Today I went birding and the temperature rose from 26C in the morning to 32C in the afternoon. We ventured on a long loop around Campbell Valley Regional Park.
Good: A lot of the park is forested and provides nice shade.
Bad: all the other parts where the sun beats down on you mercilessly.
I felt by the end of the afternoon I had maybe miscalculated how ready I was for something so taxing. I’m OK as I type this, but tired and aware that I probably won’t sleep great again tonight.
And I also realize that unless something starts changing significantly in my rate of recovery, I may not sleep great for weeks to come. I don’t sleep terribly, but I never really feel rested. Somewhat surprisingly, I also never feel like I’m dragging through the day as a result. Why, I don’t know. But today was the closest I’ve come to wanting to just lay down in a nice shady spot and stay there for a while.
I did get a few nice bird shots, though (coming soon).
In the meantime, here are some of the trees that provided welcome shade:
Trees along the Deer Trail in Campbell Valley Regional Park. No deer were seen.
Specifically, last night I found I could sleep OK if I laid on my back, with the covers pulled away from my chest, like if I was an Egyptian mummy, except not ancient, mummified and in a sarcophagus. On my side was still uncomfortable. The covers on my chest were uncomfortable. But on my back, like a mummy, was OK.
While my energy and general wellness continue to improve, sleep has been, by far, the most vexing part of my recovery. I don’t know if this is typical, abnormal or somewhere in-between. I suspect it’s pretty normal. After 22 days it’s also now pretty annoying.
At least in a few more days I should be able to roll onto the side that got cut up without risk of opening anything up.
I make this sound kind of terrible, but it’s not, it’s just what it is. I think writing about it helps me to manage the bother. Also knowing the surgery may have staved off something much worse down the line helps, too!
In the meantime, I took a walk to Sapperton Landing today to get some exercise in. I’m up to 103 intensity minutes for the week, woo. Next week I could theoretically hit the minimum, 150.
The weather was quite nice. Here are a few shots I took on my Galaxy S26.
Looking east across the Fraser River, Port Mann Bridge in the background.A plaque-free stone, plus an old boat with baby boats on the river behind it.A fish mosaic embedded in the ground, by J. McConnell.Enjoy the view while also feeling important.
And an internet pal has informed me that in Portugal this means I have money coming my way. I kind of doubt that, but would welcome it!
The spider is hanging just above the soap tray. We’re leaving it be for now, since it’s not in the way or anything. I do wonder what sort of meals it gets from the tub, though.
Three weeks ago I would have been typing this from a hospital bed, pumped full of painkillers and oblivious of what was to come, existing in a weird daze, both aware and unaware, occasionally looking out the window to my left and noting the sky changing colour.
Today, 21 days later, I am feeling mostly normal.
Mostly.
The area of surgery is still sore, but every day now it feels…tighter. This is both good, because it means it’s healing, but also in a way bad because at certain points it’s made sleeping somewhat uncomfortable again.
The Big Stitch–the incision where the surgical instruments would have gone in–is starting to become noticeably less puffy, though it still feels weird. I could look up what it is I’m feeling (folded muscle, fat, etc.) on the internet, but those kinds of searches always seem to lead to a page saying IT’S PROBABLY BLACK DEATH. Plus, I see the surgeon in six days, I’ll just ask him then.
No cat again, instead this photo I took by the hospital lane way this afternoon:
Last night was an anomaly, my sleep was bad, due to stress, but not related to the surgery! And I think the watch made it sound worse than it was.
Regardless, yesterday was a slothful, stressful day and potato chips and pie were involved. The pie was yummy, though.
Today, I went for a long walk in pleasant late spring weather and as I type this mid-afternoon, I’m around 13.3 km total, which is already more than I’ve walked any day since going under the knife. And the more I walked, the less I felt the little aches and soreness from the surgery and incisions.
I begin to entertain the idea that I actually could try running in a week. We’ll see.
I also successfully stopped two sneezes by plugging my nose. Sneezing probably still hurts, so I’ll keep doing this.
In all, today is probably the first day that has a real whiff of normality to it. Things still aren’t normal, but it’s starting to feel tangible, possible. Yay for that.
No cat today. Instead, here’s a wild hydrant I saw on my walk:
First, she’d probably get torn apart and eaten for dinner, because with that many bears, someone’s bound to be around and cranky.
But apart from that, let’s say she enters the bear dining room hall. There are 20 steaming bowls of porridge. She samples a few that are too obviously hot or cold, but then finds a dozen or more that are very close to being perfect, but not quite. They’re so similar that she can’t choose one and just finish the bowl. She regrets not eating before breaking into the bear house and leaves, somewhat sated, but unsatisfied. She is later arrested and sentenced to jail by the forest gnome police and courts.
This is a post about Linux distros.
I have tried the following:
Mint
Debian
Ubuntu
Kubuntu
Fedora
CachyOS
Pop_OS!
Zorin
KDE Neon
Bazzite
Maybe more! Some I’ve dismissed fairly quickly because of the too hot/cold thing (Debian) or never even tried because I’m not interested in making things more difficult just for the sake of challenge (Arch), but most of the ones above have something to recommend them:
Stability and built-in apps/features (Mint)
Customizability up the wazoo (any distro with KDE)
Speed, efficiency, constant updates (CachyOS)
Prioritizing gaming (Bazzite)
Looking pretty out of the box (Zorin)
But in almost every case, there’s some kind of downside:
Ubuntu: A bit bloated and pushes snaps, a proprietary package format
KDE distros: No preview app (this turns out to bug me way more than I thought)
Mint: Updates are slow, so it can lag on features and fixes
CachyOS: Can break because of the fast updates
Fedora: Does a few weird things
Many distros: Don’t play nice with dual boot, forcing you to do all the dirty work yourself
In the end, I rotate through a half dozen or so distros, forever dabbling, but never committing, save for Mint, which I kept as my alternate OS on my old PC.
I guess I need to decide why I want to run Linux:
Is it to replace Windows? Maybe.
Is it to putter around and experiment? Yes.
Is it to find better ways to do some things vs. Windows? Also yes.
Is it to game? Largely no, because I can do that in Windows 11 now.
Here’s the final irony to this post. I recently tried Fedora, then, due to a weird issue with Grub2Win that requires periodically running a script to keep it working with Fedora, I installed CachyOS.
After not using it for a few days, I went to login and realized I’d forgotten the password. Whoops. I wanted to try the KDE version, anyway (I tell myself).
Stay tuned for more Goldilocks and the 20 Distros, right here.
Another decent night of sleep, per my Garmin Forerunner 265. More importantly, I felt I slept well.
My HRV status has, for the first time since surgery, moved from Low/Unbalanced to Balanced. Woo. Wondering what HRV is? Check here.
By default my Forerunner is set to 150 “intensity minutes” per week, which is a macho way of saying “enough effort to count as some kind of exercise”. During a typical week, I will triple this goal. Since surgery, it has mostly been at zero, but not this week. As of today, Wednesday, I have 24 intensity minutes (from walking briskly)!
I successfully had a nap yesterday. Yes, this counts as recovery because until now I haven’t really been able to comfortably nap. And I realize this is now four things.
To celebrate my intensity minutes, here is an intense cat:
Last night the itchiness/numbness eased enough that I had a relatively normal sleep again after the one-night hiccup. Hooray for that.
The reason for the change, at least in my trying-to-be-logical mind, is: healing! The surgery area is reaching a point where everything is starting to stitch back together, and this is making the area feel tight. Not in a painful way or anything, but it feels different, less surgery-y and more like sore muscles?
Dreaded sneezes: Sneezing still lights up the whole area like an atomic bomb and I hate sneezing. I sneezed once today, that was enough. I should add the discomfort from the sneeze fades after a few seconds. The knowledge that a sneeze is imminent is, in a way, worse than the actual sneeze itself.
I have an appointment now with my surgeon for a follow-up on June 18th, just one day short of four weeks post-surgery and when I may potentially be on the cusp of full recovery.
In that spirit, here is an energetic cat, plus a potato:
Last night, something made me start researching Static Site Generators. It was likely a combination of things:
Seeing them mentioned here and there on Mastodon and some tech sites
Encountering a few SSGs being used on blogs I come across
That feeling of wanting to move on from the bloated and now AI-enabled WordPress resurfacing again (any Matt Mullenweg post is bound to trigger this)
So last night I started looking into them as a possible new way forward on my olde blog. I came across a few I’d heard of before:
Hugo
Jekyll
Eleventy
And a lot more I’d never heard of. There are a lot of SSGs out there.
It got late, I went to bed. And dreamed.
Of Static Site Generators.
In the dream I was somehow using an SSG that was a physical thing, a kind of vinyl (?) curtain with code on it. There was a programmer with me to my left and I remember having to lift the corner of the curtain for him to see the code written there. He was apparently operating three animated figures, one of which was a famous character I cannot recall now. He was directing them to three small windows on the site or whatever it was. The code behind the curtain, maybe.
He then did a lifting gesture with his right hand, which opened the sashes on all three windows. He next did a hand-forward gesture, to tell the characters to go through the windows, which they did. I noted that they went through the windows before he started the second gesture and thought that was good or efficient. Or something.
Then I woke up.
And I’ve been doing more research on SSGs tonight. Part of me thinks they won’t fit my needs, but another part is excited to dive into some new and different. I guess I still like learning.
And yes, I plan on doing daily updates post-surgery until I feel what passes for “normal.” I’m actually hoping this will be soon!
But it will not be today.
Three things:
I had my post-surgery CT scan today. I showed up early, the got me in early, and I was done before my actual appointment time. Nice! The process was pretty much the same as the other CT scans I’ve had. The IV went in on the first try, always a nice bonus. Hopefully everything in my chest looks OK and the scan doesn’t reveal an incubating alien or something.
My sleep score went from 76 to 43 last night. Yoinks! I think this was related to the itchiness/new sensation (not to be confused with the INXS song) in my chest/surgery area. Basically I kept flipping the covers on and off, because when they were on, I was cozy, but the fabric also felt weird and slightly uncomfortable against my chest. Maybe it’ll go better tonight.
I am probably back to about 95% of my usual walking pace. There was something else that feels mostly normal now, but it’s so normal I can’t remember it.
No cat today, but enjoy my right arm, post-CT scan:
Good news: My Garmin watch gave me a decent sleep score last night (76/100) and all stats were rated fair or better. More importantly, I felt I slept better.
Not as good news but also not bad news, really: Today I started feeling off and at first it was hard to determine why. Fatigued from yesterday’s birding? Maybe? But as the day went on, I realized that it’s probably just my body continuing to heal and the unexpected consequences of it. After the surgery, an area of my chest has been numb, due likely to some never damage, but in the past few days the healing has progressed to where some of these areas are starting to get more sensation back. Combine this with moving almost completely off all pain relief, and I am suddenly feeling more pain again. Over the next few days I’ll moderately increase the Tylenol, mostly to help with sleep.
Where: Piper Spit, Burnaby Lake (Burnaby), Tlahutum Regional Park (Coquitlam) Weather: Cloudy with some sun, 15-16°C
This was my first birding since the surgery and it went fine. The only thing I noticed is getting a tiny bit tired holding the camera up for an extended period of time. But that can also happen without surgery.
Piper Spit, Burnaby Lake
Looking west, with a Wood Duck photobombing the shot.
We were a bit boxed in by weather (showers in the morning) and fabulousness (Nic had to help with a VMC show in the early evening) so we dropped our initial plan to check the heron rookery in Port Moody and went with the Piper Spit/Tlahutum split.
We didn’t see anyone feeding birds at Piper Spit–in fact, there were few people there, likely because of the earlier showers–but the ground and pier were absolutely festooned with seed. Perhaps the Bird Police had been occupied eating artisanal organic donuts.
The recent showers meant the water level was quite a bit higher, with the island completely submerged and no chance of shorebirds. Initially, it was mostly just Goosetown, with geese arrayed across where the island would normally be. The geese were disturbingly well-behaved, perhaps because their dominance was unchallenged.
Some other waterfowl did show up, and the wood ducks and mallards are both starting to look quite scruffy, now that spring fever/mating/babby-making is largely over. I did not observe any migrant waterfowl, it’s just the locals for now.
One blackbird was acting weird, fanning its wings in a show of…something. Most of the other birbs were indulging in the plentiful seed.
We did not stay too long, because there really wasn’t much activity.
Tlahutum Regional Park
For a change of pace, the creek adjacent to the Coquitlam River.
We started at the community garden, wary of the showers creating mini-lakes here, but it was fine and we saw collections of cowbirds, swallows posing, robins acting rascally and what appears to be a Willow Flycatcher, which I’ll have to check if it’s a lifer or not (I can never keep my flycatchers straight). As usual, I kept my eye out for kitschy decorations in the plots.
The trails netted us a pair of Eastern Kingbirds and a guy claimed to see a seal in the river, though maybe it was an otter, which would make more sense. A lot of pigeons were flying overhead–in both directions. No idea what was going on there.
Bonus shot: The mostly empty big pond, with patchy blue sky overhead.
The big pond had a few ducks and a number of swallows darting overhead, but it seemed quieter than usual, a recurring theme through the afternoon. Still, by this time the weather was pretty decent, it was pleasantly mild, and it was one of the first “normal” activities I’ve engaged in since the surgery, so overall, a perfectly cromulent bit of birding.
The Shots
Shot with a Canon EOS R7 with 18-150 mm kit lens and 100-400 mm telephoto. Some scenery captured on a Samsung Galaxy S26.
Zen goose.
Canada Goose contemplating drama.
Male Brown-headed Cowbird, up close.
Fluffed out female Cowbird looking for seed.
Female Red-winged Blackbird vamping or…something.
A scruffy-looking male Wood Duck, losing his breeding plumage.
A male Wood Duck with mullet intact.
Female Wood Duck cruising along.
Female Wood Duck, posing.
Song Sparrow preparing to belt it out.
Song Sparrow belting it out.
A different Song Sparrow doing its thing.
Coquitlam River running high.
A ruffled crow atop a bench at Tlahutum Regional Park.
A fly on a daisy.
A ladybug checking things out.
Big-eyed fly of some kind.
Eastern Kingbird perched.
On the same tree, another Eastern Kingbird, with a freshly-caught bumblebee.
