Shirk in Progress

Pain for the next four days. While the physio itself wasn't a problem, it appears that coupled with driving a manual gearbox (and the car around it, obviously) that's caused me issues with possibly overstretching the recommended mark at this point in the rehabilitation. The twinges are gone by the next morning but it's a worrying sign. I'm now giving serious thought to changing cars and picking up an automatic as this really can't continue for the year of recovery ahead.

I was reliably informed by my physio that this was definitely a Bad Thing (tm) and at this point in the cycle of the injury I'm at the highest risk of re-ruptuirng. If you read around the subject of a re-rupture while scar tissue is still present in quantity and blood flow isn't back again, it doesn't make for bedtime reading and scares the hell out of me. Consider the patience and effort put in since Feburary to get this far I'd be sad to see that lost, so currently taking the utmost care in all activities

Physio again and we've graduated from simply checking my progress to gym work. Table test yielded a large improvement in forward motion and up to nearly 8cm which is good going and I felt chuffed with that. With that progress shown, cue sessions on an exercise bike, treadmill with incline and the fearsome wobble board for some forty minutes. It appears my sense of balance is better than suspected, but my level of fitness has deteriorated to the point where a brisk ten minute walk uphill leaves me short of breath and feels like I've started smoking again. Deary me.

Listening to Disposable Teens by Marilyn Manson, and wanted to clarify one of the lyrics and scuttled across to a handful of lyric sites to cross-check. In the process I discovered the line "I've got a face that's made for violence and porn" which has been much loved by me and bellowed repeatedly in the car on the drive to work for years, is actually "I got a face that's made for violence upon" which is nowhere near as cool.

The original mishearing was a great contradiction or offered an interesting juxtaposition. Now I'm left with a disappointment and a vague feeling the song will never be quite the same again ... perhaps sometimes it's simply better to live in happy ignorance. This must be how all the Hendrix fans felt after mishearing "while I kiss this sky".

I've been remiss in my updates due to real life and work, so have finally caught up.

After a couple of weeks back in the proverbial saddle I've experienced some swelling and discomfort encountered during driving. A 15 mile drive in heavy traffic involving considerably time spent sitting on the clutch was a distressing experience and by the end of it, I really felt like the ankle was ready to pop again! Sharp stabbing pains are no friend of recovery and won't be doing that again, certainly not in the next few months.

Three week review with the physiotherapist to see how the foot has been doing with the blessing of movement. All told it was the most positive session I've had with any specialist since the injury, as the range of movement is almost back to normal. The "table test" was fun, requiring you to stand firstly with your good leg against the leg of a small table on a tiled floor and bend both legs at the knee to push the table back with the good leg. Seems easy enough, and managed 12cm before discomfort in the back of the ankle. Same test again but this time with the bad leg doing the pushing ... 4cm. That's a humbling experience after feeling you've made (pun intended) massive strides.

With that said, the movement is good enough that he gave me the go ahead to resume driving, albeit short distances. So for the first time since February I successfully drove myself to work, and darned good it felt too. It is strange that such a mundane activity can generate so much enjoyment, but you take the little victories whenever they come.

This pack of figures were responsible for getting me back into the Warhammer hobby when they were originally released some time in January 2008. They've been assembled and primed for around 15 months without receiving any further attention and considering that they and my Warbikes have been the stars of the show this state of affairs could no longer continue. So here's the first batch all painted up!

Several mistakes were made during assembly, prepping and painting of these figures and I hope to not repeat this errors when picking up a second pack next week (as I tend to run with 8-10 of these). Definitely dry fit the gun harnessess to the men and number them up so they don't get mixed up, as some of them are a surprisingly tight fit and you'll just end up ripping up the undercoat. Don't fit the heads until everything else has been put together and painted as it becomes far too fiddly getting detail to stand out, and ended up being a more frustrating process than one would have hoped. The fun part now will be to assemble the same five figures with the new pack, but make them sufficiently different whilst retaining coherency.

At this point the tally stands at ... 2009 Pledge. Purchased: 3. Completed: 21.

Four days after the Space Boot came off and I was discharged into the care of the physio team, we had the first review session and it was a mixture of both good and bad. The good news being that the foot appears to be healing as expected, and with no sign of pain or tenderness first thing in the morning it's time to get some simple movement back into the leg.

Many people aren't aware that the word physiotherapy is actually Latin for "hurts like hell". The bad news being that this seemingly simple process hurts. In essence the trick to rehabilitation is getting it back into everyday usage but gently to ensure nothing falls off or has the temerity to snap again. This is overextending on the dorsiflexion ... or "walking" as the cool kids refer to it and seems to be a lot tricker than my previously bendy self remembers it.

Every night is met with a reasonable degree of swelling around the ankle and base of the tendon repair, but thankfully each morning it's done down again and ready to repeat the process. In the event it does stiffen, a dose of very warm/hot (but not boiling) water is placed on a flannel and then I just wrap it around the ankle until it relaxes a little. My natural instinct with swelling is to put cold on it, but it's caused by the blood flow thickening and the heat is designed to keep it moving as expected.

Disappoingly, they've said as a rule of thumb that it'll be nine to twelve months before I can play squash again, six months before I'm allowed back onto a cross-trainer machine, at least two months before swimming can commence, and a month before they'll even consider the potential for me to start driving my manual car again. Gutted.

I was given one simple exercise to repeat daily, which is this; sit flat on the floor with the legs stretched out, use a towel to bend my foot toward me (think a 45 degree angle) then use my muscle strength to try and push it back to the default 90 degree position and hold that stretch for 20 seconds. Repeat this for about ten minutes, then do it again but with the knee bent. This execercises all the muscles in the leg that will have suffered the most during two months of incarceration. More painful than it sounds.

Good old Mekboy. This is one of the very, very old Orks saved from my clearouts and repainted in a rush to a tabletop standard to be used as either a standard Boy or as a makeweight in a unit of Burnas should they tickle my fancy.

Not over the moon with the job I've done on him really, and there's a chance he may be stripped down in the future and looked after properly. The non-black base colour is horrible and that'll be avoided in the future. To distinguish between units I'll pop removeable colour markings on them as and when it becomes necessary. The stump of a right arm was more of a trial and error session trying to mix up blood and rust on the tank underneath his arm, but it all seems to get lost as a single amalgamous mass without clear distinction.

At this point the tally stands at ... 2009 Pledge. Purchased: 3. Completed: 16. While it won't be winning any awards in the near future, it's wonderful to finally have this many figures painted up and ready to play ... and that is the crucial aim of the whole project.

It was very politely pointed out to me that while there was reference to a Land Raider in the groupshot from earlier in the week, no previous pictures of it had been put up here. It's probably time to remedy that, so here he is. Originally the project was started out as a perfectly normal transport for an Ultramarines army I started building a good six years ago, but when the hobby was boxed up and forgotten, so was the ambition to build Smurf Force One. With the resurgence of interest in Orks last year, it struck me as a perfect candidate for converting into a Looted Vehicle and in friendly games being available as a replacement Trukk or Battlewagon.

The Ork on the gun is wearing a Hawk Lords shoulder pad as a nod to another of my regular gaming opponents. It's a recurring theme through some of the characterful units in the army to sneak in a little reference to my friends' armies for giggles.

Taking multiple elements from both the Ork Battleforce box, the bitz box, wire mesh, balsa wood, several glasses of medicinal Kronenbourg and the assistance of Cylindric with the crazy "I wonder what happens if ..." approach to building models and we present the first figure to be completed in my current Ork army. It's nowhere near perfect, some of the colours are really rough, but there's a lovely honesty about the whole thing. If I were more given to complimentary terms, it would most likely be referred to as "rustic", but we'll opt for merely saying it's turned out better than hoped for and sits proudly on the desk.