Every morning as I lie in bed waiting for it to be late enough to get up, I do an inventory of my body parts to see which ones are likely to make my life difficult in the coming day. I consider it a “Level One” diagnostic. And when I say body parts, I’m really talking about my extremities (joints, mostly). My internal organs are a different matter. Lots of them are troublemakers – especially my brain, which tends to be a constant source of irritation to both myself and others.<\/p>\n
So I kind of lie still and see if anything hurts (usually if that’s the case, I’m already aware of it – and have been all night long). Then I start moving things. Stretch out the achilles tendons one at a time, rotate the ankle, wiggle the toes, work up to the knees and so on). Of course you can never really tell for sure what’s gonna cause trouble until you start moving around, but since I don’t really have anything else going on and there’s no point in getting the dogs all riled up until the heat’s been on for a few minutes and the water heater’s had a chance to warm the water up enough to take a shower, there’s not much else to do. Plus it helps keep my mind off the fact that I have to go to work. <\/p>\n
It seems like at least one thing hurts every day (more than normal amount of aches and pains that I’ve come to tolerate with each passing year, which is something you hear about from your parents when you’re a kid – or at least I did. My mother would say “I’ve got a pain” and my dad would say, “everybody’s got pains” – but you never really understand what it means until you get there yourself). <\/p>\n
Lately it’s been something different every day. One day the ankle, another the toe, then the elbow, both feet, shoulder, wrist…. The weather certainly doesn’t help. It’s something like -5° this morning (at least according to the Weather Channel – my digital thermometer is currently only displaying the “-” sign. I think it’s sick of the cold, too), and it’s mostly been cold all winter long. <\/p>\n
Yesterday the elbow was a problem. There’s a spot right there on the pointiest part that hurts to touch or when I straighten that arm out all the way. It feels like I whacked it on something, actually. But I didn’t and it’s not red or swollen and seems to be a recurring phenomenon, so I don’t think I just happened to whack it and don’t remember (though not remembering shit is always a possibility – yesterday I parked in a different area and I wandered around the parking lot trying not to look like an idiot trying to find my car).<\/p>\n
Anyhow, the elbow hurts again today, but the pain has fallen to the degree of “background noise,” so that’s good. Everything else seems to be at the “everybody’s got pains” level, too. At least so far – you never can tell what the day will bring.<\/p>\n
I found there’s a thing called “Clean Monday” this week. That of course is followed by Shrove Tuesday and then Ash Wednesday. So I figured, shit, there’s gotta be a name for today, right?<\/p>\n
Turns out, yes there is. It’s “Bacon Thursday.” I’d say it’s only a made up thing, not an official Catholic one, but then all the official Catholic ones are made up too, so what the hell? And it’s got both a Facebook page<\/a>, and a page on “Yolasite”<\/a> so it must be legit. Turns out, it’s not about Kevin Bacon, but rather it’s supposedly because yesterday was “meatless” and all the Fridays during Lent are meatless (back in my day, every<\/em><\/strong> Friday was meatless. Kids these days don’t know how lucky they have it), so today Catholics eat bacon. Or something like that. From Yolasite:<\/p>\n History:<\/p>\n Bacon Thursday was first observed in 2009 by Thomas Rohn of Chicago, IL. The practice has spread rapidly, and now whole numbers of people celebrate Bacon Thursday. See that? Whole numbers<\/em><\/strong> of people celebrate this day. It’s not one of those holidays that only fractions of people celebrate! Like Groundhog Day. Only about 1\/8th of me celebrates that one.<\/p>\n Well, time to get ready to get out there and bring home the bacon, I guess. Stay warm, folks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every morning as I lie in bed waiting for it to be late enough to get up, I do an inventory of my body parts to see which ones are likely to make my life difficult in the coming day. I consider it a “Level One” diagnostic. And when I say body parts, I’m really […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8521"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8522,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8521\/revisions\/8522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n