Watch your step

Consider this a homage to The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. You can find it over on the sidebar to the right. I'm too lazy to link today.

I'm not, however, too lazy to find it amusing that the French warning apparently didn't need unnecessary quotation marks. Make your own joke there.

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Since we're already watching our step, so to speak, let's talk about limping... mostly since I don't really have much else on my mind just at the moment. You know how it goes. My blog, my rules.

Unless the Toronto office overrules me, I guess.

Anyway. Limping. I do. Limp, that is. Sometimes it's only a subtle limp, sometimes it's extremely obvious, but it's always there. It stems from a track and field accident back in junior high that my two fans have already heard about (ad nauseum) so I won't bother giving the gory details again. We'll just say that a person's left ankle apparently isn't supposed to go in that particular direction (and especially not that emphatically), and I've been paying for it ever since.

Limping, for those who've never tried it on a full-time basis, isn't a lot of fun. It's not a natural movement for the body, and the body has a tendency to let you know it. Your joints complain, your muscles ache, and things just generally feel out of line if you've spent the day on your feet.

And that's not even touching how loudly the offending joint itself complains.





Anyone wondering why limping is on my mind this morning?

You should be. It'd be polite to, after all.

The fact is that I've officially entered my aching-and-limping season. It happens every spring. The ankle starts to scream bloody murder on a massively annoying scale, and I start approximating Quasimodo in my gait.

Er... without the hunchback, though. I'll give myself that much.

For years I couldn't figure out why spring should be so bad on the limp front, but the answer was stupidly simple (as they often are). Spring is shoe-changing season. Throughout the winter -- and often most of autumn as well -- I'm in boots. Good boots generally have fairly firm support, which means my leg doesn't have to work so hard to support the wonky ankle. Spring, though, means shoes.

And shoes, in the world of ankles, are evil.

I wear decent shoes (not much choice there) but even the best shoe won't have as much support as a good boot. Combine that with muscles that have got a bit lazy since the boots were doing the support work, and you get a very pleasant level of walking pain until everything finally sorts itself out again.

Oh, I should make clear that when I say a very pleasant level of walking pain you should be mentally adding the phrase if you're into that sort of thing.

I, however, am not.

Maybe I should try to be?

After all, if I attempted to put some sort of masochistic spin on the whole thing I could possibly start looking forward to the start of limping season instead of dreading it, right?






Nah. That'd be silly. Besides, it'd be far easier just to remind myself to wear my stupid brace.

I hate braces.

But I suppose that qualifies as another topic. Good clue to stop typing and change laundry loads, then.

Ok.

Off I limp...

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One more thing:

This.

No reason.