I wanted to end the year with a memorable post…
 
I can’t believe another year has gone by.  My son is almost two.  And I have another year of blogging under my belt.
 
Here I end 2017 with a situation I encountered in the latter half of the year that was very troubling.  
 
I started to feel a certain restless leg syndrome type of discomfort that was also very painful at times.  When I walked, pain would rifle up and down my left leg at random times.  Sometimes I would be laying there in bed and my left leg would want to shake or tremble randomly.  It was sort of like a tickle, but not in a fun way.
 
So I kept thinking like it was a network troubleshooting exercise.  What has changed in the last few weeks?  My body has been functioning just fine and I’ve done something different to cause this painful consequence. 
 
Was it a change in diet?  Maybe, I was still enjoying the same amount of junk food.  But maybe my tired old body wasn’t able to process it as well.
Was it exercise?  I generally don’t work out, but I did try to do some odd stretching of my back.  I had not done this kind of prolonged stretching ever before.  So it became my prime suspect.  I stopped doing it, but the pain got worse.
Was my sleeping pattern different?  Yes, there was another great disturbance in the way I slept because of my son.  But not sure how that was causing this pain.
Was it a resurrection of something from my motorcycle accident?  Maybe.  The pain was causing me to limp in a similar way.
 
When I would walk, the pain could be very slightly alleviated by lifting my jeans off my left hip where it seemed like I the nerve pain was originating.  So I kept working on alleviating that pressure.  The odd part is that I have always worn my jeans low on my hips, so there had to be another contributing factor.
 
Was it my age?  Maybe.  I’m only getting older.  Which sucks.
 
Not knowing how long this issue was going to be around, I kept doing the one remedy that seemed to work: alleviating the pressure on my left hip.  I bought some Mork & Mindy suspenders.  That way I could keep my pants up, but also keep the pressure off my hip nerves completely.  I did that for a few days and again, the symptoms got better.
 
I remembered reading an article a long time ago about women who wore their jeans too low on their hips who might experience some weird pain.  I’m thinking to myself that’s the exact same problem I’m having now.  How is that possible?
 
My sleep has been crappy all year.  What about my sleep has changed?  I think I might be sleeping on my left side too much.  So I started sleeping on my right.  And the symptoms continued to get better along with the use of the suspenders.  What else has been different about my sleeping habits?  It didn’t happen that often, so I didn’t think it would matter, but occasionally I would accidentally fall asleep with my son at his bedtime.  The routine we do is that Arry and I would take turns going to bed with him to make sure he fell asleep.
 
It turns out that when I would lay down with him, I would do it fully clothed: jeans and belt and everything.  I wasn’t intending to fall asleep, but I was so exhausted that I couldn’t help myself.  So I changed that too.  I started to strip down to my undies as if I am going to bed for the night.  And that was the last culprit that was probably the trigger that started it all.  My jeans and the leather belt were putting pressure on that perfect spot when I slept on my left, which was the side that allowed me to face my son to watch for him to fall asleep so I could get the hell out of his room.
 
After changing all the different ways that I saw that I was putting pressure on my left hip, within a week my nerve pain was all but gone!!  No doctor intervention.  I forgot to mention I was trying to medicate myself back to health by using lots of ibuprofen – sometimes up to 600mg in a single dose with no great long-term results.  I was thinking it would reduce any swelling around the nerves that were having the problems.  Sometimes I seemed like it worked, but it never lasted.

To conclude, once I finished all the troubleshooting, I was very self-gratified.  I was able to fix a very mysterious health ailment by practicing the three golden rules of troubleshooting:
 
1.  Find out what has changed lately
2.  Use the process of elimination to isolate the issue
3.  If an idea seems to work well, then do more with that idea
 
Indeed, it was some very self-gratifying troubleshooting I did on myself! 

Happy New Year, y'all!
​

You’re a medium-sized country with a moderate to flat to shrinking economy, with no immediate plans for higher growth when your citizens are yearning for more opportunities.  Do you stimulate the economy by pumping a couple of billion dollars into all kinds of political and economic plans with no definitive history of success?

Alternatively, maybe you sweet talk Jeff into opening up a few fulfillment centers and allowing organic and natural demand for Amazon’s goods and services to stimulate industry, innovation, and economic velocity.  Oh and by the way, you can take a billion of those dollars and buy some $AMZN so you can have a stake in the success of Jeff&Co.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3067455/why-amazon-is-the-worlds-most-innovative-company-of-2017

I have a special ambivalence in the world of raising children.
A wise friend of mine told me:
The days are long.  But the years go by fast.
​