Six on Saturday: All over the place

Two cancellations in two weeks. I mentioned in a past post (I’m not sure which one) that I was really looking forward to a Spring Break trip to LA to visit friends and meet their new baby, and the music festival La Onda in May. Well, last week La Onda emailed ticket holders to announce that the festival is not taking place. There was no explanation, they just cancelled it. This past week I confirmed my dates with my friends in LA and they told me that I couldn’t actually come that weekend because a friend from Canada was coming with her baby then. I’m not sure how our wires got crossed on the dates, but now I have nothing to look forward to before summer break and I will admit to be pretty bummed about it.

Snagging a coveted wait list spot. The husband found a really cool Marine Biology overnight camp offered by UC and in the 24 hours we spent deciding if we should spend $3K on it (yep, you read that right, $3k for ONE WEEK of camp), it filled up. But last week a spot opened up and my husband was the first of 70 people on the wait list to snag it. Nothing like a scarcity of spots to make me feel better about spending an insane amount of money on a week of my kid’s life.

Hard drive data retrieval. Speaking of feeling okay about spending a lot of money on something, the guy at the data retrieval center was able to get my photos and videos off my busted external hard drive! I’ve been dragging my feet on taking it in for half a year because I was worried it would be a lost cause, but after a week he was able to retrieve all my data! It was $150 for a new hard drive and $350 for his services (a great price from what I’d read online), and I was happy to spend that $500 to get every photo and video I’ve ever taken of my kids (and cats!) back.

The 12yo tested! The 12yo’s belt test is done! He worked really hard for the past two weeks to perfect his form and review the massive amount of techniques he would be tested on. He was at the dojo for over ten hours this week! Luckily it was conference at school, so he got out early all week and had a little more mental and emotional bandwidth to handle that amount of training. He had a good attitude about it, for the most part, and only “crashed out” at the very end. I appreciated when he demonstrates resilience, because that does not come naturally to him.

No news isn’t necessarily good news. My knee and shoulder are… exactly the same. They don’t get worse, but they also don’t get better. I know I came back from my previous knee injury, but this feels different for a couple reasons. That was an acute injury and I knew how it happened. The injury was identified and I did a ton of PT to strengthen the muscles around my knee while the injury healed. This is an over use injury. I have no real understanding of what I was doing to cause it, and while I know it’s my meniscus that is inflamed, I don’t really know what to do to avoid further inflaming it. The doctor basically told me to stop running, hope it eventually felt better, and call to get a cortisone shot if it didn’t ever feel better. But is a cortisone shot really going to help me in the long term, if I don’t know how to correct whatever made it start hurting in the first place?

Ditto my shoulder. I’m not sure what caused the initial ACJ injury and I don’t really know how I aggravated it again. I feel unempowered and hopeless, and like I’m heading toward, “I have a bum knee.” I really don’t want to be one of those people who is not doing the shit she wants to do because she “has a bum knee.” I know it hasn’t been that long (almost two months?), but I just don’t know how I can expect it to get better if I don’t know what caused the problem in the first place. If it doesn’t feel better, I’m clearly not avoiding whatever aggravates it, and so they cycle continues.

Workout rut. On a not unrelated note, I’m in a bit of a workout rut right now. It’s been really hard to get started this week. Some days I can’t think of anything I’d actually like to do, and then I get started and that feeling never goes away and I just have to slog through whatever I picked. In the past when I wasn’t super excited to start a workout, I’d usually feel a lot better about it once I began. That has not been the case recently. It’s a bummer and I’m not sure why it’s happening and I’m not sure how long it will last. Exercise is usually my emotional escape, but lately has not provided that. I’ve also been feeling kind of low emotionally, so maybe that is the ultimately problem. I’m just not sure why exercise isn’t helping me feel better mentally and emotionally like it usually does.