Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Friday, July 15, 2005

What a Week

Man, this week can't get over fast enough. Kathy goes to a conference and the fabric of space and time itself almost seems to unravel. The biggest headache for the week has been getting the tree cleared out and the roof looked at. At first I forgot about "Contractor Standard Time". You know what I mean; the contractor says that they'll be here at such and such a time and then gets here a day or two later. In this case I can understand as statewide there was over $20 million in Dennis related damage on top of the much larger Cindy related damage. Lots of trees down and since ours wasn't actually in the house was were pretty far down on the food chain in terms of being gotten to. Still, it was a little nerve-wracking going into the upstairs bedroom knowing that a 40' tall tree was leaning against the house only 8' above my head. Add to that the fact that since the water table in present exactly 2 millimeters below the surface of the soil every ant nest in the yard is looking for higher ground and our house qualifies. I expect we'll be fighting ant infestations for the next several days as we get hit with daily afternoon thunderstorms that threaten to turn our backyard into a swamp. Funny how just two summers ago Kathy nearly got laid off from her job at the time because the place she worked needed water and there was a real shortage of that. Non-linear dynamicists call it the Joseph effect. Seven years of one thing and then seven of another. We had four years of drought, now...

Add to this the ripple effect of my crash financially and things are difficult right now. My normal way of staying balanced is to get out on the bike and sort out what to do while I ride. Unfortunately, almost all of my riding is indoors where I don't seem to feel the freedom to mull things over as much. Maybe I'll try to sneak out early in the morning just around sunrise and see if I can do a little thinking then. As far as recovery goes, I'm up to about an hour and fifteen minutes on the bike right now. I've been doing some one legged intervals to make sure there aren't any imbalances showing up at this point. I can tell the left leg is definitely not in as good a shape as the right leg but it's still a lot easy to pedal circles than just about anything else so that will continue to be my rehab. I was looking at a picture taken of me about 6 days after the crash and it's amazing how swollen my left leg in the shot. I really think the greatest damage I did was there and it'll likely be a couple of months before I really get it all healed up. I've still got numbness in places which tells me that there are crushed nerves in or around my knee and their are areas of my calf that are painful to the touch even today. It'll all heal but the process is going to take a while.

Well, I need to get to the school to get prepared for another day of stellar astronomy. We do stellar lifecycles today in a five hour lab period. The students are starting to show signs of fatigue as am I, so I'm sure Friday can't come soon enough. Hopefully, we'll all have plenty of patience for each other today.

Thanks for Reading.

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