Friday, September 10, 2010

Summer Progress and Fall Plans

I now have only two physical therapy appointments left! It will be lovely not having to go out so often and not having to spend that money, though going out two to three times a week did mean I stayed caught up on errands. I didn't have my bouts of the don't wannas when it came to getting groceries, picking up things at Target or getting the dry cleaning done. I could just do all that on my way to or from therapy appointments. I'm not totally 100 percent yet, but I'm so close that only my therapist can tell the difference, and then I can feel that there's a slight difference between arms. I'll have to keep up some of the exercises on my own to get back to where I really want to be.

I realized when I was talking to my agent the other day and catching up on what's been happening the last few (or more -- I'm a very hands-off client who mostly goes off into my cave to work) months that I've had a pretty busy summer. There was the therapy to rehab the shoulder, I taught vacation Bible school, I did heavy revisions on a manuscript, I went to two conventions, I had choir stuff, and I researched and wrote a book proposal. That research involved reading about 50 books. Not all of them were text-intensive, and I didn't necessarily read all of them cover-to-cover, but still, that's a lot of reading. Oh, and there was my usual weekly medical school work.

Now, what will I do for the fall? I've got choir, kindergarten choir and ballet. We've got a new choir director who starts next week, so I don't know yet if we'll go back to having the a capella early music chorale or any other small extra choral groups. I've got two conventions, FenCon next week and then MileHiCon in October, plus a library talk. I'm still figuring out what I'll be working on, as there are two projects vying for my attention at the moment, both of which could involve deadlines. One is in progress and the other needs a lot of development and some research before I can start it, so I may end up working on both. I probably will finish writing a book before the end of the year, one way or another. So, yeah, fall will be busy.

I've also come up with the wacky goal of being able to do splits again before the end of the year. I used to be really, really flexible. Well into my 20s, I could easily drop into the splits from just about any direction. Then I messed up my knee and had surgery, and the period of forced inactivity associated with that, along with the exercises to strengthen the muscles around the knee, meant I lost a lot of flexibility. Now the tightness in my hamstrings is hampering my extension in ballet. This limbering up is a slow, gradual process, and my ballet teacher has shown me some exercises. I just need to remember to stop and stretch every so often every day so I can keep making progress. I'm adding the leg stretching to my usual shoulder stretching routine.

Plus, there are a couple of other projects I'm involved with that I'll be talking about soon.

And to think, I was kind of hoping to take some serious time off this fall to really enjoy my favorite season!

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