Sylvia's Journal

This morning my right foot and left hand were numb when I woke up. It is very frustrating because if this happens as a result of the way I sleep I don’t know how to change it. I try to fall asleep lying on my back, but I don’t wake up that way. Luckily the numbness does tend to disappear quickly after I get up, except for the piece on the sole of my foot that has been numb since July 14th.

Yesterday Axel and I started the day, while still in bed, by getting on each other’s bad side. This meant a fight over money. These fights never quite get resolved because when we see each other’s hurt the fight stops and goes underground for awhile. This time, because we are literally and physically also on each other’s bad side, the kiss and make-up part was not as easy as it used to be because of Axel’s plastic splint contraption and his limited movement shoulder. In the past I could simply crawl under his arm and all was well again (if he let me). Such crawling now would probably add more pain; bad sides slapped together; aww, that hurts!

We did, some time ago, try to change our habitual places in bed so that we’d be on each other’s good side only to discover the power of habit. Apparently, over the course of the night, I inched back to my old place, slowly pushing Axel to the edge. He finally got up and took the wise decision to resume his old place, while I was blissfully dreaming on.

Yesterday was an intense work day for both of us, feeling very much like the old, pre-crash days. The only thing that is different is that we both are quite stiff by the end of the day of all that sitting.

Sook and Roger saved us from sitting some more in front of our computers in the evening and invited us to dinner with some friends. We discussed the upcoming primaries and argued for or against Obama or Clinton. If we’d held the election with us as the only voters Hillary would have won: imagine a woman in the White House!

Although it was a seated dinner, I got up after a while to do more exercises. Others joined in and we compared our stiff knees and backs. When we talk about joints in this new phase of our lives we mean something different than we did 30 years ago. Exercising will be the new rage, now that the baby boomers have come to accept that they have to do this in order to keep up their image of health, strengths and possibilities. Axel and I have a head start. We know that our exercise regime is for life, forever.

We drove back through a light dusting of snow and tumbled exhausted into our bed, on our usual habitual sides.