Knees Are SO MUCH Better!

Today I took what I want to be my "normal" morning walk - out the door, down into the park, back up through the neighborhood, about a mile and half, with some significantly steep but short hills down and up to the park. I've been doing this off and on for years, but recently I've fallen way off. The fact that it hurts before I even start, and will hurt more once I get going, has been one of many barriers. (Other barriers include my reactive barky dog, any weather less than optimal, having to get dressed, and sheer inertia.)

But this week, I've had to head out first thing, just as the sun comes up, to do a daily vacation backfill on a citizen science project, hyper-local network of national precipitation reporting, CoCoRahs.  It's on the "normal" route, so some days this week I've kept on going to complete the loop. Today was the first pain-free day in months! 

My knees have steadily deteriorated over the past several years. I tore my meniscus and had it repaired back in 2018. But now, it's a loop. The more the knees hurt, the less I move. I went to physical therapy a year ago, after they were really bad. Symptoms included not only pain, but also restricted mobility - I simply couldn't bend them all the way. The PT really helped with both pain and mobility. I was then motivated to keep moving by active vacations, in March and April. But perhaps from overuse, the knee pain grew enough worse that it grew increasingly easy to blow off the daily walk, despite my fantastic Iceland vacation coming up. After all, I had satisfied myself with what I could do in March and April, Iceland in July would be just as good, no?

Well, no. A couple of months off from active training eroded both the quality of my knees and also my aerobic fitness. I did a whole lot on the Iceland trip, but it was hard. I didn't do as much as I wanted. There were often options for different activities and I backed off the most active ones, hiking up volcanoes for example. I spent a fair amount of time in my nice little cabin, with my feet up and knees bent, popping tylenol and rubbing stinky and persistent but effective voltaren gel into both knees. They never once didn't hurt on the trip, and haven't really stopped hurting since.

When I got back from Iceland, I signed up for a trip to Greece. More about that another time, but everything I've read suggest all the places I'll want to go will involve stairs with no handrails. Time to fix these knees!

(As an aside, I am fully bought in to the mind-body approach to pain management. I can minimize suffering I have from pain, and even reduce and even eliminate some pain, through mindful meditation and somatic practices. It has really helped me avoid catastrophizing about issues, and my back pains and even migraines are less of an issue. These practises also help avert physical symptoms manifesting in response to external or internally generated stress, something I clearly used to do a lot. These practices include breathing, visualization, and self talk approaches that really help keep things on a more even keel. 

The way I think about these practices and my knees is this: my knees have mechanical issues that send messages to the brain. I can interpret these signals as pain, or call them sensations, and I can observe them from a distance with kind curiosity. All this helps, but there is value in also trying physical and mechanical things (exercise, strengthening, pain medications) to reduce the volume and urgency of the messages being sent to my brain.)

My previous sports-medicine doctor retired, and so I found an orthopedic surgeon to consult. My basic questions were, what could be done to help the knees short of replacing them, and was I damaging them them further as I used them? I wanted another prescription for PT because while I know many exercises for the knees, I find the skilled supervision helpful. 

The doctor said no, I couldn't damage the knees with movement, was happy to give a referral for PT, and also suggested cortisone shots in each knee, which he did right then and there. The actual shots were quite painful, but it only lasted for a few minutes until a local anesthetic kicked in. Then, over the past few days, the local anesthetic wore off and the steroid gradually kicked in. 

And hooray, they seem to be having an effect! 

The doctor said, and my independent reading confirms, that the only proven interventions to actually improve the knees (as opposed to alleviate pain) are exercise and weight loss. No supplements have been shown to have more than a placebo effect. So I can do whatever I want in exercise, if done correctly it will help, but the pain will likely be there. If I can bear it, I can do it, and if I keep doing it, I can keep doing it!  As to weight loss, that is a topic for another day.

I celebrated this improvement by putting in for a place on a short overnight sail on my schooner, about a month from now. I had held off, thinking about all the ladders on the ship. But now I'm ready to go for it!

The Nordic Isles

 Herewith a recap post of my trip to the Nordic Isles. 

A settlement from 5,000 years ago in the Orkneys

I traveled with a group of good friends where I was sort of the outsider. These people have known each other well since the 1970s (where a core group of the men worked together) and they live in the same town and see each other all the time and have taken several vacations together. I know two of the people very well, also since the 1970s when we were roommates. As a result, even though I left town forty years ago, I've met all these people before, and even taken a couple of trips with some of them. Counting me, there were twelve of us.

A standing stone circle in the Orkneys

We were on a small 125-passenger ship. Much of the time this was a great advantage over being on a more typical several-thousand passenger cruise ship. We got to know most of the people and the staff. The ship went places that don't have the infrastructure to support the bigger cruise ships, and also had the flexibility to change the itinerary on the fly. For example, we spent a couple of hours one afternoon with the ship basically drifting with a pod of humpback whales, allowing us our fill of ogling these incredible creatures.

A stone broch in the Shetlands, inhabited about 3,000 years ago.
The walls are thick and there are rooms all the way up.

We did climb on buses a few times, and then it pretty much felt like any cruise I'd been on before, with 30-40 of us climbing on and off to gawk for a few minutes at something. (Though we were still in fairly remote places where few cruise ships come, and finding 3-4 buses for us exhausted the local supply.) I make a point about the experience because this whole trip was insanely expensive, and I had to continually justify the expense in my own mind. (Legacy of being raised by frugal people.)

Sheep were everywhere in the Faroes. Mostly, in the countryside,
they roam free and so houses have fenced yards to keep them out

But it was truly awesome, in the literal sense of the world! On these remote islands stuck in a harsh climate, we saw ruins of dwellings that were the age of the pyramids. We saw a wild landscape that is under threat, from climate change and development and tectonic action. In incredibly harsh conditions, we saw abundant and charming wildlife and people. I'm so glad I went!

Drizzle in the Faroes

 

We woke up every morning to an announcement with the plan for the day, and the weather, always the same: "It's a balmy 10 degrees out, and it's likely to rain!". Every day, in the fifties and with a threat of rain. You will find in my pictures, however, a number of blue   skies. It didn't rain non-stop, and there were always "bright intervals". 

Boat trip to see rocks and birds from the sea
Faroe Islands

 

A bright interval on the south coast of Iceland

The cruise was supplied with a staff of naturalists and cultural specialists, and so we didn't just see the sights, we learned about the life cycle of puffins, and how the landscape was formed. I was fascinated by the geology of Iceland, which is being literally torn in half (at the rate of about an inch a year) by the North Atlantic ridge separating the North American and European continental plates. We saw volcanoes and lava fields and cinder cones and hot springs and geysers and waterfalls.

Volcanic beach day, Iceland south coast

Once we got out of the ship, some of our group stayed in Reykjavik for a few days. With seven of us, we couldn't rent a car (and nobody wanted to drive a van) so we took a couple of small group tours out of town to see the sights. We did the "golden circle tour" and went into a lava cave. Reykjavik itself is a great little town, and we enjoyed some of its museums. Pretty much the food in Reykjavik is fish and lamb, but one of our party didn't care for those. To our pleasure, most restaurants had a vegan option that could satisfy our contrarian. 

Humpback whale, taken with iphone from ship

Charismatic puffins on the island of Grimsey

Frisbee golf at the edge of the world
(in Grimsey)

Volcanic cinder cone we hiked up,
amid a torrent of midges (see one on my face)
Near Lake Myvatn

Volcanic landscape near Lake Myvatn

Hot springs near Myvatn

One of many waterfalls

Yeah, sheep. Flatey Island

Me and my former housemate,
after a five-mile hike up the valley
Near Isafjordur

Even the cabin had views

A volcanic eruption in 1973 took out a significant part of the houses
in this town. This is the edge where the lava stopped.
These houses are backed right up to it and survived.
Heimany Island

A geysir, right by "The Geysir" that gave them all their name.
Golden Circle tour

A short hike in the national park outside Reykjavik

Entering the lava tube. Apparently, rocks around the tube harden
quickly, underground channels form, and the lava actually drains out
rather than harden in place, leaving caves like this.
Southwest coast

Remembrance of Things Past

When the rare summer sun comes out, so does everyone else!
I ate at the cafe seen on the right.

Flight over in business class was nice. Good food, plenty of space in my own little pod, could make the bed lie flat and turn on my side. Only about 90 minutes sleep, but still. Tight connection in Heathrow turned into five hours, boring but not unpleasant as plenty of places to sit and toilets and restaurants. Sadly, when I finally got to Norway I spent 90 minutes standing in line for immigration. I was never so happy to get to my hotel room and relax! 

 

This development behind me is known as “Barcode”.
 It’s very controversial architecturally, and
Even used as a punchline in the movie 
“The Worst Person in the World”
Which I watched as part of my trip prep

But I was in Norway and I had to go out. The weather was spectacular, and everyone was out. I walked for a bit, and then had fish soup and a beer at an outside cafe. I dipped my bread into the little container of a yellow substance I thought had butter, but it was mayonnaise. In a flash, I was back to being twelve years old and on my first trip to Norway with my family. On my plate next to my fish was served a heap of yellow stuff they told me was mayonnaise. I thought I hated mayonnaise, but my mother (in the voice all parents use) said “just try it”. It was fabulous - rich in a way I had never experienced. And here was the same fabulous, eggy, rich substance! So the bread got dipped in the mayo and then the fish soup and it was terrific! In a similar vein, in the 1990s my brother and I went to Provence together. I don’t remember the year, but I remember it was February. It was always sunny, but often a bit cold. We drove down to a small town on the Mediterranean coast and I ordered fish soup in an outdoor cafe along the harbor. It was served with little toasts, and a tub of something the menu said was “aioli”. I spread it on the toast, dipped it in the soup, and it was the best thing I had ever eaten in my life! The same rich, eggy, substance, but infused with garlic instead of the faint pickle-y vinegar of the Norwegian version. 

Impossible to capture, and fabulous weather!

I left Oslo the next day. I took a spectacular, five hour train trip up and over the mountains of Norway to Bergen. I was glued to the window the whole way, couldn’t tear my eyes away to read my book. Forewarned by online reviews, I stopped in the station before boarding and bought a sandwich for the trip. On impulse, driven by a tantalizing smell at the cash register, I suddenly dredged up my childish Norwegian vocabulary to order a “varme polser” for breakfast. (It’s a Norwegian hotdog-like sausage, ubiquitous.) I surprised myself, as I wished the server “tusand tak”. (Literally, thousand thanks). 

Ice cream!

Bergen also had fabulous weather when I arrived, so I had the afternoon to walk about, eat ice cream, and have incredibly good grilled fish kebabs at the outdoor fish market. So far on the this trip, I’ve pretty much only spoken to the service people. This afternoon my friends arrive and we’ll do a big dinner. My solo time is coming to an end. Tomorrow, we board the ship.

The Brygge 

We’re staying at a hotel chosen by the tour company, and it’s in the greatest location. There is a preserved old wharf along the harbor, dating to the 15th century. My mother’s family originates here in Bergen, so it’s always resonated with me. When I was very small, my mother painted a picture of this wharf, and it now hangs over my dining room table. I have many photos of family members standing here, so of course I did a selfie. But I’ll get a member of our group to take a better one, to become part of the series. 

Reading Science Fiction and Fantasy

 

I've been reading a lot. Possibly too much, but that's a post for another time. I have thoughts about science fiction and fantasy stereotypes and tropes. This post was prompted by a friend sharing an essay on similar topics, linked to here.

I discovered science fiction in eighth grade, starting in my school library with Robert Heinlein. He had a book, Podcayne of Mars,  which features a 15 (earth) year old girl. She had agency and wit, and it started me on the genre. Reading the wikipedia summary today, maybe she had a little less autonomy than I remember. I continued with SF throughout my high school years. I don't much remember any authors besides Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, though frankly Asimov wrote enough to keep any single mortal busy anyway!

I started in fantasy at about the same time, though I don't remember much except for Tolkein, and The Last Unicorn, considered one of the best all-time fantasy novels. One of the synonyms for "fantasy" novels has been "sword and sorcery". More on the sorcery aspect below.

When I was a freshman in college, I took a class in science fiction and fantasy literature. The required reading expanded my horizons significantly. That's when I read, for example, Dune. And a great deal of Kurt Vonnegut. I don't know for sure, but I strongly suspect everything on the reading list would have been written by a man. Even "James Tiptree, Jr" was not publishing novels back then, and it wasn't until much later it was known she was a woman.

I remember having an argument in that class about women's roles in this literature. My point was that if you were inventing a world, there was absolutely no reason to perpetuate the sexist roles that exist in this one. Evil sexist people and societies might exist, but clearly their sexism was only an aspect of their evilness. Not everyone agreed with me - this was 1973, after all. 

It was only later that I found Vonda McIntyre, Mercedes Lackey, and Ursula LeGuin, as the first women of sci fi and fantasy. By imagining worlds free of our constraints, they expanded my own imagination into what would be possible in our world. Dreamsnake by McIntyre blew my mind. Arrows of the Queen by Mercedes Lackey captivated me and, as it the first of a considerable series, the author held my attention for quite a while. (According to Wikipedia she has published over 140 books! No wonder I haven’t read them all.) I sought out only books written by women for a while. Now, there are also works by men like John Scalzi. He has written some books where the main character, the narrator, is actually ungendered. Through the whole book, you don't know. I was chagrined to only realize this having read a whole novel like this. Throughout the book, my notion was the narrator was a man (after all, it was written by a man). But I read a blog post about it, and realized that it was never made explicit throughout the book.

I am sad to say that my awareness of racism in speculative fiction took much longer to awaken. There was no overt racism in any of the books I liked, but also there tended to not be any characters of color. That gradually changed, and frankly Star Trek was a leader in this area. But gradually, I have grown uncomfortable with the concept of whole races of non-human beings who are just plain evil, serving in some ways as a proxy for racism. Creatures like Orcs in the Lord of the Rings, non-human characters one can kill with a clear conscience. 

I've also grown impatient with the tropes of the semi-human magical race, and of the "chosen one" who alone can save the world (or the universe), due to some inherent quality born into him (it's almost always a boy). There is sometimes a theme of people with special abilities being persecuted and exploited, when they are clearly actually superior to ordinary humans. Huh. 

I remember reading an alternate-history book that took place with a Roman Empire that lasted through the 18th/19th century. There were excellent characters struggling with colonialism and identity, and a fun political setup. But then our main hero had to go off on a quest in the desert to find her magical heritage. The book was so interesting without that unnecessary bit, and I found it obscured the more interesting themes. Who even needs sorcery?

Lately I've been indulging myself in a series of (YA) fantasy novels, the Ranger's Apprentice series by John Flanagan. One of the appealing things about this book is the (almost complete) absence of magic. There is an evil race of beings that appear in the first couple of books, but in the many books that follow, they aren't there. I think Flanagan may have realized how they didn't help his stories forward. There are definitely people who are very, very, even unnaturally, talented in certain areas, but they tend to also utilize hard work to make the most of their talents. It makes it a much more comfortable world to indulge my imagination in. I could picture myself there happily. And I think that is often the point of fantasy novels.

Lighthearted Fun

I spent my Friday night enjoying a lighthearted, fun, seemingly trivial, movie. But according to Tom and Lorenzo, it is also heavily significant, even historic.

Here is an intelligent and amusing romantic comedy, borrowing much of the story line of Pride and Prejudice.  So of course, you know how it will end. But set in idyllic Fire Island Pines, it shows a world close physically to where I grew up, one always known to me, but never before seen.

It's fun and charming. The novel setting allows for continued interest as we see how the familiar story plays out. You end with a smile on your face.

And afterwards, I listened to the fabulous and opinionated Tom & Lorenzo rave about how good, unique, and significant this seemingly trivial movie really is.

Pop Style Opinion Fest

Dear Marilyn and Claire

I finally got through what I think (hope!) is the last of the paper-filled boxes from my mother's apartment. I have had new boxes spread out on the bed in the guest room for close to a year, each labeled with family names. As I went through my mother's boxes, I sorted papers I wanted to keep, without reading them beyond the point of deciding if I was going to keep them. So I have a box labeled "Shellabargers" with items from that side of the family, one labeled "Olsens" for that side, and so on. (At some point in the future I may dive into the contents further, and perhaps digitize some of it, certainly actually read the stuff). I actually thought I was done with document boxes earlier, but as I went to clean out the guest room, I discovered one more box. 

It was a great find! Full of important documents such as death certificates, it also contained a treasure trove of correspondence. Back in the day, people wrote letters. ("The Day" seems to have died out with the turn of the century, when email became the thing, later supplanted with social media.) This particular pile of correspondence was letters sent to my parents, dating from the 1960s through to the last poignant one dated 2008. That final one was from an old friend from Bellport to my mother, writing from her assisted living facility, disclosing her early Alzheimer's diagnosis, and going on to describe her continuing serious commitment to her church, including serving every week as a lay reader, "as long as I can".

I sorted the letters by sender, without reading them, but if they were from family or significant friends that wrote a lot, I put them in the appropriate box for later. Many documents in this last box went directly into paper recycling (who needs the caterer's invoice from my sister's wedding?) but I set aside into a separate pile some handwritten correspondence from people I didn't know or only vaguely remembered. It didn't feel right to just toss these letters without looking at them first. 

So last night, I sat down and read this handful of items. Many of them were touching, and I thought to preserve some of the anecdotes or aspects about my parents they reveal. 

My father was a professor at the University of Michigan, and there were several letters from former graduate students, in the United States and abroad. I was very surprised to see sincere thank you notes from a few former students, expressing in the strongest terms their gratitude for "your very generous gift". I'm guessing from additional clues my parents assisted these folks financially, in more than just a token way. I had no idea! My parents were fortunate indeed to be in a position to do this, and it gives new resonance to the way they drilled into me that wealth is not a sign of virtue, but a fortunate happenstance that should be shared.

One especially amusing letter I read was from my mother's friend from the neighborhood in Ann Arbor. Having children the same age is one of the things that cements relationships, and this friendship withstood eventual physical separation. Ruth was still living in Ann Arbor when I went to college there, and so the letter discusses what they had seen of me ("I think she has made a great adjustment and is quite content here.") The letter has notes of her despair over her boys, pursuing arts and fun things, ignoring their engineer/physicist dad's pleas to be practical. And she notes with humor and some irritation her husband's interviewing for a presidential appointment to the Atomic Energy Commission. "He was recently interviewed in some office surrounded by pictures of the Nixon family...  Nixon's men really zeroed in on his political life... It has been strangely quiet here since Bill stated in answer to a question that he could not always support President Nixon's programs or views... Maybe their Watergate guys have figured out we voted for McGovern!" Ruth was cognizant of the honor to her husband of being considered, but was greatly relieved it didn't happen.

The church in Bellport was very important to both my parents, and I already noted the letter above from one of their close friends from there. Our family was roiled by tragedy when the minister of the church committed suicide in 1971, when my brother and I were in high school. At that age, in my mind the tragedy was all about my reaction to it. So my memories of that time are only of me and my friends. I knew my parents over time became close friends of the widow, who remained in Bellport. But I was surprised to read a long letter from the mother of the deceased minister. She lived in Paris, before and after the tragedy, but had of course gone to Bellport immediately the news of her son's suicide reached her. She was writing to my parents some months later from Paris, thanking them for their extraordinary support while she was there, and asking them to let her know if the widow and children were not coping, and if she (the mother) should return to New York. Think about the intimacy that implies, for people who had never met until brought together by tragedy!

On a related note, my parents became very close friends with the new minister and his family at the church, standing as godparents to their daughter. He went on to become a bishop in the Episcopal Church in Cincinnati, and there are a stack of letters from him and his wife to my parents. But I read some pleasant notes from another church lady friend of my parents who actually peppered her notes to my mother with some snark about that second minister, snubs and thoughtless moments. Huh. I never would have known from everyone's more public behavior.

Many of my parents' closest friends for life were from their time in graduate school at Indiana University right after World War II. It was a happening time and place for biological sciences, but it was also a time where folks in their twenties (and early thirties - after de-mobilization) were getting married, finding jobs, and having their first children, forming indelible bonds. One of their intimates was James Watson, famous as a co-discoverer of the structure of DNA (and later infamous for acknowledging having used data stolen without consent from a female researcher to make the discovery, and even more recently infamous for expressing repugnant sexist and racist ideas about the role of genetics in human society).  I grew up on anecdotes about how he was actually kind of a jerk, tossed into a lake once by his roommates at a summer institute for neglecting his personal hygiene. At the same time, my parents were careful to acknowledge their friendship and genuine liking for him. So it was interesting to read some notes exchanged between my mother and a female friend from grad school (like my mother, once a budding scientist in a world of sexism, later a wife and mother) giggling about the controversy surrounding the publication / withdrawal from publication / subsequent new publication of his book, The Double Helix. Also giggles about the 40-year-old Harvard professor Watson's contemporaneous marriage to a Radcliffe 19-old undergraduate. This woman wrote about her "very close relationship [with Watson] that most likely would have become permanent" back then except for the intervention of their major professor, "who viewed any emotional liaison of Jim's as being tantamount to his intellectual suicide". Celebrity gossip, Shellabarger style!

I regret the loss of this form of communication. Not enough to start writing letters to people, but maybe enough to consider preserving on paper some more important email notes. Those immediately following my sister's death, for example. I tried to make sure I preserved them, electronically, but I haven't looked for them for years. Yet another rainy day project.

Fat

I started this post several days ago, and abandoned it after a while. It had nothing new to say about what to do with the fact I am fat. If I don't want to be fat, I should eat less and move more. Specifically, I should have better portion control at meals, eat more vegetables, and fewer sweets, especially at night. And if I was an Intuitive Eating success story, all of the above would come naturally. But while of course I'm not happy with how I look and feel, I am not willing to make a stringent commitment to do something about it. So I'm muddling along, making changes at the margin some days, other days, not so much.

I was going to delete the partial post below, but I think the emotion expressed is true, and I want to capture it, for myself.

 

I am fat. I weigh more than I have in 25 years, and it isn't all muscle. I am fat. My clothes do not fit well. My stomach gets in the way of certain exercises or stretches. These are facts, not feelings.

I don't like the way my body looks and feels. I am ambivalent about what and how I have been eating. These are feelings, not facts.

Fuck you, intuitive eating! You have screwed up how I think and feel and act around food. Before I read the book, I would have said I only needed to modify two main things in my diet: better portion control at every meal but especially at night, and better control of night time sweets. Now, I think I'm in much more disordered eating, because IE advocates eating whatever you want whenever you want. The subtlety of IE comes in the word "want" - getting that right - but I'm not sure I'm ever going to get there. And I'm also not willing right now to go back to the more structured eating I was doing before. So I'm stuck, and not happy about it. But it's all within my control. I just want to let go and not have to be in control. Ugh.