The Weight Of It

      "I'll just stand this 24-pack of water on end, keep my arm straight and lift with my knees to get it over the threshold and into the house.  How bad can it be?"

     Readers, it was bad.  Back spasm.  I once again saw the logo of the company that owned* whatever is left of RCA's technical IP, rotating and strobing.  I'd as soon see the old 1920s RCA meatball, myself, but what I get is far more colorful and I do not recommend it. 
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* They were Thomson when they ate RCA and that entity is gone now, bankrupt, split up and some of the parts recombined -- including one big chunk, back under the famous technichromatic name. RCA barely kept their patent pool corralled when they existed and it's no surprise the successors never quite managed.  Their pro gear was a wild mix of in-house, contracted out and rebadged products, and you kept it running by keeping track of where the parts had been sourced.

Status Report

     I am in sufficient pain and of such restricted mobility that my temper has no fuse at all.  Every minor annoyance or household mishap triggers anger bordering on rage.  This is nothing I am proud of.  It's annoying.  It's embarrassing.

     One of those remote-grabby things is on its way to me, along with a front-porch delivery of bottled water.  I have a 24-pack, but it's in the back hatch of my car, on the far side of the garage, and I can no more carry it in than I could fly.  Getting those should help with some of the frustration: I'll be able to pick things up from the floor without a heart-pounding series of scary moves to get down to floor level and, far worse, back up.  And Indianapolis city water is nothing to write home about.  It's okay fresh out of the tap but carries the faintest aroma of wet dog after it sits a spell.  (It has been this way for years, no matter how well our reservoirs are doing.  Is it that hint of canal water?  The scattering of city wells?  Some purifying chemical or process?  Our water company draws on a variety of sources and they do honest work, but it's a bulk business, not a boutique bottler.  It's clean water and plenty of it.)

     Just took the second muscle relaxer pill and the first anti-inflammatory.  The latter is some turbocharged prescription-only relative of naproxen, so I had to wait for the previous dose of aspirin to time out; you can't take both at the same time.  Fortunately, acetaminophen is still okay, and I'm watching the clock for my next dose.  Such excitement!

     First commenter to suggest horse-paste, moxibustion or a chiropractor gets punched in the face as soon as I'm feeling better.

Progress?

     Went to the doc, got checked out, got the meds.

     Five hours later, I'm still miserable.  I can't pick stuff up from the floor.  It's a gymnastic exercise to stand up.  But I'm hopeful.  It beats not being hopeful.

Almost

     I rested well overnight, got up and took a walk, napped more, did a little laundry very carefully and almost convinced myself I was getting better.

     Almost.  I relaxed eating dinner and stood up incautiously to clear away my take-out platter.  My lower back went into a spasm that nearly buckled my knees.  Technicolor pain.

     Time to stop pretending.  Tomorrow, I'll get washed up well enough to face the world and go to the doc-in-a-box. 

"Oops?"

     Between work yesterday (trying to rebuild a portable camera tripod that has had a hard life, typical of them; they're extremely difficult to take apart after a few years of heavy use) and my contributions to Trash Night last night (cleaning out the freezer and fridge, a bending-heavy activity, and changing two litter boxes, a task I have long done while sitting on the floor due to bad knees), I am back at square one with my back.  Maybe square -1.  Or -2.

     Hello, Dial-A-Doc?

     Update: The the dickens with them.  They never connected.  Waited an hour, with the little reminder that someone would be along Any Time Now blinking away at the top of the screen.  Oh well.  They don't prescribe muscle relaxers and I won't take them, so what was the point?

Walking

      During the pandemic, Tam and I got into the habit of taking a walk around the block every morning.  Or, by and by, two blocks, or three....  It was decent exercise for a couple of spinsters, and we don't actually spend much time in one another's company otherwise; I work, she's always got writing projects underway, and a lot of our interaction consists of keeping out of the other person's way.  We're usually watching a TV series over supper -- 45 minutes or an hour of staring at the same screen.

     So walking around the block is a good way to find out what's going on with the other person living in Roseholme* Cottage, as well as exercise.  We'd stopped our walks at the worst of winter, and as that damn virus became endemic and the vaccines made it far less a problem, we eventually came to a spring when we didn't start our walks back up.

     That was a mistake.  We're getting old; we need the exercise.  We're getting grouchy, too, and it helps to have a little time to go talk about inconsequentials: Oh, look, a cardinal, a squirrel, the Moon; what lovely flowers! what kind of bush† is that? and so on.

     So we're walking again, this time with our smartphones keeping track.  I need it, especially after the way I strained my back last weekend.  It's getting better, but still a little sore.  And some one of these days, our track will go as far as the place that sells breakfast pastries -- maybe it's not the most healthy goal I could have, but at least it's a goal.
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* This name of my house is not a reference to the similarly-named university but a mocking allusion to the heraldry supposedly associated with my family name, a "naturally-colored" rose on a silver-grey background.  Oh, the arms are real enough, a minor title that faded over three generations, apparently a War of the Roses version of the GI Bill, but my last name is a toponym, and so far there's no evidence I'm related to that long-ago soldier/squire.
 
† I'd sure like to know.  Feathery, reddish-green needles, gnarly branches, dense and no more than three or four feet tall.  Interesting-looking shrubbery. 

That Was...

     Monday wasn't fun.  Tuesday wasn't great, either: my back.  I've been living on aspirin and sleeping on an ice pack, walking as much as I can manage, and I'm getting better, but oh, jeepers.  I did not see this coming.

     I mean, it could be worse.  I could be stuck in a country rapidly sliding down into competitive authoritarianism, in which one party's politicians were uniformly crooks, cranks and grifters, while the other party distinguished itself by fielding many more plain old hacks and allowing the occasional idealist to slip though, counterbalanced by a scattering of outright weirdos; not that their opposite numbers didn't have a few of those, too.

     Oh, wait.

     The United States may be the only two-party democracy (in the broadest sense) that does itself in by the two parties leaping off a precipice, one shouting, "Hey, everybody, lookit me!  I can fly!" while the other party mutters, "Oh dear," and frantically tries to improvise a parachute from a pocket handkerchief all the way down.  They'll both make identical splatters when they hit the ground.

     The next person who gives me a version of "Same old same-old" in response to our present crisis is going to get the unexpurgated version of this diatribe, because no, it's not.  I'm looking back on LBJ and Nixon and both Bushes and Bill Clinton with fond regret: we didn't realize how good we had it at the time.

We Did It!

      Actually, we have almost done it.  For, well, years, Tam and I -- mostly me -- have been accumulating fallen branches and twigs on the front porch, and trimmed saplings in a pile out back.

     Some of it is decent firewood and we do have a fire pit.  I have sorted that out in batches and stacked it in small crates.  The brushpiles remained.  A couple of months ago,* I picked up a canvas mini-dumpster.  They're sold folded up flat, of course, and the package sat in the garage, in mute recrimination.

     Or it did until yesterday.  The weather was nice, the heaps were annoying, and even if we only made a little progress, it would be worth it.

     The work went much better than expected, and after a couple of hours, what do you know?  The porch was clear.

     I felt so good about it that I went out after supper, added a stack of broken-down cardboard boxes, and there was still room for the back yard brushpile.

     Still to come, calling up the provider and paying a little more to have it taken away.

     Maybe we'll even plant some flowers again this year.

     Downside?  My back feels pretty awful.  Too much bending over, not enough proper squatting.  Price of age -- and of getting rid of some of the mess.  And my creaky knees are, at least., not any creakier this morning than they were yesterday morning.
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* Yes, I do have only two speeds, but they're not Dead Slow and Full Stop, only Slow and Slower.