a bunch of lessons involving patience and time management
Tue 2015-01-20 23:22:37 (in context)
First thing I learned today was about my knee. There is good news and there is bad news about my knee.
The good news is that the MRI revealed nothing worse nor more than what the doctor suspected. It's either a grade 1 (strain) or grade 2 (partial tear) of the ACL. No other part of the knee has been damaged. The doctor was particularly pleased to see healthy meniscus tissues.
The bad news is that things are not better than what the doctor suspected, and I won't be back on skates for some four to six weeks. That sucks and makes me sad and frustrated about the timing of my injury. If I had not been injured, I would have participated in travel team try-outs this weekend; if I had participated, I'd have had at least a hope of making it onto the All Stars team this season; if I had made All Stars I'd have a chance of being rostered for the Dust Devil tournament in March. No guarantees, of course. Just chances. But being off-skates until March is a guaranteed no chance at all.
If I reel in my impatience, I can remind myself that there will still be lots of season left when I return to the track. Plenty of time for me to get in on the action no matter where I'm rostered. And I've been skating pretty much non-stop since my first season. Six weeks off is no tragedy, not really. And it could have been worse! It could have been a complete tear, requiring surgery and a much longer off-skates recovery time. But it wasn't, and it didn't, and March isn't all that far away.
Until then, I'm supposed to take it easy, let things heal, wear my brace when moving around, and attend my upcoming physical therapy appointments.
And be patient.
What else did I learn today?
I learned, or relearned, that oil-based wood stain takes more than four hours to dry. By the time I wanted to stain the second side of the door, the first side was still sticky, darn it. I suppose I'll either do it last thing tonight, or, more likely, first thing tomorrow. No need to hurry, that's what I keep telling myself.
(Maybe I'll come to believe it.)
I learned that you can't trust a Rocky Mountain front range wind to continue blowing in the same direction all afternoon long, which means you need to pause before brushing off your sanding surface each time to check the wind. That is, if you don't want to get sawdust all over your clothes and in your eyes.
(And all over your borrowed knee brace.)
And I learned, or relearned, that it's not worth it to spend three and a half hours on a Puzzle Pirates Examiner article and slideshow. I'd been meaning to talk about the Duty Navigation puzzle, yes, but I didn't need to go on that long. I should have split the dang thing into four posts once I saw how wordy everything was getting. But no, I kept it all in the same post and made five different images to upload--for probably less overall return than if I'd split it up and not bothered with slideshows, come to think of it.
And had no time left afterward for working on my short story revision. Dang it.
It's OK. Whatever I didn't get to today, I'll have time for tomorrow, just so long as I move it up to the top of tomorrow's priority queue. That's the theory, anyway. No need to shove every single thing in every single day, so long as everything gets to happen sometime.