This Frankenstein-like doozy’s from the surgery to rebuild a destroyed condyle after getting run down by a car in a crosswalk while I was cycling home from work. Last thing I saw in the headlight glare as the guy ran the red-light at speed was the shadow of a head popping up from the wheel. My assumption is the asshole was on his phone. Hit and run of course.

The impact also broke my pelvis, snapped my left femur, broke my left tibia and fibula into 7 major pieces and a lot more smaller bits. It’s the right thigh’s condyle at the knee that still poses the most problems though—there’s rather a lot of scar tissue I’m still working on as I try to get full range of motion back into it. The knee’s got about 19 pins and screws and a plate pulling the bone confetti back together. Four bolts through the pelvis, two rods running the length of the left leg, upper and lower, along with stabilizing screws at either end of each rod makes about 36 titanium implants overall.

Was in a wheelchair from January to March of 2024, then a walker until May, then used a cane until September. Was back on the rebuilt bike in December and spent the past year riding semi-regularly, even making jaunts up to 60 miles. Been a long, long, slog.

Yeah it’s a bar soap, commonly used for both skin and hair.

Aleppo Soap

If you like the weird scent of coal tar—I’m not judging, I do too—you might also like pine tar soap. Pine tar serves much the same function in soaps as coal tar, so that’s a bonus as well.

It’s clearly a scent derived from pines, not coal, but it appeals to my nose in much the same way. They’re both in the same family of weirdness.

Aleppo soap finally resolved it for me after years of fighting the yo-yo effects of medicated shampoos. It’s just an old hard Castile soap made using olive and laurel tree oils. Laurel tee oil is apparently pretty good for skin, and works fine to clean your hair.

I don’t go in for woo, but it is kinda fun to be using a soap recipe that goes back a couple thousand years. Mileage may vary of course, but I’ve found it to work extremely well, and as a bonus has a pleasantly neutral smell—herbal as you might expect. 20% or so blends of laurel tree oil seem to do the trick.

If you’re out bike touring, KOAs almost always have spots set aside for cyclists to camp. Both KOAs and state parks are really useful for showers and clothes washing. Was genuinely surprised how many state parks had both when I toured across the U.S.

If you’re in Washington state, the state parks are legally required to find room for you to camp if you rolll up on a bike and they’re otherwise full.

Haha, I’ve been using old.lemmy.world for so long I’d forgotten I even had the Space Needle profile on my account. Was truly puzzled for a minute.

“How do they know I’m in Seattle? Oh, yeah.”

Generation X here.