-
the cartwheel conundrum
It wasn’t exactly a conundrum, really, but I couldn’t think of a word that started with ‘c’, meant ‘mistake’, and wasn’t profane. :)
I want you all to understand that I went into this will full knowledge and aforethought and the expectation that I would throw my back out.
My son has been practicing his cartwheels, and can’t quite get the speed he needs to get his feet all the way up over his head. After trying to walk him through it several times, and mentioning that I needed to get my sister over to help him, I thought, well, I’ve got an appointment with my PT next Friday anyway, she can fix whatever damage I’ve done then.
Friends, I did four cartwheels, and to my absolute delight, my back was fine! Who knew!? It was a wonder!
Two days later I went to a movie, and, mindful of the way my right knee had pinched up a while back, sat with my left knee crossed over my right for much of the film.
The next morning my left knee was a stabby focus of sharp pain, and remained so. Honestly, I couldn’t really figure out what had happened to it.
Until about three days after THAT, when I realized that I was paying for my cartwheel sins, and probably also for how I’d sat at the movie theatre.
That was a damn month ago.
I stayed off my feet as much as was parentally possible for three weeks. I took taxis everywhere because the walk between bus stops was Bad For Me. My knee slowly improved, to the point where I knew I had to be EXTRA careful ALL the time because it felt well enough to use pretty normally but I was CLEARLY going to re-injure it with the slightest provocation.
After 3 weeks, I made the cardinal error of turning around, and my knee went SACCALAGLHGALALLALALGHHHHH and I spent the next three days trying to stay off my feet and encountering shooting pains when I didn’t.
On the fourth day it made a leap forward and stopped hurting when I walked. I continued to stay off my feet. (We had guests during this week. I was a GREAT host, yeah. ‘Hi, lovely to see you, I’ll be staying here with my leg up on the couch while you go do whatever, bye’.) I am STILL staying off my feet as much as possible.
This is very tedious, but better than re-injuring my damn knee.
Somehow, though, peoples’ sympathy seems to evaporate when they hear that I hurt myself doing cartwheels…
-
capturing the garden kittens
We got a capture cage and a regular cage from the animal rescue place & to rehabilitate the kittens in. (Habilitate, I guess; they were never habilitated to begin with, so I guess they can’t be REhabilitated….)
The animal rescue people are SWAMPED and they have no easily found place to give the kittens to someone else to teach to be pets. The lady there said every female cat they’ve had brought in in the past 2 months has been heavily pregnant and that she doesn’t remember a year this crazy.
She also opined, and I suspect she’s right, that our mama cat, Duchess, is probably pregnant again. She’s certainly looking Unfortunately Rotund, so the shelter people would REALLY LIKE her to be captured before she has more babies and gets pregnant AGAIN. And I think she’ll be pretty easy to catch if the kittens (who run in for the food first) are out of the way, so:
We’ll be keeping the kittens for a few days. Since the entire family is leaving on holiday on the 9th, we really can’t keep them beyond that, but at least this will give us a window for capturing them and hopefully catching Duchess and getting her into a place to have her babies as well.
So as of last night we have TWO! TWO KITTENS CAPTURED! AH AH AH AH AH also a bitten thumb the little fuckers (yes, i washed and antiseptic-ed it right away).
The parents were sufficiently upset about the trap that they did not go into it to eat the rest of the cat food last night after I caught the kittens. I’ll put new food out tonight. I hope they’ll take the bait, not that I’m catching them right now.
The kittens are terrified and angry. When we went in to check on them this morning, Turvy (aka the smart one, aka The Little Fucker Who Bit Me) found another space in the cage it could squeeze through, but fortunately (?) squirmed through it backward and couldn’t figure out what to do with its head. I tapped it on the butt a couple times and it shot forward again, back into the cage. I then rearranged the whole room to get the cage up against a wall and block off all the places they could squeeze through. They thought that was all horrible.
I will already be glad to hand them off to somebody who actually knows something about taming feral cats.
Topsy, the brave one:
Turvy, the smart one:
-
ow.
Two nights ago, in an attempt to thwart my burgeoning cold, I took some vitamin C. One of the pills went down sideways and stuck at the top of my esophagus, where it would not be dislodged by water. Over the course of the next several hours, it worked its way down to about mid-breastbone, where, when, at 2:30am, the combination of esophagal discomfort and having to pee drove me to the bathroom. Water and gravity then persuaded it to the bottom of my esophagus, where it then remained until it had dissolved enough to be knocked loose by breakfast several hours later. I spent all of yesterday burping unproductively but uncomfortably, and in pain every time I ate something, because my esophagus was clearly bruised from this maltreatment. Today it is less painful but still not right.
File under: Do Not Try This At Home. Or At All.
-
oh, for pity’s sake
My shoulder started to feel better-ish around Thursday, at which time Ted got a three-day migraine. His head started to feel better last night, at which time my left middle back turned into a spasming mess of pain.
Enough already, sez I. :p
I spent half an hour this morning doing creative stretching–the spasming part of my back is not the easiest part of the body to stretch–and it is less awful now, but I kind of suspect I’m going to have to continue the creative stretching all day in order to retain the ability to, say, breathe deeply. The particularly aggravating thing–well, ok, no; *one* of the aggravating things, because really the pain is the *particularly* aggravating thing, but anyway–is that hands down the best chair in the house for me to sit in is my work desk. As Ted said, “We /did/ spend a thousand dollars to make sure it’d be a good chair to sit in,” but I’m supposed to be on *vacation*, and there’s literally nothing to do at my workstation but work, because it has no internet access. *glum*
It’s Mother’s Day here in Ireland, so Ted’s going to make an Amazing Dinner for Mom (and coincidentally the rest of us) and I’m going to make a lovely spice cake for dessert. Except I typed ‘space cake’ when I was talking to Mom just now, which prompted the following conversation:
Mom: A space cake could be interesting.
Kit: But not what you wanted for mother’s day! :)
Mom: Well, now. I don’t know. I don’t know what a space cake would be like.
Kit: I have several ideas. :)
Mom: Do you?
Kit: Yep! I think it’d have to be a dark chocolate cake, and then there would be a variety of things you could do. you could frost it with a ribbon of vanilla frosting with silver sparkles and it could be a Milky Way Galaxy cake. Or you could make frosting planets and it could be a solar system cake.
Mom: oooh!
Kit: Or if you were feeling very ambitious you could make, let’s see. Two red devil’s food cakes, for Mercury and Mars (the Mercury one would be very small indeed!), and a silver cloud cake for Venus and…Earth would be difficult, actually. Possibly a blueberry cake or bread of some sort. then for the gas giants you’d want to do something light, maybe meringues of some kind, though Jupiter would have to be quite colorful with its red spot and all, and Saturn would probably be an angel food cake with powdered sugar sprinkles for the rings. I’d have to think more about Uranus and Neptune. And *I* would put Pluto into the planets. hmph. :)
That sounds like a good theme for a big birthday party, though. :)
I’ll have to do something like that someday. :)
miles to Minas Tirith: 132
-
improving
shoulder is improving. trying not to keyboard too much. am cranky about not swimming, but that would be Stupid right now. might be back around on Friday.
that is all. :)
miles to Minas Tirith: 121.3
