This year, I have decided to stop rebelling against the advice of doctors and have modified my activities to keep the Gods of Pain mollified. As such, I have been able to keep myself comfortable on the less potent, non-narcotic drug over the past several months. It's been great! I don't know if any of you have had to use a scheduled narcotic on a regular basis, but it makes the tummy unhappy after only a few days. Then it's a lesser of two evils thing: deal with the pain, or spend the night kneeling on the bathroom floor? I usually choose the first and supplement with adult beverages to take the edge off. It's truly amazing that I've managed to get an A in every class throughout my undergrad program considering I've been decently buzzed while writing many of my papers.

This was all until I stopped trying to pretend that there is nothing wrong with me. I have now accepted that just because I can't do what everybody else does, I am not a failure. I think of myself a decade ago, and I don't think I would have cared about physical activity at all. I would have been happy to play the victim, so I should be grateful that my idea of self worth and reliability has improved that much during my 20s!

Unfortunately, having relatively controllable pain this year has made me forget about all of the things that set off the beast. Nick entered a fun run yesterday, and I went along to watch. I would rather run in private without the fanfare which I find nerve-wracking and stressful (plus, the tee shirts from this particular race are extremely ugly), so I did not participate myself. But I did find myself standing for over two hours.

Standing for more than 30 minutes is a big no-no in my world, because it puts pressure on my already over-emphasized lumbar curve. Our modern world makes this one an easy thing to avoid. I forget about it—until it's too late, that is.

The folks at the pain clinic have suggested a surgery that may or may not help those silly facet joints, but I am not the fence about having it done. They use radio frequency waves to burn away the nerves surrounding the fussy facets, which they would also like to do with the SI joints eventually, but they will only do one side at a time (as Nick would say, I'm just really "mucked" up). I have been warned that the recovery is awful because all of the surrounding nerves go a little haywire. The burned nerves regrow in six months to a year, and the fresh nerves may be pain free or they may be nastier than they were to begin with.

Part of me thinks that I have to try because the improvement to my (and by association, Nick's) quality of life would be immeasurable if it worked. But I am afraid of the worst case scenario: the discomfort being worse than it was to begin with. At least right now, I tolerate things relatively well (with the aforementioned adult beverages). I'll consider making a decision next year, perhaps.

I have decided that it's just this weekend that I need to avoid! It was this weekend four years ago that I got that first MRI, spent a night in the emergency room to get a CT scan, and got an open-ended ticket to visit UW Hospital. It was this weekend in 2008 that I confronted the fact that the pain didn't go away like it was supposed to, and my surgeon ordered a follow up MRI...a battle between HMOs ensued, but really I just needed someone (from any ol' HMO) to tell me that I wasn't going to die any time soon because that's what I feared the most. And, it was this weekend last year that I screwed my back up so royally that I spent all of August with a TENS unit strapped to my waist, whimpering when I had to take it off to shower. I wish electricity and water played nicer together!

So, the end of July/beginning of August is just a tenuous time in the life of my low back. I am sitting here doing homework while Nick is out paddling. I need to stay relatively "with it" because I need to pick him up once he reaches the end and take him back to his vehicle. My old buddy the TENS unit is keeping me company, and I am hoping that if I keep doing the exercises from physical therapy over and over again, this will pass quickly.

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I was scouring the almighty Internet to find a visual aid for excessive lumbar lordosis for you, and I came across this link. This link says that in some cultures, this is considered an attractive trait—hah! You just ask Nick how attractive it is seeing your significant other stuff ice packs down her pants! The real thing will have to do (below). What, doesn't everybody have an X-Ray of their back sitting around the house?



I no longer consider it a compliment when someone makes a comment about my posture—it's not me, it's my spine! Genetic malformation that hampers my independence! Sexxxxxy!

Had to share, because I felt my advancing age the other day.

I have a Blackberry. I love it in an ungodly way that no one should love an inanimate object. I never thought I would enjoy a smart phone, never thought I would use a data plan, just never thought…

Then I had a moment, shortly after getting my phone wherein someone questioned one of those useless little facts I kept in my head. Instead of spending an afternoon arguing my case, probably becoming more inebriated and less convincing as the minutes ticked by, I pulled out my phone and looked it up. Dude, it was super sweet.

The Blackberry came with a one gigabyte micro SD card. A gig is a lot of space, right? I remember when I bought my first laptop, lovingly known as the brick, back in 2000. I paid $3,500 for a computer with a six gig hard drive, knowing that no one could ever possibly use six whole gigabytes in their lifetime. Then I discovered Napster (which at the time was still legal).

So, the standards for storage have changed over the years, needless to say. I remember one of my digital cameras from 2005, another brickish device (particularly for being a point-and-shoot). For a really nice just-because gift, Miles bought me a ONE GIGABYTE COMPACT FLASH CARD...holy moly! That sucker was over $100! I remember a conversation with a support rep from Kodak wherein he strongly disapproved of such a large storage card because!-because!-because what if the data became corrupted!? Think of all you'd lose! You stupid camera user! I remember thinking, "Yeah, whatever. Just tell me what's wrong with my camera."

Now we're in an age where a gig comes standard with your phone, and the card is like an eighth the size of a compact flash card. Well, my gig filled up fast with pictures, applications, and music files. I needed an upgrade. I scoured the Internet and found an eight gig micro SD card for like seven dollars. SEVEN DOLLARS. EIGHT GIGABYTES. Madness I say, Madness! With shipping included, I had another seven gigs to play with for like thirteen bucks.

It's mind boggling, really. I also notice that I call flash/thumb drives JumpDrives, because that's how I was first exposed to them (I splurged and purchased the 256 mb back in the day!). People look at me like I'm talking gibberish. I'm getting old. I'm not cool anymore…luckily, I don't think that I ever was, so it's not a big loss.

Cleaning my closet has always been an event.

Saturdays were always cleaning day in my mother's household. How that woman didn't have the physique of a fitness model I'll never know, but she was the hardest worker I've ever seen. Every Saturday was a DEEP clean. The floors? You could eat off of 'em. She physically moved every piece of heavy, heavy furniture to make sure that she vacuumed the carpet beneath. The old wooden kitchen cupboards always shone with her elbow grease. Throughout the day on Saturday, she would always find another project to add to her tasks such as scrub the rarely used good china in the top cupboard or organizing the coat closet by season.

It should come as no surprise then that my closet is organized by clothing type (makes no sense to put a dress right next to a cardigan) and then color (rainbow order, of course). With the level of detail I put into order, nobody wants to touch my closet. When I was a child, and I got behind in my laundry-putting-away, the task of all that sorting seemed way too daunting, and it seemed like an acceptable solution to instead let it pile up in baskets. Left long enough, my mother would set aside a good part of her coveted Saturday to help me (light a fire under me) to get back atop the situation. I was always left with a feeling of relief once the closet was fully organized again. The memory had me putting away clothes right away for months, for fear of that awful feeling of messiness.

Let's just say that people's behavior patterns don't vary that much as they age. I take daily medication that makes me tired, so I would probably feel overwhelmed even if I worked only two hours a day. Instead I work full time and am a full time student. When I am prioritizing my tasks to complete with what free time I have after my obligations, I'll be honest with you that spending time with Nick and Sophie comes before the almighty closet. Unfortunately, as in childhood, after I have missed a couple weeks of attending to the complex organizational system that they say only I can decipher, I am flustered and unable to think of laundry without becoming catatonic. The clean laundry piles up. I start looking through baskets to find the day's outfit.

Today, Nick asked if he could help me with the closet. Déjà vu or what? I accepted his help, but dragged my feet up to the small bedroom where my closet it located. So many clothes, so few hangers. After a few hours in the generous walk-in closet, it is shiny and new again. The bad news is that my skirt accumulation has been a little out of control (I got a new job!—but first I had to dress the part for those silly interviews), and I no longer have the skirt hanger supply to support the numbers. The good news is that I do not need any running pants. Turns out that I have upwards of 20 pairs and should cancel my plans to shop for more. Who knew?

After all the clothes were put away, Nick started going through all my old purses and organized them on the top shelf. Even though I was thinking mean things because he was all up in my closet business and I was tired and sore, he saved me the expense of a new purse. I was looking for a new one in a certain style a little while ago, and lo and behold I must have been in the kick for that style purse like four years ago too.

Will I ever perfect my closet etiquette? Probably not. I think I probably freaked out when my rattle supply backed up on me in infancy, too. It's just me—if I don't have time to make it perfect, I ignore it until the imperfection of ignoring it bugs someone else enough to say, "Let me help." I guess the moral of the story is to be grateful for the people in your life who are willing to save you from yourself.

This week, starting in about 15 minutes, I am going to start integrating strength training to my workout routine. I have a mild dose of OCD, and I find diversifying difficult with certain activities. So far this year, I have done nothing but run. I had an outpatient procedure in December, so January was mostly getting over the fear that I would injure myself and getting the legs to run more than two miles at once. By the end of January, I had the distance thing down again, and in February, well…

Nick thought it would be a grand thing to create a Nike-Plus challenge between him, me, and our friend Jeff. Nick was a challenger for the first week of the month, and then decided to sit it out. Jeff and I got a little competitive, however. No time for strength-training during the shortest month of the year, no way, no how! Especially when I wanted to beat Jeff in a mileage challenge spanning those 28 days:



I told Nick that he's not allowed to schedule another one of these, at least not right away. I don't like feeling competitive. I get a little manic and a lot moody. Anyway, I went running outside yesterday. As my quads burned running hard up one of my last hills, I accepted that I have not had a well-rounded exercise routine as of late. Last year at this time, I challenged myself to work out every day until a scheduled surgery in March '09 after inspiration courtesy of Oprah. During those 60ish days, I remember thinking that I should really be incorporating cardio in my exercise routine. See!? Extremest!

I miss those days when I could spend a leisurely two hours in the gym every morning, splitting my time evenly between strength and sweat! Didn't realize how lucky I was to have all that flexibility with my time! For now, I am about to blow the dust off all my Jari Love DVDs and those nasty, unsafe, killer 80's workouts from The FIRM (workouts seem to be much more effective when they disregard concern for injury).

I imagine that tomorrow evening I will have a case of DOMS so severe that I will be in tears. I'm just so gosh darn excited…