Yesterday was a busy day for a Thursday (our Saturday). I went shopping in the morning for some parts to fix my scooter. I finally decided the lock assembly was broken and just wasn't going to work, so the solution that came to the top of the list was to bypass the switch and install a simple toggle switch to turn it off and on. So my friend David and I went to find a switch, wire, connectors, etc.
Had a good trip to the Souks in a nearby town called Khobar. Like many U.S. cities with urban sprawl, the primary city here is Dammam, and there are many many suburb areas, like Khobar Dhahran, where I am. The Souks are a series of small shops. I had pictured an open air market, but that's not right. It is street after narrow street of shops, many of them one room, most of them specializing in one thing or another. And they are clustered by specialty. There is a large area of several blocks with hardware and building supplies. Another area is clothing. Another is jewelry - most of it cheap, gaudy, flashy stuff, but a few seem to have the genuine article (yes honey, I'll be back to those). :)
One of the shops we walked past, which neither of us had noticed before, was a locksmith. Good to know. So we got back to the camp and worked on the scooter to try and bypass the lock. Sadly, we didn't get very far before realizing the wiring was much more complex than we thought and bypassing the switch wasn't going to work. But we were able to remove the lock assembly. And then found that we could remove the actual switch from the bottom of the lock assembly and actuate it by hand. Amazingly, after sitting for 6 months, there was still juice in the battery. And no, it didn't start (that would have been too fantastic!), but the starter works!
So hopefully later this afternoon I will go back the recently found locksmith , whose window had HONDA in big letters, and see if he can get the lock to work! If he can, I'll be able to just reinstall it and put it all back together, and all I have to do is get the engine to fire. David is an engine guy, though, and pretty confident we can get this to work.
So in my room I have a bed, a "lounging" chair by the window, a small desk, a mini-fridge and a simple wooden desk chair. Last night I stayed up working on things until I just couldn't sit in the desk chair any more. I also have a nice flat screen TV in my room. I've had it on a total of maybe 45 minutes since I've been here - there's no TV schedule available, 90% of the channels are in Arabic, and I just have too many things to do to sit and flip through the English language channels in case there is something interesting in. Last night though, I thought I'd turn on the TV for a while to help me stay awake cause I hoped to hear from Dana before going to bed - she'd been out running errands getting ready to go shoot a wedding with Darby this weekend in the Little Rock area.
So I was on the bad with my back against the wall, legs stretched out with the left ankle crossed over the right one. I'd found a very interesting show on BBC about the bronze age. If felt like time to shift foot position, you know, like we've all done 10,000 times this month. As my left leg came up though something went pop on top of my ankle - not really in the ankle though - lower than that but above the foot. Then my ankle wanted to stay right there. It moved fine if I moved it in the direction to point my toes, but if I tried to move it the other way, like to walk and stuff, it objected all the way up to my knee. Crazy.
So I sat for about 45 minutes trying to stretch it, flex it, rub it, relax it, anything I could to move it - no good. Then I had to go to the bathroom and had to slide down to the end of the bed, use the chair back to stand up, and then slide it in front of me like a walker to get the 4 feet to the bathroom and back.They have a fine hospital here in camp, with a reportedly very good emergency room, but this is not something I wanted to test personally, so I took an advil and about that time Dana called and we got to have a nice talk. (As an aside, God, thank you for the Skype team who have made such wonderful communication with home possible!!)
Now it was very late but it is always worth it to get to talk with my sweetheart, but time for bed and I had to figure out how to get this foot under the covers. And yes, I sleep under sheet and blanket - gotta have the layers because the thermostat is in degrees C, which means there's nearly a 5 degree temperature change before the AC comes on or goes off again, so every night is all off, pull up sheet, then pull up blanket shivering, then reverse the layers by morning because the AC hasn't come on for 4 hours and the room is warm and stuffy again! But I digress. So I took a naprosyn tablet, rubbed and massaged my ankle as best I could, and told it to be good and be better in the morning. Tried sliding the left foot under the covers but it was too painful to push with it, so used my right foot to raise covers up, then gingerly worked left foot down until I could turn on my side and let it rest flat, and fell asleep.
Woke up three hours later and it felt the same. Went back to sleep and woke again when the alarm went off, foot still didn't want to move to walking position, so I rolled over and dozed off again (which I almost never do). Woke an hour and a half later and gave my foot an exploratory wiggle and it moved! It was sore, and stiff, but it moved ok. Put feet on ground and it didn't hurt - so far so good. Stood up successfully, and so far doing ok with it. Can walk with short steps, so I won't be going at my normal, aggressive pace, but that's fine. My leg is stiff and sore all the way to my knee, but it's working and that's a win!!
There's a bus to Khobar in two hours, so I'll see how it's doing by then. The locksmith isn't very far from the bus stop, so if I take it slow and easy I should be ok. It just feels like it would be better to use it gently than to put it up, which is where the problem started. Lesson learned - no TV for me!!
Had a good trip to the Souks in a nearby town called Khobar. Like many U.S. cities with urban sprawl, the primary city here is Dammam, and there are many many suburb areas, like Khobar Dhahran, where I am. The Souks are a series of small shops. I had pictured an open air market, but that's not right. It is street after narrow street of shops, many of them one room, most of them specializing in one thing or another. And they are clustered by specialty. There is a large area of several blocks with hardware and building supplies. Another area is clothing. Another is jewelry - most of it cheap, gaudy, flashy stuff, but a few seem to have the genuine article (yes honey, I'll be back to those). :)
One of the shops we walked past, which neither of us had noticed before, was a locksmith. Good to know. So we got back to the camp and worked on the scooter to try and bypass the lock. Sadly, we didn't get very far before realizing the wiring was much more complex than we thought and bypassing the switch wasn't going to work. But we were able to remove the lock assembly. And then found that we could remove the actual switch from the bottom of the lock assembly and actuate it by hand. Amazingly, after sitting for 6 months, there was still juice in the battery. And no, it didn't start (that would have been too fantastic!), but the starter works!
So hopefully later this afternoon I will go back the recently found locksmith , whose window had HONDA in big letters, and see if he can get the lock to work! If he can, I'll be able to just reinstall it and put it all back together, and all I have to do is get the engine to fire. David is an engine guy, though, and pretty confident we can get this to work.
So in my room I have a bed, a "lounging" chair by the window, a small desk, a mini-fridge and a simple wooden desk chair. Last night I stayed up working on things until I just couldn't sit in the desk chair any more. I also have a nice flat screen TV in my room. I've had it on a total of maybe 45 minutes since I've been here - there's no TV schedule available, 90% of the channels are in Arabic, and I just have too many things to do to sit and flip through the English language channels in case there is something interesting in. Last night though, I thought I'd turn on the TV for a while to help me stay awake cause I hoped to hear from Dana before going to bed - she'd been out running errands getting ready to go shoot a wedding with Darby this weekend in the Little Rock area.
So I was on the bad with my back against the wall, legs stretched out with the left ankle crossed over the right one. I'd found a very interesting show on BBC about the bronze age. If felt like time to shift foot position, you know, like we've all done 10,000 times this month. As my left leg came up though something went pop on top of my ankle - not really in the ankle though - lower than that but above the foot. Then my ankle wanted to stay right there. It moved fine if I moved it in the direction to point my toes, but if I tried to move it the other way, like to walk and stuff, it objected all the way up to my knee. Crazy.
So I sat for about 45 minutes trying to stretch it, flex it, rub it, relax it, anything I could to move it - no good. Then I had to go to the bathroom and had to slide down to the end of the bed, use the chair back to stand up, and then slide it in front of me like a walker to get the 4 feet to the bathroom and back.They have a fine hospital here in camp, with a reportedly very good emergency room, but this is not something I wanted to test personally, so I took an advil and about that time Dana called and we got to have a nice talk. (As an aside, God, thank you for the Skype team who have made such wonderful communication with home possible!!)
Now it was very late but it is always worth it to get to talk with my sweetheart, but time for bed and I had to figure out how to get this foot under the covers. And yes, I sleep under sheet and blanket - gotta have the layers because the thermostat is in degrees C, which means there's nearly a 5 degree temperature change before the AC comes on or goes off again, so every night is all off, pull up sheet, then pull up blanket shivering, then reverse the layers by morning because the AC hasn't come on for 4 hours and the room is warm and stuffy again! But I digress. So I took a naprosyn tablet, rubbed and massaged my ankle as best I could, and told it to be good and be better in the morning. Tried sliding the left foot under the covers but it was too painful to push with it, so used my right foot to raise covers up, then gingerly worked left foot down until I could turn on my side and let it rest flat, and fell asleep.
Woke up three hours later and it felt the same. Went back to sleep and woke again when the alarm went off, foot still didn't want to move to walking position, so I rolled over and dozed off again (which I almost never do). Woke an hour and a half later and gave my foot an exploratory wiggle and it moved! It was sore, and stiff, but it moved ok. Put feet on ground and it didn't hurt - so far so good. Stood up successfully, and so far doing ok with it. Can walk with short steps, so I won't be going at my normal, aggressive pace, but that's fine. My leg is stiff and sore all the way to my knee, but it's working and that's a win!!
There's a bus to Khobar in two hours, so I'll see how it's doing by then. The locksmith isn't very far from the bus stop, so if I take it slow and easy I should be ok. It just feels like it would be better to use it gently than to put it up, which is where the problem started. Lesson learned - no TV for me!!
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