Life in the Easy Chair

I worked too hard yesterday. I pulled and jerked on palm roots and shrub roots. I knew better. Today I have a massive kink in my spine somewhere below where the ulnar nerve connects to the spine....the sight of my original injury. Now, I am confined to holding my head a certain way and sitting upright. Sucks, I had big plans to pull out more junky contractor's bushes today and move pavers to the edges of the new fern bed and dump the excessively large pots of dirt into the fern bed. Well, that will have to be on hold. I guess the nice thing is that as long as my battery holds up, I can do some more planning and work on my computer generated landscape plans. I have managed to find a way to prop the laptop up so that I can use it with minimal use aside from typing.

Sometimes injury gives you time for reflection. Funny, while I was pulling up all the grass in the new fern bed yesterday evening, I was thinking to myself how joyful and thankful I was that I could be out there in the heat on my hands and knees, sweating and working--that I had the health to do it. And that I had overcome my blues and feelings of worthlessness to get off my butt and do things that I knew I'd want to do when I go back to work, but will (when returning to work) complain that I never have the time for.

You see, right now, I have the best of both worlds (don't know which worlds I'm talking about)...I can exercise, play with the puppy, train the puppy, study (hard to do), blog, clean my house of the 10 years of grime I have found on the windows and blinds, restructure the flower beds, organize the household, cook dinner most every day, look for my dream job, make photo albums for family for Christmas...all the Martha Stewart stuff you all make fun of me for.

Then I got to looking back (while pulling the grass up) on what I'd done since I've been laid off:
1. Unpacked the rest of the boxes from the move
2. Decorated the back porch with plants and lights
3. More organized the "stuff" we hold on to in the house
4. Reclaimed and maintained the landscaped beds from weeds and ants and SNAKES!!
5. Refinished 6 dining room chairs
6. Finished 4 barstools
7. Convinced Brian to set up the weight room in the dining room
8. Painted the very large entertainment center in our living room
9. Cleaned out the "junk" room and turned it into a bedroom (now we officially have 3 bedrooms and 1 office)
10. Learned to care for and maintained a beautiful pool
11. Back to exercising
12. Learned to blog
13. Applied to graduate school again!
14. Purged our home of all the stuff we held onto that we no longer needed
15. Trained the new puppy without going to school
16. Created a home inventory
17. Created some new flower beds (2 in process)
18. Planned new landscaping for the spring
19. Decorated the whole house the way I want it (less wall art and the master bedroom)

Might not seem like a lot, and I could have done it all in less time that what I have, but I've also spent a lot of time catching up on lost sleep from travelling and moving, and a lot of time mindlessly watching TV and chatting on the phone to those who I can make answer the phone.

Life in the Easy Chair is hard when you're chomping at the bit to work on your to-do list. However, seeing all this makes me not feel too bad for sitting in the easy chair. Besides, I can sit here and expand the to-do list, another habit I'm known for.