‘Staying in here’: What to do when a ‘rainy day’ turns into months

So I love the out­doors, this much is obvi­ous. Whether you’re read­ing my blog for the first time, or have been hang­ing around for a while, I think it’s safe to assume with a blog called Get­ting Out There that my hap­pi­ness in life involves being outside.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, in late Novem­ber 2020 I injured my spine, her­ni­at­ing my L5/S1 disc. I’ve suf­fered this injury before, ‘slip­ping’ the same disc back in late 2017, and after eight months of excru­ci­at­ing pain and a relent­less goose chase caused by med­ical incom­pe­tence and indif­fer­ence — a whole oth­er sto­ry alto­geth­er! —  I final­ly had my back oper­at­ed on by a won­der­ful­ly skilled and very kind neu­ro­sur­geon in June 2018. Since then I’ve felt great, and have been very care­ful in not lift­ing any­thing heavy and watch­ing my pos­ture, and I’ve been tak­ing clin­i­cal pilates class­es for over a year to build up my core strength. Despite these pre­cau­tions and pre­ven­ta­tive mea­sures, I’ve hurt myself again and now face a long wait to be seen by the same sur­geon, due in part to wait­ing lists caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

I can’t real­ly walk, or even sit for more than 15–20 min­utes at a time, so I’m most­ly stuck in bed until at least 24 March (my con­sul­ta­tion appoint­ment with the sur­geon). Not want­i­ng to sink into the men­tal health abyss that I faced in 2018, I’ve tak­en a bit more of a proac­tive approach this time around, which leads me to the top­ic of this post: how to pass the time when stuck inside. It’s not just the sit­u­a­tion of my injury that holds rel­e­vance to this top­ic, one might also be stuck inside at the moment due to COVID-19 lock­downs, or oth­er ill­ness or sit­u­a­tions. Impor­tant to men­tion how­ev­er: this is a list of things I’ve done/am doing to pass the time in bed, whilst sore. There are a few mil­lion posts about cook­ing sour­dough in lock­down, this isn’t one of them.

Here are some of the ways I’ve passed the time. I’ll be com­ing back over the next few weeks to add to this list wher­ev­er rel­e­vant. In the mean­time, if you’ve got some great ideas/advice about activ­i­ties one can do from bed (keep it clean! ?) please leave a com­ment below.

Bingeing Netflix

Okay, I’m going to start out hon­est­ly, and admit to hav­ing binged a lot of stream­ing ser­vices, pri­mar­i­ly Net­flix. Par­tic­u­lar­ly over the Christ­mas peri­od, before I realised just how long I was going to be bedrid­den for, I rewatched the entire series runs of Deep Space Nine and Friends, and watched a few shows I had­n’t seen before, the best of which were Still Game and Dis­en­chant­ment.

Although cer­tain­ly not healthy, watch­ing some­thing enter­tain­ing helps some­times to get the mind off the pain.

Learning French

With our long-planned bike tour­ing trip from Aus­tria to France now post­poned for a few years by the ‘rona, I now have the time to learn some Français before going. I down­loaded an online app called Duolin­go, which is avail­able both as a web brows­er app and a smart­phone app (iOS, Android, etc.). Whilst it has some lim­i­ta­tions, I cer­tain­ly plan to expand my learn­ing beyond Duolin­go once I’m up and about again. The men­tal health ben­e­fits of learn­ing French through the app has been two-fold — not only am I active­ly engag­ing my brain and learn­ing some­thing new, but it’s a pos­i­tive way to burn some time. In just my first three days of usage I spent six hours and 27 min­utes on Duolingo!

J’apprends à par­ler français! Je va trés bien.

Working on my blog

One of the best aspects of being a lover of the out­doors who’s also a rabid geek is that I derive as much enjoy­ment out of main­tain­ing this blog as I do from the activities/things I’m blog­ging about. Now that I’m forced into bed, I have plen­ty of time for site main­te­nance. Over the past few weeks I’ve cleanup some posts, worked on some bet­ter typog­ra­phy and appear­ance issues, updat­ed plu­g­ins and wrote some cus­tomi­sa­tions in my own plu­g­in. I’ve also been work­ing on some upcom­ing blog post ideas and con­cepts for when I do get back on my bike and on the rivers.

Updating my professional resumé

Now that I’ve fin­ished my degree (late Decem­ber 2020) I’ve been updat­ing my resumé to reflect my new edu­ca­tion achieve­ments, as well as tak­ing this time to refresh the over­all lay­out and appear­ance of the print­ed ver­sion. Like this blog — my online resumé is actu­al­ly a sub­do­main of this site — I’ve tak­en the time to work out some site bugs and bet­ter HTML markup etc. as well as line up some plu­g­in mod­i­fi­ca­tions and port­fo­lio fea­tures into the pipeline for the future.

Reading a book

This one seems so obvi­ous that I was shocked when I realised just how long it had been since I’d read a good book dur­ing the day. As a young laid-back teenag­er I’d love to just curl up on the bed all day with a book and get lost in its pages. As a busy father, work­ing, study­ing and look­ing after my chil­dren has tak­en up most of my day­light hours in recent years and my read­ing has been lim­it­ed to an hour or so before sleep in the evenings.

I’ve picked up a copy of Dark Emu by Bruce Pas­coe. I’ve read so much about it and its impact, am look­ing for­ward to it!

Creating a WordPress plugin

Maybe it’s just bore­dom, but I had an idea for a Word­Press plu­g­in around the top­ic of men­tal health, that I’m inves­ti­gat­ing and devel­op­ing the frame­work for at the moment. I haven’t attempt­ed a pub­­licly-dis­­trib­ut­ed plu­g­in before so it will be an inter­est­ing lit­tle project. More to come on this soon, hopefully…