Sunday August 7, 2005
Things are going that way this week. Well, if I don't count the slight set back that had me thinking I'd somehow managed to negate several weeks' worth of rotator cuff strengthening. A few days ago I awoke with stiffness and a general reluctance to do anything in my right shoulder. Like pulling up my pants.
While I sat on the back porch looking out on the dirt with my coffee I pondered what in hell I had done the day before that may account for this change. All I could come up with were two seemingly innocuous activities.
The first was doing the logic puzzles at the back of the recent Scientific American Mind magazine whilst laying on my bed to rest my neck muscles. It's a great read by the way. The magazine, that is. This required that I hold a pad of paper above me for a while and write (and erase! many erasures I confess...) upon it. Took me about an hour let's say.
The second was more likely the real culprit. I decided to busy myself while the thunderstorm came and went by rolling some loose change. The paucity of table surfaces in my small dwelling required that I bend to the floor while sitting on the futon in order to smush the two sides of the plastic holders together. I did about 10 rolls. (Actually only 5 rolls but most had to be done twice because my brilliant system of making little piles of coins and then putting the right number of piles into the holder fell apart once I discovered, on the last roll, that a significant number of piles had been piled incorrectly. :-/ ) So, how much pressure does that take? More than usual for my shoulder apparently.
The good news (yes there is some) is that my neck itself is doing great - the muscles are learning to do their thing with smooth movements instead of the jerky, shaky ones we started out with a few weeks ago.
I tried to get my bike adjusted for comfortable neck positioning but it turns out the handlebar stem is at its limit and won't be raised. I'll get it to a bike place and see what they can do for cheap. This put a slight damper on my planned new activity exploration (biking) so I went for a swim at Westboro this evening instead.
10 minutes of sidestroke and backstroke and I was done in. Neck, arm and hip were all weary. Good for a first run though. Tomorrow I'll find out how upset these parts are with me.
I've spoken to both of my children this weekend and spent Friday evening with my friend Patrick. We had a great visit drinking wine and floating around his pool looking at the stars listening to tunes. And, no hangover the next day - woohoo!