Life of Wry

Still in the thick of post-Christmas non-routine mode.

Went for a walk with my buddy Carrie & Bodie dog in the ditch on the north side of town. Talked of draughts while crunching through crisp, brown vegetation, bathed in the golden, orangy light of a late afternoon winter day. Carrie described the Putah Creek Council’s native plant restoration project in and along the ditch. We talked about our mutual experiences of the holidays and, not necessarily related, about compassion fatigue–a term I’d never heard but immediately understood. Talked of lightening up.

Winter days, desolate and muted, are not supposed to feel this warm. Still, pleasant as all get out.

I found out today that in the entire 2013 year, we received only five-something inches of rain (considerably below average, which is maybe 19-20″per year). I see in the forecast that, while pretty, these clouds mean nothing.  Sunshine and mid-sixties for the next week.  Mid-sixties. January.  

This is the view from my office window. 

I’m excited because I’ve decided to blog again.  No fanfare; just a goofy selfie to get things started. (I see the word “selfie” has shown up on many year-end lists of words that are now considered overused, dated and annoying.)

I took a long walk last night in the final light of 2013, and mused about the prospect of starting up my blog again.  The long shadows and warm air were lovely and just the inspiration I needed.

Here is a better shot of 2013’s final sunset.  And a beautiful year-set it was.

Time for a picture change.  Backyard nectarine tree in full, gorgeous flower. Though, funny, the color scheme of my last wintry picture and this spring picture is pretty much the same.  And matches my profile photo, to boot.  Bonus.

So, I am missing blogging.  I realized a couple days ago, that the daily blogging that I committed to last year was great for bringing me to the present moment.  It connected me to the seasons, to what’s going on around me, and made me think actively about my daily life.  Plus, it was really fun.

I was quick to criticize The Great 2011 Daily Blogging Experiment for being less than creative, less than edgy.  It was not risky enough, nor writerly, I thought.  In some ways, that’s true, but I miss doing it anyway.  So I’m going to wrap up this other writing project (The Great 2011 Nepal Travel Blog), which is so time consuming (but fun, you should see my office right now–maps and notes and travel books and travel journals everywhere), and then return to something more regular and bloggy. ‘k?

As Walt Whitman said,

“…read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life…” 

Which, I have no idea what he meant by that, but it seems relevant.

And actually, here’s the entire quote, which is lovely:

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.” 

See you soon.

That’s tonight’s sunset. And this might be a pre-storm sky.. they’re predicting rain tomorrow and if that happens, it’ll be the first rain of 2012 and the end to a long dry spell.  I have to say, it’s been lovely, unseasonably warm and dry, but very un-wintry.  I would really enjoy some inclement weather.  I’d love to see about six months of wet and cold (that won’t happen), only because it looks like I’m going to be spending a lot of time over the next half year–at least–inside, sitting… and hopefully repairing my stupid achilles tendons.

A friend, Karrie, a physical therapist, came over today to provide a second (or really a sixth or seventh) opinion on what’s going on with my tendons. After hearing the whole story and doing an assessment, she affirmed that they’re messed up and it’ll take time and a serious commitment to get them back.  She estimated a year of immobility.  Really, she said that.  It was all I could do to keep from crying.  I was actually told a similar thing last week by an orthopedic surgeon, a podiatry specialist, who said these kinds of injuries are notoriously slow to heal, far dicier and less straightforward than bone fractures.  Almost cried then, too.  And promptly, reluctantly, canceled plans for Kilimanjaro this summer.

Immobility. Casts. Sitting. A year.

I have really messed up my tendons.

Sort of wish I’d gotten that message two years ago when all of this started. Honest to god, numerous sessions with numerous physical therapists never really got me to that realization.  It was only after my first visit with Dr. Fredenburg last month that I began to understand the degree of damage and what it would take to heal.  And even then, it took two visits with him to fully comprehend what he was getting at.

Not sure if this is because I didn’t hear what the therapists and the doctor were saying all along or whether they just didn’t fully grasp and/or convey what was going on.

If they said it, I certainly didn’t grasp it, and was way, WAY too casual about the tenderness and soreness and just thought I could keep walking and hiking and trekking and climbing (and swimming and biking and stretching and massaging).  I mean, soreness is not a foreign experience among active, athletic people, even oldies like me.  So I just thought, huh, I’m sore, so I’ll stretch and ice and massage and do the exercises the therapists gave me… and eventually it’ll resolve. In fact, I was committing violence upon my tendons with every cavalier step.  Engaging the joint and aggravating the tendon was preventing the fibers from healing, and on top of that, the assault to already-damaged tendons was leading to the formation of more and more scar tissue.

Wish I’d understood that.

Achilles tendons are super tricky.. they’re avascular, meaning blood flow is very minimal, which means healing can take a long time.  You don’t mess with tendons; if you stress them, you’re going to need to set aside adequate time to heal them, and if you don’t, they get worse.

Such, such, such a bummer…. if, you know, you have a mountain to climb.

So, check this out:

For some reason tonight, not sure why, I found myself in my Twitter account reading tweets I’d posted over the course of the last couple years.  (I haven’t tweeted much in recent years, so this wasn’t a lot of reading.)  I was quite surprised and sort of chagrined to come upon this tweet, posted on December 9, 2009:

Ran whole way. No stops. HILLS, BABY!

Turns out, in December of 2009, I had spent two weeks in Palos Verdes while my mom was undergoing open heart surgery.  I had set aside mornings for exercising, as I was spending the rest of the days in the hospital.  I started with my usual, hilly-ish walking route, but as the days wore on began to add a little running into the mix.  I discovered, after years of not running (post-pregnancy, loosy goosy knees..), I could run again (!), it felt fantastic, and pretty soon I was running with a vengeance…  And I guess I overdid it. Physical therapists will tell you, achilles injuries are most often the result of too much, too quickly.  Factor in age, hills, lack of stretching…  a predictable disaster.

Talk about a smoking gun.  The tweet shows pretty much exactly when and how I screwed up my achilles tendons. Great.

The real bummer is that I hurt myself two years ago.  I knew it then and saw a physical therapist within weeks of doing it.  Had I dealt with it correctly then, I wouldn’t be dealing with casts and splints and heating pads and ice packs and crutches and All This Sitting.

A great quote I read the other day went something like this: Don’t look back, we’re not going that way. 

Know what this is?  Me trying to make something for Peter that he’ll more or less eat.  Still.  At age 13.

This is an all white/orange lunch:  apple & mandarins, pasta w/ cheddar cheese, milk and oj.

(He ate it all.)

Lately, he favors cuisine that is deep fried and sticky.  Current favorite:  The Lemon Chicken from House of Chang. The chicken’s battered and fried and the sauce is incredibly sweet.  He’d eat it nightly, but we limit his phone orders & delivery to once a week. They are so familiar with his order, they don’t even ask for his address any more.

He also loves the Orange Chicken at Panda Express.  Same deal…deep fried and sticky sweet.  Ugh.

We tried.. we really did.

When you’re wearing casts on both legs, you sit a lot.  And when you’re having unseasonably sunny weather for January, you get nice light shining on your furniture.  So, with those two things in mind, here’s the view from the chair (this was yesterday, late afternoon).

I do love the Palms.

Electric blues guitar falls into the right-place-right-time category for me, music I thoroughly enjoy live, in a funky venue, but which I probably wouldn’t listen to while writing or driving or whatever.  Last night, Guitar Shorty, upstairs in the old opera house in downtown Winters, drinking beer and rocking out?  Super fun.

Guitar Shorty, a 70-something guy, brother-in-law to Jimi Hendrix (yes, really), is the kind of guy who plays the guitar with his tongue, wanders through the crowd, jumps up and down (a bit stressful to watch), and has a great blues voice.  Guitar people say he’s pretty good, not genius like his brother-in-law, but damn good.

Nice to be in Winters and show Jay a good ol’ time.

Aunt Joy.  The consummate hostess and homemaker, teacher and counselor. Woman of taste and elegance. Active, athletic, headstrong, quick to laugh.

Uncle Vic. The distinguished professor and writer. Man of the mountains. Wise, generous, curious, ready with a smile.

Here are some images from our visit on Friday..

Making lunch:

Listening, talking..

Uncle Vic was my dad’s older brother.  He’s 89!

Time to eat:

Only Aunt Joy can paint a room black and make it look cheery:

Nice to have time in one’s life for puzzles:

I just like this one:

Poor California.  No snow. Record breaking lack of snow. Which made our annual snow shoeing trip to the top of a ridge (usually high above Donner Lake) to watch the sun set in the west and the full moon rise in the east a bust, at least as far as snow shoeing goes. Instead, we hiked on a dirt road to a place called Iron Point, and watched a lovely sun set, thanks to a few well placed bands of clouds, and a sufficiently dramatic moon rise over mountains and trees.

Started out at about 4:45 or so, unseasonably warmish, and goldeny:

Crossed Southern Pacific tracks, after an east bound train passed:

(Note to self: take train to Reno someday.)

Ambled down dirt road about a mile, mile and a half, and came upon this guy, seemingly out in the middle of nowhere.. looking like Ansel Adams, himself:

Climbed a hill on the way out to the point:

Looked west:

The locals among us had a name for this gap, but I can’t remember it.  Far below is the north fork of the north fork of the American River.  Really, that’s what they called it.  And I believe somewhere below is also Euchre Bar, and a strenuously steep trail we took once, a long time ago, and I still remember that pull out of the canyon.

Once at Iron Point, we had some hot tea with brandy and various, assorted snacks, keeping an eye on the eastern sky.

And after a while, la luna.  She did not disappoint:

This is always an exciting moment, as you can see:

(Actually, I’m sure this expression is related to something else entirely.)

Quickly, she (the moon) disappeared into a thin bank of clouds and looked rather ghostly:

While that was going on in the east, the sky in the west was looking like this:

Sun down, moon up and now behind clouds, toasts complete.. time to go.

We actually needed headlamps to see on the way back because of the clouds.  Often the moon’s bright enough to light the way, especially reflected off snow; but not this time.

And pretty much, that was that.  Back to the cars, back to Susan’s and Jim’s for a two-soup dinner.  Would have been Jim’s birthday (60th!) dinner, but the birthday boy was sick and went to bed.  Hrrmph!

Here is this year’s intrepid moonrise gang:

Jim J, Lee, Heidi, Bonnie, Susan, Jim F and Jay.  Peter, in full teenager mode, opted out completely, Rick and Linda met us at the house for dinner, and as I said, Jim R retired early.  Poor guy, missed his own party.