A Quick Buck

Greetings,

While not related to FM this is a thought which has been going through my head for some time and I decided that it was time to put it to "print". There are various considerations we need to make before we decide to make a quick dollar or two out of a hobby or something we do, and this post will go through some of the thought processes that I have recently been through.

I have three different blogs. I have this one, one about fencing and one which studies Elizabethan English and associated subjects. The fencing blog is by far the most popular of the two, indeed it hit 75,000 hits not to long ago. Even if you added the hits together of the other two you would not get close to that. This is discussing that blog, which I write to inform people about my thoughts with regard to various bits and pieces mostly about the use of the rapier, but other things as well.

I had previously looked at blogger's AdSense previously to see what the deal was, just in passing without any consideration of using it at all. In essence, you select adds, they go on your blog, when people hit those adds, you get money out of it, a simple process. Seemed like a simple idea and possibly a way to supplement my pension. As my fencing blog became more and more popular the consideration for using AdSense grew as I thought it would be nice to have a little extra cash on the side.

I established a date when I would put AdSense into the blog, and waited and thought about it. The date arrived and I decided not to do it. What? Why not? I have seen things commercialised all over the place. Advertisements being added to Youtube, free-to-air TV these days feeling like there are more advertisments than program, pay TV even having advertisments. I decided that I was not going to follow this trend. While my readers were in no way obligated to click on any of the advertisments, their mere presence would seem like I had caved into pressure.

If there are going to be these advertisements on my blog, they are going to be there because I put them there, because I want to sell the product. They will be products which I personally endorse and/or have used myself, or they are ones I have produced in some way myself. Commercialisation invades our lives all over the place, and it seems that if you are not making people pay for it, it is not worth having or reading. I disagree with this whole-heartedly. There is information and services which should be free, or as close to it as possible. We should not have to be bombarded by advertisements all of the time.

Cheers,

Henry.

Update 31/10/17

Greetings,

Personal Update

I have not written here in a while and to all my readers I must apologise. I have been focussed on other projects away from this blog. It has been a bit of a hard winter for me. I have had two chest infections, one of which saw me immobile and stuck in on my couch for a month so I have the long process of getting fit, again. So I am back to the physiotherapist to gain all my muscle-tone back around my problematic knees. On the good side of this, the surgeons have decided that it is not worth operating on them, which is a good thing in my mind. Needless to say my FM has been having a merry old time with my current state, but as per usual I am battling through.

Been a Long Time...

Greetings,

I do apologise that it has been so long since I have written anything on this blog. I had not forgotten about it, it is more that I really had not much to say about what's been going on and really nothing to say pertinent about fibromyalgia (FM). Today, I have found things to talk about, so this entry may be a little long to catch up on the past year and five months.

What's Been Happening

Well, as usual, I have been plodding along at my usual pace. I am still fencing, and training regularly. My fencing school is going from strength to strength. I now have two subsidiary schools, one that focuses on Italian longsword and, sword and buckler; the other focuses on Iberian swordsmanship. We now have a membership total of about 60 members total, which still blows me away. Fencing is still my main form of exercise, but as will be noted later on I have added to this.

I have finally gotten in to do something about my degrading knees. I have an appointment to have an arthroscopy done on my left knee, and a referral to get the right knee done hopefully at the same time. This means that I am going to be off my feet for a period of time, but it beats having one done, and wrecking the other, and then vice versa, a vicious cycle. If I get both done at once even weight on both legs. There will be some trying times ahead but I look forward to better health at the end.

My neck has been giving me no end of grief, we have tried physiotherapy on it, and now I am on a waiting list to see an neurosurgeon to see if he can do something about it. There are vertebrae out of place and pressing on nerves, all ugly stuff, and not playing nice with the FM I can tell you. I look forward to getting that all fixed.

Recently... 

Mid-last year I started getting on my treadmill to do some walking at home. I started slow and for a relatively short period of time. This was for some basic cardio-fitness work. I have been gradually increasing the amount of time I have been going for and now I am walking for 30 minutes. I have also been gradually increasing the speed as well and have gotten up to 5.9kph (3.7mph). I have found the best thing for this to keep you going is that it need to be regular and at a time where you know that you can do it. I put my headphones in with music playing to keep me going. I have also found that it is useful to have a goal as well. My goal is to achieve the "legionary step" which is 6.44kph (4mph), but also to maintain this speed for an extended period of time. It is the historian in me that picked the speed. Goals are really important for motivation, and they need to be personal.

There have been some hiccups with my training needless to say, and there are days where I just can't do the walking, but it is important to recognise these too. The important thing is that you also need to recognise the difference between the "physically can't" and the "I'm just being slack, can't". This is the reason why it is important to have goals and motivation to do your exercise. Of course the goals need to be reasonable. I am not aiming to run a marathon, in fact I am not going to be jogging or running at all. Walking is reasonable for me so that is what I am sticking to.

Very recently thanks to a new friend Andrew, I have been going to the local hydrotherapy pool to do some exercises, and work on my joints to ease some of the FM. It is going to be a long-term project, but the results will speak for themselves. I am hoping that I will be able to get my wife to join me later on as I think it would help her too. Merely being in the heated water and being able to relax all of the joints has been an absolute blessing, even if it has been meaning getting up really early in the morning. If you get the chance to go to a hydrotherapy pool, just DO IT. You will not regret it, especially in the cooler months.

Some Notes

Just to polish this entry off I am going to give you some notes and things to think about. These are things that I try to think about all of the time, and especially when I am considering my FM. More so when I am reading about it, or discussing it with others.

1. Don't let people tell you that you can't until you have tried.

2. You don't know what you can do until you have tried.

3. Do things that make you feel good (and don't impinge on others feeling good).

4. Listen more than you talk.

5. All information is useful to a point.

I thought about giving explanations for each one of these, but I think, for the most part, they do not need explanation. If you have any queries about what I mean with regard to these notes, please feel free to ask in the comments below and I will explain what I mean. Fibromyalgia can be a debilitating condition, but only if we allow it to be, we need to stand up and not let it take control. You have the power to do this.

Cheers,

Henry.

If this is your first time reading this blog, I recommend that you go back to the beginning and read my introduction so that you may understand what I am going on about, just follow this link to my first post: https://alifewithfibromyalgia.blogspot.com.au/2009/11/introduction.html

Coming Back... from the Semi-Dead

Greetings,

I have been feeling like garbage of late, and every time I go and see a doctor, they seem to have either "situation not changed" or bad news to tell me. Needless to say I have been going through a bit of a bout of depression and it has been affecting things, well, a lot really. I had been finding convenient excuses not to do things, or putting things off, or just not doing things at all. So I had been coasting, doing only what I really needed to survive. In my books this is being semi-dead.

Yesterday I got back on the treadmill after an absence from it for about five months. So I decided a casual stroll would do the trick to warm things up again. So I did 20 minutes at 4.5 kph, this results in 1.49 kilometers or thereabouts. Sorry about the metric measurements, its what I mostly use. This is about where I like to start with the exercise thing. That was it.

The plan is that any night that I am at home, 6pm will roll around and my alarm on my phone will go off and I will go and get on the treadmill again. This is to get some of my long-lost endurance back again and also some fitness in my legs as well. Needless to say, as I progress the time and speed will increase, more than likely it will be the speed that increases first.

Sounds simple right, yes, it is. That is the point. You have to start simple and then work up to things. At some point in time I am hoping to advance things to a stage where I can even do the treadmill on nights when I have training and not have the threat of being too stuffed to teach of train. More to the point I started, and that is the bigger thing.

I had not started because sometime in the next year I am going to get my knee operated on which is going to put me out for some weeks at least. Next there was a threat that I might have a brain tumour, turned out to be a false alarm, YAY! My neck is still a mess so off to a neurosurgeon I go to see what can happen about that, or at least a referral will get written and I will go on a waiting list. You get the idea, things just kept piling up higher and higher (this is just the short version by the way).

Only way out of this one was to stand up and decide it was not going to run it all for me. Yes, I will end up off my feet for a while, but until then I can get back doing things and the fitness will help my recovery. Sure my neck is going to be irritating, but there are ways for coping with that. It was simply time I got off my butt and did something that I could do about it all, not wait until some medical professional said I could. There will be more training ahead for me, and more fencing too, because I can do it.

So, what can you do?

Cheers,

Henry.