Catching up on posting: flying, swimming, shoes

Nice flying, weekend before last - 2 flights, one with Rob on a gray overcast Saturday and one solo on a lovely clear Sunday. Each time I did a bunch of turns in the pattern and then left when it got crowded. Two in a row is a good confidence builder. (My confidence in my flying skills drops sharply when I haven't flown in a while.)

Swimming doesn't feel like a lot of a workout. I know my heart rate and breathing are increased; I know my face gets red. Why then doesn't it feel like I'm working? Do I associate feeling hot and sweaty with a workout? Alternatively, am I really not pushing myself enough in the pool? I suspect it's a bit of both.

The new shoes aren't too awful; they're just not as good as my wedges. I'm undecided about keeping them. They're less ugly than the wedges, so perhaps good for something like a job interview, but they're not good enough for a wedding, so they don't solve every fashion problem.

Great weekend, Part 1: AOPA Expo

Our extra-long weekend started Wednesday evening when we flew down to Palm Springs for ( the 2006 AOPA Expo. )

Great weekend, Part 2: the Barn dance

We got home from the AOPA Expo around 10:30PM Friday, and we departed for Sacramento in the rain at 8:30 or so Saturday morning. If we'd been thinking we'd have gone straight from Palm Springs to Sacramento and slept there. Ah well - it was good to see my kitties.

What does one say about a weekend of square dance calling? "Oh man, that 'release the snake and run wild' was funny"? (That was Barry Clasper's, by the way. I love stuff like that.) The dancers seemed to have fun no matter what was happening: as Barry put it, they were entertaining themselves. Good sequence? Cheer. Broken square? Laugh about it. Caller goofed? Make teasing remarks from the floor. Since dancer fun is the whole point of the exercise, that boisterous energy made our job easy!

Working with Barry was a treat. Our styles mesh well, being neither too alike nor so different as to be jarring. It was also great to see friends, as always; I don't get around as much as I used to, so there were people I hadn't seen in quite a while. Arlene puts on a wonderfully informal dinner on Saturday night, and a big group sat around drinking wine and playing cards until late. I actually stopped at a reasonable hour, though I didn't stop at a reasonable amount of wine.

This morning my right arm aches and I haven't the foggiest idea why. Maybe I picked up the luggage wrong. Other callers have mentioned being a bit sore after holding the microphone up all weekend, but I'd be a little surprised if that's my trouble -- I was on only half-time and I've done this many times before. Ah well. Hopefully it will go away soon.

Okay ... deep breath... back to the normal routine.

MRI results: cue Twilight Zone theme

I got a copy of my MRI reports. I can read them only at the most basic level; I don't know implications. Keeping in mind that the "flexor plate" and the "plantar plate" are the same thing, here's a tiny but intriguing snippet of the right foot report (emphasis mine):

"Patient with previous plantar plate rupture of the 3rd metatarsophalangeal joint as well as a Morton's neuroma at the 3rd interspace. Examination now for follow-up. [...] Specifically the region of the flexor plate of the 3rd metatarsophalangeal joint appears unremarkable. There is no evidence of edema at this time. No obvious flexor plate injury is determined. Recommend correlation with clinical history of surgery."

In other words, it's fine, and that should have required surgical repair.

I can't wait to hear what Dr. C has to say about this tomorrow. Maybe the plate never was ruptured. Maybe it was, and is healing on its own in an unprecedented burst of self-knitting telekinesis (now if only it'd quit hurting). Maybe my problem is tendinosis instead. Maybe it's forefoot degeneration caused by an allergy to cats. Maybe it's the tiny aliens living in my joints.