A day off

Oddly, there was nothing on my schedule. Rather than complain, I filled the day with things I wanted to do. I got a massage. It was pretty good, but not great. Not painful enough. The experience is most worth it when it hurts...a lot. Like I'm getting the most pounds of pressure per square inch per dollar (PSI/$). Still, though, I can't complain, and I got a $10 discount for making a morning appointment, which increased the PSI/$, unexpectedly boosting my enjoyment of the experience, but only in retrospect.

I got my toes buffed. After my massage (and the ten buck savings) I decided that the calluses on my big toes needed to be addressed. Brooke told me about a nice little shop on 23rd with pedicure massage chairs, whirlpool foot baths, and sanitary conditions (apparently there are standards for this sort of thing). The Thai women running the shop thought it was pretty funny that I wanted a pedicure, but they had me come right in and did a fine job and were very friendly. The woman responsible for trimming my calluses was named Lisa, as was the woman working alongside her. Easy enough: I know who to ask for when I return (and I will).

I took Yagi to the dog park. Lisa is still out of town on her honeymoon, which I only discovered when I pulled July off the wall, exposing August and another week of "No Lisa" marked in heavy black ink. Whoops. That seemed to mean that poor Yagi didn't get a chance to crap yesterday. He seemed awfully serene for one having missed his constitutional. I took him up do Blue Dog, which still has puddles on the ground despite record-breaking warm weather and only 0.06 inches of rain in July. Another fellow at the park today speculated that the water is coming from filling and emptying the small dog pool at the north end of the park, but there's just no way. The water covers a huge swath of earth. I think it has something to do with the water table (the park is in a big hole used for winter rain runoff; trips there in January are miserable), but with that statement I am immediately out of my depth.

I went to physical therapy for my aching low back, which is actually much better now that I'm doing the exercises Laura suggested. The trouble is that since nothing really hurts now, it's hard to compare one day to the next. On a scale from 1 to 10 (ten being the worst pain), I suppose I was around six just before I started PT. Very quickly the pain has gone to around 3 to 1 to sometimes absent. So it is with two years of episodic pain. Core strength improves it, running downhill and holding Zoe for a long time make it worse. So now I'm really picking nits when Laura asks how the pain is. "Hard to say. Maybe 0.7? I dunno." Something is odd about all this, though. I'm definitely out of balance. I can't rotate far to the right or bend much to the left. I do rotate my hips (inappropriately, I'm told) when doing exercises. I'm asymmetric, and this appears to be at the root of my episodic pain. It may have something to do with falling--jumping--off a wall about twelve years ago, an incident that had me bedridden for two days, then just fine for ten years. Who knows? The good news is that I'm feeling better.

I picked up my new clip-on sunglasses. Perry will be happy to read that I've retired the glasses I wore in Mexico last winter, the ones that made me look "like a cabana boy," he said. I like the cabana boy look. My new pair are identical to the ones I lost last year at the arboretum. I had not heard that anyone found them unbecoming, so I feel safe wearing them in photos. The woman who fitted them to my glasses is named Mildred. She's a very jolly fortysomething woman with a ninetysomething name. Mildred. I'll save name discussions for later editions.

I did not exercise.

I did eat a lot of fruit. And a tofu dog--disappointing.

I do now, this minute, have to dash off to an evening homeless teen clinic in Wallingford. I'll be casually late. It is a day off, after all.