Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Just like old times



It's funny how no matter how old you get, some things just never change. My sister, brother and I are home for Christmas this week, and last night we all regressed to our grade-school ways. Too unmotivated to leave the house, Natalie and I decided to play beauty salon.

We have this kit for dying eyelashes, but we were out of the strips that go under your eyes to protect your skin. So the ever-resourceful Natalie (who, as usual, wanted to go first) used address labels to affix strips of medical gauze beneath her eyes. I did as best as I could to neatly brush the dye onto her lashes, but her gauze creation was a flop and she ended up with a big, purple blob under her left eye. It sure is nice to have a younger sister who lets you learn from her mistakes.

Since Natalie spent the next hour trying to erase her shiner, our beauty parlor sort of fizzled. But then Natalie's dog, Sprocket, renewed our interest in the game. As you can see from the picture, Sprocket was very well-behaved for her manicure. Then things got interesting. In a ridiculous reenactment of childhood days, we played dress-up with the dog and made Neil pose next to her for a photo shoot -- in case you were wondering what the other photo is all about.

Oh, there's no place like home for the holidays.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

I'll be home for Christmas, but I'm sure not driving there

So the plan for today was to wake up early, load my car and be on my merry way to Chicago. Since my knees are still screwed up and I need lots of get-out-and-stretch stops, I had planned a whole road-trip itinerary: a shopping break in Jackson, a YMCA break in Kalamazoo, a wine-tasting break in Paw Paw, and whatever other coffee/food/bathroom breaks I deemed necessary. I'm not joking -- I even MapQuested the Y in KZoo! Sure, it would've taken me till 10 p.m. to get home, but at least it would've been a fun and productive day.

After stuffing my car with everything from laundry to my laptop to my beloved foam roller, I made my way through downtown Royal Oak. Halfway down Washington, I remembered that I needed a couple of things from CVS, so I turned down a side street that happened to feature a railroad crossing. I got stuck. On the tracks.

I seriously felt like I was in some kind of horrible scene from a movie. I kept switching back and forth between drive and reverse, but my car would not move. This went on a for a good minute or so, and not a single person behind me got out of their car to help me! When I finally broke free, I was so freaked out that I went straight back to my apartment. No way was I going to drive to Chicago now.

The one good thing about being stuck on the train tracks is it reminded me that I could always take Amtrak instead. Fortunately, I was able to get a ticket for the 5:30 p.m. train for only $32. If I were smarter, I would have just done that in the first place. No wine-tasting stops to look forward to, but much safer -- as long as we don't hit some poor driver who's stuck on the tracks!

Friday, December 19, 2008

Grown-ups get snow days, too!

Thanks to 10 inches of snow intrenching my car this morning, I stayed home from work and sampled the luxurious life of a freelancer today. I definitely enjoyed cozying up in front of my Christmas tree with my laptop, but there's a big difference between kid snow days and grown-up snow days.

Kid snow days mean no school, sledding and building snow forts. Grown-up snow days mean you still have to work, and sooner or later, you have to dislodge your car from its personal avalanche. Kid snow days mean knocking on the neighbors' door to challenge them to a snowball fight. Grown-up snow days, as I learned this afternoon, mean enlisting the neighbors to help push your stuck car out of the parking lot.

Seriously, the roads here are awful. I had to take my car to fix a loose tie rod before I leave for Chicago tomorrow, and the drive to the mechanic was like fording the river in Oregon Trail. Except instead of oxen, I have a Mustang.

I really hope tomorrow is a lot better, because there's no way I can drive 250 miles in this mess.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Doing a half-ass job

My butt fell asleep. Two months of physical therapy, $300 in orthotics, and more tape than Santa uses to wrap presents, and the source of my chronic knee pain is a weak booty.

I fell victim to patellofemoral and IT band syndromes in September, just weeks before the Chicago Marathon. Since then, I’ve done nothing but try to reverse the damage. I went straight to physical therapy, followed my PT’s directions like a scared kid in Catholic school, and spent three months stretching, strengthening and inflicting pain upon myself with a foam roller.

Three months later, I’m a giant Gumby with rock-hard abs, no money and a shattered faith in physical therapy.

I’ll start at the beginning (brace yourself, this is long). The pain under my right knee started after the monsoon-like race that was the Chicago half. Later that week, I had to stop mid-run when I felt a sharp pain on the outside of my left knee – my IT band. I was not about to mess around, so immediately I put in a call to Beaumont to find a good physical therapist. John, they assured me, worked with a lot of athletes; he would know what to do.

John was not the bodybuilding badass I expected him to be. In fact, he wasn’t even John. When the flamboyant Jonathon greeted me in his pink Polo shirt, perhaps I should have been skeptical, but I didn’t want any subconscious homophobia to interfere with my therapy, so I put my knees in Jonathon’s hands.

He was a big proponent of stretching my hamstrings and strengthening my quads – textbook solutions for patellofemoral syndrome, so I can’t really blame him for this. But one month into my therapy, I was worse than when I started. Jonathon sent me back to the doctor, where I was advised to pop pills three times a day and pay half-a-month’s rent for custom orthotics.

The pain just continued to get worse. When I couldn’t run at all, I tried biking. It hurt to bike, so I tried swimming. I swam every day for a week and tore my rotator cuff. I was falling apart.

It got the point where the only thing I could do, other than physical therapy, was Pilates. Then, one day I was in class at the Y and the teacher asked us to get into a plank position or the modified on-your-knees version. Since my shoulder and knees were both useless, I couldn’t even do either. I walked out on the class feeling like some kind of quadriplegic.

Not until my physical therapy expired (my HMO ran out) and my knees were so bad that little old ladies at church were starting to pray for me, did I take matters into my own hands.

In Googling desperation, I discovered a Web site that advocated strengthening glute muscles to resolve patellofemoral pain. The theory is this: When you run, your gluteus medius and minimus muscles provide balance and control for your femurs, which help keep your hips, knees and ankles aligned. 
But an inhibited gluteus medius can cause other muscles in your legs to overcompensate, leading to all kinds of problems.

My Eureka moment came the other night, while trying to do a bridge pose with one leg extended. I remembered reading that this pose was supposed to work your gluteus minimus. Why, then, did I feel like my hamstrings were doing all the work? I stood up and tried to flex my butt muscles, one side at a time. It sort of worked on the left side. Then I tried the right. I couldn’t do it. It was as if my right glute muscles were sleeping. Or to put it more literally, I had been doing a half-ass job.

I’ve spent the past three days doing exercises to isolate and activate my gluteus minimus. Amazingly, I FINALLY feel an improvement taking place. Let’s just hope this theory continues to work!

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Starting off right

It just so happens that the day of my first blog is a day that I've done something worthy of posting. On my way home from work today, I was listening to 103.5, Detroit's Christian radio station, and the DJ was trying to get listeners to sponsor children through World Vision. The way it works is you pay a dollar a day to support an impoverished child abroad.

I must have heard the same schpeal hundreds of times -- "Little [insert unpronounceable name] from [insert third-world-country] was born on [insert date]. He/She desperately needs a sponsor, etc." Every time I hear this, I tell myself I'm going to call and sponsor a child. Then I decide it's too hard to dial while driving and that I'll do it next time. Or that I'll do it when the kid who needs a sponsor has my birthday. And then I feel a tinge of guilt. And it goes away by the time the next song comes on.

Tonight, somehow, was different. Maybe because I had just gotten off the phone with a friend when the WV schpeal came on. Maybe because little [name I don't even remember that starts with a T] has a birthday on February 8th (mine's the 9th). Or maybe just because everything is so dismal in Detroit that I needed a boost. In any case, I got myself a kid in Ethiopia today. Granted, I'm no Angelina Jolie, but it feels pretty good to finally have called that number.