Goodness, what a week it’s been! The spring semester began and the library was busy, busy busy, not just with students but with professors too. It made for days that flew by with little down time but for lunch, and tired evenings at home where I wanted to do nothing but get rid of the day’s frustrations with a bike workout on the trainer and then curl up in bed with a book. By Friday everything had begun to calm down and I was able to get other work done that had been pushed aside in the rush. The start of semesters are usually busy, but this one was more hectic than usual for some reason.

Amidst it all, I managed to do my physical therapy exercises three times a day—in my office before work, again in my office during my lunch break, and finally at home in the evening. Because, yay! A week ago Friday I got my arm out of my sling, just in time for a 3-day weekend. My arm and shoulder were stiff from not moving it for a month. I moved my arm around a lot, tested out light weights and body weight strength exercises, and refused to baby it in all of my everyday activities. By the time I had a physical therapy appointment on Monday, some of the stiffness had already gone.

My physical therapist is lovely and I surprised her when I told her the things I had tried and what I could and couldn’t do. She had me move my arm and did some measurements and gave me some exercises to do. She said because I was strong before I fractured my clavicle that I’d bounce back quickly.

She’s right. After a week of doing the exercises she gave me I have already maxed out on the reps and added a heavier weight to the one she told me I could add weight to. I think on Monday I will need to email her and ask her if I should increase the weight on the other exercises, or whether there are some new ones she could give me. As of today, my arm and shoulder are feeling great, and there is hardly any stiffness left, so little that most of the time I don’t even notice.

At my final appointment with my orthopedist, I asked her when I could ride my bike outdoors again. She said I had to be able to hold myself up on my arm for my entire ride and not be sore during or afterwards. She’s a clever woman, since this kept me off my bike outdoors for all of last week.

But today, today we went grocery shopping by bike! Ironic that my first bike ride after my fracture should be on the very bike I was riding when I fell, doing the very thing I was doing then—grocery shopping. But this time the studded winter tires were on the bike and we didn’t have an icy snow overnight. It was cold and horribly windy, but the roads were dry with very little ice.

I was a bit nervous at first, and I cringed when we biked by the scene of the break, but it was so great to be back out on my bike again. And best of all, my shoulder didn’t even twinge once.

Friday I figured it would be my last bus ride, so I was extra determined to get my grumpy afternoon bus driver to say something. He has never said a word and I’ve been cheerily saying hello and thank you to him every day for over a month. When I reached my stop, I said a chipper “thank you, have a great weekend!” I heard a noise. Did he grunt at me? Or was it just bus or traffic noise? It sounded like a grunt, but I can’t be certain. So maybe I got him to respond, but I will never know for sure.

Last week we actually had winter with a couple days not warming past 0F/-18C. There was not a single day warmer than 10F/-12C. Real winter! We’ve had the heat on in the chicken coop since a week ago Saturday night. Even though the lamp is red and not supposed to interfere with their sleep cycle, it’s still a light. The poor chickens end up walking around like zombies. We turned the heat light off today because winter is over already. Tomorrow, and the rest of the week, the forecast is for temperatures at or above freezing during the day and not far below freezing at night. I know there are plenty of people who consider that cold, but for this time of year in Minnesota, our coldest part of the winter, it’s nearly tropical.

Now that I have two hands again, I managed to make some time to work on my weaving. It’s been so long, and it was so wonderful and relaxing. And, I am almost done with my kitchen towels! I have just one inch of weaving to go, then a half inch of weaving thread to turn under for the hem. This being my first on my own project since I took a beginning class at the end of summer, I have learned a lot. I finally figured out how to get neat and even selvages on both sides. It also took me quite a bit to get an even weave and not pack the threads too tight on one side, or all across, or compensate by not beating them tight enough. Of course, it all really comes together in the final four inches of weaving. Ha!

I hope to have the last bits woven next weekend, and cut the towels from the loom. With luck, I will have time to hem them both and then wet finish them for a Sunday blog photo opportunity. It’s going to be tough though since all my seeds are finally here and I’m itching to finish my seed starting and planting calendar and begin the jigsaw puzzle of where to plant everything. But since the only seeds that need to get started in February are the onions, I should be able to hold back my gardening excitement for a little while longer.

Reading

• Article: The End of the Multiverse The multiverse as metaphor has peaked and we are all getting tired of it. I agree, especially in the Marvel movie multiverse where I don’t even know what the point is anymore.
• Article: OpenAI Eliminates Ban on Use for Warfare and Military Purposes. Not that militaries haven’t been using AI, or that militias or other militant groups haven’t been using it, but the fact that OpenAI removed the prohibition from their user policy, whelp, that says quite a lot right there.
• Book: An Interrupted Life: The Diaries 1941-1943 and Letters from Westerbork by Etty Hillesum. I had never heard of Etty Hillesum until my friend Cath told me about her. I started reading the book in 2020. Between the pandemic and Nazi occupation of The Netherlands, the reading was slow going. Weeks would go by without me picking up the book. But a couple months ago I picked it up and something clicked and I found myself reading a page or two nearly every day and then I couldn’t put it down. Hillesum found peace and joy in the midst of war and death. She is a wise woman and her precious diaries and letters have much to teach us.

Listening

• Podcast: Scene on Radio: Echoes of a Coup. The podcast had a long hiatus, but they are back with a new series on Wilmington, North Carolina. In November 1898 an armed mob of White Supremacists murdered untold numbers of Black Wilmington residents and drove out the city’s elected government made up of a coalition of mostly Black Republican officials and mostly White members of the Populist Party and installed Democrats in their place. It is the only successful coup in America to date. I’ve listened to the first two episodes, and highly recommend it.
• Podcast: How to Keep Time. This is a series from Atlantic Magazine about time. I just listened to the first episode, and found it thoughtful and interesting as they delved into why we take photos we never look at, save all the drawings of our children, and keep diaries.

Watching

• Series: What We Do in the Shadows. This has been on a couple seasons but we are only just discovering it. It is the nightly lives of four vampires who live in Staten Island. It has an awkward, sometimes uncomfortable, Office-like vibe that leaves you wondering how these vampires could have survived for several hundred years because they are just so bad at being vampires.

Quote

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.

Shunryu Suziki

James’s Kitchen Wizardry

Cold weather requires comforting treats. We have a recipe in one of our Post Punk Kitchen vegan cookbooks for brownie breakfast waffles, but they only ever stuck to the waffle iron and made a mess. So James would make them as pancakes sometimes. This time he made them as dessert. Brownie pancake with whipped hazelnut cream and the last of our sour cherries from last summer’s garden that were hiding in the back of the freezer.