Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I have been to the Quest lab in Arlington again, this time with an appointment. It went pretty smoothly, in part because I asked for a butterfly needle. However, walking even with the quad cane hurt by the time I left our building on the way there, so if anything a little worse than Tuesday. Functional rather than clinical improvement.

The blood draw was at 1:30, and even if Quest sends results through MyChart before the end of the day, I don't expect to hear from Carmen until Monday.

My knees have been sore for the last couple of days. Nonetheless, I went for a stroll with cattitude this morning, masked, because I wanted to look at something other than our yard and the bit of Mass Ave where adrian_turtle and I were standing with "black lives matter" signs.

My cucumber plants have produced their first flower. However, I think it would be prudent to wait until Wednesday to set up the trellis, and make tomorrow a rest day.

cattitude and I spent a chunk of yesterday afternoon in Inwood Hill Park. The emphasis this time was on the "hill" part of that. In the last few months we'd mostly stuck to the river shore and the low ground near it, but I wanted to look at fall colors and decided my knees could stand it.

We didn't get a lot of fall colors: having had a very early spring, we're getting a late fall. Some of the leaves had turned yellow, red, or yellow, but most of them were still green. We're also getting flowers later than usual: not just dandelions and clover and lots of purple composites (asters?), but goldenrod, which I was sort of expecting because I've been seeing it next to the marsh, but jewelweed. On October 21st. Just a few plants, but still bright orange, not dried-out bits just clinging to the stem. (In a normal sunmer, the last of the jewelweed might be blooming on September 21st.

We spent a lot of time going up and downhill, including three flights of stairs, which caused a few twinges, but no worse. Lately I've been climbing some subway stairs on purpose, not just the ones I can't avoid (because those stations don't have elevators or escalators). This is less to test how my knees are than to rebuild muscle: stairs are good exercise for the thigh muscles, and some focused exercise at the gym twice a week doesn't really substitute for 8-10 flights of stairs every workday.

Since I'm still feeling my way here, and I know that if I overdo it I can lose ground in terms of knee pain, I'm mostly doing the stair-climbing late in the day, on my way home, and using elevators and escalators early in the day. That gives me more flexibility if it turns out something I'm doing involves stairs I hadn't known about, or if an elevator I would be using is broken. But I am seeing improvement, and glad of it.

( Since I'm posting about exercise anyway, this morning's gym details )

I'm just back from a long walk in the hills with cattitude. We looked at lots of plants (some flowers, and some observing of the trees and which saplings looked like they might get enough sunlight to become tall trees), listened to and saw some birds, and gathered a very few berries: black raspberries, salmonberries, and two tiny red raspberries (a total of five of those tiny round berry-lets). There used to be a lot more black raspberry bushes up there. It may be a good blackberry season in 2-4 weeks, though.

By the time we were ready to come back downhill, my knees hurt a bit, and the downhill parts were painful. Fortunately, now that I have rested a bit and am sitting down, they're fine; nonetheless, I shall probably take things easy for the rest of the day. (Inwood has virtues, but it also has lots of hills; going almost anywhere from my apartment except the across-the-street bit of Inwood Hill Park means going uphill and then downhill again.) If they start hurting again, maybe ice; I've already taken 375 mg of naproxen this morning, so no more NSAIDs for a while.

Yesterday Cattitude and I went out for dim sum with marykay/marykaykare, her niece Sarah, womzilla, L, who arranged this, and Moshe (who I think is on LJ). Good conversation, a lot of it theatre-related (Sarah is an aspiring actor, and in town for the summer for a fairly intense acting course that will be starting in a few days). Then we wandered around, via the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory, which had ginger ice cream this time. (Yay!) Womzilla peeled off somewhere in Little Italy, and the rest of us got as far as the Housing Works bookstore. I thought about tea, remembered papersky noting that they had been unable to boil water when she gave a reading there, and did without. I was tired enough by then not to want to browse books, so I just talked to Mary Kay and L for a bit. Then Mary Kay and Sarah went off to a matinee, and Cattitude and I went home (and I got tea en route).

By early afternoon, most local transit was running again (after the latest large snowstorm), and I decided to keep my appointment with Emilie at the gym. The trip was a little annoying, because of slush at intersections, but not bad otherwise; the air temperature was around freezing, and the trains were running well. The gym was (no surprise) less crowded than it has been lately, though far from empty.

I did a bunch of cardio, and then a reasonably good session with Emilie. In the course of conversation, she said that she had been unsurprised when I told her that after months of slow progress and some reversals, my knees had suddenly gotten a lot better: this is something she's seen before and expected, but she didn't predict it because she had no idea of how long it would take, and didn't want to set me up for disappointment. Nonetheless, this took long enough that I had been starting to think that while we were doing nice things for my balance and posture, it might not fix the knees, and that I might be looking at a relatively small but lasting disability. I am still being cautious: I took some elevators and a ramp at different subways stations. But I also used the stairs down on my way into two different stations today, both because I wanted to get indoors and out of the slush sooner.

( gym numbers )

( Also, I have an odd rash )

Last week in Montreal, I was somewhat careful about stairs, but I did climb more stairs than I've been doing at home in months: almost none of the Metro stations are handicapped-accessible, and papersky and rysmiel live in a walk-up apartment. I overdid things when visiting in July, because I thought for a few days that all was well. Being careful this time, I got home without significant knee pain.

On the strength of that, I went down to Chinatown after work today to do a little shopping (despite checking, I left my tea thermos at Papersky's, and it had already proven useful enough to be worth spending $10 on another). I walked down to the #6 station near my office (two flights, it's one of the relatively shallow lines, old cut-and-cover construction), and rode up in an elevator at Canal Street. After shopping, I walked down to the A station at Canal, and used my usual elevator up here. I got the thermos at Pearl River, which has elevators connecting the shopping floors; useful, given that I first tried the second floor, and actually needed the basement. When I decided to take the train to Chinatown, I figured that if necessary (i.e., if my knees hurt by then(, I could walk or take a bus to West Fourth Street, which is accessible, so I was only committing to the stairs down to the IRT at 33rd Street.

(Tonight's episode of "while the cat's away, the hobbit will eat mushrooms" was moo shu pork.)

I didn't do much this weekend: went to the Greenmarket last week (breads, apples, asparagus, fish) on Saturday, and made chicken stock for later use today. We had the remains of a roast chicken, and the necessary vegetables; we will have a couple of quarts of chicken stock for later use in whatever we want to cook. And I wrote to mrissa. Other than that, I read some, talked to Mom and adrian_turtle on the phone, and kept cool: we have turned the air conditioning on for the first time this year. (It's not the first hot day, but a month ago it wasn't humid.)

I've been trying to rest my left knee (in the hope that this will make it stop hurting without needing medical treatment), but there are problems. There's the walk to the subway every workday (and from subway to work, but a crosstown bus can help there). Stairs are what mostly hurts, and fortunately both subway stations I need to use regularly have elevators (but using them adds to the amount of flat walking).
( more about my knee, maybe not of interest )

I need to sort out travel plans for Wiscon, which is feeling oddly like a Task (maybe I shouldn't moderate that panel), and for a trip to see Adrian between now and then. But I needed this to be a rest weekend, with decisions to follow in a day or two.

I stayed home yesterday because of a sore knee--there was nothing that couldn't wait until today, so I opted to mostly sit and rest, sit and read on a park bench, that sort of thing.

Feeling better this morning, I came to work.

As I was waiting to buy my usual morning roll and cup of tea, someone stepped backward onto my right foot. Hard. With her heel, so with most of her weight.

I shouted. She moved, and relieved the immediate pain, then explained that she'd been moving away from someone else's just-lit cigarette. Okay, but you don't have eyes in the back of your head, so either turn or move in some other direction. Ouch.

Fortunately, I keep a cold compress in the freezer here.

But it's being another of those days. If not for how gorgeous the morning was, I'd wish I'd stayed in bed. As is, I just wish I'd stayed in Inwood Hill Park.

I don't like stairs. Really. And right now I live in a de facto seventh-floor walkup. For six weeks. My knees are not happy, although all that exercise has meant I don't get as tired as I'd feared.

The pretty orange lentils cooked down to a yellow mush, but it tasted good anyway.

I got email from an old friend I haven't seen in years: she's had two daughters since we last spoke, and the older girl is seven years old. This is a bonus of posting meeting announcements to a Usenet group I don't otherwise frequent.