Bump, Skid, Ouch!

Boy, yesterday was a pretty wretched day all over the world.  The Norwegian tragedy is beyond comprehension (Gerry called it right away, saying that it felt to him like Oklahoma City, and it does sound very much the same at this point.)

In our own corner of the world we had two minor bits of excitement, neither one tragic at all, just inconvenient.

Watch Out For That Hole!

I ride my bike quite a bit because it seems to get all of my juices flowing and keeps the pain from my fibromyalgia at bay.  At first I thought I may have been imagining this, or projecting, making myself believe that the biking was helping to assuage the guilt I felt for peddling away from household duties once or twice a day.

But when I don’t ride for a day or two, the stiffness returns.  More than 3 days and the pain can be so bad when I start to ride again that I need to ease back up into my longer rides.  Right now I average about 6 miles a day, most of my rides are between 7-14 miles.

It sounds like a lot, and I guess it is, but it doesn’t FEEL like that much.  Not now.  When I started riding 2 years ago after a 20 year break (I used to ride in grad school) it was a big deal to go even 3 miles.

These days a 20 mile ride really doesn’t feel THAT far, and I keep expanding my riding circle to add more miles. (The great thing about a place like the Twin Cities is that not only are there ample bike trails and paths, but if I get really tired or burned out I can hop on a bus and go home.  ALL the city transit buses in Minneapolis & St. Paul have bike racks on the front.)

Falling isn’t fun, but everyone does it now and then.  I haven’t fallen for a while, but I did a doozy yesterday and scraped myself up pretty badly.  Even worse, my right hand (thumb & joint especially) are very tender, so knitting is out of the picture for a bit.

Luckily I fell right in front of the home of a very kind woman, a nurse, who patched me up and sympathized, and also happens to be a (new) fibromyalgia friend.  Small world!

Gerry came and got me – I was feeling pretty woozy – but overall I’m dandy.  I’ll take a day or so off the bike, but I’ll be back on it, believe-you-me, because nothing else brings me the same joy or decreases my pain to such a degree.

CRASH!

However, that was just the start of our excitement yesterday.  Later in the day, while I was down in Rosemount visiting Steven B’s shop the Yarn Garage, Gerry had a car accident while driving the kids home from piano lessons.

It was minor in the sense that everyone is okay, and fault was difficult to determine (Gerry’s car was hit, but his immediate reaction to any accident is to blame himself, which is what he has done here, and now it’s a moot point…)

The kids are fine, Gerry’s fine (if shaken) and I kept waking up last night from fitful dreams of what might have happened.  We were lucky. The car, unfortunately, is a total loss.

Now we’re a one-car family, which isn’t terrible in a good mass-transit area like Mpls/StP.  I use my bike for most of our daily grocery shopping and errands, and the kids will have to lean to rely on THEIR bikes and the busses to get around.

We’d contemplated becoming a 1-car family for a few months, we just didn’t expect it to happen so quickly or in such an unplanned way.  This is life.

And, of course, Gerry just had $800 of work done on the car.  Damn.