In which I am refusing to let life get me down

So.  It's been a couple of weeks since I posted, and a lot of things have happened since then.  I did indeed go geocaching the day after my last post.  It turns out that hiking 11.whatever miles is a Bad Thing when you have an ankle that is, lets say, not optimal.  At least not right off.  Maybe if I led up to it.  However, under the circumstances (really, what can 20some more caches hurt?) the favoring of my left ankle caused a bad pain in my right foot, because of that whole favoring thing.

The kicker?  I was supposed to run a 5K the next weekend.

I know.  I have joint problems.  Quite a few of which relate to my track career, which ended in grade 8 due to a nasty accident involving someone who wasn't me being unable to take a simple hurdle.  However, I'd discovered a couple of years ago, after years of therapy and a bout of surgery,  that I could run barefoot, and on trails.  No shoes (Five Fingers don't count).  No pavement.  And I trained, I really did, to the point where I could jog a 5K.  It doesn't help that the nature center that hosts this race always holds it the day before Easter.  These other runners must practice indoors, is all I can say, since none of them seemed to be sporting broken legs from running on ice.

The facts so far: 

1) I have an injured foot.

2) I have already paid for this race.

Can anyone guess what 3) is?  If you guessed that I would stay off the injured appendage as much as possible, treat it with known remedies, and then attempt to run the race anyways, you would be right.

If you are in any way a runner, you would have noticed the statement "I could jog a 5K" earlier.  On race day, I discovered that jogging a 5K, and running a 5K, which is what I will do if I start near the front of the pack, are two different things.  I made probably the best mile of my life.  It was fun while it lasted.  Then I hobbled a mile so bad I was being passed by walkers.  Then I gave up, figuring it wasn't fair to the volunteers to wait for me.  Hey, at least I got the t shirt.

And then I went out to the farm to help hold horses for their yearly shots.

I know, I know, here I can hardly stand, and I'm going to bully big hairy beasts 10X my weight?  But I promised!  So the horses got their shots, my foot (and other assorted joints) were so badly traumatized by the experience that they decided they better straighten up and fly right, in case I decided to do something worse.  I made Easter supper.

And the next week one family member and two acquaintances passed away.  Almost a third acquaintance, too, but God was merciful in that case.

So here is where we are.  Life, as it is said, goes on.  It's not easy.  But tomorrow I start hiking again, after a hiatus of a couple of weeks. I have plans for this summer and don't want to miss them.

Unless it's pouring down rain.  In that case, I'll stay in bed and snuggle with my cats. 

Spring; and attendant brain-deadness

Meaning Psycho Mare, of course, not me!  We have been having typical Michigan weather lately, so one day it's 85 degrees, two days later it's 35.  Maybe.  And raining, if you're not lucky.  All this means I haven't been able to ride much for three reasons:

1:It's 85 degrees out, and Psycho Mare still has her winter coat, seeing as how it's March and all.  Cue sweating and gasping after 15 minutes of work-and who can blame her?  She's wearing Mother Nature's version of a down-filled jacket!

2: It's 35 degrees out, and the hideous Wind Demons are out with their minions.  Psycho Mare, as per the contract between equine and human, is required to protect me from them.  Yay.  I just love going sideways at 600 mph.

3: It's spring.  You know, when "In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love".  Or young women.  Or mares.  And not lightly, in Psycho Mare's case.  Let's just say her mind is not focused on her work and leave it at that.  Trust me.  You do not want that mental image haunting your dreams.  I did not need that mental image haunting my dreams!

Also, there are other things going on personally on a couple fronts that I don't care to share, that involves losing family members, which accounts for my brain-deadness.  Too bad, too, as riding would make me feel better, as long as it didn't involve me being tossed into a fence.  Or dumped in a mud puddle as the Hideous Dead Leaf of Dooooom skidded by Psycho Mare's feet.  Note: neither of those situations have actually happened.  Yet.  This year.  And I could skip the fence thing for the entirety of my life, please God.

So.  I am happy today because Psycho Mare listened to me (mostly), I got to spend time with good friends around a bonfire, my new Rogue Squadron pathtag came, and I'm going geocaching tomorrow.  And tomorrow is another day, which with any luck won't involve Wind Demons.

Short update

Well, the "abuse my ankle" theory still holds.  I've been A: to water aerobics  B: ran  C:  ran again  D: rode my bike to work and back, then rode my horse, and D: walked all over New Buffalo and then rode my horse.  Who has reacquired a brain, after all the work/hot weather.  My ankle is holding at "annoyance", not "Can't walk.  At all."  So there's an improvement.

And I'm now 3 weeks from my first 5k run, so yeah, we'll see how that goes.

Update: ankle

Well, it seems my wager has paid off.  My ankle hurt this morning, but I was definitively ambulatory, unlike yesterday.  So, to celebrate, I went geocaching.  Unfortunately, it appears the first stage of the cache I was after is gone.  DH called as I was looking for it, and despite him telling me where it was I couldn't find it.  There was a lot of new graffiti there, so I'm wondering if it's gone.  I'll haul him out later to make sure.  Still, I got a good mile hike in, and since I'm registered for a 5k not 3 weeks away I should get going.  I'm going to water aerobics tonight with friends, and tomorrow I'll go ride Psycho Mare, who only needs 6 days of work a week to get her brain back.  Lucky me!  Good thing for the time change!

I'm both loving and hating this nice weather.  Loving it because, well, nice weather, and hating because we will get a horrible freeze with snow before the winter is out, and there goes the fruit harvest for the year.  On the bright side, most likely we'll have very few mosquitoes this year...

New toy; or, how I spent lots of money and tore my pants twice

It's been a while since I blogged.  It's not like I had a shortage of things I could talk about.  For example, I could have ranted about how Psycho Mare lay down on me (Literally.  On my leg.  The one with the bad ankle), and then spent the next 30 minutes trying to throw me.  I could have talked about the 16-hour day I pulled at work, and then went in and worked the next day, too, but I was too tired.  I could have given a play-by-play of our trip to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago yesterday, and how my mom and I rode the flight simulator and almost made ace.  But no, something even more momentous has happened.

I bought a new GPS.

I had been geocaching with a Geomate Jr., which is like the simplest GPS unit ever.  It was designed for kids and gives you the bare minimum of what you need to find the cache.  I bought it because it was cheap, and I didn't know if I was going to get into this geocaching stuff.  I used it for two years and found 560 caches with it, but I was starting to think about getting a better one.  Them out of the blue, the company that made them stopped supporting them 5 days after Christmas.

It was a pretty crappy trick, really.  They promoted the hell out of it, getting people to buy them for their kids, then dropped it with no warning.  Supposedly you could download pocket queries with this new program they released, but you need to be a premium member on geocaching.com to even get those, and the whole process was apparently horribly complicated.  Not for little kids anymore.  I never tried it.  Forced to make a new GPS decision suddenly, I had settled on a Garmin eTrex like @saintvi has, and went to Best Buy today to get one.

They didn't have the one I wanted, but I was going to suck it up and get the one they had, for about $50 more.  At this point in time I should have stopped looking while the sales associate went to get the key to unlock the case, but I started playing with a nice touchscreen higher end Garmin, which was only about 3 times more than I'd been looking to pay.  Guess which one I ended up buying?

If you said the expensive one, you're right!  It has bells and whistles.  It has, for some reason, a calculator, an alarm clock, and a stopwatch.  It will tell me when the best times are to fish, and will calculate how big an area is for me.  It has something called Man Overboard.  We have no idea what that is, and we're afraid to try it for fear that's precisely what it will arrange.  It also, of course, does all the "normal" GPS things my Geomate never did, like give me logs and hints on the caches I'm looking for, which thrills me as much as the fishing times.  And as a bonus, it's easy to use!  It took me three minutes to set it up and figure out how to enter coordinates.

The downside is that I've already had to pry it out of my Dear Husband's hands three times already.

So despite the fact that my ankle was killing me-remember the horse?  And the museum?  6 hours walking on marble floors is painful-we went geocaching.  To, you know, "make sure it worked".  It does, spectacularly so.  We found 5 caches together, and then I went after DH's newest cache, which is where I tore my pants twice, in the butt.  Then we went grocery shopping, with me in my torn jeans.  All this was actually an experiment testing my theory that if I do something to hurt my ankle, more exercise will make it straighten up and fly right.  I couldn't go riding, more's the pity because it was such a nice day, because if my ankle gives out on my when I'm caching, I stagger around until DH hauls me upright again.  If it decides to fold while Psycho Mare is having another snit-fit, I might dig a trench 4 feet deep when I hit the ground.

So now I'm home, being very glad I don't have to work tomorrow.  You know, in case my theory is totally wrong, as seems likely.  And if it turns out to be right, hey, I have a GPS now.  I could go geocaching!