Unforeseen Tweaks

This weekend required a series of unforeseen tweaks. Plans changed, but we tried to make the best of everything.

The biggest unforeseen tweak was that I tweaked my back. Kind of badly. It was feeling twingy on Friday, but I wasn’t worried about it. Saturday morning it was so bad that I couldn’t ignore it. In fact, I couldn’t do a lot of things, especially movements that required I bend forward or put out my arms.

Luckily the crap weather meant we weren’t planning on doing much. I obviously didn’t go to the dojo like I planned (I’m actually pretty sure that I did this to myself at the dojo on Thursday night). I didn’t work out at all actually. I spent a fair amount of time lying on the floor or on the firm couch. I did some stretching. I took a lot of Advil.

Sunday it felt better right when I woke up but felt worse fast. After making pancakes for my son and his friend (my son’s illness turned out to be food poising because he was fine after he threw up on Thursday night), and cleaning up the kitchen, I had to lie down for a while.

The good news is I don’t think this is just “lower back pain” flaring up. I think I was tight before martial arts on Thursday and then I compensated in weird ways when we did high knee jumps during warm up, which led to a pulled muscle on my right side. I actually was able to find the spot with my little massager and I think that is why it felt better Sunday morning. I have a few little gadgets that help with back pain and I’m using them all to help release the muscle and the area in general. I think that if I give it some time to rest, and keep taking anti-inflammatories, it will be better soon.

But it sucks to lose this training time for my test. Sometimes it feels like the world is telling me to quite martial arts.

Right now I’m on the elliptical, plugging along at a very low resistance, just trying to move my hips a little. We’ll see how it feels tomorrow.

Remember that mug with the text, “Woman foolishly thinks she just needs to get through this week,” that I posted about? Well, I found myself banking hard on “next week will be better” until I realized I had way too much planned at work and I had to make some changes. So instead of doing a really fun, but super tine consuming thing in all four of my 7/8 classes, I’ll only be doing it in two of the classes. The other two classes will be doing what I planned for the next week, and then the next week we’ll switch. I may do this for the remainder of the year, because creating stories with them, and then making video skits of each story is super fun, but also incredibly time consuming and a massive energy suck. I just don’t think I have the bandwidth to do them all in the same week, and I’m proud of myself for recognizing that and taking steps to do remedy the situation.

The weather continues to be awful. My husband said that weather.com showed a full TWO WEEKS of nothing but rain cloud and storm icons. It’s starting to weigh on all of us. I especially hate it because I have to open my door on rainy day lunch with means I lose that time to work, and also add time I need to be managing discipline and making kids clean up their own messes. (Because it’s usually nice here most of the year, the majority of our eating spaces are outside, and uncovered, so when it rains teachers have to open their classrooms so kids have enough places to eat). It’s amazing how trashed they will leave my room if I’m not watching them like a hawk. On Thursday, I was trying to be on a zoom with the tech guy, who was showing me how to post the grades for my semester classes that switched during trimester 2, while also managing some dumb shit 7th grade boy behavior. It was super exhausting. The idea of two more weeks of that is demoralizing.

And of course we sprang forward this weekend. Springing forward is really hard for me. I already struggle to fall asleep at a reasonable hour when my body doesn’t think it’s an hour earlier than it is. I’m definitely breaking out the melatonin tonight.