Gratitude Monday - The Pot-Bellied Slump Edition

The pain in my leg is almost gone and I have social media to thank for it.
An ad for a video course or somesuch and free ebook appeared in my FaceBook news feed. Normally I'd ignore it, but "leg pain" caught my eye so I read a bit.
After clicking around I learned about the psoas muscles and how they need to be engaged to walk properly without assorted pains.
In short we need to stand the way we were told to when we were young, shoulders back, chest out, tummy tucked. The latter should actually read the pelvis needs to be flat, but you get the idea.

 A few years ago I pulled hamstring, or so I thought. It never really did heal and I'd limp a bit after sitting awhile.
I've made an effort to stand properly and sit properly, something I never did. I slump. When one slumps one gets a pot belly.
Surprisingly, standing and sitting properly with the psoas muscles engaged feels really good.
The leg pain is reduced considerably, and best of all the stomach and abdomen muscles that were hurting me when I stood too long is all but cured.
I am grateful I found this ad, happy I was intrigued enough to look around, and beside myself that merely changing my posture has led to all this improvement.

I'm not sure engaged is the right word to use, but it gets my point across.
I must note this is anecdotal to me. In no way am I dispensing advice, medical or otherwise.
There's still a far way to go. The stance does not come naturally and it only hides the belly a bit.
But hey, it's a start, and that's good enough for now.

Gratitude Monday -- Saved by Social Media

It's almost Halloween. What's better than a black cat? Two of them!

I am grateful for this blog and for Facebook. Without them many of my photos be gone forever.
Last January we lost the hard drive. Nothing was recoverable. Anything that wasn't anywhere else lived only in my memory.
All big trip photos get backed up right away. Most of my manuscripts are in hardcopy and all were on some type of disk.
This left some general pictures, camping trips, scenics, some playing around on the camera that I did with my Yellowstone photographs.
It hurt, but I could live with it. I'd certainly learned my lesson as regards backing up everything.
About a week ago I went looking for a photo from our Cuba trip to post on Friday.
Nothing.
I swore I backed it up on a flash drive.
It wasn't there.
I further swore I had it on disk.
It wasn't there either.
That said, I will still swear to it.
Blogger has the pics from the blog on a file one can get at by going to the post a picture feature. I saved more than 400 of them to my computer the other day. 
I wish it had all of them, but I can recall some photos I've posted that were not there. The two I can think of were scans of prints so I won't be worrying.
For as happy as I am to have them, they've lost a few steps in quality. They get fuzzy when enlarged to a decent size.
I'm still grateful to have them.

FaceBook, for as much as I may grumble, will send a download of everything.  I am so grateful for this as it was easy to put them on to my computer once I sorted out what to do.
It was nerve-wracking, I admit. It comes in a zipped file which means nothing to me.
I thought I was going to have to open each one --more than 1200--and save it.
Did I want to extract the contents?
Maybe.
I tried one.
It opened in my photo file with no problem.
I swallowed hard and did the whole file.
Success.
Exhale.
They blow up fine.
I'd put many of my travel pics on FaceBook including what appears to be all my Cuba photos.
They've been backed up on to an external hard drive and a flash drive with the notation they are rescues as opposed to originals. I want to be able to tell the difference when I fire up one of those drives and find my original Cuba files waiting.