Roadkill for Breakfast

This morning was a California day. It started out really overcast and drizzly, then the sky cleared up by mid-morning.

Got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. Probably because my body is all messed up on one side. Same side as the hamstring, except now it's my back and butt too.

Yesterday I did something really stupid. I was taking a picture of the girls and had to lift them up, then take them down from this tractor. I was taking them for a walk and saw this. It's my mom instinct, wanting to take cute pictures of my kids.

So I'm not sure if I did it while lifting them up there or taking them down, but I strained my back and by the time I got them both down and started walking home, I was in serious pain. As soon as I got home I took some ibuprofen and made an ice pack, iced the crap out of my back. I was scared, I hoped I didn't do any serious damage.

As the day went on, I could feel the pain through the ibuprofen, but I did a bike ride in the rain anyway, because I felt like I needed to move. I knew running would only aggravate it. The bike ride didn't feel bad except every time I went over a bump, I could feel it in my back. It hurt.

After an easy 30 mile ride I came home and iced again, continued with ibuprofen, and kept getting down on the floor, lying down flat to ice my back and using Iris's duck to prop up my other butt cheek so I'd be even on the floor.

By the end of the day it was apparent that I didn't do any serious damage but I was sore and stiff as hell on that one side. Trying to heal this thing quickly is my priority. I could kick myself, how dumb of me, finally I have a decent week of running and then I ruined it doing something stupid.

So...I decided to call off work for Monday just to spend more time icing and taking it easy. Work involves a lot of twisting and bending, always working in tight spaces. I thought if I give it another 24 hours to settle down that will help keep the inflammation down, then I can work on Tuesday.

When I woke up this morning I was stiff and was having a hard time getting up and down into a chair and couldn't bend over to hug the girls. It doesn't hurt a lot, but when I hyperextend or twist it hurts the muscles all the way around to my ribs on the left side, and my butt. I'm so pissed at myself! I'm sure it will loosen up with activity.

In addition to being annoyed with myself for being stupid again, I feel growly and snarly and irritable. Not really in the mood for anything.

Then, I destroyed my laptop screen this morning, somehow, carrying it from the woman cave into the house. I don't know what I did, but it's cracked and I am going to have to wait a week for the part to come in, so until then I am staring at an old monitor screen that I bought for $20.

Before I ruined my laptop screen, I canceled my plans to go to Wisconsin and run the 12 hour race in the end of August. Not because of my back, but because I keep running into glitches, and the back strain was just one more glitch, so maybe it wasn't meant to be.

First the airlines changed the return flight on me. The nonstop flight from Milwaukee to Denver that I made reservations on was cancelled, and changed to two flights with a layover in Kansas City that would make it a long travel day. I have to go back to work on Labor Day Monday and I'd be trashed. So that wasn't very appealing. I was going to do it anyway, but then...

I had trouble making hotel reservations. There's some huge Harley Davidson event near Milwaukee at that time and every hotel was completely booked. I called around to half a dozen hotels and no luck. I wish the race director would have mentioned this in the race info, I would have made reservations a long time ago, but I'm not sure if that would have made a difference.

The way things have not come together easily, I think the universe is telling me not to go. I can always do my own 12 hour training run here. That's probably what I'll end up doing.

But I am looking forward to next Saturday, and I'm not even racing. It's Wheaties Boy's triathlon debut at Boulder Reservoir. I'm going to meet Megan (aka Mrs. Wheaties Boy) at the reservoir and go cheer for him at as many different places along the route as we can.

And then this morning I got this e-mail with a vaguely familiar looking subject heading: Congratulations you have been admitted... I didn't think it looked like a virus, so I opened it. I wondered, since being a nurse, admitted usually means someone is going into a hospital or some other care facility. Someone wants to admit me to a psych facility, maybe?

Actually it was from University of Northern Colorado. In June I applied to the gerontology graduate program. I already forgot all about it! I was thinking about taking four courses for a certificate in gerontology.

I think I'd still like to do it, but I might wait to start until January. The classes are all online and not self-paced, so I'd have to stick to a rigid class schedule and that's a bummer, especially with going on vacation in the beginning, and my race schedule.

School is about as appealing to me as eating roadkill for breakfast. Realistically, I am looking at a good 15 to 20 years of working life left and I know I have to expand on my current knowledge base somehow, and this is definitely an area of knowledge and skill that is much needed out there.

So...whether I start this fall or postpone starting until January, it's something I think could be worthwhile. Except for the part about higher education being big business and way too expensive. Six thousand dollars is a lot to fork over, when you consider that I could run Badwater for that, and have a lot more fun than the slow torture of jumping through academic hoops for two years.

So much of it is bullshit. I'd like to skip the bullshit and take only the substance. Is the substance-only option cheaper? Just give me the damn syllabus and I'll teach myself, okay?

Maybe this isn't such a good idea...

I think I'll go back to bed and see which side I wake up on tomorrow.

Snarl.