Long story short, I have been busy doing things and haven’t had the spoons or time to write about it, but I really wanted to. Weather has been “Texas winter” as in bouncing between extremes of cold and heat from low 80s Tuesday to low 20s with freezing drizzle Wednesday, the day I had an appointment with my brain doctor. So the doctor’s office was closed but I had a televisit over the phone, and the doctor is disturbed about my depression, which we can’t do anything about until I go on Medicare and can see a therapist, and my electrolytes which requires an in-person visit to draw blood to test my levels. We know I need to supplement my magnesium, but how much we don’t know without testing. Also I need to take the nerve meds at dinner to deal with leg twitching before I go to bed at night. Leg twitches are annoying but not dangerous in themselves, but more of a warning that other things may not be operating within tolerances. I’m basically going from 300 mg to 600 mg of the Gabapentin per day, and the pharmacy has been sent prescriptions for a 6 month supply, basically 360 pills.
In other news the race at Daytona was excellent, some equipment and parts failures that were concerning due to the lack of experience with the Gen 7 (or is that Gen7?) including wheel failures either from the lug nut not being tight enough, or the wheel not seating firmly against the hub even though the nut was TIGHT. The Penske cars have been cleaning up the wheel machining to seat square against the hub, but NASCAR confiscated 2 sets of wheels to see if Penske exceeded safety margins (and rule limits) during the “cleanup”. From what I took from the press release they took a few thousandths of an inch out of the socket for the drive pins and the ID of the pilot hole that centers everything on the hub, plus all the coatings in the area of the hub seat so that there was nothing between the metal of the wheel and the metals of the hub.
My car is also not proceeding as planned, and the lack of progress is starting to make me angry as in “Mad Scientist” angry. Reminder if you want to see progress on the Sprint-T there is a link to my Ko-Fi account on the front page of the blog and I promise to use the money to buy more parts for the car and not waste it on medical bills or food.😌No guarantees about not buying copious amounts of gourmet-quality dark chocolate which (for me) is both food and medicine. More on that later. Anywho, I still need an engine and transmission that I need to know the weight of within a few pounds to know how far to the right I need to mount them for balance as opposed to how far to the right to mount them so my feet fit between the bellhousing and the inside of the body. Hopefully the “room for feet” distance is less than the “balance left to right” distance, or I’ll have other problems down the line.
Back to the dark chocolate. Back a little over a decade ago I was part of a study on the effects of really dark (basically the stuff they use in baking without the sugar) chocolate on the body, and let me tell you if it was a drug it would be a miracle drug: it lowers systolic BP 5-10 points, it reduced the effects of stress beyond blood pressure, it’s an effective antidepressant. Any kind of real, botanical (as opposed to synthetic flavoring) chocolate can do that, but the closer to pure unsweetened chocolate liquor you get, the greater the effects and fewer the side effects like zits and weight gain. I weighed about 210 pounds back then so my dose was about 3 ounces a day of bitter chocolate or I think 6 ounces of milk chocolate, fortunately I like the bitter chocolate. If there was any drawback to using dark chocolate as a drug it’s the dose needed to see results, usually drugs are prescribed in milligrams, not ounces, and are taken in tiny pills, not in huge blocks. On the other hand the overdose limit is in the tens of pounds range , and it’s in the GRAS list of substances you can put in your body as food. I’ll leave it for the reader to calculate how much chocolate they would need to die happy, but let me just say a toxic amount of chocolate would make you so sick to your stomach that you would not “die happy”.
One more reminder that I have a Ko-Fi account you can donate through at the bottom of the sidebar to the right and I’ll put this one to bed.
Witch on a Bicycle 