Sculpin

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.)

Moderate fever, sore throat, comes on like a freight train… sound familiar? Anybody know how long this bug usually lasts?

And of course my judgment has gone to hell. Every time I start to get a fever, I get all weird and manic, and only later do I realize what’s up. I really should stay off the Internet and keep well away from sharp objects and open flames today.

Dear peoples of the internets: if you should happen to have a very young toddler, and if that young toddler should, heaven forbid, require open-heart surgery or some other highly invasive surgery, please ask your child’s doctor about post-surgical physical therapy. Watch out for the kid’s developing movement patterns. I don’t know if this kind of PT exists for kids, but it should.

I’ve got a nice big surgical scar wrapping around my left side and up my back from when I was two years old and my heart was stitched up. (Thank you, modern Western medicine!) The heart’s absolutely fine now — it’s been checked and checked again, believe you me — the stitching job was great, and I seem to have remarkably little in the way of physical restriction from the scar tissue now. But I learned to walk and stand when it hurt, and I suspect that’s a good part of why I’ve got this damned protective hunch seared into my neuromuscular system.

Posture and movement patterns send social signals; I wonder if that submissive element in my posture was part of why I used to be such a creep magnet. Whatever signals I sent, I doubt they were anything I would have chosen.

It’s a small thing now, but it’s been the devil to get rid of. I’ve managed to rid myself of a lot of it in the last couple of years, but there are some persistent little remnants. (”Hey, how ’bout we just stay contracted all the time?” say the hip flexors.) So I’ve been working on my tadasana this week. Tadasana is hard. Standing up is complicated.

Things just keep ticking along, steadily and undramatically getting better. In August 2005, I was flirting hard with crashing out if my heartrate went over 120 bpm — and I thought I was doing outstandingly well. Now I’m not flirting hard until it goes over 140 bpm.

ETA: oh, heh. So after three-plus years of bodywork I’m finally doing a fairly good job of standing up when I remember to think about it. I’m looking less as if I’m about to take off on a ski jump. (Note to self: straighten up, not forward.) And having started to get the hang of standing, I decide to give walking a try from my mindfully adjusted position. Oh. Heh. When I straighten all the way up but continue to place my feet in my usual manner, the result is, uh, insanely seductive. (I demonstrated for Josh. “Hellooooo, nurse!” said Josh, when he collected himself and stopped gurgling.) Yeah, I think I need to learn to turn that down. But if I ever want to walk like a hyperfeminine sex-charged tiger-goddess, there I go. I just have to practice standing up for half an hour first.

I’ve been busy with physical therapy lately. It’s about what you’d expect from me: weak VMO, internally rotated femurs, sub-optimal hip muscles… if I’d realized how much of the body’s well-being comes down to the muscles of the butt, I would have been a lot more careful after being tossed through the air by a van and smacking my derriere on the pavement a few years ago. (”You’ll be fine in eight weeks,” indeed.) Fortunately, I don’t seem to have done myself a whole lot of real damage — no torn ACL or anything.

It’s been sort of fun working on the VMO part of all this — I get to run a small electric current through the VMO while flexing it. It feels like I’m ripping Scotch tape off the skin there. Dan the PT also has got me doing little tiny interval training: I boost my heart rate to about 135 for thirty seconds or so, then cool back down to below 110 for a minute, and repeat.

Lately I’ve been experimenting with oddball resist-dyeing methods. So far, my experiments have not been particularly successful.

Yesterday, Josh and I dropped by the open house at Two Cranes Aikido, which has moved to my neck of the woods. We’re thinking about giving it a try, starting probably in April.

A minor rite of passage: I had my first bike wipeout on January 13. Out on the tandem a block and a half from home, we hit a patch of ice and went down. My thought on the way down: “Oh, man, I really don’t want to have to tell the physical therapist about this.” Because, really, being out on that road that day was plain crazy. But I’m glad to have the first wipeout over with. I’d been fairly afraid of falling on the bike, especially since it’s a tandem—I’d imagined the combined force of bike, pavement, and captain all working together to snap my femur. But no, I just jarred a few joints.

I placed a super order at Raintree Nursery a few weeks ago during their winter sale. Arriving in the mail at some point are two kinds of strawberries, three kinds of lingonberries, two kinds of thornless blackberries, two kinds of blackcurrants, and a Stevens cranberry. (Oh boy oh boy oh boy….) I’ve gone plant-mad. I want to rip up the parking strip and plant it with raspberries. I want to train apple trees on wires into a living fence in the front yard. I want a greenhouse. Yeah, it’s January, all right.

Yesterday in Pilates I did something very dumb. I was kneeling on my left knee on the reformer, with the right leg straight and resting on the floor. And as I got out of that position, I put too much weight on the left knee while moving. There was a sickening creak as the patella seemed to slide toward the outside of the knee, in a way that patellas ought not to do. That leg is much stronger than it was last year, but it’s still pretty atrophied and probably has some minor nerve damage; so I’ve got this weak, sluggish VMO on that side, and… well, I should have been paying more attention, because I know better than to do that. (I will be calling my PT soon, because all this bicycling requires good knees.)

And then Part II of The Dumb: hey, it didn’t seem too bad, and maybe I was making a big deal out of nothing, and I sure had a lot I had to do that day. So I said to myself, “Quit being a whiner!” and walked around on it a lot. Then it seemed too bad. It puffed up a little and got very stiff and a bit hot, so I did the usual things one does for inflammation. “Do not,” I said to Josh, “let me ride a bicycle tomorrow.”

“Got it.”

Later, predictably: “You know, I’m feeling a lot better. I bet I could totally ride that bicycle.”

“Nope. I have my orders! No riding the bicycle!” And thus was The Dumb Part III averted.

Anyway, this seemed like a pretty good time to try out Josh’s ability to haul me to and from the U District on the Xtracycle — we’d never gone more than about 2.5 miles round trip before, and that was almost entirely on the flat. I grabbed my bus pass just in case, and we headed out to the Farmers Market. Our haul: three kinds of cheese, cider, apples, cardamom bread, potatoes, beef jerky, soup bones, kale, collard greens, onion rolls, garlic, and two tiny pies. And the trip home is gently but insistently uphill. But Josh hauled all that, plus me, and did just fine.

I try to get a massage once or twice a month from Mark Pearlscott in the U District. They’re effective as hell, these massages, but they leave me extraordinarily woozy, and I often crash hard within 30-60 minutes of receiving one. (And not because they’re soothing, friends. Myofascial work is not soothing.) Josh has been picking up a Flexcar to get me home on those days, but I think we’ll be able to use the Xtracycle instead. I reckon I can hang on to the back that long.

I’m proud and happy for Josh when I think of how much fitness he’s gained since he started riding his bike to work. It could be that crashing his car will turn out to be one of the best things he’s done for his health.

I’ve been letting my yoga home practice slide pretty egregiously, and I thought a new challenge might help me breathe some new life into it. So today I’ve been working on Ardha Chandrasana, Half Moon Pose. When I tried, several months ago, to do it unsupported, I crumpled in place without even getting into the pose, let alone holding it. It was humbling. I do not enjoy being humbled.

I’m fairly well used to doing Half Moon fully supported with my back against a wall, but now I’m trying to move out into the center of the room. (Hello, atrophied muscles. It’s my old friend the glute medius that’s going first.) As an intermediate step, I’ve been bracing my free foot against a wall while I work to put more and more weight on my standing leg without locking the knee. It’s a minor milestone: I can now hold the pose for about 1.5 seconds before it falls apart. That’s if I start with my upper foot semi-pointed with toes at the wall, and then flex the foot so the wall no longer supports me; I haven’t yet lifted straight up and held the pose successfully.

It seems to help me a lot to strongly imagine lifting from the hip and inner thigh of the raised leg.

As for the home practice, I’m going to do half an hour of yoga a day or more for the next week and see how that feels.

Today Josh and I made it to the farmers market on the tandem and back. Hooray! That’s around five miles round trip, through slightly busier streets and more difficult intersections than I’ve been becoming used to. More wind, too, which sometimes made communication tricky. Packing organic vegetables from the farmers market into Oyster Buckets on the bicycle, I felt that I was surely qualifying for some sort of Granola Scouts merit badge.

I had to take a breather on the way back to let my heart rate settle back down. Oh well. No hurry, and I got to hang out with a very nice dog. (There are a few, I guess.) After the ride, I was tired, but not quite tired enough to conk out fully.

I’m starting to think that I should look into some additional exercises for bikers. I’ve been pretty sore in the lumbar lately — like somebody whacked me with a rubber mallet the size of a frying pan. (I see many Epsom salt baths in my near future.) I’ve been flaking on my home practice these last few months. But pain avoidance is a pretty good motivator.

[Unless something particularly noteworthy happens, the rest of the week’s bike notes will be in comments in this post.]

Well, I take it back. It wasn’t a tetanus shot reaction that I had, apparently; it was some virus that happened to hit me hard that same day. Josh is now down with the same symptoms. He looks like he’s been dragged backwards through a knothole. Poor guy’s laid out in bed with a cold washcloth over his forehead.

At least he managed to get the antiperspirant from hell off of himself before he got sick.

I was all set to have my first One Local Summer meal be spectacular. The plan was to go to the farmers market on Thursday and get everything I needed, and then have some sort of grand cookery day today.

That was the plan. And here is the problem: I had a tetanus shot on Thursday. (I was a couple years overdue, and I’ve been wanting to try needle felting, which means that I will almost certainly stab myself many times with a barbed needle.) This time I was in the minority of people who have unpleasant side effects other than plain old soreness. At first it wasn’t too bad — some extra fatigue, a tiny fever — and I thought I’d get through my day with no problems other than a little bit of extra loopiness.

But at the market, a wave of dizziness hit me like a Mack truck. I could feel the blood draining from my face. I barely managed to get to a bench where I could lie down. Somehow I dragged myself the three blocks to the bus stop, sitting down about once every block to gather myself up and mutter, “I can do this, I can do this…” Then the bus ride and another two blocks home from the bus stop, with more sitting down and psyching myself up. I wish that I’d thought to ask somebody to call me a cab, but I was too far gone for common sense. I got home, whimpered at Josh for a while (he’d just gotten home), and then fell face-down in bed and slept for three hours.

Still better than tetanus, though. I’m well supplied now with snacks and silly books, and I’m just going to take it easy for the next few days.

So forget cooking. Instead, I’m popping open a can of local tuna fish and having a wintered-over local pear for dessert and calling it good. Oh, and some of the sugar snap peas I got from Willie Green’s before I fell over. Hey, that’s not a bad dinner after all.