Ugh. Allergies. Not even a proper cold or other sickness that I can treat and get over when it’s run its course. No, this delay had to be because my body, plain and simple, hates me.

I don’t remember what all I did on Monday besides keep an eye out for the arrival of certain hardware upgrade options. (That capture card I mentioned in the previous update, for instance, or a monitor arm so I can start work on decluttering my desk.) Not my outdoor walk, though, not according to my run logs.

Thursday, though, I woke up in the middle of the night with a sharp pain in my left eye… the kind of pain that feels like an eyelash had landed in there and which I was later told was most likely an ocular migraine. (Yay, more types of migraines.) This in conjunction with sinus allergies made for a hard time seeing past some very watery eyes.

Now, I don’t get this type of pain what I would consider “frequently,” but I’ve had it often enough of late that I deemed it worth investing in one of those refrigerator/freezer gel eye masks. And normally what happens is I’ll stumble my way out to the kitchen to grab the eye mask, stumble right back to bed with it, and wear the mask for a few hours, and when I’m properly awake in the morning the pain is gone… or gone “enough” that my eyes are no longer streaming and it doesn’t stop me from going about my day.

This time, though, the pain did not go away by morning, and my eyes continued to water all through the next day. In fact, my eyes were watering so badly that I called in sick to work for the simple fact that I could not keep them open for more than a few seconds at a time (and then got a ride to Urgent Care so I could get it taken care in the hopes that I could get to work the next day). The cold air and lack of traffic on my road meant I was safe enough attempting my outdoor walk, but I was unable to do anything that required consistently watching what I was doing like run a cash register.

All of which is to say that once again, there is not only a delay in recordable footage but a delay in the actual monthly update. But now that the capture card etc has finally arrived, the next videos I record will be me finding out just how much using my computer instead of the TV changes my recording options… I look forward to at least being able to include a real-ish-time heart rate monitor in the footage, so my fingers are crossed that the capture card wasn’t a waste of money and/or doesn’t require a newer computer to do the job properly.

But as previously mentioned, I did get in one Zombies Run mission for the week.

This graphic actually represents my second attempt, done on Friday during one of the rare moments that my eyes and the weather cooperated with spending time outside.

The first attempt on Thursday started out normally enough despite my watery eyes… until I got to one end of my road, where I thought it was very odd that a mission lasting 0.7 miles had not progressed past the first story clip. I checked the app, noticed it claimed I had only gone about .14 miles (should’ve been near to half a mile) with an average pace of over 60 minutes per mile. Then, after far too much troubleshooting on some of the more complicated potential causes of the problem, I finally discovered the very simple fact that my tracking was set to “simulated running”… I’d forgotten that I’d set it to that some days before to check something and had never changed it back to GPS for an actual mission.

Oh, come Saturday morning my eyes were fine. A little more tired than normal, even a little sore like an overworked muscle, but normal insofar as being able to see to get anything done is concerned. (Well, “normal” for me, anyway; one of these days I might have to invest in sunglasses made specifically for allergies and/or light sensitivity and not just trust “darker lenses” to be good enough, and the kind I’m looking at is not cheap.)