Wabbit Season April 29, 2007
Posted by aikenthum in Bicycling, Moozak, Stuff I wrote.add a comment
No, I haven’t been watching Warner Bros cartoons again, but we have been hunting! Hunting what you say? Well, houses.
Let me take this opportunity to say that house hunting is a fairly depressing pursuit in the current Melbourne real estate market! Prices seem to be ballooning, most unlike my salary, which is seeming more and more inadequate as each day passes.
That said, we were out looking today, and saw a house that seems to fit the bill quite nicely. By that I mean, we both kind of like it. Usually I hate it while my wife loves it or vice versa. It’s being sold at auction, and goes under the hammer on the 12th of May. Assuming we can get our finance sorted in time, then we might finally say goodbye to this renting gig! Yippee!
It’s been awhile since my last post, so I should update the blog with what I/we’ve been up to:
- My abstract to the brain monitoring conference in San Francisco got accepted! woohoo! Now I have to wait and see if they want me to present orally – yep, that means getting up and speaking in front of loads of people far more clever than me – or sending a poster to put up on the wall that describes the work. It’s really expected that you’ll present orally at some stage in your life, so the pragmatist in me is resigned to the fact that I should just get it over with. Conversely, the optimistic scaredy-cat in me hopes that it doesn’t get accepted for oral presentation and that in time, noone will care either way. Methinx it doesn’t work that way. Let’s just wait and see!
- As mentioned above, lots of house hunting. We’re totally over renting and that besides, Amy needs more space in which to work. She works from home you see, and it can be a bit depressing when your loungeroom is your office is your loungeroom, I’m sure you understand. So, we’re outta here. It’s just a matter of when and where to!
- Also on the research front, I got a paper accepted to the European Journal of Neurosurgery! Also known as Acta Neurochirurgica. It’s their ‘local’ journal so it’s no Nature Neuroscience, but they do publish lots of work that’s relevant to what I do so it’s good from my point of view. It means that all the people who I want to read my work will get to read it, and that’s good. Or bad, if it turns out that my work is crap!! haha. The same journal have also provisionally accepted a separate paper I wrote, that I’ve spent the last couple of weeks refining at their request. They reviewed it, and decided they liked the basic premise of the work, but wanted more detail here, add some figure there or another table, etc etc. It’s a better paper now so I’m happy with the reviews I got. In the past some reviews have been frankly pretty poor, so it’s nice to get good solid critical feedback! So, that paper is now off with one of my co-authors being read and refined by him before we send it back to the journal again. If that gets accepted that’ll mean I’ll have 3 first author papers! Yeah!
- Been seeing the physio still, a couple of times a week at least for my knee. I had a strength retest at the 6 week mark, which was about a fortnight ago now. My quads have increased in strength by about 5%, and my hamstrings by over 10%! It’s hard to tell what difference it’s made to my cycling because I lost my speedo, whoops! Last ride home from work felt really good though, so I think it’s helping.
- Have organised a jam with some of the guys from work for tomorrow night (Monday). It’s been ages since I got a chance to play the guitar with anyone else, and there’s a couple of dudes at work who can sing or play the guitar and they’re keen to have a jam. I’d be up for regular practise sessions if they were, so we’ll just have to see how it goes. I’m quietly excited about that! I can never get enough of playing music….
- I’m halfway through the game ‘Phantom Mansion’ on my mobile phone! Now *that* is exciting 
- Speaking of games, I finally cracked ‘Cowboys from Hell’ in expert mode on Guitar Hero! I was being just a little bit facetious on that last bullet point, but this time I’m deadly serious. When I realised I’d finished the song, I squeezed the neck of the plastic guitar so hard while pumping the air, I nearly broke it!!! You have NO idea how hard that song was. The stars were in alignment! Minimal skill, maximal luck!
- Entries for ‘Around the Bay in a Day’ are opening again soon, and I’m going to have another go at it! I’m also trying to convince a friend of mine to do it with me. He’s proving a tough nut to crack, but I think his resolve is weaking in the face of my witheringly strong arguments for doing it Amy has decided she’s going to ride the 250km route this year (she loco!) and I’ll either do the 100km or the 210km. Which distance I attempt all depends on my friend and whether I can con him into having a stab at the long one. I’ll keep you posted…
I think that’s about it. Sorry it’s been so long since the last post. As you can probably gather, it’s been a bit crazy busy around here. In a good way though 
Hope you’re all well!
Cheers!
Brace yourselves… March 19, 2007
Posted by aikenthum in Bicycling.1 comment so far
Went for another bike ride on the weekend (er, to the pub and back), and wore a brace on my knee. It helped enormously. It still let out a nasty CRACK when I hoofed it across an intersection to avoid a red light, but it cracked a whole lot less than usual.
The physio reckons that wearing a brace simulates the effect that improving quadriceps strength will have. Good news!
Knaughty Knee March 16, 2007
Posted by aikenthum in Bicycling.1 comment so far
My right knee is a bit of a mess right now. Lately any time I’ve gone out on the road bike, every pedal brings forth a buildup of pressure until – CLUNK my knee kind of resets itself and the pressure-building starts anew.
I’m seeing a physio to strengthen my quads at the moment, which is apparently the best medicine for a clunky knee. The original prescription was for 6 weeks of isokinetic muscle training, where you’re limited by a fancy machine to a certain speed of flexion and extension. It’s pretty cool actually, the machine resists you proportionally based on how hard you push and pull, so the harder you push, the harder it pushes back! The other cool thing about it is that, unlike when using a free-weight system, the load (force required to push it) is kept fairly constant from the beginning of the stroke, right to the end.
Anyway, the physio says it’s the best way to improve strength. I’ll believe her! However, when I told her about my ongoing clunky knee she said I’ll (k)need 12 weeks, not 6 as originally planned. Good thing I work in a hospital, hey!
Mountain mayhem March 13, 2007
Posted by aikenthum in Bicycling.2 comments
Kelvin’s comment about cycling reminded me of the old cycling blog that my wife and I kept while we were training for around the bay in a day, that bike ride where you punish your body over a distance of 220ish kms for dubious benefit. Well, it was in my case anyway… I suffered! Badly! Nevertheless, an adventure it was, and being the reckless type I think I’ll give it another go this year.
Since then, the cycling has continued, although my wife has kinda crept ahead in the fitness stakes. I turned into a bit of a lame duck after the bay ride, copping a nasty right knee injury, which seems to be an exacerbation of a previous posterior cruciate ligament injury I sustained in a motorbike accident. In any case, I took a couple of months off to let my knee settle down, while my wife trained like a madwoman and subsequently conquered Mount Buller, one of our local ski fields. It’s quite a climb!! Anyway, she made it to the top, ’smoked’ a bunch of people on the way up and I have to say I’m pretty proud of her!
