the resurrection

Well, in honor of the coming Easter holiday, I thought I'd give the blog a small shot of life after - what - two years? So much has happened so where to begin?

For one thing, M is a person now. She has an apartment and a person and a car (that she pays for) and a savings account! She even just got her first parking lot hit-and-run yesterday! (Scratch what I said about the savings account...) B is on his way, he expects to graduate in just a few short weeks (to me, I suspect they may be long for him.) An internship that he's had for the semester has extended into July so he won't have to worry about hunting while he wraps up his scholastic career, which he capstoned with a travel study class to India!

Otherwise the rest of us are status quo. We lost our dear Rusty (featured as a baby tuxedo cat in the profile picture for this blog) about a year ago to some kind of ruthless and incurable cat cancer. This is where you wonder how people can afford to have pets. Countless tests and medicines and visits later, and within two months the cat died. His cat wife Lilly hasn't recovered. She cries in the morning and wonders why he never comes to visit her in her isolation unit (she can't get along with the new addition, Dora from the mean streets of Philadelphia). Wilbur and Abby have fallen into their routine with their daily dog walkers and frequent weekend travels which leave them home alone for stretches on the weekends. They long for the summer and the trips to the beach (one so far this year! always so much colder just a few miles away by the ocean!) Wilbur is eight years old!

My latest trial is a pain in my hip! For years I fought hip pain on the right and it finally went away. I thought I'd better get to a gym, with my advancing age and all that, so I shopped around and joined Orangetheory Fitness. I loved it! It was a little pricey, but was otherwise everything I'd been looking for in a workout - high energy vibe, varied workouts, and someone to tell me what to do with the weights. A rower was an added plus. I'd never used one before and, unfortunately, it became obvious soon that that was a problem! That and a treadmill workout that involved running on a steep incline.

So the theory is that you're supposed to stay within the "orange" and "red" zones for a minimum of 12 minutes out of the hour and be in the "green" for a fair amount as well. But there was something in me that wanted to get the most possible points in an hour. I'd frantically keep my eye on the screen. One day, a couple of months after I joined, I got a little overzealous and there went the left hip during a treadmill block. Thinking I could walk it off, I continued to go, and modified my workouts, which continued to include rowing, squats, lunges and lots of jumping. My hip continued to worsen, and all I was doing was walking on the treadmill at that point. Still with inclines :/

Finally I went to the doctor at the end of March, to be admonished and told that I've done this to myself. It's awful! The diagnosis is bursitis and SI joint dysfunction. It could have started on the treadmill, but the rower was probably terrible for it as well. I've currently frozen the membership for one month (free with a doctor's note! Imagine having to pay $15 to not have to pay a membership fee for the place where you got hurt in the first place...?) Anyway they were very good about it and I hope they will remain so. I am hoping to be able to go back but at this rate I still have a lot of pain and I'm sure if I go back too soon I will end up having to cancel the membership and join chair yoga.

Along those lines is the bed. We had a terrible pillowtop and I couldn't stand the amount of pain I was in every morning. My entire body ached when I turned over. We tested out a Casper mattress at a local west elm, and it felt pretty OK. They offer a 100 day return, so we gave it a shot. Sadly, I didn't initially love it and now I am not even sure if I like it. I've been away from the gym and yet my hip is not improving, and it's at its worst in the morning. We stopped in and tried some Tempurpedics when we were in NYC to see Hamilton (!) and they were worlds apart from what this bed is like. I feel terrible about returning it, I really, really wanted it to work. But pain is pain and comfort is comfort. I think it's time to pay for the real bed.

And in other news, Hamilton was indeed as engaging as they say! Warning - try to not drink anything the entire day because the bathroom procedure is the worst! I left my seat in the first mezzanine immediately upon the lights going on, had to fight my way downstairs and then they had us wrapping through the orchestra seats just to get to the real line.  By the time I got back to my seat, they had already turned off the lights. And I wasn't even last! You literally could not move through some of the common areas. So maybe stay in your seats and relax for 10 minutes. Or an hour. Not good for a claustrophobic! But highly recommend the show. Happy Easter to all!