Sylvia's Journal

I still wake up every morning with two useless arms: numb hands and a painful right upper arm. The upper arm problem, according to the nurse practitioner and my physical therapist, is a rotator cuff tendinitis, the one that doesn’t want to go away. I am getting used to it and know that the hand numbness goes away as soon as I get up. The radiating pain in my upper arm tends to linger, decreasing in intensity but often staying with me until noontime. After that it only hurts when I make certain movements.

My walking is steadily improving although this is not very visible when I get out of bed. The last couple of days I have been walking much like normal people. It is only slightly uncomfortable, as opposed to painful just one week ago.

Nevertheless, we both started our day yesterday rather stiff, after the stand-up party of Friday night. So this is how each day begins: lunge exercise in bed to stretch the Psoas muscle, 25 squats next to the bed, a slow and awkward descent down the stairs, and 20 minutes worth of various shoulder, Trap, Quad and neck exercises in the shower. Then I am limber again. Towards the evening stiffness, soreness and tiredness return, one affecting the other. The next morning everything starts over again.

Arne had planned for us to fly to Gardner and retrace my flight, including that fateful last landing on runway 36, but the weather was too marginal. We decided to postpone this important outing until the weather was right. Instead I received a quick lesson from Mike, one of the plane co-owners, about the newly installed Garmin system and radio and then went flying by myself to practice touch-and-gos. It was my first solo flight since July. Except for a little snow and ice here and there on the taxiways, the conditions were excellent. I completed 10 perfect landings, with a confidence that surprised me.

While I was flying Axel got us re-connected to the world. As it turned out his friendly Bangalore helper had actually messed things up. Axel was furious, having wasted many hours on following bad advice. He negotiated some deal with the long distance phone service; the competition is so intense that anything appears to be negotiable. He then went for a long walk to calm down and be thinking more forgiving thoughts about our Bangalore friend. After doing his stretches he walked into town – it’s good to have an objective. It was dark when he left

Sita, Jim and Tessa went to Newbury to pick up our 18 pound turkey (imagine two large newborn babies) at Tendercrop Farms. These are honest turkeys, not produced by the nutritional-industrial complex that starts processing the poor animals from the moment they hatch. Tessa is going to wrap our bird in bacon for our Christmas dinner. She claims it is great, but we wonder about all the fat. It certainly is one way to get our weight back up.

Axel dialed home for a ride back. A round trip with snow and ice and in the dark turned out to be a little bit too much of a challenge. He was in good spirits when he returned holding two videos for our evening entertainment. Jim left to have dinner at his mom’s, leaving the the four of us like old times. We had Indonesian chicken satay, a great vehicle for peanut sauce, and veggie rolls to balance things out. After dinner I read out loud the part about turkey sex in Barbara Kingsolver’s latest book that Edith had given us in August. It is a treatise on eating locally, called Vegetable, Mineral, Miracle. That’s how I learned that the nutritional-industrial complex has so completely intervened in the raising of turkeys that they lost their ability to reproduce naturally. Barbara describes how she tries to teach her turkeys the art of loving (and reproducing) on their own. It is a hilarious account that is at the same time very sad and disturbing. We don’t think the turkey we bought will have experienced good sex, but we hope it has at least tasted the outdoors before we cover it with bacon; this comes from another pitiful creature without knowledge of the facts of life.

The pirate movie Axel brought home was awful. He ended up watching it alone after the girls had been picked up by friends to see other friends. I only watched a few minutes and then withdrew to my office to continue the work of catching up. I wished I had been more forceful in making entertainment choices for the evening. We had the ‘Stap Op’ game waiting in the wings. It is an old Dutch game that requires bicycling certain distances, faster with a headwind, and slower when faced with obstacles such as flat tires and waiting at train crossings. It’s a clever variation on Uno with great pictures that the girls colored in years ago as a gift to me; they made it resemble the set of cards I played with when I was young. I was so touched.