Labor Day
I took a nap last night after Daisy got up and went to work; because of the holiday, she was working strange hours (only until midnight, and then she goes back in tonight at midnight, or something like that). I've still been recovering from my time in overdrive, so I've been trying to sleep as much as I can, since I need to. I may have a shorter week than usual, but by Thursday afternoon I'll still be tired and burnt-out again, if possibly to a slightly lesser degree than normal.
It has taken me the entire weekend to recover, I suppose, from being in overdrive for so long. I've not been particularly active -- I've had no real energy to be active, really -- and most of my free time has been spent decompressing and resting. I also think I may be getting slightly sick with a cold or something along those lines, though it could be my allergies and fatigue working in tandem.
My overall point is that when I woke up last night from my nap, the muscle pain was back.
"Babe. This really worries me," Daisy told me. "Take an asprin, at the least. And check your pulse."
"Honey, it's not a heart thing," I said. "Seriously. It's about how I sleep, with how I stretch out my arms and chest muscles because they're the only comfortable sleeping positions. It's muscular, not internal. I've somehow hyperextended a muscle or a tendon in there somewhere, as it's mainly in my upper left back and ribs/torso area, not in my organs or bones or anything like that."
To the best of my knowledge, this is true. It didn't/doesn't feel internal, and it's largely based on how I sleep. In order to sleep comfortably, I sleep in one of two positions a good 95% of the time -- and it's always at an angle, because I'm a big guy. Imagine it as a typographic slash, and this diagram I created should help:
It's really hard to explain, honestly, but try to picture it. I sleep at a constant angle because of my gut and because it's the only comfortable position for my back -- so a pillow (usually a thick one) is stuffed under my chest to balance out my body shape/provide support, and I stuff a smaller one between my neck and shoulder to give me head/neck support. This means that my armpit is parallel with, and on, the surface of the bed, and my arm is stretched out and up over my head, around the top/back of both pillows. My legs generally splay out. So, if you're picturing this correctly, you should be able to understand exactly how easy it is for me to hyper-extend and/or pull my arm/chest/shoulder muscles when I have to sleep this way in order to be comfortable most of the time. I usually sleep facing the wall, which means I'm laying on my left side -- the side of my body where I've pulled this muscle or muscle group.
After sleeping Friday night, I was fine on Saturday. It still ached a bit on Saturday morning, but went away. I figured that if I'd pulled or hyper-extended something, it went away or righted itself in my sleep, and the remaining soreness was simply from the light trauma in the first place.
Well, when I took my nap last night, it all came back -- the muscle aching and pain woke me up prematurely from said nap, and no position or movement stopped the ache until I physically got up. When I got up, it was as bad as it was on Friday morning (though, thankfully, the pain did not reach the levels that it did on Friday night). And, to make matters worse, the spasms had returned. Daisy, while on Skype with me after work, was able to see me physically twitch momentarily and suck in a quick breath every time I spasmed, which interrupted my speech. As it also happened when I breathed deeply -- meaning my chest muscles were part of it as well -- this was not fun when my continuing allergies/smoking made me cough. Don't even get me started on what happens when I sneeze. Fucking pollen.
I'm physically fine otherwise; I'm not achy anywhere else, and my allergies/allergy symptoms are at their normal levels for this time of year. I'm not lethargic or groggy, and all of my bodily processes seem to be functioning normally. This leads me to believe, through deductive reasoning, that I am not dying. Though, I will say that my bowels don't seem to be particularly happy with me after eating a lot of soy-based products when Daisy was here.
I told Daisy that I'd probably feel better after a nice, long shower, but that isn't a theory I've been able to test yet. Instead of taking a shower, I went to Walmart -- driving is a little tougher when your muscles hurt like hell -- to get the stuff I needed, came home and made a sandwich (since I hadn't eaten all day yesterday) and went to bed after talking to her. I'd exhausted myself to the point of sleep, finally, around 3AM. When I slept, I tried to sleep in different positions so that I wouldn't further injure myself, and woke up this morning with residual aching, but no real pain or spasming.
The trip to Walmart was uneventful, but expensive overall because I had to get stuff for the car (coolant and bug wash), water filters, and my cigarettes. The only other stuff I got was a few essentials -- ham and cheese, a loaf of bread, etc. Everything else I need I already have in the house. Again, I don't require much. I shouldn't have to do any shopping again until at least next weekend, if not longer.
I really think I'm just getting old more than anything else. It's difficult for me to keep up at a strenuous pace anymore (such as when I'm in overdrive) when it never used to be. It's difficult for me to pull an all-nighter and then drive to campus, teach, and come home before sleeping, when even a year or two ago it wasn't, and in undergrad, days like that were the norm for me (minus the teaching part, of course). It's exhausting for me to get up early and go to campus to teach four days a week now, when previously as a grad student I sometimes spent four much longer days on campus every week, including time spent teaching, and didn't get to come home at noon or earlier. It's not that I'm out of shape, though I am a little more than I'd like to be, but it's me getting old. My joints ache a lot now. It's hard for me to get any real restful sleep, but most of the time I can fall asleep at the drop of a hat when I don't want to or need to (it's only when I must sleep that my body won't let me). I creak and crack whenever I move around too much or when I'm too physically active for too long of a time, and even simple household chores like mowing the grass will wear me out for the rest of the day. Sure, a fair amount of this could be attributed to allergies or my smoking habit or both...but I've always had those. And it doesn't account for why my muscles decide to suddenly pull themselves in my sleep, the same sort of sleep I've always slept every night for many years.
I think it's ironic that today is Labor Day, and I've done little else but actual labor. Since waking up (around 11; I let myself rest) I have worked on my car, done two loads of laundry, debated on cutting the grass but decided not to since it's 86 outside right now (I'll do it in a few more days if/when it cools down some), have rewritten a lesson plan for my students, and I'm about to clean the cat box/room, take care of the trash for morning pickup, get a shower, and then probably -- if I still have energy left -- eat something. And then I have to read through my texts and create my lessons for the rest of this week for my students.
As an aside, I don't know how grass can grow six inches or more in ten days when we haven't gotten a drop of rain, and for five of those days it's been over 100 degrees. Shouldn't it be turning brown and dying? I'm all for having green grass in the yard, but when it grows like crazy even when there's no rain, it just creates more work for me, and more time I have to be outside sweating through every single pore in my poor aging body.
The working on the car I mentioned above was little more than checking and refilling fluids. My "low coolant" light has been on, constantly, even though I poured the last of the coolant I had before (1/3 of a bottle or so) into it about two weeks ago. This is probably because it's been so hot as of late, and when I drive the car when it's hot outside, it tends to use more coolant. I bought more last night, as mentioned, and refilled the reservoir (which wasn't, by the way, low at all) to a higher level in hopes that the light will go off, and in this heat it will help as I drive the car 200 miles a week. I also needed to refill my windshield washer fluid, which I was running quite low on in the car and had used the last of almost a year ago, so I bought that last night and refilled it as well. I checked the oil and put about another half-quart into it, not because it necessarily needed it, but because I had a bottle already opened, and if I already had the hood up to work on the other stuff, there's no reason I couldn't use the rest of it to save me time in another few weeks or so. I also looked at the belts and other connections under the hood to make sure they looked okay (they do), cleaned the inside of my windshield with the glass cleaner wipes I purchased when I last washed the car a few weeks ago, and cleaned off the license plate so that I could put my new registration sticker on it, which I did. As you may know, I try to perform these maintenance check-ups about once or twice a month, a little less in the winter, as the car is old and needs constant care like this more than I'd like to admit. I learned my lesson a year ago when I had to put $1400 into repairs in order to keep it running, and don't want to have to do that again anytime soon. I'll probably need two new front tires by the spring, though, depending on how bad this winter gets. The wheel bearing, of course, is still growly, but no more than it ever was. If it goes out, I'll have to get it fixed. All that's left, though, is to get gas tomorrow morning on my way to West campus. I could probably wait until Wednesday morning, but I don't like running down the gas any further than I have to, and I'm off my normal driving schedule due to taking Daisy's car down there on Thursday and having today off.
My week should be relatively light after today; I'll do more work today just doing stuff around the house than I'll do at school the rest of the week combined. I should be out of the house tomorrow and Thursday for a whopping three hours (at most) each day, and on Wednesday the biggest thing I have to do aside from teach my 011 class is fill out the background check form in the department on main campus and make some copies. In there sometime, whether I do it one day after I get home from classes or if I wait until Friday when I'm off, I'll have to mow the grass (as mentioned above), and pay a few small bills as I cross my fingers on getting that background check form processed super-quickly.
It just occurred to me that they've probably already processed all of my payroll stuff but, like the financial aid office does for student loans, they are waiting to let it drop until that form comes in and they can keep it on file. After all, it's not like any of my info has changed; it's all in the system from three years of previous employment there, and I've not changed my address, bank account, or anything like that. Oh well. I'll see what I have to do when I get in there on Wednesday.
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