Last year on Earth Day, I put my name on the waiting list for the community garden down the street from my house.  I can walk there, it is a block away.  I can also ride my bike there.  I met with the community garden coordinator and all the other potential plotters on Saturday, and we got to pick our plots from what was available.  There were several really good ones, some with shade, some that hadn’t been worked well, and one really great one in full sunshine right in the middle of the garden and right next to a water spigot.

That’s the one I picked.  One of my new plot-neighbors has offered to bring his tiller and till up my plot when he does his, and I readily agreed!  Today Tater and I went down to the garden to pick out rocks (rocks are everywhere here, even in well-worked soils), and remove the treated wood walkways inside our plot.  We also pulled up some of the old plants and tossed them in the compost bin onsite.

The season starts now, although there isn’t a lot to do in Colorado in March.  We still are getting snow and freezing nights, and will until May at least, so it will be a while before I plant much.  But there’s plenty to be done to prep the area.  I can put in fertilizer (only organic), get the ground worked and ready, plot out what I’m going to plant and get some planting dates sketched out.  And like today, I can dig up weeds as they begin to appear above the soil.  I dug out three or four patches of weeds this morning.

We can only use organic fertilizers and pest control methods.  we get one bale of straw we can use for mulch, plus there is a mulch pile (wood chips) we can use for pathways.  We can water as often as we want, and grow what we want.  I’m in the preliminary stages of figuring this out, using a white board and a grid.  I’d like to grow squash, corn, turnips, beets, eggplant, tomatoes, cabbage, and maybe one pumpkin.  The plot is about 20 feet by 20 feet, which sounds big until you start plotting it out.  I’ll still grow the lettuce I want by the house, in the garden behind my patio.  It did well there, so I won’t have to do it down in the big garden.  I want to plant what we will eat, and not what we won’t.  The idea is to feed my family, not just play at a hobby.

Of course, the biggest problem is going to be finding the time to do it all.  Part of the process, besides just taking care of my own plot, is to serve at least 10 hours of community time, and also participate in Work Share hours, where we maintain common areas of the gardens, or do other tasks that need to be done that don’t involve our own plot.

I’m looking forward to the adventure.  This will be the first true test of whether or not I can garden in Colorado.  The lettuce and mutant 5-lb. cabbage I grew last year were only anomalies.  This year, it’s for real. Wish me luck!

Yesterday morning when I got up, I noticed the carcass of a duck in our back yard.  Well, what was left of a duck, anyway.  I was way too squeamish to go out there and take a close look.  It appeared to have been a victim of a fox.  We have a lot of ducks hanging out in our back yard, because the green space leads to a little pond.  Since the pond melted a few weeks ago, there are dozens of ducks on it.  Dozens.  Mallards and wood ducks mostly, male and female.  One of the local cats, a little fat black one with the prettiest golden eyes you’ve ever seen, stalks the ducks regularly.  He even attacks once in a while, but these ducks are easily twice his size, and I’m sure he wasn’t the one who had a duck dinner overnight.

The real problem comes with what to do with a dead duck.  Well, what’s left of a dead duck.  As I already mentioned, I’m not going out there to pick it up.  I thought about asking the HOA to take care of it; after all, they complain when things don’t look “just so” in our yards, so they should be keeping the green space “just so” as well.  It’s what they are getting paid for, right?

But there was a Plan B.  Or Maybe C.  Plan B was leave it there and see if other wildlife would clean it up for me.  In Missouri, that “other wildlife” would have been an opossum.  But we don’t have those here in Colorado, so I held out hope for a crow, or maybe another fox.  Plan C was much more entertaining, and this is the one I employed.

Plan C involved texting the Perfect Child at work and telling her about my gruesome discovery.  She loves gruesome.  She is at that age.  At her age I loved gruesome too.  She was, of course, fascinated.  When she got home from work, I asked her if I could give her a bag and she could pick it up and bag it up and put it in the trash.  She went for her gloves, a pair of pink and black bike gloves that she wears for everything that would require getting her hands dirty.  I had not suggested she actually touch the carcass with her hands, gloved or not.  Tater, of course, was equally fascinated, and stood on the patio jiggling up and down with excitement.  The Perfect Child circled around the bony carcass a few times, her nose wrinkled and a total look of disgust on her face.  But she wasn’t backing away, either.  She reached as if she was going to pick it up, then cringed away.  She looked around her, grabbing a cottonwood stick that had fallen from one of the trees.  From this distance, she was able to pick it up – she stretched the stick through the open rib cage of the body and lifted it into the air, where she could then turn it around a bit and get a closer look.  Then she dropped it in the bag.  Immediately after that, she did her Dance of Disgust.  It looks sort of like the Pee Pee Dance, only much more animated and with lots of tossing of the head.  The Dance was so intense that she had to drop the bag to finish it.

Once that was done, she picked up the bag and asked if Tater wanted to see it.  Of course Tater wanted to see it!  She raced out there and her sister held the bag open so she could see.  “Oooooh.” They informed me that there was no head, only a tail, both wings, and one leg/foot.  That must have been one hungry fox.

The excitement and disgust done away with, the Perfect Child tied the bag closed and unceremoniously dropped it in the trash can.  Today, she dragged it back out to show her boyfriend, with great glee.  He’s a country boy, so it didn’t bother him any but she was sure proud of it, as if she’d been the one to kill it and eat it.  Kids are so funny.

The best news of all?  I didn’t have to deal with any of that gruesome cleanup.  Thank goodness.

We’ve had houseguests this weekend.  They are the first guests we’ve had since my mother was with us last fall.  I know one of them, but not the other.  This required a flurry of activity this past week to clean, get the bed made up, get a second bed in place (in this  case, a air mattress), and food laid in.  And as a planner, I needed to get the right kind of groceries and know when I needed to get meals made.

They arrived late Friday (after 10 p.m.) after a full day of attending a conference.  Basically, we are acting as a bed and breakfast for these people.  They are out just after the sun and home long after dark.  Tomorrow morning they have an insanely early flight out, and will be dashing out the door at 5 a.m., if not earlier.  So I’ve seen them for breakfast, and briefly at night.  It is nice to see my friend, but there’s really no time to do any kind of catching up.

And I don’t mind all that much.  As long as I get to host people in my beautiful house, feed them filling foods, provide soft and warm bedding and plenty of hot water for showers, I feel like I’m being the hostess with the mostess.  I’ve often thought about running a bed and breakfast.  I could meet interesting people, but not be tied down to a 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week commitment.  And I like to cook, and take care of people, but I don’t want to do it all day long like a nurse or something.  A bed and breakfast would be perfect.

I would call it the Celestial Chicken Bed and Breakfast.  Because I like chickens, and I like suns and moons.  Put them together and you’ve got a Celestial Chicken.  I’d have a cute little sign, and a menu of what breakfast would be for each day.  I’d only be open Thursday through Sundays, because I wouldn’t want to work too awfully hard, and I’d still need days to myself.  I’d have four or maybe five rooms, each with a theme.  I would decorate for the seasons, and my garden would be fabulous.  Maybe more than one garden.  There’d have to be a big porch made for sitting and chatting, and on pretty days, for having breakfast.

As my mom says, “are you going to live long enough to do all these things you want to do?”  No, I won’t.  But having dreams like this keep my mind busy and give me something happy and positive to think about when I need a distraction.

Would you stay at the Celestial Chicken Bed and Breakfast?

It’s been ten days since my cast was removed and I was told to get to walking.  In those ten days I’ve progressed from barely being able to put weight on the leg in the cam boot, to being able to walk without crutches and only somewhat of a limp.  I still cannot walk far without the boot, but that’s okay.  The foot and ankle are still swollen, and movement of the ankle is still difficult, stiff, and painful, and that’s okay too.

Because I’m walking.  On two feet.  I’m driving, even in snow, and going shopping and meeting my friends in the coffee shop and working every day.  I climb the stairs to my second-floor bedroom, and take showers standing up in my own shower.  I go down the steps to the basement to my office and to do laundry.  I can stand on two feet to cook a meal or iron a shirt or run a vacuum.

Those first few days were rough and by the time I went to bed at night I was exhausted and discouraged.  I’m usually discouraged by the time I go to bed, but mostly that is because I’m tired and have probably pushed a bit too hard.  But then again, the pushing I do does mean I’m recovering, healing up, getting back to a normal life.

My knees are screaming at me, which doesn’t surprise me.  The knee scooter really put pressure on my right knee, and it is also the leg that has been holding up the cast all these weeks, and now has to lift a heavy foot covered in a cam boot too.  It has a right to be angry.  The left knee?  Mad because it’s had to do everything these last 8 weeks or so.  I know that once I get back on my bike, the knees will be happy.  A few weeks of biking and the knees won’t remember anything was wrong.  I have to think that the ankle may feel the same way.

I have less than three weeks of cam boot left, then I go into regular shoes.  I’m up to six exercises from my little physical therapy pamphlet from the doctor.  Soon, I’ll add three or four more.  I need a little more movement in my ankle first, but that’s coming, slowly but surely.

We’re headed into our second snow storm in a week, this one worse than the last.  Anywhere else, this would be a frightening prospect.  But being Colorado snow, it melts off the pavement fairly quickly, so I can get out and about.  We’ll see what tomorrow brings.  Tomorrow will be spent with a warm fire, a good book, and a pile of yarn, I think.  A well-deserved rest for two days of errand-running.

February 14th was the big day.  The cast was schedule to come off, xrays to be taken, and the surgeon was going to take a look.  I am happy to say I am now a free woman!  Okay, not completely free, but I’m completely free of the cast.  Beautiful as it was, in hot pink and lovingly decorated by my friends and family, and doused in glitter, it was time for it to go.  And away it went.

I did everything right.  I have eaten so much calcium in the past six weeks that I should be pooping seashells.  I boned up (haha, pun intended!) on my protein, laid off the carbs.  I kept my foot elevated at all times, and never put weight on it.  The surgeon had said before my surgery, “it you do what I tell you to do, you will walk out of here in six weeks.”  So I did.  And I walked.  Sort of.

The ankle and leg feel fine.  No problems there when I walk.  The only pain I am getting is on the bottom of my foot, and across the bridge of my foot.  There is so much dry skin on the bottom of my foot that it feels numb, and the swelling doesn’t help.  Now that it is out of the cast, it can get a chance to heal up properly.  In only two days since the cast was removed, I have managed to exfoliate most of the foot and ankle, although there is still some remaining.  And I walk with crutches, but put as much weight on my leg as I can stand.  The trick is, according to the surgeon and the PA, is “as tolerated.”  I try to push my limits, as I want to be driving and back to going to work every day.  Yes, I’m pushing myself hard, and I could take it easy a bit longer, but the truth is, I’ve been taking it easy the last nearly seven weeks.  I’m so over the laying around, leg propped up, feeling completely useless.

Today, I’m in my office in the basement, now that I’ve navigated how to do stairs both up and down.  I’m catching up on laundry, of which there is plenty.  I straightened up most of the sewing room so I have room to work on the laundry.  The office needs to be cleaned, all the Christmas stuff needs to be put away, and the bed brought back down from the living room in preparation for house guests who will arrive in less than two weeks.  Yes, there is much to be done.  Much indeed!

It is nice to stand on two feet, it is nice to be able to take a real shower (although I have to do it sitting on the shower chair for now).  Going to the bathroom is not the ordeal it was, I can walk in there with my crutches, not have to maneuver the walker and “hop” on one leg.  I can sit down and stand up fairly easily, because I can put weight on the “bad” leg now.

Will there be physical therapy?  Actually, no.  They sent me home with exercises, which I can do as soon as I can tolerate them.  I’m already doing stretches and wiggles with my foot, trying to get the atrophy in the ankle to lessen.  There are stand-up exercises to do later, when the foot is more normalized.  There are big stretchy rubber sheets I will use to pull and push with my toes.  If I do everything, and continue to push my limits, I will, in four weeks, be in my tennis shoes.  For now, it’s the cam boot and the crutches.  I’ll move to a cane later.  When I’m not walking, I’m out of the cam boot and doing exercises, stretching the foot, making it get used to being “naked.”  I sleep with it “naked” too, and so far that’s been good.  The first night was a little rough, I was worried that I would twist it or it would get kicked or something.  Last night I slept like a rock!

The surgeon expressed his disappointment that the first emergency room (Estes Park Medical Center) did not set my leg (what the orthopedists call “reduction”).  He said the nerve damage I have (which presents as numbness) and swelling I still have are a result of it having been splinted in its broken and dislocated position for more than 8 hours after my injury.  If it had been set early on, within the first two hours, I’d have not had so much pain, and might be a little more healed than I am now.  He also confirmed that the fibula double fracture was a compound (open) fracture.  I never saw that side of my leg, and didn’t know.  I am glad I didn’t.  Scary.

Anyway, I’m further on the mend.  I’m including some pictures below, not too gruesome.  I’m also including scans of my after xrays, showing my total bionic-ness. In other words, watch out!  I’m invincible!

Awesome cast artwork…next four pictures.

I’m bionic!  This is the follow-up xrays that show the plates and screws.  There are two screws holding on the end of the tibia, and another 8 screws holding together the three pieces of my lower fibula.

Bottom of my foot after the cast was removed.  Most of this dead skin has now been cleared away through a couple days of soaking and exfoliating.

Right (outer) side of ankle.  Incision looks good!

Left (inside) of ankle.  Incision is almost invisible (it is just above my instep).  The one remaining scab is from the fracture blister, and it will heal up and slough off the scab on its own.  I am not touching it.  The bright red area next to the scab is the blisters that have already healed but are still very tender.  From the blister down I have no feeling on the skin.  There is quite a bit of nerve damage there.

View from the top of the foot.  The ridge you see going around my ankle is just a mark from the sock I was wearing before I took the picture.

Six weeks ago today, I broke my leg.  Six weeks ago today, I was riding pell-mell down the mountain in an ambulance.  Today I got the first of what will be several bills for my care.  My insurance (Kaiser Permanente) is not going to pay any of the ER charges that occurred in Estes Park, even though I was taken there to be stabilized.  This should be a fun argument.  I had no choice about where I was taken for care after my injury, no choice about my transportation to get there.

I’ve learned a few things over the course of my convalescence.  In six weeks of being mostly confined to home, being out of my normal routine, being away from my friends and work and activities I enjoy, I have learned a lot of things.  Some good, I suppose, and some bad.

First, I learned that I could get a whole lot of work done at home, probably more work than I would have gotten done while actually sitting at work.  There are no interruptions, I’m usually by myself, and do nothing but work the whole time I’m sitting there.  So despite the fact that I decided to hurt myself at the busiest time of my work year, I have managed to keep up with the workload.

No amount of hopping around on a walker is going to build my shoulder and arm muscles up.  I thought they would get stronger, but they haven’t.

I can do more than I think I can around the house, sometimes. Other times, not so much so.  I also learned that having limits makes me grumpy.  But I can make my own bed, I can bath and wash my hair adequately in the kitchen sink, I can fix meals as long as they aren’t too complex, and wash dishes.  It’s not all bad.

The best tool ever for my situation is a silly souvenir.  My extendable/retractable “bear claw,” back scratcher allows me to reach things that are just out of my reach (like that sock that rolled under the bed), turn on light switches that are just a bit too far away, and the cat likes it when I scratch her head with it.  Silly cat.  But this tool has been invaluable.  It has allowed me to be independent when I thought I couldn’t.

Probably the most disconcerting thing I’ve learned is that I’m an awful lot more like my mother than I thought I was.  I like things my way.  I like things done when I say they should be done.  I’d rather do it myself than leave it to someone else to be done poorly.  I do not like to wait for someone else to get motivated to get going.  And I get cranky when these things go wrong.  Considering I’ve had six weeks of all of these things going wrong, you can imagine there have been a lot more cranky days than non-cranky days.  I have spent way too many Saturday afternoons in the grocery store than I’d like, and I’ve worn an awful lot of wrinkled clothes because no one else understands that when the dryer buzzes, that means go get the clothes NOW.

With any luck, this Thursday I will be out of my cast and into the cam boot.  This means I will be weight-bearing, and can climb stairs (yay, shower, yay, I can do laundry again!), and can reach light switches and the cords for the blinds, and I can go outside and water my trees (we are still in drought), and go to the grocery store at the crack of dawn.

Wish me luck!

I have two other blogs you should not ignore!!

Fat Bottom Biking is my health/exercise blog, I post there normally twice a week but for now am doing once a week until I’m actually back out biking!

The Celestial Chicken blog is my writing blog, updated on Sundays!

Check them out!

Got this recipe from Martha Stewart…and it’s sooooo good I need to share.  We had this with a nice pork roast the other day.

Braised Red Cabbage

1 head red cabbage, quartered and sliced thin

1 yellow onion, sliced very thin

1 Gala or Braeburn apple, cored, peeled, and sliced thin

2 T. butter or margarine

4 tsp. sugar

3 T. apple cider or wine vinegar

1/2 cup water

salt and pepper

Melt butter in large dutch oven.  Add in onion and apple, saute until soft and translucent.  Add in cabbage and toss.  Mix together sugar, vinegar, and water, pour in.  Salt with about a teaspoon of salt and fresh cracked black pepper.  Cover tightly and cook for 20-25 minutes or until cabbage is soft yet still crunchy.  Toss several times during the cooking.  Taste and season with more salt and pepper as needed.  If you like it a little sweeter, you can also season with a little extra sugar.

This past Wednesday I visited the orthopedist again, to get a new cast.  I still had some surgical dressings inside the cast that needed to be checked or removed.  Some of the swelling had gone down, as well, so the cast I had was getting loose.

My first cast was a surgical cast, which basically was a bunch of plastic “plates” strapped over wads and wads of batting and held down with about 20 elastic bandages.  Okay, there were probably only four bandages, but there were a lot.  That cast was cut off with scissors.  The second cast, though, was fiberglass over wads of batting, and required a cast saw to remove.  That was a whole new experience for me, and not just a little frightening.  At one point the blade touched one of my surgical scars and I about jumped off the table.  There is so much nerve damage down there that any touch becomes somewhat of an overreaction by my nerves.  This was no different; once the cast was off it was obvious there had been no damage from the saw.

The foot and ankle are considerably less swollen, although still puffy and bruised.  This time, 12 days after my last cast was put on and 25 days after my break, my ankle was noticeably more stable, and I could move it slightly without feeling like it was going to fall apart like a house of cards.  The pain of moving it is more of an ache than a sharp jab, and that’s got to be a good sign.  The doctor removed the steri strips on the incision on the outside of my ankle, as those are no longer needed.  I told him about the strange pain I have been having on the inside part of the ankle, at my ankle bone above the incision.  He took a close look, cleaned off the area of the fracture blisters (which are healing very nicely) and found a staple that had been missed the last time.  Once he removed the dead skin covering the healing blisters, it was there, shiny and new, mocking all of us.  He removed it, but the pain is still there.  I do believe it is nerve damage, from my ankle having been dislocated for so long, and that it may eventually repair itself.  The skin is numb there, and I think when anything touches that area, no matter how lightly, the nerves that can feel it are overreacting and causing a much larger than necessary feeling of pain.  I can ignore it most of the time, but sometimes it’s pretty bad.  I’m hoping that eases after the cast is off.

Everything appears to be healing well, and I was refitted with another cast, again in hot pink, again non-weight-bearing.  The tech who put my cast on was nice enough to wash off my leg and foot before she put the new cast on, something that I desperately needed.  The doctor assured me that I will be weight-bearing when I walk out of the office on February 14th, cast-free.  I will go into a cam boot, and will likely start physical therapy after that as well. I’m looking forward to being able to move and drive and walk, but I’m not looking forward to the sure pain that will come with PT.  I broke this leg before, and tore up the ankle, and I well remember the torture of PT after that injury.

My poor foot is none too amused by all this cast stuff.  The bottom of my foot is scaly as an alligator.  Of course there’s nothing I can do about that.  The first thing I’m going to do when I get home after getting my cast off is walk up the stairs and take a nice long shower.  Then I’m going to soak the foot/ankle in epsom salts, and slather my foot in neosporin and Lubriderm, and put on a sock.  I might have to do that daily for a while.  If I don’t, all that alligator skin is going to crack and split and I’ll be a bloody mess.  Literally.

Now that I’m more than halfway through my cast waiting game, I’m feeling better.  I did go to work for a while Wednesday, before I got the new cast.  It was nice to talk to all my coworkers, to get some things done that I can’t do from home, and just be out and about for a while.  I am still hoping to arrange some transportation so I can get into the office a couple days a week, but so far I’ve not had luck with that.  There is a service that can take me, but seating is limited and so far I’ve not gotten lucky enough to get one of those seats.  Hopefully I’ll get a better shot this week.  I am working pretty much full time from home, though, so I’m not having to use up any of my precious vacation or sick time.  I am so very thankful for this, as it gives me something to do, and keeps the paycheck coming in.

I’m including some pictures below from my doctor’s visit.  Klown was taking the pictures and he has a shaky hand, so they aren’t very good.  But it still gives you an idea of what is going on as I heal.

The bottom of my foot, looking not so great…dry skin!!

View from the top – ankle is much less swollen than before, but still fat.

Outside of the ankle, before steri strips were removed.

Inside of ankle.  The blisters run perpendicular to the incision, at the very top.  These are greatly healed since the last time I saw them.  

Top of my leg, from my perspective.  I think it looks pretty good, overall!

This post is going to be whining.  Just thought I’d warn you up front.

I miss getting in my car and running to the store or wherever.  I miss being able to stand in the shower for ten minutes.  I miss being able to not think about going to the bathroom and just going whenever I want.  I miss being able to stand in the kitchen and cook a meal.  I miss being able to run away to my office when the noise is too great in the house.  I miss doing laundry, and being able to walk to my closet to get out whatever it is I want to wear.

I am just about three weeks into nearly seven and a half weeks of forced convalescence and dependence.  I’ve come a long way in these three weeks, but I still have a very long way to go.

I am confined to the first floor of the house, which, since it is an open concept designed house, means that I get to hear everything that goes on.  I get to live right in the middle of it.  Whatever is on TV, I get to hear and see.  I’m in the middle of every conversation.  I eat, sleep, work, and rest in the same place.  I can’t easily go outside because of stairs, and I can’t drive.  I can’t stand for very long because I have to balance myself on one leg while doing so.  I have a knee walker, a nice rolling device that allows me to move around a little quicker, but it doesn’t fit in our tiny tiny bathroom.  I still have to hop in there sideways with the walker.  I think about when I need to go to the bathroom now, because it is such an ordeal to do it. I’ve had to leave the grocery shopping to others, which means my budget is totally blown for the month. My baths are taken with no privacy and a sink full of water.

I guess I’m getting a good look at what it’s going to be like getting old.  My mobility is greatly impaired.  I have nightmares about falling and injuring my other leg and becoming even more immobile.  I feel my extra weight, which never bothered me before, as a ticking time bomb.  I can’t even reach the toes on the leg with the cast.  I have to rely on one of my daughters to put lotion on those cracked, bruised toes.  these are simple things.  Things I take for granted and do by myself whenever I want.  This has been one of the worst ordeals of my life.

I miss being able to just get in the car and go to work.  I have worked for so many years that to not work feels strange.  I am working at home and putting in almost as many hours as I would if I were going to the office, but it’s not the same, either.  I miss working with my students and student staff, miss interacting with the people in my office.  I miss seeing my mountains on my commute, watching as winter deepens and changes the landscape.  I miss taking pictures for my 365-Degree blog, which I’ve now had to put on hiatus.  I miss my bike rides, I miss my coffee shop and a large iced mocha whenever I want.

I am likely not to ever take these things for granted again.  It isn’t until we lose something that we knew what we had, right?

I will walk again.  I will ride my bike again.  I will drive my car again.  I will climb stairs again.  I will take a shower again.  I will fix family meals again.  I will clean house again, and do laundry.  I will retire to my office on those evenings when there’s too much noise in the rest of the house.  I will sleep in my own bed, and when I get up in the morning, walk across the room to the closet and get out what I want to wear.

27 more days until my cast comes off for good, if I heal properly.  I always told myself, if I knew there was an end to it, I could do anything.  I have 27 days.