04/10/21 Splits, Boules, Dex

The right thumb split is pretty much healed now,as long as I don't do anything stupid to open it up again. Wore a glove on it all the time at boules yesterday. The right middle finger one is a little less advanced, but at least no new ones have started. Despite some evidence that wearing a glove on that hand doesn't affect my boule-throwing significantly it just doesn't feel right so I continued to throw bare-handed, keeping that hand in a warm pocket the rest of the time. I think a small investment in hand warmers may be required to keep me going through the winter. The technology may well have improved since I last used them before I gave up fishing, and that was nearly ten years ago now.

Bowel management worked well yesterday, and I stayed off the sena overnight in the hope of being OK for Epping in the morning, when I expect I'll be hearing lots of stories about why they went down 3-13 in the Epping - Ongar challenge. I, of course, was at Tower playing in the Herts & Essex League for Tower 5.

We had a reasonable day for a new team, about 50:50 on points overall. Every team member had to drop out of one game and I chose to avoid Wethersfield as they had two recent ex-England internationals and I preferred to play against Tower 2 where at least I have some idea of the strengths and weaknesses of the opposition players.

There are a lot more petanque players around than one might think:

For a brief while, sunshine broke through:

Measuring. There was a lot of measuring.  I can't cope with the bending down required, so I leave it up to others:

A couple of little videos. They may look the same but they're not (two other members of my team throwing. Best viewed in full screen:

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and yours truly at the piste:

Hard to remember that my beard used to be ginger instead of snowy white. Tempus fugit...

Generally the dex sleeplessness isn't anything like as bad as it once was. It's either the reduced dose (20mg now as against 40mg back then) or my body getting used to it. Went to bed about 02:10 last night, woke up with that old familiar feeling at 05:30 so got up - no chance of sleeping another hour or two, just like old times. I think knowing that I have to be up for an early breakfast in order to get to Hanbury Gardens (Epping) by 10:00 has a lot to do with it. For some years now - many of them pre-myeloma - I've had an internal alarm that works pretty well when there's a real reason to get up early. Years ago I would sleep through anything, and often did. Those days are gone now, dex or not.