Getting Back into Alignment

It was a pretty rough Monday morning. Yesterday was spent mostly sleeping, so this morning I had that “too much sleep” hangover. I was also still sore. I might not have been so sore if I had pushed myself to go take a walk at some point yesterday, but that didn’t happen, so whether it would or would not have helped, I was still sore most of today. My back was in knots, so I hobbled more than walked. Luckily, the work day was good. It stayed busy enough to pass quickly, but not so busy I couldn’t get stuff done.

After work, I went to the chiropractor for an alignment. My regular doctor wasn’t in, so I saw one of the other doctors there. They’re both really good, so I didn’t mind, and I didn’t want to wait three days considering how jacked up I felt. Like magic, when the doc was done, I felt about ten times better. I still have some residual and alignment soreness, but everything was loosened up so I could at least walk normal again.

I picked Jon up and we went to the library to renew a book. While there, the message on the dashboard came on saying my oil was low. I had him check, and sure enough, we were getting dry. So we took an unplanned trip to the quick lube to get that taken care of. I was due for an oil change anyway. In fact, I was overdue. I tend to look at the dashboard stats, which isn’t always the best idea, since the percentage on the dashboard doesn’t necessarily take into account all the driving we’ve been doing. So technically, I was about a thousand miles past (one mark against my attempts at full adulthood).

Luckily, there wasn’t a leak, and the change was done in ten minutes, probably less. The guy at the front desk there reminds me of Michael Cera. He’s really friendly, and they’ve always done good work for me. Eventually I’ll have to take the car somewhere for a major tune up, but for now, these guys have been quality.  So yeah, it changed our plans a little bit, but nothing drastic. Also, Monday afternoon seems to be a great time to get an oil change.

For exercise tonight, we decided to walk the mall. I’ve been wanting to walk outside, but it was raining and I didn’t want to get caught in a downpour. Also, since I’d just been to the doctor, I had to take it easy, so we didn’t do any zombies or C25K, we just kind of strolled around the mall. We had a pretzel snack, and we stopped in one of the stores we’ve never visited. It’s a food store that sells kitchen items but also all kinds of teas and coffees and little snacks, as well as candles in the back room. I tried some roasted chestnut coffee, and we bought some wafer cookies to try.

At home, I worked on some projects. Now that Tengaicon is over (the event portion of it anyway), I feel a little bit more relaxed about handling some other things. Current projects include Tengaicon follow up, editing my friend’s book, and getting through a Coursera course. After I finished the first one, I haven’t put much time into any more and have dropped several of them. I kind of want to do this one, though I’m going in knowing that I probably won’t finish with a certificate. I’m going to read the excerpts and watch the lectures, but I’m not much of a message board person, so I doubt if I’ll get full credit.

I also put away laundry and debated picking up my knitting needles, but decided against it. Might take some knitting to BOW this coming weekend, but just not ready to get into or finish a project. I still feel like I accomplished something tonight. Tomorrow is a gym day. This week we can meet one of our goals, but with BOW happening, we won’t meet both. Unless I count the walking I do there, which I might, especially if I do the mini-walk. But as a couple, we’re taking it easy and just focusing on one.

But now…bedtime.

A.

Slots, Putts, and Kicks

I think the days of lazy weekends are officially diminishing.  In follow up to yesterday’s activity, we ended up going out and doing more stuff today.  I was wide awake at 7am but let Jon sleep in longer. Still, we were out of the house before 9.

The plan was to go to Topeka to buy shoes and maybe geocache, but I realized that we’d have some time to kill because the mall didn’t open until later, and I’d only seen a few caches on the list.  I remembered that yesterday we picked up a trackable that came with a message that it “wanted” to visit casinos, so I suggested we go out to Prairie Bend.

We decided to each spend 20 dollars, and I hit the quarter slots per the usual. My money disappeared in a hot minute.  When I was done, I went to find Jon. In the tradition of his lucky streak, his machine was going nuts. He hit for almost 400 bucks. We cashed out and ran, not even tempted to stay and return it. We decided to use the winnings for the day’s spendings, deciding that whatever was leftover would go into our travel account.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to find any caches in that area, so we still have the trackable, but hopefully we’ll get that way again. I should clarify – there are caches that way, but our signal was bad and we hadn’t had the foresight to save any beforehand.  We did find a couple caches near the mall, and we pinpointed where a couple other ones were, but there were too many muggles. For our next trip to Topeka, we’ll go super early again to hit those ones up, then kill time at the zoo or something.  The ones we found were micros…no room for a trackable.

The stores in the mall hadn’t yet opened when we got there, but the mall itself was open so we walked around and got a snack. We split a cinnamon roll from Subway. It wasn’t great and probably not worth a recommendation, though maybe other Subways have better ones? I won’t recommend them from the Subway in the Topeka mall, at any rate.

When things finally did open up, we went and played a round of Lunar Golf (located on the second floor of the mall, if anyone is interested).  I won, which was my one victory for the day since Jon was the casino winner and spotted both caches.

 

We only played one round (even though you can play up to three on one admission) before heading to the shoe store and picking up new walking shoes for both of us. I did some looking back in Instagram to pinpoint when I’d bought my last pair, and it had been about 18 weeks. To me, that felt like a really short time, but it was about average for walking shoes, I think, and I had put a lot of miles on those ones. I probably don’t need to justify how long I had them…they were starting to hurt my legs and feet because they’d worn down so much…but it’s kind of interesting to know how far they’ve come.

For my new shoes, I went with New Balance runners. They’re really light and comfy. I wore them to the gym today, which wasn’t a long time to break them in, but I’m not sure if they’re going to need a lot of breaking in.

 

Jon was also able to find a good pair of walkers on clearance. They’re one of the minimal types, which works for him since he hates wearing anything on his feet other than flip flops…and if they’d let him walk barefoot everywhere, I’m pretty sure he’d ditch those too.  Unfortunately, the store didn’t carry any hiking type shoes, but I think we’ll be okay with what we have.

From there we headed to Red Lobster. I went with the maple glazed chicken and roasted veggies. Not sure why I went with the veggies…I hate veggies. But I was craving them, and they were okay when eaten with pilaf and chicken.

We controlled ourselves and managed to not eat three baskets of cheddar biscuits…but it was tempting. It was a good meal and I didn’t overstuff, so that was good. The only iffy part was that RL has little booths, which I generally avoid for obvious reasons. But the working out and activity was beneficial because sitting in one was not bad at all.

Jon ended up taking some of his meal to go, so we stopped back at home to drop it off before heading to MHK to do laundry and go to the gym. The laundromat was busy, likely because the students are back for the fall semester, so our plans of playing Dungeon Roll while we waited for our clothes was thwarted.  To kill time, we went to Radina’s on the Hill and had drinks: lemonade for him, an iced cafe mocha for me.  I was in my own little world and didn’t notice my friend, V, sitting there reading until she noticed us on our way out. We chatted for a bit, but we had to go get our laundry and I have a phobia of leaving our clothes too long unattended (if you’re reading this, V, we’ll have to get together and catch up soon!).

Due to the fact that the evening was getting later, we ended up going to the gym while the clothes dried, back to get them when we were done, and then back to pick up some things at the store. Yeah, it was extra driving, but it didn’t seem like a huge deal considering all the driving we’ve done anyway this weekend.  Once we made it home, I played DI:R for about an hour, then put the clothes away, finishing in record time. Once this post is done, I’m going to have watermelon and some cherry juice for dinner and watch a little more of The Missing, then it’s shower and sleep.

Next weekend probably won’t be as active since it’s Fall Juice Fast 2013 weekend and we’re going to stay safely put in the house for the most part. However, there will be house cleaning and extraneous item purging and probably some gaming…all in the air conditioned back room if this heat keeps up. We’ll make the most of it though. We always do.

A.

 

Return to the Cube

As far as first days back to work go, today wasn’t bad at all. My team did an awesome job in keeping things caught up and done through the week, so I didn’t have any emergencies or fires to put out right away.  They also decided to do some interior decoration on my cubicle while I was gone to welcome me back.

 

They made me another sign with my initials and a bunch of words that may or may not describe me. Not only are they sweet, but I think I may have them fooled into thinking I’m a nice person.  Either way, it was a pretty cool way to return to work.

We made it to the gym after work where I started watching a movie called Mutants. I’m not entirely sure if I like it. It’s slow and gory. I can handle the gory, but I need something to engage me during a workout. I’ll finish it, but I hope it picks up soon.

Today marks a rare day of actual grocery shopping instead of procrastinating. We’re now set for meals and snacks for the next several days. The next shopping trip will involve buying stuff for Juice Fast 2013.

At home, I finished scheduling Gen Con posts and watched an episode of Clean House with Jon. At blog time, I still haven’t put away laundry, and I still need a shower. Overall, a pretty uneventful day, but I’m okay with some down time for a week or so.

Now to finish the night with laundry, shower, a frozen yogurt, and some sleep.

A.

 

Preppin’ and Restin’

It was a good day of rest for Jon and I. I was sore again this morning, though I knew I would be with climbing that hill yesterday.  I’m not complaining…it was a good soreness…but I had to stop my brain from being slightly obsessive about going out again for a long walk.  It helped that my shoes were being washed, so I couldn’t walk anywhere for a good portion of the day.

We went over to a friend’s house while she and her family were in KC. She was awesome enough to let us watch her movies and use her laundry facilities while we kept her dog company. My tennis shoes are now nice and clean, though they seemed to have shrunk a bit in the wash. They felt fine on my feet afterwards, though, so I’m sure they’ll be fine for the week.

Later, we went and found a quick geocache to get our “souvenir” for the 31 days of Geocaching this month.  It was close to my friend’s house and turned out to be a really easy find. I spotted it first, so I’m the winner today (whoo!) and we took the trackable, hoping to find somewhere to leave it in Indy or one of the states in between (if we should happen to stop somewhere where a cache is nearby).

I grabbed some headbands from Walgreens and we got smoothies from the People’s Grocery for dinner before heading home.  We packed our clothes and most of our toiletries, which means we just have a few last minute things to pack tomorrow night and to grab Tuesday morning. I sent out a confirmation email to the friends who are riding with us to Indy, and it was around that time that I started the “What if?” game: what if we get a flat tire? What if the car breaks down? What if something happens to our money? This is a dangerous game, and I hate it when my mind goes there and starts making me anxious.  I’m doing okay so far to keep it at bay though, and my plan, if something should go wrong, is to not panic, do what needs to be done, and just roll with it.  Don’t worry, but be prepared…that kind of thing.

That about sums up the day. The only other news was that I received my confirmation for the Being an Outdoors Woman (BOW) weekend.  I didn’t get all of my first choices, but that doesn’t bother me, especially because my registration was so late. I’m signed up for fishing, GPS 101, Geocaching (I know, right?), and nature journaling. There’s also a mini Race for the Cure that I’m thinking about participating in, even though I’m a really slow walker. It’s like a mile and a half, though, and I think I could handle that without it taking all night. Right?

This is one of the rare instances I want Monday to get here, but that’s because I want to get it done and over with so we can start vacation.  So I’m off to shower and sleep so I can tackle the last minute stuff tomorrow.

A.