We are having some issues here with cabin fever. It helps to explain the lack of posts for the past week on this blog. Don’t believe me? Well, let me give you a glimpse into the wondrously crazy little world that is my mind…You’ll begin to see how it all snowballs.
It started about this time last week with my back. About twice a year my back goes out. Is it the arthritis? The damage done when the semi slammed into our truck on the highway while we were stopped in construction? Is it the cold? Overdoing it with the exercise? Stress? Hell, I don’t know. I do know that about twice a year, my back starts to twinge, and then my mood goes south, and I spend the next week clipping out snarky responses and making faces. Unless I am trying to move from sitting to standing. Then I make horrific mewling noises like a slowly dying cat.
So, the back went out. The workload at work increased (second week of the semester). The workload at home increased as one kid prepares a National History Day project and another kid gets back into the full flow of homework. And then the storm came. All of these things equal cranky people, with stuff they don’t want to be doing, stuck in one freaking house. Yippie!
The worst part of my back going out, in my mind, was that it was going to derail my exercise routine. I’m limited right now—mainly because I do not go to a gym, and the weather doesn’t allow for my love of the great outdoors to combine with my exercise routine. My limitations mean that I do a lot of ballet during the winter. One thing you can’t do for exercise when your back is tweaked? Ballet. That would be the worst idea in the world.
The Nana took pity on me, and allowed me to borrow her recumbent bike. She even brought it over, and K unloaded it—right in the living room. Even though my back was at its worst last weekend, I jumped straight on that thing—another thing I know (as well as I know that bad-behaving back = no ballet) is that nothing—not Advil, not heating pads, not even beer-- feels better to me when I am sore than to get the endorphins back up and running.
No pressure on my back, endorphins, and TV mean that I have been spending about an hour each day on that bike, for the past five days. My back feels better and better each day, and while I know that it is likely the normal course of events, I am attributing magical powers to that bike. And telling J about them. Frequently. He hates having that bike in the living room.
He does think it has potential, if we find a way to hook it up to a generator which can power the house in the event of an electricity outage.
It feels good to be able to exercise. It feels good to know that this is not going to derail me. I just need better daytime TV.
Snowpocalypse has kept us home for the past three days, and will keep us home for at least one more. Now, we are perfectly okay, with plenty of food, water, charcoal to grill outside if the power goes out, blankets, etc. I even have a new book to read when the TV selection starts to irritate me (or I deign to get off the bike and let my kids have a chance). The bad news is that we’ve had plenty to do around the house to prepare, and then to keep everything up and running. Eighteen inches of snow, which drifted to about three feet against the front and back of your house (how DID that happen?) means that you get to spend a lot of time shoveling. Or supervising shoveling. Depending on how whiny about your back you are feeling at the time.
We have plenty of time. The snow plow got stuck on the road that was cleared to get to our road, which was not cleared. It’s going to take them awhile.
Speaking of time… you can’t make your children do homework all day long, for three days in a row. It just doesn’t work. You also can’t convince them to clean baseboards or mini-blinds for you, and even though I tried it, you cannot convince them to spend their entire day watching TV and eating junk food and mewling like a dying cat. This means I have had to come up with activities. I haven’t had to do that in a good while!
My lack of practice shows. In fact, I am pretty sure they would like me to get off the computer now, so that I get back to practicing and maybe come up with a fun idea that all four of us would actually like to do.
Because there’s only so many times you can let Super-Sophie outside and watching her hurdle over the drifts in the backyard in order to pee. Or so I am told. It still makes me laugh, every time I see it!
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