Catching up

A lot going on and hopefully I'll get some old blogs finished and posted soon.

Swimming is still going really well. I'm still focusing on drills for now, but I think on Monday or Wednesday I'll be moving up to whole strokes.

I got my Pearl Izumi shoes and Speedplay pedals. It took me over four hours, a fight with Chris, and a trip to the bike store to get the shoes and pedals all put together. Now that I've got the shoes finished, I have no idea why it was so hard to figure out! You screw one piece to the shoe and then another piece onto that. But for some reason simple things, like deducing if my shoes are 3-hole or 4-hole, were like a calc final written in Chinese. (I'm more like a guy in the fact that I won't ask for help if my life depended on it, so the fight was over me refusing to ask a Home Depot sales clerk for help finding a wrench. Which for some reason Hubby took to mean that I'm never going to stand up for our children. I figured, screw it why waste time buying a tool to take off the old pedals that we'll never use again and don't even know if it will work when I can just go to the bike shop to get the job done right and for free in the morning. He saw it as my lack to confront people and take care of myself. But after I burnt the pizza and starting crying that I can't even get frozen effing pizza right, we talked it out and everything's groovy.)

I've successfully clipped in and out with the new shoes and pedals while riding around the neighborhood. Getting used to the pedals has so far been much easier than I thought it would be. But being able to leave my shoes clipped in for faster transitions is proving a bit tricky. Taking the shoes off is okay, but putting them on takes a while longer because the tongues keep getting in the way. Then I took my first fall on my bike. I had my left shoe clipped in and on, and I was trying to get my left foot into my shoe. Well, I ran out of street and needed to turn around. Silly me, I went too slowly turning around. I fell over on my left side and the thought of clipping out didn't even occur to me. I knew it was a matter of when not if I'll fall getting used to my new pedals. The fall wasn't all that bad just a bit of a scrap on my knee and arm, but my poor right leg has a good gash from the teeth on the big ring. After swimming this afternoon it looks like a shark took a bite out of my leg lol

Chris should be getting approval from our insurance to start seeing doctors at OHSU. I'm so happy about that! He's got a bad disk in his back and getting the care he needs in podunk Corvallis has been a painful (literally) process. He's been dealing with this since April, and the primary doctor wasn't even going to prescribe a well-known treatment (a steroid injection) until Chris bugged her about it. She's extremely physical-therapy-will-fix-everything chew-on-some-bark-you-don't-need-drugs, I don't think she really knows what she's taking about and I think she's been refering Chris to other doctors just so he'll leave her alone. On top of that, he's having to wait 2-3 weeks for the referal to be approved thanks to dealing with the buracrazy of the hospital and the insurance. Then after we get the referal approved, the doctors he needs to see don't have open appointments for at least 3-4 weeks. So wait about 5-6 weeks in pain so you can hopefully see someone that probably isn't going to do anything for you - grrr!!

The Spine Clinic at OHSU seems like our best bet for getting healed. They have one team of doctors who all work together (no more bouncing around and playing a he said/she said game with multiple doctors). It sounds like they have a lot of procedures to chose from (the primary doc said the only other treatment besides physical therapy was a surgery to fuse the bones together which would leave him in pain for the rest of his life). So far, it looks like the doctor he'll start off with at OHSU is scheduling about 1-2 weeks out. So right now, we're just waiting for the approval to go through and then hopefully Chris can start getting healed.

We're having a very white person Saturday: We're starting off with picking our VW up from service. It has only one bumper sticker (and it's on the window so it won't affect the resale value. Extra points that it's a 26.2 oval.) Afterwards we're going to ride our bikes to the market (yes, the exact same one mentioned in this article.) They have the best strawberries, that I'll use to make a fan-fuggin-tastic pie, and to die for feta made locally. Last time we took our dog, but he likes to herd bicycles so he doesn't do well on the waterfront. After the market, we're going to stop by a grocery co-op to see what kind of goodies they have. Hopefully we'll have time to stop off at the gym for some laps, but we'll probably move that to Sunday morning before we head up to Portland. I have a 10k in the evening which counts for my long run of the week and I don't want to be too tired from swimming before the run. Plus, we just got a bunch of new movies from Netflix, so we have to "watch" those this weekend.

I'm getting pretty sleepy, so I'm off to bed...