Last night I slept much better than Sunday night. I suppose it's all due to the pain killer I took after dinner. The drug is just Ibuprofen (aka Motrin or Advil) -- but prescription strength.. 600mg per pill (your normal over-the-counter extra strength Motrin is 500mg I think) but this pill is the size of a JellyBelly(tm)! Apparently ibuprofen at this dosage is also commonly presribed treatment of the pain from arthritis. I guess it's strong enough -- I can even walk today without wincing in pain every step. However, if I twist my leg relative the foot, or tug on my heel (imagine putting on a pair of shoes and attempting to push your heel into the shoe) it will hurt like hell. But that's am improvement I guess from yesterday.

But boy does the foot swell! not only is the ankle swollen, today the top of the foot is also swollen. The purple colour from the bruising has also spread from around the ankle, down to the side of the foot, towards the front. If I press anywhere on the outside of the ankle it hurts. I still cannot abduct or adduct my foot without pain, and my toes have limited mobility because of the swelling towards the toe-end of my foot.

Oh well, I think it can only get better at this point.. I'll be wearing my sandals (with socks, cus otherwise it's pretty gross), and look at my lonely scooter longingly before I step out of the house. :\ Meanwhile I should try the suggestion made in this webmd.com article.

Ouch.. yesterday I was playing b-ball with my friends Alex, Bryan, and my brother Vic.. and I pulled a Vince and landed on my left ankle weirdly -- I sprained it pretty badly. Immediately (say an hour later) it started to swell. This morning it got even worse so I took the day off and went to see the family doc. After waiting an hour (my doc is a busy guy, I find) he took one look -- by this time the ankle is twice the size of the other one -- and said the x-word: "Dude you need to get some x-rays done". DOH. He prescribed some pain killers for me to take, told me to get some tensor bandage, and gave me marching orders to the x-ray place. Luckily I found that I left my hiking pole in my trunk so I used it to help me get up the stairs. Four x-rays exposures later I get to go home. Well that was fast. Anyways now the ankle is swollen, painful as hell if I twist it or pull on the heel, and purple! I never knew that one gets massive internal bleeding after a sprain.. well.. either it's really bad (ruptured arteries, oh my!) or that's just standard for a bad sprain. oh well.

Come to think of it this is the second time I had injured myself badly enough to warrant an x-ray session in front of the big GE machine. Last time it was when I was in second year in university.. I had a "terrible" bike accident.. Then I think I had injured a rib (bruised the muscles around it) and couldn't breathe without pain for a week, and had subluxed both shoulders.. then again that time I had 15 x-rays pictures taken, this time only four.. I am getting better at this. (reader: er.. what kind of twisted logic is that?)

On second thought, my left shoulder hadn't been right ever since. I reinjured it around Feb 2002 when I "overstreached" my left arm warming up for a swim.. it went pop and it hurts like hell. I tried swimming a few lanes and then had to quit. Ever since there is a certain range of motion that I cannot do because of the pain. I am sure it had to do with reduced shoulder stability. I laid off swimming ever since.

Interestingly enough, while looking at links for subluxed shoulders I found a page describing rehab exercises.. I should try them out seriously. I've already heard of the first set of exercises detailed on that page -- an instructor at my gym taught them to me when I first joined. Apparently the guy studied sports medicine or kinesiology.. it actually worked well to reduce the pain when I was doing those.. then I stopped when the pain seemed to have gone away. Maybe I should restart them.

So lately I am trying to learn cheeses. No, not the processed chedder type.. but like.. well, the stuff you could get at a half-decent wine-and-cheese party. What with the St. Lawerence Market close by to work, I get to visit the cheesemongers there and get some hands-on (well, or.. taste-buds-on) experience.

Recent visits to Quebec and trips to fancy restaurants there has awaken my appetite for European cheeses. Promptly, my dear o' girlfriend (thx hun..) suggested that I should get a book on cheeses to learn about them. The book recommended to me is French Cheeses: The Visual Guide to More Than 350 Cheeses from Every Region of France by Tomoko Yamada et al. (ISBN 0789410702, DK publishing ). It's actually not bad a book. It is, like the name suggest, a reference book to French cheeses. Each cheese it catalogues has at least one picture, brief history, and suggestions on how to serve it and what wine to pair to the cheese. For the more famous cheeses a longer description is given.. for example for Roquefort it has multiple pages describing the history of the cheese, and even a guide to the geology and properties of the caves of Roquefort that the cheeses age in, and that lends the name to the cheese. Too bad in Canada you aren't supposed to be able to get raw milk cheeses due to some legistration.. but I hear if you know a cheesemonger well accidents do happen (oops.. they undercooked this cheese.. in fact.. they've undercooked it for centuries..)
Anyways, every two weeks or so me and my friend Vivian goes to St. Lawerence Market to have lunch. Of course afterwards we go to the cheesemongers and see if we can pick out some cheeses to have. My girlfriend too is starting to get a hang of the cheeses too! (well.. last time I made her taste some of the blue cheeses I bought and she seems to like them..)

So far, I have discovered some cheeses.. Not all of them are French, but they are all good so far.. (i.e. I haven't yet found a cheese that I dislike.. yet.)

• Cambozola, a creaming German cheese which for me tasted like a Brie with blue veins.. very creamy and the veins are not too strong. Too bad it doesn't really keep and you have to eat it quick.


• Jarlsberg, a Norwegian cheese that is like swiss cheese.. Well.. it even tastes like swiss emmentaler.. and has a wax rind which I find annoying to remove.. doh.


• Saint Albray.. I had some in Quebec while on vacation and I like its spicy flavour.. (well it's not like.. spiced up spicy hot.. but it has a bite and a tang.. if you know what I mean. .. hmm. you don't? oh well.. buy some)


• Saint André, this is the cheese that I accidently bought after mis-pronoucing "Saint Albray".. this is a cheese much like Camembert.. but its much larger and has a middle that is more cream/curd than cheese.. you can imagine that it has the outside moldy rind, then cheese, then a sour-cream core.. kinda. It's quite good actually.. sinfully good.

I think I'll now attempt to get me a slice of Roquefort...

After months of hard riding, I think it's time soon to replace the wheels on my scooter -- but they are hard to come by! I am still trying to find places either in Toronto or online that I can get replacement wheels for my JDRazor2000. doh doh. Perhaps it's also time for me to get some accessories for the scooter too.. such as lights for the end of the board, perhaps a helmet for me. Hmm..

So some time during the early days of my blog-hiatus, I've rediscovered my scooter. Ok, well, the picture at the other end of the link is not exactly my scooter, as my wheels and strap are green. Hmm.. come to think of it, I don't have a picture of me on my scooter! The only thing I can recall is that my friend Nick who took a video of my back side as I scootered up Ring Road in Waterloo, in front of Needles Hall.. Perhaps I should get a copy off him some time and show you all.

But, I digress.. I guess after a while of riding the GO train and having to walk from Union station to work, I got sick of it. Why? I think chiefly because I am a Lazy-ass, and I hate physical exsertion. You have to admit though, riding on the scooter is faster than walking! In fact, if anyone asks (folks at home included) I tell them: "Yes, walking from Union to work takes a minimum of 12 minutes (even if I race walk like the best of them, due to slow pedestrians), while going on the scooter takes about 7 (yes, including waiting for the traffic lights and doging slow walking pedestrians.. this time also rubber-necking and staring at you like there is a big wort on my leg)".. but I think on the scooter I get to go as fast as I want (.. er.. can) and get that much needed adrenaline rush.

So what happened during my laziness-induced blog-hiatus? Well, first complaint -- Stupid GO Trains dropped our smart-card for the Richmond Hill line. DAMN! They went back to paper-tickets. Well, the paper tickets aren't as boring as I thought. The old machines that "cancels" your paper tickets behave rather like the ones at factories that workers punch-in their time cards with. I feed either end of my ticket into the machine, and it prints the current date-time onto the card.. the term "ticket canceller" the conductors use actually dates back to at least this. A bit of mystery solved!

What's bad about it? Well, according to a friend of mine that's a longer-term GO rider, these machines are old now and they have a hard time working 100%. Yes, that's true, it fails repeately to find a spot to print the date-time on my ticket after some use.. so it was quite frustrating after a while.. especially when yours truly was in a rush, 'frate of missing the train, and our friendly machine says.. nope, your ticket I cannot print on.. DAMN IT...
So, then after my first 10-ride paper ticket ran out, it was the start of July.. so I went to buy a monthly pass instead. So now I can just hop on the train without cancelling nothing.. no worries.. so.. free.. Even better than the metropass on the TTC.

Wow.. almost 2 months without a post. Was I busy or was I busy and lazy? I think I was busy, because there was much work at work, and then when I get home, one doesn't want to use the computer again.. My eyes kinda goes on strike and all the words and pictures on my computer melted into one solid block of.. grey.. and it's time to sleep. Then I am lazy.. I have things to say, but then I don't wanna write after I thought about things and you know .. like I had to repeat myself.

So why I write now? I felt like it I guess.. and then I found out my friends actually read it.. or.. they come to my blog and realize I didn't write jack shit. Then they complain .. WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR BLOG? Well.. you ask and I write :) I guess it's nice to get feedback from one's spew.