Sylvia's Journal

During my vacation while seeing Joe going into work early and coming home late and exhausted, I saw myself and vowed that after I’d come back from Abidjan I would do things differently: go in later so I could actually get up with the rest of the family, have breakfast together and come home a bit later just about the time that dinner would be ready. It sounded perfect and I wondered how I could not have thought about that before. I found the answer to that on my way home yesterday.

I executed the new plan. Things did not quite work out the way I had imagined. When I got up everyone else remained sound asleep, even though it seemed late enough; so there went the nice family breakfast. I left the house a bit before 8 AM and arrived at work a little after 9. Not bad, slightly longer than if I’d gone in at 6:00 AM. But going home at 5 PM with the rest of Cambridge and Boston turned out to be a really bad idea. It took me 10 minutes just to get out of the parking lot and nearly 50 minutes to get out of Boston. I arrived home about 2 hours after I walked out of the office, at 7 PM. Dinner was not ready either.

So, all in all, a nice idea in theory but not very practical. This morning I got up at 4:30 AM again. I have a new coffee maker, a dinky cheap machine that may not last long but for now it is delighting me with its timer feature that has coffee ready when I get out of bed. It helps, now that it dark and, this morning, also cold again.

I had not been in the office for over a month and found new arrivals and others leaving. There was much catching up to do, and so I was not very productive (but very social!). And then there was (is) the overflowing mailbox, discouraging, and requiring much discipline about what to do with the new stuff that’s coming in over the transom.

The fall canvas is being colored in with trips that may or may not happen, always a tentative affair, nothing quite sure yet. Good news from Ghana; the seeds we planted in January are sprouting and the local team is being put to work, exactly as we had envisioned this when we first met as a group of strangers. I pulled out the vision we created together, and we are indeed creating what we had in mind. I can teach about the power of vision because I experience it over and over again.

It would have been a good day yesterday for rowing. I realize that if I want to get my money’s worth for this rowing season I better use every available day before hand (and possibly ankle) surgeries take me off the water for a bit, and before the boats are ordered off the water later this fall. My last row is usually sometime in October.

Now that I have a better understanding of what is wrong with my posterior tibial tendon I am a little nervous about the current arrangement which has the tendon positioned right over the ankle bone instead of behind it. It has been like that for over a year now but I had not understood the cause of the continued swelling. Now that I know it seems more fragile and I am worried that it will tear. I am suddenly getting very impatient to come to some conclusion and get all those other opinions in; but that will have to wait until the end of November which seems a long way off.