Banged Up

I've been pretty banged up over the last week. Physically, that is.

Last Tuesday I went to the gym and lifted weights seriously for the first time in quite a few months. I then spent much of the next three days feeling sore all around my body from the effort. Clearly I'm very out of practice!

Thursday night was Ultimate. Our team has someone bring treats (read: sugar) each outing. For my birthday, Subrata brought birthday cake. This week I bake baklava, which went over really well. (It's a recipe from my ex-girlfriend Colleen. It uses sugar, lemon juice and orange blossom water rather than honey.)

Right before we started playing, I got this strong pain in my left knee. For no apparent reason. It didn't feel like I'd banged it, it was just a general ache through the knee area. It did give me a bit of a limp at times, but it didn't prevent me from playing. Weird. It was completely gone by the next day and hasn't come back.

On top of that, part-way through the first game I turned my left ankle. Ow! I've been taking ibuprofen for much of the weekend, and it feels a lot better now, but I'll take it easy and see how I feel by next Thursday for that night's game. If nothing else, it's made me aware of the weird positions I keep my feet in during the day, usually crossed under my chair. Maybe I'll buy a footrest to keep under my desk at work and see if I can break myself of that habit.

And on top of that, early in the week I have having a strange pain in my groin, again for no apparent reason. Obviously when you're a no-longer-young male, having pains there is a matter for some concern, but I wasn't able to tell whether it was, say, a pulled muscle, or something else. Fortunately, by Thursday it had subsided. Also strange.

Anyway, all of this has motivated me to finally choose a primary care provider and make an appointment for a physical. It's been about seven years since my last one. My appointment is in mid-March, so I'll have a few things to mention to the doctor at that time. Besides the ones I've mentioned, I also haven't gotten any shots for anything except the flu in at least 12 years. I dunno whether I need to keep current on anything (tetanus, say).

I've been pretty lucky with my health; the last time I went to the doctor for anything other than a checkup was 1994, when I had a nasty sinus infection (ahhh, antibiotics!). That's a pretty good run. But I don't expect it to last forever, so I need to get more serious about my health.

Debbi's moving to a new apartment this week. I've been helping her pack a little, but mostly she's been doing it herself after work, and has done a great job. She's nearly done. We spent a few hours there yesterday where I packed up much of her kitchen. It turns out I'm perfectly happy to pack up food and such, and she's prefers to wrap and pack dishes. So we make a good team in that regard. I also pulled out stuff from under her bed, which was daunting her. (There wasn't all that much stuff, actually. Mostly old audiocassettes.)

She's been donating things to Goodwill, totalling ten trash bags full of clothes and other items. Today I decided to pull out stuff of my own, and I filled four garbage bags with clothes. Most of my clothes were either old polo shirts, or jeans and shorts which are now too big for me (since I no longer have a 40-inch waist, thank goodness!). Quite a bit of stuff.

That freed up several shelves in my closet, and Debbi and I moved items from my mostly-unused bureau to those shelves, since I'm giving her the bureau for her new place. (It's actually a nice bureau, which I bought from Colleen years ago. It could use refinishing, but otherwise it's good. It even comes with a large mirror which mounts on the back, which I have but have never used.)

I also did some work in the garden, mostly picking up some leaves from along the fence in back, since some stuff back there is trying to grow and would probably appreciate not being covered in mulch. (Lucy is probably shaking her head right about now at my gardening habits!) The duckweed is starting to proliferate in the pond, so I cleared out some of that. I might drain the pond this spring and scoop out some muck at the bottom, since the previous owner once told me he'd never bothered to keep leaves from falling in the pond in the fall. Ick! Since there are no fish in there right now, doing that work should be safe, if messy.

Other weekend activities included chatting with my Mom and my friend Karen. A trip to the Hillsdale Mall, where I scored a copy of Acquire for only $20 (half its list price - I suspect they mis-priced their copies, although it's possibly they way over-ordered for the holidays, since they had a stack of about 15 of them). Plus a trip to the Stanford Shopping Center, where - alas - I discovered a store which sells rum- and coffee liqueur-filled chocolate cordials I like. Sigh.

And a meeting with my cow-orker Anders and his girlfriend at Borrone, where we sat and chatted for a couple of hours.

Not a bad time, all-in-all!

I'll leave you now with a photo of my miniature statues of the Endless, from Neil Gaiman's comic book The Sandman. Little did you know that there are in fact eight of the Endless, but there are:

Despair, Desire, Destiny, Darth, Destruction, Dream, Death and Delirium