Injury Report

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A friend told me the other day that he’d checked into my blog to see how my knee was coming along, and I hadn’t posted on it in a while. He inferred that the adventure was wearing thin. He inferred correctly.

Six weeks out. Early weight-bearing, first steps walking today without the crutches. Just a few small crutchless journeys. I felt as though I could have done more, but I’m trying very hard to be patient. These journeys were quite literally the first time in six weeks that those crutches have been out of arms’ reach, except perhaps for the times my friend Paul gave me a ride to work and put them in the back of his pickup. Palpable freedom.

I got the brace yesterday, beginning what I expect to be a lifelong relationship. It gave me the confidence to start the walking, though in truth I don’t really need it for that. Its main role is to protect the damaged part of the knee during strenuous exercise. Two logos in full view: U.S. Ski Team on the box and the Arthritis Society on the brace itself. Interesting conjunction of lifestyles.

Physical therapy right now involves endless series of quad contraction exercises of various sorts, a rear guard action in the losing battle against lost muscle mass. And more and more time on the bike: up on the stand with a view out the back window of trumpet vines and hummingbirds and sunflowers. (Note to self: find gardener and kiss her.) I’m finally able to starting pushing enough with my right leg to get my heart rate up, revealing a whole new level of frustration. I’ve slipped aerobically out of shape.

Work to be done. Work to be done.

The Accidental Pumpkin Patch

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A new pumpkin patch has sprouted, largely of its own accord, in our backyard.


Pumpkin patch

Last fall, I put one of the Halloween pumpkins out in the raised bed in the backyard, smashing it open with the idea that the birds would eat the seeds. They seem to have been less than interested. Then over the last few weeks, Lissa has been disassembling the planter box and using the dirt to make a new mound in the back garden. The pumpin seeds, mixed in with the new mound’s soil, have sprouted enthusiastically, on several fronts.

It’s late enough in the summer that we should be past the risk of squash bugs, which have made previous pumpkin experiments sketchy. So perhaps this fall, we can sit in the backyard in our accidental patch and await the arrival of the Great Pumpkin.

It’s Partly About the Bike

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“It feels like the end of something,” Dad said as we left my parents’ apartment this morning after the final stage of Le Tour.

I remember when this started. It was the first Saturday in July 1999, and I was home alone watching a network TV feed of the opening day time trial at Puy du Fou, and this brash kid who’d come back from cancer offered us a surprising moment of hope. I cried.

This morning I sat with the two cancer survivors closest to me as the boys lapped the Champs ?lys?es, and I didn’t much think about cancer, which is OK. It is, after all, a bike race:

Vino wins

So how ’bout that Vinokourov? Man he’s fun to watch.

Rufous Visitor

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We had a visit by a rufous hummingbird this afternoon at the trumpet vine outside the back door.

rufous hummingbird

(Image courtesy National Park Service.)

He had a lovely rust back with a bright red throat – matched the orange flowers. We may have had more of them at our feeders, but I usually see them backlit in silhouette, so I’m not sure. Big fat guy, though, as hummingbirds go. Lissa said they usually show up around this time. Sure enough, in the margin of the rufous entry in our Sibley is a notation in Lissa’s handwriting: “Our house, Aliso, 7-20-04”.

Warm Nights

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Overnight low before dawn in Albuquerque: 73.

Previous record, according to the Western Regional Climate Center: 72, set in 1925.

update, 3:40 p.m.: I wasn’t very clear. It’s a record for July 20. All-time record is 78, July 15, 2003.

Last day Albuquerque had below-average temperatures: June 14.

More from me in this morning’s paper(sub. req.):

When the monsoon is firing on all cylinders, it can bring as much as 40 percent of the annual precipitation that falls in New Mexico, with thunderstorms firing up in early July and lasting into mid-September.

But research by Higgins suggests that a late start translates to a sub-par monsoon season.

Dry summers have become a habit of late. After gangbuster monsoon seasons from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, with above-average rainfall, the last five summers have been the driest in New Mexico since the late 1930s.

As often happens, heat has been an unwelcome side effect of the lackluster monsoon season. In Albuquerque, we have not had a cooler-than-average day since June 14, and the current National Weather Service long-range forecast suggests that is not likely to change at least through early next week, despite Emily’s lingering ghost.

Overnight temperatures have been especially warm? four degrees warmer than average for July, on track to be the second-warmest average overnight temperature reading in Albuquerque history. Tuesday morning’s low of 72 tied an all-time record for warmest overnight low for July 19.