Pearls of Wisdom and Foolish Mutterings

The merry, merry month of May - HA!

I'm dubbing May "the uninspired month." For me, at least. I just checked my blog calendar and this will only be my 7th entry for the month. Pitiful. And that's only valid if I actually do go ahead and post it, instead of deleting it like I have so many others. It just has not been a very inspired month for me.

It's hard for me to believe I have nothing to say. I nearly always have something to say and usually I couldn't keep myself from blathering on and on even if I wanted to. But this month.... well, I sit and wait for inspiration to strike me.... and all I hear is.... crickets. That and the sound of a big empty space in my head. Disturbing, very disturbing.

Hey, wait a minute. Maybe it's those thrice weekly visits to the bone cracker. Maybe when he crackcrackcrackCRRRAAACCKKS my neck, all of my blog ideas fall out on the floor. Maybe. But probably not. Besides, I don't really want to blame the bone cracker because I'm feeling way too much better to assign any nefarious dealings to someone who has my back and neck pain running away like a scared little girl. Until I began to go for whole days at a time with no back pain at all, I had no idea how much stuff I had stopped doing because it might make my back hurt.

Seriously, I was walking through the grocery store the other day, pushing my basket along, when all of a sudden it hit me - NO PAIN! I wasn't leaning on the basket, using it as a big silver crutch on wheels, I wasn't stopping every few feet to rub my lower back and bend this way and that to try to relieve some of the pressure. I wasn't doing any of that. I was just walking along normally. And what's more, my right foot wasn't getting more and more numb the longer I walked.

After several days of that, I decided to really put this to the test. My two youngest grandsons were here and I just picked them up indiscriminately, hefting here, hefting there, here a lift, there a lift, everywhere a lift, lift. For hours, I lifted and carried and lugged. Then they went home. And you know what happened? Absolutely nothing! No pain. None. Zip. Nada. (Nada as in none, not as in Sheila. Hi Sheila!)

I still wasn't convinced though, because I've been to bone crackers before for this back problem and it never helped this much and it dang sure never lasted. I went to bed every night thinking, yeah, well, let's just see how it feels when I get up tomorrow. And every morning when I woke up, I just sat up in bed like a normal person and got out of bed. Wow. This was something I could get used to.

Then I started doing all kinds of things that I haven't done in forever. I worked at one of the houses we're rehabbing, I patched a hole in the ceiling, I sanded doors to make them close without being forced, I carried stuff up the stairs - heavy stuff, not just papers or cotton balls! I stood up the whole time at church during praise and worship. I even started wearing flat sandals with no support again.

After all that, I am happy to report that I am still pain free. Yippee! I feel like a new woman. No, wait, let me correct that. It's not so much that I feel like a new woman. It's that I no longer feel like an OLD woman. Ah ha! So maybe that is the explanation, after all. I've been a lot more active so I haven't had as much time to blog. Ahhhhh! That must be it.

Just in time, too, because remember that rafting trip I told you all about? The one we won in an auction sometime last year and I lost the papers for? Yes, that one. Well, it seems that I did indeed lose the papers with all the info about it. But my diligent husband kept the program from the auction with all the information on it about every auction item. So I called the place and sure enough, they had all our information and all we have to do is pick a date. 5 days, 4 nights river rafting and camping on the Salmon River in Idaho.

And now? Now that I can walk across the room without pain shooting up my back and down my leg? Well, now I think that rafting trip might be a lot of fun after all. I've never been to Idaho - looks like it's time to go there.

Salmon River, here we come.