Geezer

There are 384 posts filed in Geezer (this is page 15 of 39).

Twitches continue

My muscle twitches have continued constantly since I first noted my left knee twitching. Now I get twitches in my upper left quadricep, right quadricep, right foot, both hamstrings, buttocks, left calf muscle, and elsewhere. It seems that at any one point in time there is something twitching. It’s as if someone is tickling me, 24 hours a day. It frequently wakes me up hours before my usual waking time. I’m really starting to wish this would go away but so far it has only gotten worse.

I am set to visit a neurologist tomorrow who can hopefully give me some answers. As I pondered my upcoming visit, I realized I had been assuming the doctor could provide some sort of medicine that might still my twitching enough that it wouldn’t disturb my sleep. Tonight I considered the very unpleasant possibility that the doctor can’t do anything to calm my muscles. Never mind whether this is a symptom of a more serious condition – nevermind the underlying cause – what if I was simply stuck with being invisibly goosed for the forseeable future? This alone would suck.

In the darkest corners of my mind is the fear that the mysterious health issues that have occasionally plagued me for decades have now fully latched onto me, having chewed through my body’s defenses. Pessimistic, I know, and premature since I haven’t seen the neurologist yet, but I admit that whatever is affecting me now has my full attention.

Fifteen years

Wedding bliss, 1999

Wedding bliss, 1999


Kelly and I celebrated our fifteenth wedding anniversary yesterday. For a little romantic night out, we spent our evening with a few hundred other Ligon Middle School parents at the Open House. Hey, at least we were together and, to be honest, it was fun! We’re going out tomorrow night for a romantic dinner.

Above is a scan of a wedding photo we’ve had on our shelf almost since our wedding day. The color may have faded but the love is stronger than ever!

Labs come back clean

I got my lab results on Monday. They all look perfect – everything is right down the middle of the acceptable ranges. I’m as healthy as a horse … except for the weird. unexplained twitching I experienced.

Fortunately, the twitching has almost totally stopped since the family bike ride we all took on Sunday morning. And my muscles are not feeling as tense during the night, giving me a better night of sleep every night.

As nice as the clean labs are, though, it doesn’t really explain what happened. As it appears to not be an issue and my doc is satisfied I suppose I’ll just chalk it up to a mystery for now.

Visibly twitchy

My leg looking puffy where my dress sock just was

My leg looking puffy where my dress sock just was


For a day after writing my post about my twitchy leg I didn’t notice it twitching at all. Eventually the twitching came back and I began to try to track it down.

This morning while I was reading in the easy chair I watched it twitch. I don’t know if I had actually seen it twitch until today, so now I know it’s probably not the more serious, invisible twitch that had me concerned this week. Hopefully the lab work will come back tomorrow and my doc and I can work through what might be causing it.

On another note, Kelly, Hallie, and I went for a bike ride this morning and which I haven’t seen or felt my leg twitch. I wonder if something had gotten tangled up in there and worked itself out today?

About my left leg

Went to see the doctor today for something I considered a minor annoyance: Ever since I was in Jamaica I’ve noticed a very slight but maddeningly consistent twitch in the bottom of my left quadricep. I remember being on the beach and remarking to our friends the Ambroses that this twitch was driving me crazy. We are solidly into the third week of twichery and things haven’t gotten better.

Of course, after the ice bucket challenges and watching ALS videos, my mind has conjured up the Worst Possible Scenario about what this could mean. Which is stupid. But predictable. This Popular Science article explaining the two types of twitches, for example, has only added fuel to the fire, to wit:

However, involuntary muscle twitches are not all fasciculations, and any non-fasciculation muscle twitch is almost certainly a bad sign. Fibrillation, for example, can be confused with fasciculation, but fibrillation indicates that the surrounding muscle fibers have completely lost their nerve supply. Fibrillations are very bad news, and indicate a serious nerve disorder, like Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

My twitches appear to my not-at-all-medically-trained eye to be the Could Be Something More variety. Thankfully, my doctor tends not to jump to wild conclusions like his patient does, and will treat this as something simple until proven otherwise.
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John A. Walker Jr who spied for Soviet Union dies in prison | Mail Online

John Walker happily sold out the United States to the Soviets for a few bucks. Had there been a conflict with the USSR, we would have been toast, with all of our forces exposed thanks to his treason.

I’m a peace-loving guy but if John Walker had gotten shanked while in prison you wouldn’t have seen my cry. He was the worst shipmate you can imagine, a buddy-fucker who gleefully stabbed his shipmates in the back all for a few bucks.

And, yes, I see a huge difference in the actions of Walker and Snowden. I believe Snowden loves his country and rightfully called it out for training its sights on ordinary Americans. [Update 23 Apr 2019: Snowden is a tool of Russia.] Walker, on the other hand, was a cheap intelligence whore with no apparent morals whatsoever. Prison was too good for him.

A former American sailor convicted during the Cold War of leading a family spy ring for the Soviet Union has died in a prison hospital in North Carolina.Retired Navy Warrant Officer John A. Walker Jr. died Thursday at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, Federal Bureau of Prisons spokesman Chris Burke said.The cause of death was not immediately released. He was 77.

via John A. Walker Jr who spied for Soviet Union dies in prison | Mail Online.

Mark Turner: Core continuity | Letters to the Editor | NewsObserver.com

The N&O printed my letter to the editor today about Common Core. It was something I’d been meaning to write for months but only got around to finishing about the time the decision was made. Too bad.

IBM employees joke that IBM stands for “I’ve Been Moved.” Growing up in an IBM family, I experienced this firsthand.

When someone is educated in five states, continuity can become a real issue. Our state welcomes new residents and businesses every day. Military families come and go in what we like to call the “nation’s most military-friendly state.”

”Yet our state legislators are about to undo the one sure way our young new residents can hit the ground running with their education: the Common Core. Rejecting Common Core will hurt our new residents, both civilian and military.

Think about that the next time our state leaders crow about North Carolina being business- or military-friendly.

Mark Turner

By the way, the editor did a little tweaking to it, changing the format. Here’s the way I submitted it:

IBM employees joke that IBM stands for “I’ve Been Moved.” Growing up in an IBM family, I experienced this firsthand. When someone is educated in five states, continuity can become a real issue.

Our state welcomes new residents and businesses every day. Military families come and go in what we like to call the “nation’s most military-friendly state.” Yet our state legislators are about to undo the one sure way our young new residents can hit the ground running with their education: the Common Core.

Rejecting Common Core will hurt our new residents, both civilian and military. Think about that the next time our state leaders crow about North Carolina being business- or military-friendly.

(Yes, I was educated in Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia.)

via Mark Turner: Core continuity | Letters to the Editor | NewsObserver.com.

One Parks board meeting left

Raleigh's Parks board at the Fred Fletcher awards, May 2014.

Raleigh’s Parks board at the Fred Fletcher awards, May 2014.


At last week’s Parks board meeting, I did some calculations and realized I have exactly one meeting left: July 17th. Has it been six years already? Where does the time go?

So much has been accomplished during my time with the board. I recall how contentious my early board meetings were, with lots of strong opinions and little sense of compromise. I contrast that to the last few years, where my fellow boardmembers have voted unanimously on nearly every issue. I don’t think that all votes should necessarily be unanimous but I’m so glad to have been on a board where the members try to work together.

I’m working up a speech to give for my two minutes of member comments at the end of every meeting. There’s a lot to cover for these six years so I’ll have to choose my words carefully.

While July 17th will be my last meeting, my term doesn’t officially end until September 5th. Thus I have one more dedication left to attend: the Mount Hope Cemetery dedication on September 4th. After that, who knows where life will lead me?
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Bike graduation

Travis hot-dogging on his red bike, June 2013.

Travis hot-dogging on his red bike, June 2013.


While Kelly was away for the weekend visiting a friend, the kids and I had a couple of opportunities this past weekend to go for bike rides. This opened up an opportunity for me to try the kids on larger bikes. When we rode downtown for Artsplosure on Sunday, Hallie rode Kelly’s bike while Travis rode my mountain bike (I rode my road bike). Both kids crowed at how easy it was to ride the bigger bikes, leading me to conclude it was time to go bike shopping.

Yesterday afternoon, Kelly found a very nice Trek bike being sold on Craigslist. After some discussion, she fetched it and brought it home to present to Hallie. More bike talk ensued, with Travis getting eyes for making my mountain bike his. While I’m not yet ready to yield my bike to him, we did agree that it was time to part with his red sport bike.
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Mitochondria disease

The past few weeks have been so busy for me that I’m only now coming up for air. Going through my list of to do items that had been piling up, I chanced to put in a Google search in an effort to see what my New York illness episode potentially had to do with Gulf War Illness (GWI). A search for “gulf war” and “capillaries” brought me to an online announcement of a recent research study that links GWI to something called mitochrondria disease.

Reading about mitochondria disease was both a revelation and … well, a bit anticlimactic. Checking off the list of symptoms that matched what I’ve had it just seemed like well, of course you have mitochondria disease. While this does give me satisfaction in knowing what I have, simply having a name for what I’ve been suffering from doesn’t bring me any closer to a cure. But at least there are some strategies for mitigating it. I haven’t been officially diagnosed but I’m going in to see my doctor as soon as I can.
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