Injury and Insult

If I write a post that is not so happy, but just as spirited, will my audience be all right? Well, here goes: a little therapeutic exposition of my recent past.
Injury: About 6 weeks ago, I was heading out to a friend's boyfriend's band's performance. They were great! Happy, happy bluegrass! Ok, back to not-so-happy.
As per my usual, I was a little late heading out to the venue, and so, as I turned left out of my building's driveway, I broke into a quick trot to make up some time. Bad move, Indy.

The sidewalk is none too even in my neighborhood and I tripped so fast over a botchy job at even-ing out the sidewalk that I was sprawled out on elbows and knees before I even knew I'd fallen. Impact fell mostly on my knees and left elbow.  These two were taken about a week after the incident, after the initial swelling went down and the bruising got all pretty. Good thing I wasn't going to a ball that month, eh?
While it was painful to hold ice to it while listening to the bluegrass all that night, I'm glad I went. I may never get to lean with my elbows on the table again, but ... well, that would be hard. But at least they still bend!

And these two were taken a day or two later, for comparison.

There you have it, my ghoulish/ proud-of-injuries side. It's a sleeper, so don't blink or you might miss it!

And no, of course I didn't see a doctor about this. I'm terrified of navigating health care waters. But I did make a baby step in the right direction by asking a coworker about help understanding it! (Go, me!)

Part II of this post is about Insult. I live in an apartment which faces out onto an alley, which affords me the occasion of hearing many sorts of human interaction, almost all of them from people passing through on their way hither and thither in this metropolis we call Washington, DC. But this summer, and now this fall, I have been plagued by two pests that set up camp and persist for a time like wasps: a neighbor, and a construction crew. Listen:

That is what I heard, of a sudden, on Wednesday, November 2nd, at 630 AM. Notice the super-strong lights necessary, because it was not yet light out when they started drilling, beeping, and jack-hammering. This went on for most of a few weeks, and it made me want to get out of my apartment as fast as I could in the morning, which is my usual quiet-time, devoid of obnoxious lunkhead neighbors who yell during the evenings (to whom I have just composed a strongly-worded letter, as they are at it again!).

But there is happy ending to this post: the city construction is done and now we have a nice red-brick alley and the convenience store on the other end of the alley has nice parking spaces (that we of course can't use). And my elbow no longer show any traces of the fall; I'm hoping eventually I'll be able to lean on tables with my elbows again.
There: now it's out of my system. I hope to post a lot this week to catch up with all the other fun activities I've been up to (and keep my promise to the Food Blogger Cookie Swap peeps, as well!), so stay tuned!

Osmotic Pressure and Metaphorical Me

"Osmosis is the movement of solvent molecules through a selectively permeable membrane into a region of higher solute concentration, aiming to equalize the solute concentrations on the two sides."

Often I speak in metaphors which may seem out of place in the current conversation. My brain likes to dig up particularly esoteric or far-fetched descriptions for me to use when I am trying to better convey a certain feeling or state of affairs. This happens frequently at work, and while I register the lack of comprehension, I'm somewhat at a loss to replace my outlandish metaphors with more down-to-earth descriptions. Heave forbid I come off prosaic.

So here is my metaphor from today. I could feel the osmotic pressure of my Within and my Without this morning- the tug and swirl of the happiness experienced through self-discovery and creative effort over the weekend (Inside), contending with the lack of challenge and inability to focus on a long-term goal of the mundane Monday (Outside).

I just sort of floated along with it, letting myself be happy with the former rather than obsess over the latter, and you know what? About 2/3 of the way through the day, my brain started engaging and firing on different pistons, enabling some more cogent contributions to be made to work conversations. Good. Keeping the mind nimble and adaptable. Although- I am thinking maybe the forever-going-around-from-hobby-to-hobby to keep my interest in and mood up is disguising something deeper... but let that go for the moment.

What has been captivating me for the past week or two? All the old hobbies, come back in glorious technicolor: runs on Sundays and yoga on Tuesdays and writing for the novel and baking for friends and cooking for myself. Plus, a new dance course! A style called sean nos, which seems less glamorous but more accessible maybe than step dancing. We'll see. Two classes and I'm already enjoying the improv parts!

And here's a fun video that shows some of the inheritors of sean nos in the Carolinas...

Now as far as the more usual theme for this blog (FOOD), I'll leave you readers with some encouragement. "If you make it, they will come" turned out to be true for me this week:

red wine chocolate cake --- afternoon tea on Saturday with Jess
grilled corn salsa (salad) --- Sunday luncheon with Kim and Juan
and tomato-shallot Tarte Tatin
lemon rosemary zucchini bread --- brown bag lunch with coworkers (I hope- that'll be tomorrow!)

So now I'm off to grate my zucchini with my only pertinent instrument- a microplane!- to make it easier to bake tomorrow morning! :-)

And let me know: do you want more Scotland or more food? I've got both at the ready...

The Peaty Bog

Here's another peek from the vacation in Scotland:

Where I Found a Bog, Or a Peat, and almost Lost my Shoe!

I had a million+one ideas about what to spend my time on, but a lot of the decisions came down to travel time. I decided against a long-and-involved train day in favor of a morning outing to Glen Affric (where the above video was taken). And against a day trip to the west coast in favor of going inland to see Stirling Castle and the Wallace Monument. I don't regret either decision.Glen Affric was my favorite part of the trip, and Stirling gave me some good history about the only castle I visited while there!
The peaty bog, as I've taken to calling it, was brilliantly colored in reds and yellows and greens and held a whole lot of moisture. At one point I strayed from the path for a different vantage point and delighted in stepping carefully to see how much water I could push out of the moss with my weight. It was pretty fantastic.

De - Tension

I had never thought of the root or origin of the word detention before this morning. It was a hated word, not worthy of being examined. It represented a feared and loathsome experience in grade school, and so I conveniently forgot it when I left high school.
But I woke up this morning thinking about my exposure to Judaism growing up. It started with the U.S. Open, which 2 people I knew were attending this weekend, who were both Jewish. Then I thought of my first memory of meeting a Jewish person (at a Catholic school in a small California town, this was an event). Then I thought of a friend in high school whose family was Jewish, and what I most remember about her, besides that we shared a penchant for wearing bell-bottoms, was that we got in trouble in Biology for dropping a piece of paper. The ensuing detention was a traumatic event for me, as a goody-two-shoes at the time.
This is usually how my thoughts work, but if you're lost already already, it's ok. My trains of thought often go off-track, and I'm lucky if I can preserve the links before I forget how I got to the end!
Anyway, I started thinking about the word detention, and liked that it sounded like 'De - tension.' I could use some of that right now!
Since I got back from Scotland, it has been a rough two weeks for me. I had to right away take the reins for a big work project from a coworker, we DC-ites had an earthquake, then I got a bad cold (from the air travel I suppose), then we had to prepare for a hurricane, which meant I had to leave on Saturday morning for a Sun-Tues work retreat (in order to make sure my flight would not be cancelled), leaving me with no weekend break, then I had to struggle to stay present with the cold and the altitude, ...
it's all been a bit much. So I am very content to have a 3-day weekend to recover.
I have been able to edit down my Scotland photos, but my first foray into online photo management was disappointing: Flickr is made by Yahoo, but not part of Yahoo, like Google and Gmail are, so there are more hoops to go through. Plus, it segments its accounts into 'free version' and 'paid version,' thus limiting the photos you can put in a 'set,' and send to people. I almost made it- 10 photos and 10 videos did not make the cut. So I'll include a couple of those here, with some explanation. :-)

This first clip was filmed at a free music concert housed in the National Museum of Scotland, located in Edinburgh. There was a pair of talented musicians in to perform some traditional and some contemporary music. Here the lad is enjoying the breakdown of a certain song- I recorded a part right between two choruses, so it may be hard to tell, but can anyone guess the tune?