Going To the Dogs? in Everyday Ramblings

This is another shot from “my” bus stop of the grocery I go to. I love the shape and color of the orange tree. This is the prime week here for gorgeous orange foliage.

Thursday is my down day. In the most positive sense. Right now, I am teaching the morning half hour Open Practice where we do simple movements to wake up all the joints in the body and this afternoon the half hour of free-weight lifting, both on Zoom. In the meantime, I am free.

Mrs. Sherlock has a friend, a retired nurse she has known for a long, long time whose husband had major heart surgery on Tuesday. Her friend is now living about three hours north in a lovely home with acreage they recently bought on a rural canal. Mrs. Sherlock went up to visit them and be with her as he gets ready to transition home from the hospital. He is a handful.

Anyway, Mrs. Sherlock has been trying to get her friend to participate in my classes for a long time. This morning she took her iPad into the kitchen and made her friend sit down and say hi. Most Honorable joined in as well. We were a cheerful group. She has two dogs, one of whom is a ten-year-old dachshund mix who is a sweetie and clearly adores Mrs. Sherlock, and another younger rowdier dog they adopted recently from Mexico.

A couple of my students also adopted the most adorable dog from Mexico just a few days ago. He has big ears that stick straight out, and his name is Jimmy. They introduced him to us last night in class and said that he does understand the English word, “Treat”. Smart dog.

One of the teachers on my weekly call lives in Mexico and spends her free time fostering dogs. She loves it.

I even chose a dog related poem to read this morning.

The cats are not amused. Well, I don’t think the guy with the gas-powered leaf blower just outside the window here is helping. How excellent of California to ban the darn things.

This is week four of my Pull-Up Club. It is interesting to be presented with physical challenges I cannot do. I can do a lot of the things, as my biceps will attest to this morning, but I won’t be hanging with my full bodyweight off the rings anytime soon. The rings are great though because they were inexpensive, and you can easily adjust them for all sorts of movements and loads. This is such a surprise for me. Who knew? Anyway, the adventure continues.

I have been doing some continuing ed on Plantar Fasciitis. When I went to the doctor last month about what turned out to be the Costochondritis (inflamed cartilage in my ribcage) I talked to her about how the sciatica was flaring up and my feet hurt a lot when I get up. She said, “Oh, that is probably plantar fasciitis” and I was extremely skeptical.

From what I had heard described to me by several folks was heel pain and I didn’t have that. I just hobble around in the mornings. One of my students told me hers was so bad at one point she had to crawl when she got up. Anyway, I had never heard it described as anything other than heal pain. I thought maybe it was a lingering effect of the statins or circulation or something.

But having learned this simple practice of movement and self-massage and sharing it with my students my feet are so happy. It is like (before this latest flare-up which has resolved) I found the simple movement practice for the sciatica. And I got the Pull-Up bar in the first place because I heard a little hanging was good for the spine. It’s all connected. :)

Right this moment I feel great. No back pain, no foot pain, no headache, nada. It is a lovely thing. Okay, yeah, my biceps are a little sore, but it is more like having the pain in your arm after a flu shot. The arm only hurts when you move it and only a little. Today is the anniversary of the day Gerald Ford received his flu shot on television in the Oval Office in 1976.

Life is so darn weird.