Sal's

My tennis leg

2026-05-27T00:00:00Z

I got “tennis leg” two days ago. Tennis leg is an acute strain of the large calf muscle. I found some other guy detailing is journey with it, and that was helpful to me, so I figured I’d do the same. I’ll update this as things progress.

This post will probably be boring unless you’re interested in this specific injury.

Day zero

I’m playing tennis! I’m at an adult drills session with my wife, and while I’ve been hitting balls with my family here and there, this is the first time I’ve actually been trying to win points against anyone since I played competitively 25 years ago. I’m having a blast, but my body is not used to it.

I’m at the baseline, and an opponent hits a short ball. I lunge forward to rush the net, and suddenly it feels like someone punched me in the back of the calf. My immediate thought is that someone whacked a ball super hard and it hit me there. I turn around thinking, “Who did that?” But no one is behind me. And now I can barely walk.

I limp off the court, hoping it’s nothing, but soon I realize something significant must’ve happened. A quick web search on my phone tells me this is a classic case of an acute calf strain (a muscle tear), also known as tennis leg. Quite common in men over 40 who work desk jobs and suddenly try to be athletes again. Hey, that’s me!

I hobble to the front desk and ask for ice, and I spend the rest of the session icing and elevating it. My wife checks on me and says we should go home, but I insisted she stay and finish the session. I was super bummed I had to quit and didn’t want her to lose out too.

It’s very painful to walk, and It’s quite painful even when resting, maybe a six or seven out of ten on the pain scale.

When we get home, I have my wife do the Thompson Test to check if the Achilles is also torn. The test suggests it’s not. I also book a doc appointment for the next morning (ZoomCare) to get a professional’s opinion. If the Achilles is torn, it may require urgent surgery to avoid permanent damage.

I sleep okay that night, but I have to keep my leg elevated, and even then the pain is enough to be distracting.

Day one

I wake up with much less pain while lying in bed. That’s a good sign. But moving around still hurts a lot. I’m heavily dependent on crutches all day.

I ice and take ibuprofen. The ZoomCare doc confirmed the Achilles seems fine. Phew.

I try to work, but I’m feeling groggy and dejected. I don’t get much done.

Day two

More progress! Pretty much no pain while resting. I start the day with crutches, but soon realize I can walk without much pain as long as I keep my leg bent just so. I’m aggressively limping, but at least I can use my hands again.

If I accidentally straighten my leg too much and put weight on it, there’s a flash of searing pain. It reminds of the Fellowship of the Ring movie when Gandalf touches the ring.

I’m a little less useless around the house, at least cleaning up after myself and making dinner for the kids while my wife is out.

My head is more in the game at work.

I sit down to write this blog post before bed.

Day three

Zero pain when resting, but still limping carefully. My calf still feels swollen and right. Still get flashes of Sauron pain if I’m not careful. I iced in the afternoon and it felt like that helped.

Got a good amount done at work. I don’t feel fatigued anymore.

Day four

As of 10 a.m.:

My gait feels a little closer to normal. I don’t feel any need for crutches or a walking boot anymore.

The Sauron flashes still happen but are less intense. I’m back on my treadmill, going slowly and carefully, but it feels okay!

I get the sense that soon it will feel good to stretch my calf instead of horrifying.

Freedom units

2026-05-26T00:00:00Z

Our trip to Italy made me once again wonder with a tinge of frustration why the U.S. doesn’t use the metric system. Well, I finally got around to looking this up, and it turns out things could have been different!

As NPR reports, Thomas Jefferson thought the metric system was “was just what America needed.” He wrote to a French scientist friend of his, asking him to bring the system to the States. Unfortunately, the scientist’s ship hit a storm and blew down into the Caribbean, where it was captured by pirates. The scientist eventually died in captivity.

There were subsequent efforts to standardize on the metric system in the States, but the people were already too used to Imperial for behavior to change. “So,” NPR concludes, “for now, we’re stuck with Quarter Pounders and 9-pound hammers.”

Le sigh.

Oregon coast

2026-05-24T00:00:00Z

It was supposed to be overcast all weekend, but we got lucky. Beautiful out here.

Fixing my footnote superscript styling

2026-05-23T00:00:00Z

Thanks to Chris for his post, Superscript and Subscript Line Heights, which helped me fix my busted footnote superscript styling.

Here’s an example of what my blog looked like a few hours ago:

See how the space between the first and second lines is wonky due to the footnote superscript? This was the direct fix of that problem:

sub, sup {
  line-height: 0;
}

Chris gave me that fix, and he digs into some more styling polish that I want to revisit as soon as I have some more minutes.

Thanks again, Chris!

My remote blogging workflow

2026-05-21T00:00:00Z

I wrote earlier about reworking my blog so that I can manage it remotely over SSH. Here’s an update on that.

TLDR: success!

Connecting

I use Zed’s Remote Development to edit my blog content and run git commands over SSH. It works really well.

To get it working, I defined the SSH connection to my home server (a Mac Mini) in Zed’s settings like so:

"ssh_connections": [
  {
    "nickname": "blog",
    // `mini.jump` is defined in ~/.ssh/config
    "host": "mini.jump",
    "args": [],
    "projects": [
      { "paths": ["~/repos/sal/blog-11ty"] }
    ],
    // built-in port forwarding!
    "port_forwards": [{ "local_port": 8080, "remote_port": 8080 }]
  }
]

This does a couple cool things. First, when I run Zed’s open-remote dialog (Ctrl-Cmd-O), my blog project shows up as an option. When I select it, Zed manages SSH behind the scenes and gives me a workspace that feels more or less like I’m editing my blog locally. When I open Zed’s terminal, for example, it’s SSH’d into the remote host and in the blog path. Sweet.

Second, when I open the project, Zed starts forwarding port 8080 from my home server to my local machine. That means when I run npm run start to launch the 11ty dev server on the remote machine, I can go to localhost:8080 on my local machine and see my blog. With live reloading!

Best of all, it was easy to get working. No gotchas or head scratching. I was thinking there’s no way this port-forwarding thing is just going to work this easily. But it did!

You can also get this working in other ways, too. For example, before I realized I can do all of the above in the JSON config, I was doing it in the terminal:

# create a Zed project connected to my home server
zed ssh://mini.jump/~/path/to/blog

# start port forwarding
ssh -N -L 8080:localhost:8080 mini.jump

If you’re curious how the SSH config works, I’ll briefly explain.

When I’m away from home, I SSH into the Mac Mini sitting on my home-office desk via a jump server. I chose a VM in OCI as my jump box because OCI’s free tier seems to have a good rep, but any VM that can run Tailscale should do. (The VM connects to my home server via Tailscale.) When I’m home, on the other hand, I connect to my home server directly via the local network.

Meanwhile, in ~/.ssh/config, I have hosts defined for both scenarios: connecting over the public internet using my jump box (mini.jump), and connecting over my LAN when I’m in my house (mini.lan):

Host mini.jump
  Hostname 
  User 
  ProxyJump 

Host mini.lan
  Hostname 
  User

ProxyJump is the config line that makes the jump happen. When I run ssh mini.jump, it routes me directly onto my Mini. Pretty cool.

Writing

I use iA Writer if I want to start a new post with no fuss. It’s fast and peaceful. I can use it on my iPhone, iPad, and Macbooks, and they all stay in sync via iCloud.

Once a post is taking shape or I feel like using Vim mode, I move it into my blog’s git repo and continue writing using Zed. Then I can start previewing the post on the local 11ty dev server.

I do most of my pre-publish writing in a git branch called draft. In the Cloudflare Pages config, I disabled builds for non-main branches, so I can commit and push freely to the draft branch without triggering any Cloudflare jobs. This is how I sync my repo’s drafts between computers (mainly between my Mac Mini and Macbook Air).

Publishing

When I’m ready to publish, I remove draft: true from my frontmatter and make my final git commits. I typically use either lazygit or Zed’s git UI for these commits.

Then I do something like this:

git checkout main
git merge draft

# one more round of previewing
npm run start

# to trigger the publish build:
git push

About 60 seconds later, the changes should be live on my site. I double check them and call it good!

Closing thoughts

My primary goal in moving my blog was to find a writing and publishing workflow that works end-to-end over SSH. Mission accomplished! I’m super impressed how well Zed’s remote-dev feature works for my use case.

I was confident out of the gate that 11ty, Gitlab, and Cloudflare would all do what I wanted once I figured them out. I’ve been down similar roads before.^[1] But I wasn’t sure if it’d be comfortable or fun to work the rig over SSH. Zed made it so.

To someone unfamiliar with git and such, all of this may seem highly convoluted compared to just using a CMS like Bear Blog or Wordpress. And … yep, you’re right.

As I’ve written about before, I’m a one-time software engineer, now a people manager for many years. I look for excuses to roll up my sleeves and get a little dirty with the command line. Glory days, I guess. Plus, I find working with git to be satisfying and reassuring due to all the benefits of version control. I know git’s not perfect, but it’s great for my simple use cases.

So, for me, this workflow is fun and rewarding. For a different brain chemistry, it might be a total headache.

TTFN!

One of my prior blogs was built on Hugo, GitHub, and Netlify. Very similar, and I liked it. ↩︎