Do It On Your Own

February 2, 2015February 9, 2015 ~ Shara ~ 2 Comments

Short post tonight, because it was a long day tacked on to a longer night. The Super Bowl party was a hit, though half our guests barely caught five minutes of the game. Good food and good company, I suppose?

Today was my last day of physical therapy. I’ve gotten stronger since I started last year, but let’s be honest: I’m not very good about keeping up my exercises at home. I’ve got a long way to go, but at this point, there’s no need to keep making appointments with my PT guy, so I’m officially discharged. It’s just time to buckle down and figure out a way to get my exercises in and do them consistently. That, coupled with my time on the elliptical, is how I’ll get stronger.

And don’t get me wrong: it’s not like I’m still jonesing to take up running like I was last year. Rather, it’s the realization that everything I do between my day job and my hobbies involve me sitting on my ass. I need to get stronger so that there’s less pressure on my joints, which means I’ll be dealing with less pain as I get older. And that’s nothing to sneeze at.

That said, I wish there were more hours in the day, or that I was the type of person who really looked forward to exercise of any kind, or barring even that, I wish I was the type of person who was motivated by the benefits of exercise, even if I didn’t like the exercise itself.

I’m not, so it’s a matter of buckling down and doing it.

Today’s headline brought to you from “Invincible” by Muse, from the album Black Holes and Revelations. It’s one of my favorite albums by them, and part of the playlist for my Codename: Telepathic Soulmates project. That’s right…I’m getting in the mood! You can listen to “Invincible” here.

I Cannot Brain Today….

January 17, 2015 ~ Shara ~ Leave a comment

….I has the dumb.

Seriously, does this cat not say it much better?

I did not write yesterday. I came home from an incredibly stressful afternoon at work, brought home groceries, helped the hubby clean up for company and as soon as we finished cleaning up, company was unable to attend. Which was okay: we had the last two episodes of Penny Dreadful to watch and lemme tell you: I was hooked.

But I along with groceries I came home with a headache, and when the jolt of caffeine from a 5 Hour Energy didn’t knock it out, I had to pull out the Excedrin Migraine. I thought the headache was from caffeine withdrawal, but it must have been stress, because it felt like someone was shoving a screwdriver in my left temple when I stood up. Pleasant, right?

The headache did go away, and stayed away. Today has been a day of errands, and I set the mood by trying to walk to the car while balancing on the curb. I got distracted by a very pretty, deep red car (a Dodge Challenger, maybe?) and as I tried to get the hubby’s attention, I lost my balance and fell in the parking lot.

Yeah, falls: not just the purview for the old or the intoxicated. I should note I’m okay. Nothing twisted or broken, though I had to scrap the knee highs I was wearing and repair a part of my shoe. I’ve got a scrape, slight swelling, and a bruise delightedly forming on my right ankle. I can’t remember how I fell, in terms of where and how I landed, so I worry about pain during the night, but we’ll see.

On one hand, my physical therapist would be very disappointed in my lack of balance. Then again, I’d like to see him balance on curbs in heels. The moral of the story: don’t balance on curbs while wearing heels. Or maybe, just don’t wear heels.

But my brain is all kinds of mush, and Word Press has been playing with it (or I screwed something up: if you saw a post about me talking about writing SF, it’s been deleted — it should have never shown publicly in the first place), so I think I’m going to forgo writing tonight and just get some sleep.

Because tomorrow is a busy day: our toaster oven decided to stop working tonight, and we must hunt for its replacement.

Happy Weekend!

Cat Be Nimble, Cat Be Quick

January 5, 2015January 11, 2015 ~ Shara ~ 6 Comments

Today was my first physical therapy session of 2015. Somehow and miraculously, I’m getting stronger, which is news to me, since I’ve done a shit job of taking care of myself the past three months. Of course, 2015 is a new year, and I resolve to do better, but I assumed my session today would kick my ass.

But apparently I’m getting stronger. My therapist wanted to try some new exercises with me today, and while he was setting up one of them, I made the smart-ass remark, “Oh great. You’re gonna make me jump those, aren’t you?”

“Oh no,” he said, “But we can do that next!”

And despite my protests, he set up two jumping exercises while I attempted this balance and coordination thing with a four-pound ball that’s apparently supposed to be strength-training.

The jumping exercises: in one case, I had to jump up on a step. “Light as a cat!” he kept telling me, and I told him that was a bad analogy: my cat is a 17lbs cat, and there’s nothing light about the way he jumps. As I practiced the exercise, he kept reminding me, “Light as a cat!” and I decided to think differently: spry as a kitten. Yes, that works. Funny that last night, one of the lines I wrote a few times during my free-writing session involved my heroine thinking she’s weak as a kitten.

There’s some kind of irony in that, me thinking I’d be weak as a kitten before my session, and then being a spry one instead.

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Currently Writing: Codename: Magic Twins
Last night’s word count: 1,217 words
Total word count: 3,833 words
A good session last night, despite writing in bed. Since I’ve got a laptop now, I’m trying to mix up the writing locations a bit, keep myself from getting into a rut or settling into super-bad posture, which is what I think sparked the migraine of DOOM back in October. And after hearing the 12/21/14 episode of Writing Excuses, I think it’s an even better decision: all too often, we forget that writing is supposed to be FUN. I think more thoughts are coalescing about this topic, so they’ll get their own post, but the point is, I’m trying to mix things up this year, writing what I what, when I want, how I want. We’ll see how it goes.

Currently Reading: Jeff VanderMeer’s Acceptance
Enjoyed the Alexie, but now it’s time to start nibbling at my pre-Hugo reading pile. Finishing up VanderMeer’s weird-but-wonderful trilogy is a must.

Next up: tonight we finished up the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy with The Dark Knight Rises, and I have some THOUGHTS about the re-watch. Those can come later. We’re saving tonight’s new episodes of Gotham and Sleepy Hollow for later this week, but tomorrow, I’m super-excited to be watching the two-hour premiere of Agent Carter live. What’s Agent Carter, you may ask? Just put Marvel, the television show Alias and the year 1946 in a blender, and that’s Agent Carter. I can’t wait. I hope to hell it’s worth it.