(no subject)

Been feeling sick for a few days. Not "I've got a cold" sick, and not really out if it sick, just vaguely sick. I've also had a pain in my lower right side for several days, which is part or most of the problem.

On Wednesday or Thursday when I realized the pain wasn't going away I had a bout of hypocondria where I wondered if it was my appendix, and I went online to read about apendicitus. I was relieved to note that symptoms usually were a duffuse pain, not a specific pain. I had a specific pain, so it must not be that. Also when I read that one way to detect apendicitus was a "barium enema" I became firmly convinced that I could not possibly have anything like that.

Now I'm more concerned that it's something serious. Maybe my liver. Maybe I have pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes. Not that it runs in my family but you know, I'm a bit overweight and don't exercise much (at all).

Or maybe I'm being a hypocondriac again, but I need to see a doctor, if only because I haven't seen one in more years than I can count. You know, I'm the sort of person who never feels sick -- I haven't even had more than a very minor cold in several years, haven't taken any sick time in probably as long as I've worked at my current company.

Actually I need to see a dentist too, but that's a very specific problem that I know is not my imagination. ^_^

(no subject)

wakka lakka for Osaka

Among other things today I made an appointment to see the dentist and found out what my medical card number is so I can go see a doctor. Cornelius told me where there was a clinic that takes walk ins, I drove by it on the way home and saw that it was a UW Medical place so that sounds cool, and it's really close. My plan is to go there tomorrow.

Over the weekend I decided that whether I had any idea about what was wrong with me or not, it would be only a good thing to start exercising and eating better. Not that I think I eat tons of junk food or bad fast food -- I mean I do eat a lot of fast food but I stopped eating greasy hamburgers 2-3 years ago and usually get a salad or maybe a sandwich from Arby's or Subway, and sometimes I go for mexican or teriyaki or thai... or taco time... those would be the most egrarious of my lunch targets. And while I almost never get up early enough to eat breakfast, I've been in the habit of taking a cup of yogurt or a yogurt smoothie to work, which seems like an okay quickie breakfast to me.

Where I'm really bad is not eating regularly. I don't eat when I come home, until the next day, generally, and on the weekend I can go all day without eating which is probably not a good thing. So Sunday I went out and got some salad and ate some of that in the early afternoon, and then I made a small stew with carrots, onions, and beef and had that for dinner. Dunno how high that is on a normal scale of healthy but it's much better than what I might usually do. ^_^

And I've been trying to exercise a bit. I don't like to run and I don't like pointless exercise that much, but taking a walk is okay and everything is better if set to music.

Saturday I set out to score some Hong Kong action movies. I've been doing research on the internet, in particular trying to track down one of those films that Tom and I rented from Scarecrow Video years ago that I loved -- something about the Tao. There were two guys who were friends, but one grew up to become a hard, angry fighter, while the other one studied the ways of the Tao and how energies ebb and flow, and how to bend but not break -- "soft" styles of fighting I guess, and he developed this completely new way to fight that made him much more powerful than his friend in the end. (They had a royal battle for the last 1/4 of the movie of course, can't exactly remember why but that's never important in these kind of films.)

Anyway I have a list of some of the films I'd like to get that I'll probably need to purchase off the internet. On Saturday I went to Southcenter to the Half Price Books there, which is undoubtedly not even one of the better Half Price Books to go looking for such things. I found a couple of obscure (and probably very mediocre) Hong Kong films, and some of the Western ones made recently by people like Jet Li, and even an old Jackie Chan film ("Half A Loaf of Kung Fu"), but in the end I passed on them all. I did pick up Shanghai Knights, which was another of my goals. I also picked up two Shakespeare plays from the Thames Shakespeare Collection (A&E) -- King Lear and Romeo & Juliet. (I passed on the modern Leonardo DiCaprio version. For that matter one of the Jet Li movies I passed on was Romeo Must Die, which I've seen before and wasn't too impressed by.) I also picked up a very cheap ($4.95) dvd of Louis L'Amour's "The Quick and The Dead". I figured, it could suck, but at least the plot should be solid. ^_^ And it's set in Wyoming, woo!

The Shakespeare movies bring my collection to six. Woo. I've had a plan to collect as many Shakespeare plays on film as I can for many years, probably going back to the days when I was at SPU and taking Shakespeare as a course, and would ride the bus over the the University of Washington campus, where in their library you could check out videos to watch in their video room. It made "reading" the plays much easier! ^_^ I remember Gene came with me one time and we watched Othello. Othello is still one of my favorite of the plays, along with MacBeth (the first one I ever sat down and read all the way through), and Tempest, and of course Midsummer Night's Dream.

So what I own now, along with the A&E King Lear and Romeo & Juliet, is two of Kenneth Branaugh's Shakespeare movies, Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing. I think he made at least two more besides that, including Hamlet. I also have Hamlet, but mine is the more recent Mel Gibson version. And I have a somewhat cheesy version of Midsummer Night's Dream. Pretty sad when you consider that I've been "building" this collection for years now, and the 2 dvds I just bought increased my collection by 33%!

I need a few more. ^_^ I'd like to find good versions of my favorites, and I'd like to get the Merchant of Venice that was out a year or so ago. Come to think of it, Merchant of Venice was something we had to read in grade 10, so I guess I read that before MacBeth. And then I need to have a Shakespeare festival on my couch. Or something.

Shanghai Knights was fun, if incredibly silly. The parts involving Arthur Conan Doyle, Charlie Chaplin, and Jack the Ripper were goofy enough, but when they drive 50 feet off a road somewhere near London and somehow crash into stonehenge... please.

Of course, Jackie Chan in action makes it all good. ^_^ Maybe he needs to do a few Shakespeare plays...