Sculpin

I dunno about aikido for me, folks.

Here’s the thing. Chronic fatigue syndrome (I still dislike that name) has made me well aware of the varieties of fatigue. I divide them into three basic stages:

• Stage 1: Your brain is telling you that you’re tired. Really, really tired. Man, would you like to sit down. A nap seems like a good idea. Sheesh, what a long day/week/month. You just don’t think you can bear to drag yourself around. Your limbs are heavy. When I had mononucleosis, it was generally an advanced Stage 1 phenomenon.
• Stage 2: You start making unusual cognitive errors. Word-finding becomes difficult. Your judgment may become questionable. Your balance goes off. Your circulation may be somewhat restricted. Aural and visual perceptions get strange. You start having little mini zonkouts; you sit down to a plate of scrambled eggs and suddenly come to with your face a couple of inches from the plate. You become very spacey — I once nearly left the house without pants on, and while that’s pretty bad, the fact that I was actually ambulatory puts it into 2 rather than 3.
• Stage 3: you hit the Wall and you go down. I don’t care how much of a badass you think you are, or how much positive thinking you can muster, you’re going down. Maybe you have time to take off your shoes, maybe you don’t. Maybe you can be awakened, maybe you can’t. You may lose time in some kind of blackout stage before you actually sleep, and wake up to find that you’ve put your keys somewhere really weird.

In stage 1, you can suck it up and deal; in stage 2, you can often fake it; in stage 3, forget it, you’re toast. Hey, at least it doesn’t hurt.

I’m convinced that a fair bit of some able-bodied people’s jackassery about CFS comes from their applying stage 1 rules inappropriately to people who are dealing with the realities of stages 2 and 3 in their lives.

Anyhow, as I’ve been recovering from CFS, I’ve been able to spend a lot less time in the nastier stages of fatigue. That’s great. Stage 1 is really not all that bad; the difference between being unfatigued and being able safely to ignore and manage your fatigue is not as big as all that.

My strategy of the last couple of years has been to accept that I live in stage 1, purposefully visit stage 2, and avoid stage 3. (Too much time at the Wall of Fatigue seems to make things worse, not better.) You can imagine it this way: I live with a full-time flu and I put myself into light shock a few times a week. And this has been great. For somebody with my health history, I’m pretty badass. I attribute this to working tenaciously at my edge, not to mention having a lot of luck and support.

And here’s my problem. The edge is tricky. The edge is in stage 2. I can get sloppy when I get tired enough to be stupid, pale, and unbalanced. Usually it’s fine, but sometimes I screw up and injure myself. That’s okay when it’s just me. But in aikido, if I’m defending (the “nage” role), it’s my responsibility to make sure that the other person (”uke”) is safe. I’m not sure I can work at my edge and take care of uke.

I’m thinking I might have to wait a little while until I can be sure that I can fulfill that responsibility. Aikido’s a real reach for me, and it may be slightly too much of one. There’s not a lot of slack in the system right now, and I’m feeling pretty stretched here. On the other hand, I understand that things happen to everybody. I’m not the only person who can get sloppy in there. I just don’t know. We’ll see.

ETA: And having thought about it — it’s not cool of me to risk somebody else’s getting an elbow in the face because I’ve stretched it too far and can’t bring sufficient focus to the mat. I need to take some time to regroup, get over this damn lingering sinus infection, practice some rolls in the park, and build my strength and stamina for a few more months. Well, crap. I’m disappointed, but there it is.

Or as Garfield Minus Garfield puts it:

So this is a neat thing: I have a gig. Kind of a weird one, but it sounds like fun. I’ve been hired into the Standardized Patient Program at the UW. Basically, I’ll be a sort of medical actor/educator. My job is to play a patient for med students to interview and examine. More about that when I actually have some kind of experience to talk about! So far I’ve just watched some SPs at work; my first training is in a couple of weeks.

Sheesh, I’m going to be paid to act. How often does that happen? What a weird job! But I like the people there, and I like that it’ll use both sides of my brain.

I was a little concerned that my new classes in aikido would be a problem. Josh and I started lessons in January, and there’s been a whole lot of limping going on. After my first class, my left knee couldn’t hold me up reliably; it’d give out suddenly, and I’d crash into a wall or a sofa. I wasn’t injured, just extraordinarily sore. The soreness was epic. It’s gotten a lot better since then, but still, I’ve gotten stepped on and bruised; I’ve taken an elbow to the face; and I think I’ve got a pretty good shot at dislocating a shoulder in the next couple of years.

So I can see how I might confuse the med students, limping in all beat up and bandaged. But that’s nothing. They’ve got a guy there who does bike stunts. I would certainly not be the first standardized patient to come in with some interesting physical things to work around.

I’ve wanted to do aikido for a very, very long time. In high school, I had no money. (Not to mention how broke I was as a dropout.) In college, I couldn’t make the time work. After that, I worked at a startup, and then I got sick. I came back from that, I had one aikido lesson, and the van hit me. So now, finally, I am back and I am doing this thing.

Aikido is fun and fascinating, and I’m glad to be trying a discipline with more complicated movement, but I’m unsure. Sometimes I think I might have been better off doing tai chi. “Well, duh,” somebody’s thinking now, “You like your shoulder where it is,” but it’s not the injury potential. I’m just having a hard time in there, session after session. Part of it is that it’s just intrinsically really tremendously difficult, but what gets me down is that again and again I hit the same problem that I don’t know how to fix. I thought the CFS would be the limiting factor, but that I can work with. No, the hard problem has been the minor nerve damage in my left hand from that burn I took a few years ago. I hadn’t realized how strong the outside of my hand would have to be, and I don’t know if I’ll regain enough strength there. I keep having to slide on the side of my hand, and it folds on itself and collapses painfully. It’s probably time for me to talk to somebody about that, or a couple of somebodies.

On the other hand, I bring some weird strengths to the aikido practice as well. My time in Pilates has mostly served me very well there. If nothing else, aikido’s shown me more what it is that I’ve been doing in Pilates. (More about that later, probably.) I’m well aware of my hara, and I’ve learned to think my way through some movement chains in useful ways.

Also, you know, I fought my way back from a serious illness, all the way from being housebound until I could walk six miles; then I got hit in a crosswalk and had to do a whole lot of it all over again. Aikido is pretty hard, but I remember that it’s not nearly as hard as learning to go up stairs was: two stairs on one day, then three, then four, and then the amazing day when I did six stairs, oh hell yes. And after a couple of months, I could actually leave the house and get back up the stairs again. You learn a lot about your capacity for badass tenacity that way. Not that I can recommend it, exactly. If you’ve been there, you know what I mean, and I know some readers have been there, are there right now, or are having an even deeper exploration of their capacity to be badass. (Hi, Desolina.)

That said, it was a whole lot more important to me to go up stairs than it is for me to do a perfect front roll. So we’ll see. I figure it’d take eight weeks to get a taste of it; a year to settle in; three years to understand if it’s right for me over the longer term. I’ve done my eight weeks, and I’m ready to try the rest of the year.

Hello, friends! I have not died in a blogging accident or otherwise. It’s just that I’m not really doing anything blog-worthy. But then again, does that stop anybody?

Remember that bug that was going around late last fall that lasted a good three weeks? It took me and my dime-store immune system six weeks to get over it. And in that time I established a good solid list of things I wasn’t getting around to. Now I’ve made a list of those things and am slowly knocking them off, one after another. Grind grind grind.

There was some mildly stressful stuff over the holidays, which put my back muscles into an unhappy state. (Listen, traps, you can’t actually make the furnace work by seizing up. No, seriously.) So Pilates was kind of eh for a couple of weeks — fun and all, and it was helpful with the discomfort, but I wasn’t seeing much progress. But I’m back on track now and working on some relatively strenuous variations of rollbacks and rollups. The rollbacks are pretty challenging for me with my particular pattern of hypo- and hypermobility and pelvic position. And doing a rollup with my hands behind my head is just not happening yet, no matter how much I growl and grit my teeth. I am not a ninja yet. But it’s coming along pretty well. I’m particularly pleased with how well I’ve been keeping my balance and alignment even with various muscles going all snarly.

The weirdest thing I’ve been working on in Pilates is keeping my chest broad while I roll back. It’s automatic to start that pelvic and lumbar curve as if I were a little sowbug, curling the top of my torso along with the bottom of it. It really makes things interesting to try to change that. That’s what I love about Pilates, besides giving it credit for stopping my back pain — you get to think your way through every single movement and really observe carefully what you’re doing, including in areas that aren’t necessarily what you’d consider the focus of the exercise. I can almost feel my brain crackling as it seizes on new variations of movement patterns. The closest thing I can think of in my experience is learning to play the cello. It’s got that degree of physical subtlety.

At the moment, I’m making tortilla soup — essentially this recipe but with more roasted peppers. Smells divine.

I’m getting over one hell of a cold. It may be that standing in the pouring rain shoveling elephant poop is not good for me.

Other than that, I’ve been feeling really good these days. Along with the physical strength and stamina, the neurological stuff’s coming back too — I hardly ever say anything bizarre by accident anymore. No more substituting “mouth dishes” for “teeth” or “time collision” for “scheduling conflict”. I can feel the goo leaving the gears of my mind. Wouldn’t you know it, this is happening just as I’m pretty well losing interest in the life of the mind in favor of more physically grounded pursuits. And I don’t think it’s because the brainwork has gotten easier.

I said to Josh today, “Man, I used to be so abstract and philosophical-like, and now… it’s all about the wool pants and the vegetables and the chickens. But I have the distinct impression that something philosophical is gurgling away in there, informed by the real-world stuff, and that the best way to develop it is to do the real-world stuff.” Maybe in fifteen or twenty years I’ll be all over the mind-body problem or something.

I’ve been loopy these last couple of weeks. First I got a mild sinus infection. Then I threw out my lower back. Then I strained the bejeezus out of at least one intercostal muscle. (If you’ve never done this, the pain is weirdly knifelike.) Bah! So there I was, popping aspirin and going into sleep deprivation; couldn’t sleep on my back because of the back pain, couldn’t sleep on my side because of the rib pain, had my chest tied together with an Ace bandage. Couldn’t even yawn. Sure as heck didn’t get much done. Thank goodness that’s over. I’m still feeling a little squirrelly and off-kilter from it all.

But when I look back at this last lousy week, one memory comes shining through, redeeming the whole week: biscuits. If learning to make these biscuits is all I managed to accomplish this last week, it’s still plenty. I got this recipe from Melissa of Pix-y Sticks, and it is diabolically good. My old drop biscuit recipe is as nothing compared to this. All the notes are hers. Incidentally, she’s not kidding about it being sticky.

Melissa’s Cheddar Garlic Biscuits

Makes 10-14 biscuits, depending on the size.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
• 2 teaspoons sugar
• 1/2 cup slightly softened butter [1]
• 4 or 5 cloves of garlic, minced very finely [2]
• 1 cup grated sharp cheddar [3]
• 1 cup milk

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees.
2. Sift the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, salt, cream of tartar & sugar) into a bowl [4].
3. Cut in the butter with a fork or pastry cutter until the bowl is full of coarse crumbs [5].
4. Mix in the minced garlic.
5. Stir in the cheese [6].
6. Make a well in the middle and pour in the cup of milk.
7. Stir quickly with a fork, just enough to moisten all the ingredients and have the dough follow the fork around the bowl.
8. Drop biscuits on to an ungreased cookie sheet [7]. Remember that they will increase half again in size and plan accordingly.
9. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes.

Variations:

• Traditional Biscuits: Cut milk down to 3/4 cup, turn out the dough on a flour surface and knead it for 10 to 12 strokes. Roll dough out to 1/2 an inch thick and cut out rounds with a glass, biscuit cutter or cookie cutter. These will be more traditional biscuits.
• Adding More Flavor: Add half a cup of grated parmesan or green onions to the mix.

Notes:
[1] Shortening can be used instead, but I really recommend using real butter. It does a lot for the flavor. I usually leave it out of the fridge for half an hour before I make the biscuits or 15-30 seconds in the microwave will soften it up easily.
[2] This is a suggestion. The garlic should really be to taste. I often use more than this, but some people prefer less.
[3] Again, this is to taste. You may find that you prefer more or less cheese.
[4] Sifting will mix these better, but I also just toss them all in and mix well with a fork, which mixes them better than using a spoon.
[5] Simplest way to do this is to take a fork and push the butter against the sides of the bowl. Keep doing so, while mixing it in with the flour until the butter is in tiny pieces totally coated with the flour mix. A pastry knife is faster, but a fork will always work in a pinch. In general, the more you cut, the better the biscuits will turn out.
[6] The cheese and garlic are mixed separately because the cheese will stop the garlic from being mixed in well, if you add them at the same time or reverse the order.
[7] Since the mix is sticky, I find it’s easy to use two spoons to create batter balls and then drop them on to the cookie sheet.

Thanks, Melissa!

Here I am with a wee bit of the flu and a cobwebby blog, so I’ll do a little catching up. In a nutshell: I’ve been domestic.

Most recent things first: rosettes. I’m a real vulture for going-out-of-business sales, and when Martha By Mail went under, I snapped up some fantastic Halloween rosette irons on the cheap. Finally we got around to trying them out. These are implements for making crispy little deep-fried Scandinavian cookies. You make a thin, simple batter, dip the iron in most of the way, then deep-fry. I think they’re best sprinkled with cinnamon sugar — imagine an airy, crispy essence of cinnamon toast. It took a little while to get the hang of it; you want to have everything at exactly the right temperature, or you wind up with rather abstract rosettes as the batter drips off the iron. Soon, though, we had it down. I hope to make crispy deep-fried pumpkins, spiders, and bats for my friends soon!

In body news, my hip still hasn’t quite healed, though I’m not gimping around too badly. Apparently I’ve got some kind of a problem with my right obturators, deep inside the hip; my rotation’s pathetic. This does not please me, though I’m a little amused by the horrible sounds that joint keeps making. I suppose I should go back to PT and/or find an LMT to work on them. (I love Mark the LMT, but crotch massage is past my boundaries for a male massage therapist. Maybe any massage therapist.) Ugh. In the meantime, I’m just rolling them out with some small Yamuna balls, which helps a good deal, and hoping the problem will magically go away.

I’d planned to replace much of our front lawn with a big vegetable garden this summer, but with one of my hip joints still in limited service, I decided that Combat Gardening was probably not in the cards for me. So I called the Seattle Urban Farm Company, who came out and installed a beautiful new raised-bed vegetable garden in two days flat. They even included automatic drip tape irrigation, with the line cleverly snaked under our walkway and the remaining grass. It’s marvelous. I can hardly believe how fast everything’s grown; I’ll be harvesting the first bok choy this week. (Pot stickers!) I’m definitely calling these guys again. For a few days after the garden went in, I felt slightly unmoored– there’s this great garden in front, and yet I am not sore. How can this be? Eh?

I’ll definitely be calling them again anyway, because once the fall planting season cools down a bit, we have plans to put a chicken coop in the back yard. (We’re getting ever closer to hippie paradise here at House of Cranks.) SUFC has a chicken expert on staff. Brad loves chickens. To hear him talk, you’d imagine that they are the sweetest, most wonderful animals in the world. I don’t know about that. Josh is still more pro-chicken than I am, but I’ve come around on the subject. I’m interested in the eggs, mostly, and I’m also a little curious about what I might be able to train a chicken to do. (Apparently, dog trainers often work with chickens to hone their skills. There are even “chicken camps” for trainers.) Plus, some of them can be very pretty.

Speaking of front yard changes, we finally had our alder tree taken down. It was in pretty weird-looking shape after the developers next door sheared off all the branches on the west side of the tree. Plus, I have a strong suspicion that I’m allergic to the thing; it’s either that or the birch, or both. In any case, we called up Seattle Tree Service and they came out and took the thing down. The process was fascinating. And I got to see it a little more clearly than usual because one fellow was being trained. Ours was his very first tree ever. At first I could hardly watch; he’d put on his climbing gear upside down, and I thought, “Oh no, catastrophe ahead.” But Mike, the certified arborist who’s the boss, corrected him without freaking him out (would that all teachers were that good) and got him ready to climb up and limb the tree. He was all ready to go when he looked up and said, rather tremulously, “Do you think there are squirrels in that tree?” The tree came down safely with no squirrel attacks or other catastrophes. Hard to believe that thing was just sixteen years old; some years it grew more than an inch in diameter. Alders are amazing.

We kept the wood for firewood. I was sure we were going to get a splitter. No way could we get that tree split ourselves. And by “ourselves” I mean “Josh”. You know, we all have our oddball gifts in this world — I’m a bizarrely fast and accurate collator, and Josh can pack boxes like a pro. And then there are our anti-gifts. Do not, on any account, give me an axe and a load of wood to split. Many years ago, at the peak of my physical condition, I spent ten weeks in the backcountry of Yellowstone doing trail work. Every day, I’d try to split some wood for the fire. And pretty much every day I was grateful for my steel-toed boots. I am world-class lousy at splitting wood. So, while I could help stack the wood, all the splitting was up to Josh. And Josh did it. The man is a machine. We’ve now got a woodpile that must be about 8′ by 6′ with some more left over.

He really has been pouring it on. (Josh, you rock.) The new shelves he built in the shed are fabulous. I’m amazed at how much more space we have in there (using the opportunity to get rid of some junk didn’t hurt) and I’m excited to see that we can probably fit a workbench in there. Maybe I’ll even get that glass kiln I’ve been wanting for years but had no place to put. (Yes, because what I really need is more things to do.)

Josh went gonzo on those shelves the day after I made macaroni and cheese for us, his dad, and my mom. If that’s what a really good macaroni and cheese dinner does, well, heck, I will make some more. I used the Beecher’s recipe that was in the P-I recently. It felt like some pretty high-stakes entertaining: this was my first butter-and-flour roux (as opposed to an oil-based roux), my first white sauce, and my first cheese sauce. The next day, I read about a cheese sauce that had curdled. Boy, am I glad I didn’t know anything could go so wrong. Served it up with some salsa and some steamed local broccoli; for dessert we had some homegrown plums, roasted with a little Zulka sugar and topped with a dab of whipped cream.

In other food news, Josh and I learned to can last month. We’ve put up some rhubarb and strawberry-rhubarb jam, and still have lots left to can. I hope that someday soon we can have another canning day.

Whew.

“So, this is why they call it the core,” I keep muttering to myself. That hip injury I got in yoga last month? It just goes and goes and goes, and it’s having wacky secondary and tertiary effects. Tweak the hips and you tweak the femur, then the lower leg, then the foot, and then it’s time for The Ow. Meanwhile, going up rather than down from the hips, weird back effects are happening. So I’m not so hot with the walking, standing, sitting, or bending over at the moment. I can, however, sprawl with the best of them, as long as I do not try to do anything rash like turning over. It’s been like this all week. Long week.

This was really not the plan. As much as I enjoyed PT, I really do not want to start on another round of it right now. I hope this works itself out.

So “One Local Summer” is on hold for a while, on account of too much standing, and so is a lot of email and other internettery, on account of too much sitting. I’ll read, but probably not write much. (I’d wanted to write a post about how awesome it was to hang out with Ben last week. In a nutshell: Ben, it was great to hang out with you, I really like this person you’ve become, your philosophy of awesomeness is both inspiring and reasonable, and I think I’m going to try mounting those etched plates on springs.) Not to mention all the yoga and gardening and frisbee-throwing and bike-riding I had in mind for this summer. Pah! I’ll be making it to breakfast with friends this Sunday, though, I’m sure of it, even if I have to bundle myself into a laundry basket and be hauled into a taxi.

If we were going to take wood to the dump anyway, we might as well take a full load, we figured. So today Josh and I took out the too-large frames for the raised beds at our place. I’m going to configure the beds in a whole new way, and then this time we’ll live with them for a year or two to make sure they’re really what we want before we build frames for them. So there was the digging and the prying and the hauling.

It’s been a very heavy load of work for me, this hardcore gardening, and I’m psyched that I’m able to do it. I’ve made a lot of gains these last several months; last week I was released from physical therapy on grounds of kicking ass. As I was leaving, I overheard Dan the PT saying, “Yeah, this was her last day. It’s great to see. I’m really happy for her. She’s been working really really really hard.” It’s kind of bittersweet: I’ll miss PT, because it was fun and I was very good at it. I’ve surprised everybody. Dan gave me a big hug and made me promise to keep in touch.

I’ve still got plenty to do, but I’m at a whole new level of physical competence now. For instance, I can walk up hills now. About ten days ago I powered my way up Virginia from the Pike Place Market to First. Not too many years ago I had a regular appointment about a third of a way down that block, and I’d have to pause a few times on my way up. Now, vroom. (Okay, maybe more like puttputtputt, but it was steady and, for me, powerful.) I hadn’t felt my lungs work like that in more than ten years; they seem hugely expansive now! It was fascinating to feel the ribcage expanding and contracting side-to-side. This whole medical-fitness thing has been mentally absorbing. The kinetic chain from the hips to the feet continues to interest me. I turn on a hip muscle so and abracadabra, my weight shifts back on my heels. Super.

In other news, today I noticed my first gray hair. I’m 35, so I’m well overdue. It’s a pretty nice gray, I have to say — shiny and light — but it also makes me recognize even more strongly that getting off my ass is exactly what I ought to be doing right now. I got squashed by chronic illness for the better part of a decade. For somebody who had severe CFS for a lot of that time (I’m talking Bell 10 to 30, possibly less), and moderate CFS for a great deal more, I did pretty damn well for myself. But I missed out on a whole lot of moving around, is what I’m saying. I feel that I’m entering a sweet spot between illness-related decrepitude and age-related decrepitude, and I want to make the most of it while I can.

Today I found out that I’ve got cataracts. They’re of the posterior subcapsular variety. Just a bit of cloudiness, but there it is. So that’s why I hate the sun. It did seem, more and more, that I was cringing and hissing at glare that other people didn’t even see.

<RJL20> You mean, I _didn’t_ marry a vampire? Nuts.
<cameron>That thing where I cringe from crosses? Purely coincidental.

Yep, I am unusually young for this. Not much to do about it except stay healthy and get myself a good pair of sunglasses. Maybe take another look at my salt intake and my birth control methods. Lutein and zeaxanthin might possibly help slow it down; I should probably be eating more dark leafy greens anyway.

Weird.

For one tiny, wobbly, inelegant moment I actually managed to lift off the floor and hold Bakasana today. Unless you count front and modified side planks (and I don’t) this is my first arm balance ever. Whee!

Update: and then I tried demonstrating it for Josh. I lifted up pretty well and held it a little longer, and then I nearly fell over onto my nose, yelling, “AAAAACK!” in a most unyogini-ish way. Heh. Okay, then, here’s my hypothesis: it’s called “Crow Pose” because of all the squawking. (”Everybody falls when learning this pose,” huh? Good to know.)