My 35th year has not been kind to my body.  Sure, my right knee and left heel/ankle started bothering me last year, when I was a fresh young 34 year old, but now I have new problems in my old age.

Perhaps it is unfair to say that the year itself has not been kind, and more apt to say that dumb luck has not been kind.  That would be especially true over the last month.  If you recall, when I was in Paris I fell off a chair (without drinking, mind you), injured my thigh and busted my elbow.  My elbow is much better, but it’s still, almost five weeks later, not fully healed.  (That was five weeks ago?!?  I feel like we’ve only been back a week or so.)

For her birthday, Milly got a water slide.  It worked right once.  The second time it didn’t really work well at all, and since then I think it’s grown a few more leaks.  (I think certain puppies might have had something to do with that.)  Amanda and I discussed it in passing today and decided to throw it away, so before I mowed the lawn this evening (which I was obligated to do because I’ll be gone this weekend and the front yard was in need of some trimming) I drug it from the back yard and was trying to toss it over the fence.

So I’ve got these two large semi-inflated pieces of plastic, and I try to sling them over our privacy fence.  The first one goes halfway over, which is good enough because I can pull it the rest of the way from the front.  The second one, which is more inflated and therefore harder to throw, barely catches the fence and falls to the ground.

To make matters more complicated we’ve got these large banana spiders near the fence in the back and front, so I’m trying to avoid them, but the second piece of the slide takes a web out.  Now, I really like these spiders, but in no way am I prepared to pick up a large floppy piece of plastic only to have one crawl up my arm.  These things are big.  Like the size of my palm or bigger big.

So I’m a little skittish when I pick the one off the ground, and to try to get it over the fence I jump to get a little extra height when I throw it.  For some reason I land on the side of my  foot then fall to the ground.  I get dirt all over my shorts, shirt and arms, so I might cuss a little.  I get up, angry that I hurt my foot, angry that I got dirty, angry at the stupid slide, so I walk around fuming for a minute, go back and finally get the thing over the fence.

I went ahead and mowed and I was pretty much fine, but almost as soon as I got inside and stood still in the kitchen my foot started really hurting.  Maybe it’s a sprain, I don’t know.  I felt all along both of my feet, and while it’s swollen, nothing feels out of place or anything, so I’m hoping it’s not broken.  That would really suck.  I don’t think it is, but one can worry about these things.

I swear, I hardly ever used to have dumb things like this happen.

So, the rest of my day.

Amanda’s alarm went off and almost immediately I think I heard Milly’s door open.  She said something about a book and I heard Amanda talking to her.  Short story shorter, Milly wanted to go do her exercises; she wanted to do the yoga poses from Amanda’s book that she discovered last night.  I suggested to Amanda that she get the yoga mat for her from the office.  Amanda suggested that I get up to go look at Milly.  I probably should have, but I was pretty tired.

Cyra dropped the pups off.  I was still in bed, but I heard Milly talking to one of Cyra’s nephews.  I’m not sure which one it was though.

Milly was pretty lethargic for most of the day.  I guess the yoga took something out of her.  Amanda mentioned that Milly had already been up before the alarm went off.  When I went to go check on her at one point I couldn’t find her downstairs and it turned out that she was in her bed with the lights off watching the iPad.  She was very sweet when I cuddled with her for a minute and she seemed pretty tired, so I let her be.  She stayed up there until after Amanda got home.

Amanda got some thin crust Papa Murphy’s for dinner.  It was really good.  I mowed after we ate and Cyra got her puppies.  I ran out of gas in the can, so I mowed the front yard first just to make sure I got what was needed.  I did end up finishing all of the front and back though.

Milly used the word “hilarious” today in describing Spongebob.  I didn’t know she knew that word.

Amanda and I watched the season finale of Falling Skies.  The ally aliens wanted to round up all the humans and put them in a safe zone and do all the fighting themselves.  There was a scene towards the end where the commanding alien expressed surprise because every other species they’d helped accepted their protection and didn’t want to keep fighting the bad aliens.  He talked about how they’re sworn to protect the inhabitants of the planets they liberate.  I was glad of this because it removed any thought that they might have sinister intentions, which would have been the tried and true and obvious direction to take.

Zach Dotsey
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