So much for that bright idea.
My new office is furnished and just needs a few remaining touches. I've inhabited its space every day on my pseudo vacation, getting used to its new feel and looking forward to the next time I can be there. Am I there right now? No. No I'm not. The office, as much as I love it and am proud of what I was able to put together on a very small budget and a precious allotment of time, is up a flight of stairs and down a long hallway. Under normal conditions, I would actually prefer this seclusion. But right now, no. No I don't.
One of the developments of the past six months has been our enrolling the kids in Tae Kwon Do classes. Before we moved to the new house just over a year ago, we were members at one of those high tech expensive gyms, and we were all getting regular exercise, a couple of us with psychotic but effective personal trainers. Last year's move, surgeries, work travel, family stress, and financial demands put an end to that, and we canceled our membership and told ourselves we'd use our treadmill, or jog through our neighborhood in the mornings, or stop eating Ben & Jerry's. Ah, sweet fantasies. The kids' Tae Kwon Do studio offers kickboxing classes, and a few months ago I thought it would be a perfectly good way to start a new exercise routine after a year of not doing so much as even thinking about exerting myself beyond raising a glass of wine to my lips, walking to and from my parking lot at work, or having daily nervous breakdowns (those don't burn as many calories as you might expect).
The kickboxing classes were some of the best and most challenging workouts I'd ever had, but they were done barefoot, and there was lots of hopping, and kicking, and kneeling, and then more frenetic hopping. Occasionally during one of the one-foot hopping sessions I would have searing pain in one or both of my feet, and I assumed I landed wrong or I blamed the extra 15 pounds that refuses to disappear because I refuse to do a whole lot about it. Then I took two more work trips, carrying who knows how many pounds of paper and laptop over my shoulder. One day a few weeks ago, walking to my car in a recently purchased suit (in a bigger size than I'd prefer, which is actually why it was recently purchased, if we're being honest here), with my anvil, I mean laptop, hung habitually over my shoulder, the heel of my shoe landed in a hole in the sidewalk and I crashed to a pretty pathetic heap after my shoe flew off in one direction, my laptop in another, and the left knee of my new suit pants ripped. The scabs on my knees have healed, but the top of my left foot has never felt back to normal, and I think between the kickboxing, sporadic workouts, already bad bones, and the crash landing in my suit, I've got some kind of stress fracture.
So now, I'm on the couch in the living room to avoid all the painful walking upstairs to the comfortable, private office I finally have. This seems pretty typical, and yet a little more cruel and taunting than usual, even for life on the Fringe. It's okay, though -- if it wasn't this that banned me from my own space, it was going to be the "165 bad guys" carefully and strategically placed on every flat surface by Bryce and Quinn during the hour they were supposed to be resting the other day. I limped upstairs still in denial about my worsening foot pain, heard peaceful playing and assumed the kids were in one of their rooms next door to my office. In actuality, they had christened my room as their own, which means whether I'm on the couch with my foot up or in my personalized, cozy, upstairs office, I'll be surrounded by plastic toys and the sound of kid mouth explosions.
One of the developments of the past six months has been our enrolling the kids in Tae Kwon Do classes. Before we moved to the new house just over a year ago, we were members at one of those high tech expensive gyms, and we were all getting regular exercise, a couple of us with psychotic but effective personal trainers. Last year's move, surgeries, work travel, family stress, and financial demands put an end to that, and we canceled our membership and told ourselves we'd use our treadmill, or jog through our neighborhood in the mornings, or stop eating Ben & Jerry's. Ah, sweet fantasies. The kids' Tae Kwon Do studio offers kickboxing classes, and a few months ago I thought it would be a perfectly good way to start a new exercise routine after a year of not doing so much as even thinking about exerting myself beyond raising a glass of wine to my lips, walking to and from my parking lot at work, or having daily nervous breakdowns (those don't burn as many calories as you might expect).
The kickboxing classes were some of the best and most challenging workouts I'd ever had, but they were done barefoot, and there was lots of hopping, and kicking, and kneeling, and then more frenetic hopping. Occasionally during one of the one-foot hopping sessions I would have searing pain in one or both of my feet, and I assumed I landed wrong or I blamed the extra 15 pounds that refuses to disappear because I refuse to do a whole lot about it. Then I took two more work trips, carrying who knows how many pounds of paper and laptop over my shoulder. One day a few weeks ago, walking to my car in a recently purchased suit (in a bigger size than I'd prefer, which is actually why it was recently purchased, if we're being honest here), with my anvil, I mean laptop, hung habitually over my shoulder, the heel of my shoe landed in a hole in the sidewalk and I crashed to a pretty pathetic heap after my shoe flew off in one direction, my laptop in another, and the left knee of my new suit pants ripped. The scabs on my knees have healed, but the top of my left foot has never felt back to normal, and I think between the kickboxing, sporadic workouts, already bad bones, and the crash landing in my suit, I've got some kind of stress fracture.
So now, I'm on the couch in the living room to avoid all the painful walking upstairs to the comfortable, private office I finally have. This seems pretty typical, and yet a little more cruel and taunting than usual, even for life on the Fringe. It's okay, though -- if it wasn't this that banned me from my own space, it was going to be the "165 bad guys" carefully and strategically placed on every flat surface by Bryce and Quinn during the hour they were supposed to be resting the other day. I limped upstairs still in denial about my worsening foot pain, heard peaceful playing and assumed the kids were in one of their rooms next door to my office. In actuality, they had christened my room as their own, which means whether I'm on the couch with my foot up or in my personalized, cozy, upstairs office, I'll be surrounded by plastic toys and the sound of kid mouth explosions.
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