The "Old Man" Leaves the House

I left the house today, for the first time since I came home from surgery, to go teach at the college. This was also, obviously, my first time to go out in public while using the walker, and I was expecting the "old man" jokes to be flying.

But oddly enough, that was not the most common crack that people made. What was? "You need tennis balls on that thing!" Obviously everyone's seen that commercial on TV (whose sponsor is escaping me at the moment) with the old man who gets a baseball thrown at him by a much younger guy, after taunting him repeatedly to do so.

My parents even made note of the tennis balls when they were here, but the truth is, mine doesn't need any; it has wheels instead. That means I can roll it from place to place instead of having to pick up the front end and move it to the next "step." The tennis balls are there to keep the non-wheeled ones from having such rough landings when they hit the ground all the time.

So I have one more trip to the college and (hopefully) half a trip to the doctor (I may get my knee "unlocked" a bit at that visit) where I have to not only bum rides off friends but also spread out across their back seats to do so. So far, this phase of the recovery is going well, though, and I'm looking forward to continued progress.

Pacing myself: OK, I said on Sunday that I'd be blogging on a regular basis, and I really will, but please be patient with me. Even though I'm able to teach during the day, I've found that, when it gets to the evening times when I'd usually be blogging, I'm just dog-tired. I suppose that's normal for someone who just had surgery not quite seven days ago, so I'm not going to fight it. If my body says "go to bed," I'm going to listen to it for now. Perhaps I'll finish Monday's post during one of tomorrow's breaks.

Blowing out some candles: Happy birthday to my friend David F., as well as to Josh and Juli, two people born on the same day in the same year and who played in the same band at my college for a while....but who otherwise couldn't be more different.