A knitting non-update

You may have noticed the extreme lack of knitting update on the blog in the past two months.

With good reason. There has been no knitting.

I’ve been battling elbow and forearm pain for a few months, which started when I was knitting those two bulky sweaters in a row earlier this year, and got aggravated due to the house remodeling we’re doing. (Note: ripping shake shingles off walls and pulling nails out of wood is not a good thing for your elbow.)

Home treatment wasn’t working too well, so I finally sucked it up and went to see a doctor. Turns out I have some tears. He gave me some stretches and exercises to do, and a prescription for physical therapy. I’m a couple of weeks into it, and it does seem to be helping. I still have some pain and tenderness, but not nearly as much.

Since I spend a lot of time at the computer, one thing that my doctor suggested was using an ergonomic “vertical” mouse. Vertical mice are designed so that you use them with your hand rotated 90 degrees upward, as if you’re shaking hands.  He said they were quite expensive (around $100), and the Evoluent brand mice are indeed close to that, but I found an Anker vertical ergonomic optical USB wired mouse on Amazon that had pretty good reviews and was only $15. Unfortunately, it looks like it’s not currently available, so I guess it was good I snagged it when I did.

There’s a wireless version, though, that’s still pretty well priced at around $30. I didn’t want to deal with the batteries, which is why I went with the wired model.

I got the new mouse the other day, and it seems pretty nice. It isn’t quite as vertical as the Evoluent mouse, but it seemed like a cheap way to see how I like it. But that review will have to wait, since for now, I’ve gotten pretty used to mousing with my left hand. I think I’ll stick with the left-handed mouse technique until my arm is closer to normal. But from just playing with it for a little while, I think I’ll like it.