Sylvia's Journal

Today Axel will be flying in style to Costa Rica for a 10 day vacation with our snowbird friends Anne and Chuck. How he managed to get an upgrade to business class on (a) an award ticket that was (b) arranged at the last minute, and (c) not being a frequent flyer himself is a mystery to me. Part of me wants to cry out ‘not fair,’ but of course I am also very pleased for him. For me such upgrades are rare even though I fly at least once a month on tickets that cost thousands of dollars, bought a little earlier than the night before and have at least half a million miles to my name plus gold and platinum standing on the same airline and its major partner. Axel is just a very classy man, and, more importantly, people can pronounce his last name.

Steve and Tessa and the dog are returning home later today from their brief (and surprise) family visit to Ontario. After I leave on Saturday for Ghana, they will have the house for themselves for a short week. I hope they will rake the yard and free it from all the puppy-generated debris. Now, with most of the snow gone, the sticks, dog toys and turts are revealing themselves.

I rode my bike to see the physical therapist yesterday in between an avalanche of ad hoc requests and reviews of other people’s work that advanced our common cause but not my own personal work plan for the day (which was about finishing the chapter I have been trying to write for a month now).

My usual PT was on vacation in Florida so I had a stand-in; a sweet young woman, who’s not quite done with PT school yet. She’s so careful in her touch that it felt all a bit tentative and it’s hard to gauge whether her manipulations made a difference. Much of the work consists of getting my body to do its own healing and none of that is instant. The signs of the contusion have mostly gone leaving only a deep purple spot around my elbow where gravity pooled the subcutaneous blood. The dull pain of the rotator cuff tendinitis has merged with the dull pain of whatever it is that I ripped in my upper arm.

The biggest accomplishment is that I cleared all the paper and other stuff from my two desks so I can use them again. The second biggest accomplishment is that I reached the bottom of my electronic mail box. Small victories for a long day.