Odds & Ends: October 22, 2022

 


Here is today's Batavia Depot Pond picture. It's a gorgeous fall day here in Illinois. When I took this picture it was about 55 degrees. As I write this on my back porch, it's 79! We'll have temperatures in the 70s through Monday. Then it will turn cooler, but mid-50s is hardly anything to complain about. 

Writing Contest

A friend of mine, Cathy Kern, and I have entered as a team in a writing contest. The contest will give us a genre, action and word and we have 24 hours to write a 250 word (or less) story with those three elements. The first round of the contest kicks off November 18, so we have a bit less than a month to practice. The first two prompts we gave each other went well. (Cathy lives in New Zealand, so we're doing this via email and Skype with a pretty hefty time zone difference.) Then one of us thought we should tackle the "comedy" genre. Cathy got a couple done, but my productivity screeched to a halt. I stare at the legal pad, or the computer screen, and I have nothing, nada, zip. I'm overwhelmed with the idea that I have to write something funny; so far I have written nothing at all. I know I have to get past this, and I will. 

Sciatica

For years I went to a yoga class every Wednesday. I went because I got a cramp in my calf walking to my mailbox. My mailbox! I decided stretching might be a good idea and signed up for yoga. It worked. My flexibility greatly improved and I met some nice people that I still run into and chat with. When I developed some knee problems, I blamed yoga and stopped. My knees are better now, and I'm not sure yoga had anything to do with the problems, but I never went back. This summer I "got" sciatica. It's a nasty pain from your hamstrings all the way to your foot, on one side of your body (mine was left). It hurt so much! It hurt to sit; it hurt to get back up. I did the stretches I saw on the Mayo clinic website that turned out to be mostly the same poses we did in my yoga class and 12 weeks later my sciatica went away. I still do the stretches, darn near every night. I encourage all of you to stay flexible somehow - you want to avoid sciatica if you can, it is no fun at all. 

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