Recovering

Slept well last night but when I took Farley out for his walk my toe really started speaking to me. In fact, it hurt a lot with every other step I took and my ankle began hurting from the contortions it was making as I tried to find a less painful way to walk. Coming back to the house after a half mile of limping around the neighborhood I wasn't feeling too optimistic about the injury I got at yesterday's duathlon.

But that was the worst it would get! As the day wore on the foot got less and less painful and I was almost walking normally. Sure, the toe was still quite colorful and that corner of my foot around the four outer toes was swollen but the pain was minimal. Jonnene had said that it might be a soft tissue injury and I'm beginning to think she may be right. I can deal with that. I really didn't want a broken bone to hash about with. Tonight I finally got around to dunking my foot into a pail of ice water to reduce the swelling. It's something I don't have to do often and I'm glad, because you really have to keep your mind focused on other things during the ten minutes you have a foot in freezing water. I did this twice! Yeah, I soon felt like my foot was on fire but I kept sitting there watching TV and concentrating on the motorcycles being fabricated on "American Chopper". I don't see how most athletes do this on a regular basis...putting body parts in ice water, that is.

I'm down to removing the tough pieces of wallpaper in the guest bathroom and it's a little tedious. Tomorrow I'll cut and remove a louvered divider between the toilet and the vanity. That'll be fun and messy...hope I can get any collateral damage repaired after that! The redo of this bathroom is more cosmetic than structural and I can do 90% or so of all that. But we'll need someone to come in and "slip" the now bare sheet-rock walls so that they'll be ready for paint and protected from the moist air when anyone takes a hot shower in there. Then I'll add some wainscot paneling along the lower part of the walls and a chair rail above that and it'll look pretty good, I think. A relatively easy and quick room improvement in the house.

We should be getting our front windows replaced starting Wednesday but the week is looking like rain will be a factor with Wednesday being the best day. So we might get the two windows under the porch replaced first and maybe wait for a better day to do the other two that are not under the porch. I like it when things are happening here at the homestead.

I've come up with a unique...well, I hope so...way to finally have a house warming party here in a couple of months. I'm thinking of an Aussie movie festival where we'll show Australian movies at scheduled times and have about 30 minutes between movies to let everyone roam about the house. Maybe start at noon on a Saturday and end around midnight. We'd show movies like The Dish, The Man From Snowy River, Australia, Mad Max, Babe, Ned Kelly, Crocodile Dundee, and whatever else we can find. This could be fun!