4 months post-surgery

No, this is not me now! From July 2014

Last Friday marked 4 months since my ligamentum teres reconstructive surgery.

I don't feel like much has changed since 3 months, to be honest! I saw the physio again a couple of weeks ago and he's really happy and doesn't need to see me again until the end of October. He said that at 3.5 months post-op, I was already where they expect people to be at 6 months, so that's a bonus. He tested the responsiveness of the new ligament compared to the other side and it all moves evenly, my leg stops rotating where it's meant to stop, I can touch my toes, so that's all good news.

I'm still incredibly stiff but that's possibly because I haven't had time to do much exercise in the last week as I had a big project due. Today I'm back on the exercise bike and cross-trainer so hopefully that will help loosen up my lower back and hips a bit.

Even though I was told it was a 6-12 month recovery, I think a part of me was expecting to be completely back to normal by now. I don't remember recovery from the previous arthroscopes taking this long - I wish I'd kept a blog for one of those procedures now so I could check! Of course, this is completely different, it's not just the outer scars healing this time but a graft healing inside my hip, and my knee recovering from the tendon removal. Logically I know all that, and it's good to see the physio every so often to reaffirm how far I've come - but some days I am just SO tired of myself. It's a really long haul back to "normal", whatever that is. I think I need a holiday. :/

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DIG252 - Internet Interactivity Design

For DIG252 - Internet Interactivity Design, we had to create a website that used interactive elements.

"In this unit you will plan, design and execute a website that uses interactive elements to engage the user and enhance your website. Using interactive elements to make your website more dynamic gives you a novel means to engage the user with the topic of the website."

The goal of my website was to market a fictional sports photography business, via the use of an online photography portfolio and a photography “tips” blog. It was presented as a single page parallax website. It was designed to be a primarily black and white-themed website, with colour provided by the photographs themselves. It utilised images taken by my husband, Photoshopped by me.

Interactivity included:

• Parallax scrolling, which creates the illusion of depth and movement within a website and adds interest to a single-page website.
• An image slideshow consisting of 4 images which will be displayed individually, at full screen width. The slideshow will automatically progress to the next image, but will also have either an arrow effect, or navigation indicator which enable a user to manually forward or rewind to a different image, if desired.
• A "scroll down" style arrow on the main page, encouraging users to scroll and activate the parallax experience.
• An image gallery/portfolio with a hover effect on mouse-over. Clicking on an individual image resulted in a pop up in a lightbox.

I've taken down the live version of my DIG252 project now and obviously it is difficult to show interactivity via a flat image, but here is what the final version looked like:

(Final result was a 79. Not QUITE enough to squeeze into a HD, but very happy!).

**Update: I've put an archive of the site here **

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