One Week!

I've been trying to pre-plan for the road trip (#FünfTrek) stopping points this year, mainly because I'm tired of fighting with the Sturgis attendees for a place to stop anywhere in a 500 miles radius of the rally. I also know that I struggle to get away from the house to even start the trip, ever since 2018, so I made a reservation to kickstart that as well. 

I should be on my way next Thursday, as I made a reservation in Shenandoah National Park. 

In the meantime, I'll be going through my gear to make sure I'm prepared for all parts of my trip! I also figured I'd sadly review the state of my New Year's Resolutions. 

1) This is the one that I have been able to maintain without fail, despite injury, weather or whatever. Most recently, it was Soldiers Delight again. 

A swollen stream to traverse at Soldiers Delight

2) No, I haven't been blogging once a month. I skipped April which bled into May and June.... I'll go into the why momentarily because it relates to another resolution. 

3) Eesh, no, I've fallen off the book reading wagon, and I need to change that. I think with the road trip coming up next week, it will be easier to get back into it... at least with some e-books. I don't want to bring a bunch of physical books with me. 

4) This. This one frustrates me the most because breaking it wasn't due to anything I consciously (or even subconsciously) did. This one stopped on April 5. I know the exact date because that's the day that I unintentionally walked off the tailgate of Pat's truck. No, I don't know what I was doing; I was just trying to unload the storm doors I'd bought, and I apparently forgot that the tailgate was down or something. I legitimately thought I was stepping down to the bumper of the truck. You ever have that sensation of stepping down, thinking you are going to contact the next step at a certain point, and it doesn't happen when you think it will? Yeah, now, imagine that you never make contact with that step. That is what happened. I stepped down.... and my leg kept going down.... Pat said it looked like I just walked off the end of the tailgate. 

I landed on my left forearm and hip, hard. I don't know how I didn't break something, though the pain was so intense, all I could do was writhe there in the driveway, crying in pain. Pat looked helpless. I hurt so bad. After over ten minutes, I staggered-crawled with Pat's help to the bathroom to try to clean up the wounds and assess the damage. 

It only took minutes to bleed through the wrapping

I could move my wrist and my elbow up/down (flex/extend), but any hyperextension of the wrist, attempts to support something with my wrist extended, or twisting (pronation/supination) of the elbow resulted in extreme pain. I went to urgent care the next day, and they sent me to the radiologist for X-rays. 

My elbow

Nothing showed up on the X-rays, so it was all soft-tissue damage. And it hurt. It hurt so bad. I was taking Advil like candy, and ultimately was prescribed 800mg tablets. 

It still hurts. 

Yeah, you read that correctly. Almost four months later, my wrist and elbow still hurt, though it's not nearly as debilitating it was the first two months. Now, kinesiology tape or a wrist brace will allow me to do things, including exercises that involve the wrist. My left hip still has a sore spot. 

It took three months before I could put enough weight on my left wrist/elbow to do planks or bear crawls or anything else that involved body weight on it. I tried a few times over the course of those three months to pick up where I'd left off (I'd just restarted the Centr Sculpted program again), and while I could many of the moves, I became horribly depressed over the pain and the inability to do simple stuff, like open a door or carry stuff with my left hand/arm. 

That depression was hard to overcome. I'd wanted to do so much during my spring break, and the injury derailed everything. I didn't get to camp, I couldn't exercise, I couldn't tie my shoes, I couldn't even drive. As it was, when I returned to work, I probably shouldn't have been driving those first few days. The pain was still intense, and if I had to move the steering wheel even moderately quickly, the pain took my breath away. That's why I wasn't blogging. That's why my exercising ground to a halt. 

Anyway, over the last two weeks, I've been able to pick back up and recover. I lost some of my gains, but I'm back in the saddle. I was still hiking as much as I could (my first post-injury hike was at Soldiers Delight right after there was a massive wildfire there, and it hurt my hip but I had my hiking poles so I was able to push through). 

Three days after the injury

Soldiers Delight after the fire

So, yeah, over the past two weeks, I've gotten back into the 4+ days of at least 20min of exercise. I plan to continue this.

5) Let's not talk about this one. Depression takes a hell of a toll. 

6) The WRX is currently languishing in the garage and serving as a shelf. Maybe I'll look at this before I leave next week so that I can at least get it through emissions, if not drive it to Boxerfest, which is the Sunday after I return from STEAM in the Park Voyageurs and the road trip. 

In the meantime, I do have the Camaro back after the engine install. Just one bent rod, but I guess that's also because I shut it down immediately when the damage occurred. 

Don't use cheap parts or mechanics. It will cost you more in the long run. Those lifters have 10K on them.

Happy Camaro

I do need to get it tuned, though that will likely not be able to happen until after I return from the road trip. 

So, that's where things stand, more than seven months into 2023! 

Wake Up To a Brand New Day

It's 2023. Yay. No, I'm not particularly excited about it. The last few years of societal collapse around a maniac as President and the subsequent pandemic and just decreasing lack of civility and compassion has worn me down. 

Still, I wanted to think about things I wanted to do better for this year. I mean, I make "new years resolutions" at every "new year" chapter, whether it's the start of the school year, the start of the summer or whatever, so it's really just an exercise in putting the thoughts out there, and then trying to make them manifest. 

Instead of just vague objectives though, I'm going to take a page out of my teaching book and try to make them "SMART goals" with time sensitive, measurable and attainable attributes.

1) Hike at least once per month. This one should be easy. If I can do more than once per month, that will be even better, and I want it to be a real "once per month" not an average over the year. This might work well if Pat has a resolution to fish at least once per month. If I can bundle this with camping, it would also likely help my mental health a thousand-fold.

The C&O Towpath is one of my go-to places for hiking

2) Blog here at least once per month. Yeah, that seems like a low hanging goal, but considering "blogging more" hasn't worked out too well, making this something measurable, time sensitive and attainable seems more realistic. Maybe I'll even finish the "writeup" from last year's road trip before this year's. 

3) Read at least one chapter in a book at least five times per week. Seems weirdly specific, I know. I'm very disappointed in how much I've read the last few years. So, again, I'm trying to make it measurable (one chapter) and attainable (5+ times per week). Will I read more than one chapter and more than five times per week? Maybe. Hopefully. I'm still working on The Queen's Weapons, which I bought in March of last year, and finally started just before Yule.

4) Exercise at least 20 minutes at least four times per week. Again, it may seem like an odd goal, and why not the recommended "30 minutes"? Because I am still subscribed to Centr, and some of the sessions there are 25 minutes, and not a full 30. Like the previous resolutions, I would like to do more than four times per week when I can. Hopefully, sickness doesn't derail this particular goal, as it often does; the most recent bout with COVID-19 over Thanksgiving break derailed a good run started after my "second marking period resolutions". Of course, hiking any particular day would tick off this box as well as the first one.

And now for a few more difficult ones to attain....

5) Make strides towards National Board Certification every week. This can take different forms, depending on which component I am working on, but I do need to do this, since I really dropped the ball last year and it turns out that you can't last minute this like you can a fifteen page term paper in college. I will start this right away this week when I go back on Tuesday. 

6) Sell the WRX and get a reliable new(er) car. This breaks my heart to write out, but if I don't commit to it, I don't think I will ever go through with it. I haven't driven it since April of last year because the brakes need to be redone, and while I have all the parts to rebuild the front calipers (and my brother did the work of removing the seized pistons from the calipers I have for rebuild), I just haven't sat down to do it. Part of it is fear of doing it wrong, I know, and part of it is also knowing it's a PITA to swap a caliper much less two of them. I did a caliper on the black Camaro years ago, plus I did the front calipers on the green Camaro when I upgraded to LS1 brakes after finding a pair up for grabs at the pull-a-part junkyard. Anyway, once I get the brakes done -- let's set a timeframe of "by Spring" for that -- then the car is going to be officially for sale so that I can use whatever I get for it for a down payment on a new(er) car that has a warranty and all that. 

No more road trips to the Salt Flats in this car

7) Feel like I've done something worthwhile everyday and making note of it. I don't know how else to phrase this one. Those who know me know that I suffer from depression, and a lot of that revolves around constant feelings of worthlessness. So, making strides to feel like I've accomplished something, no matter how small, and acknowledging that accomplishment in some away will be tough. I have a little journal at work that I have used off and on since autumn 2019 where I try to do this. I try to write at least one positive thing about the day, no matter how minor, and then one thing I wish I could change and how I could change it (a "delta"). The framing is important -- it's just not something bad, but something I wish had gone better and (this is the important framing part), how I might have done things differently or what I could do to change the outcome. 

I think with this last goal, it's about the negativity that permeates everything these days, and I just need to try to find the positive out there, somewhere. Oh, hey, I put together this coat rack today! Check it out, I mowed the lawn! I got out of bed and took a shower! I read that chapter in a book and hiked today! 

It's 2023. 

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