving it but the Magnetek won’t let them go dead on me.

I need to start putting my various project plans on the website, too. A place to keep it all together and easy to find “what’s next to do”.

ttfn

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