Thoughtful sort of evening, after a day of hectically trying to get this contract work done. It did get done, and of course they're going nuts with being understaffed, so there's more work to do. It has some trained-monkey elements to it, but except for aikido it's not like I had other plans. True to form, after a day of work I didn't want to do anything but come home and vegetate. Balancing work and aikido should be interesting.
Speaking of which, I'm still really low-energy these days, and I'm not sure why. Partly I feel like it's my injuries: my shoulder (eleven days ago) and knee (four days ago) both still hurt, and I get really physically and psychologically affected by injuries that take a little while to heal. I think soon I'll be able to start rehabilitating my shoulder by strengthening it with those surgical-tubing stretchy-things, which will help, as it feels weak right now. If I keep working I'll probably try acupuncture. I feel like my ukemi (the art of falling/receiving techniques) needs some help...right now it's almost as if I'm afraid of getting more hurt, so I hold back in ways that make getting hurt more likely.
Strange how applicable metaphors show up when you're least expecting them.
It could be there's also some nutrients I'm missing; I've been bad about taking my vitamins and eating my vegetables. My body is still settling into the movements and extensions of aikido and exercising in general...knees feel like they might buckle, patellar tendons hurt, joints cracking more than usual, ankles sore, yadda yadda yadda. But I think the primary things going on are not enough sleep, and I've started to be a little lonely in the past week. Not so much for lack of social contact, but for lack of affectionate cuddling and kissing, which more specifically amounts to missing my girlfriend, I think. And I'm not quite up to finding other cuddling and kissing. But these things will all take care of themselves in the right way.
Pretty big winds tonight, while there's been fairly unusual earthquake activity in the East Bay on the other side of the hills from my house. Whenever I've looked at that map in the past, the overwhelming majority of quakes have been up in Healdsburg and The Geysers (sorry, I've been unable to figure out where The Geysers is, exactly--feel free to email latitude/longitude coordinates or road directions or something if you know where it is), so to have such a persistent concentration around San Ramon, and now into San Jose, seems ominous to me. These could just be releasing some seismic stress, but they're along the Calaveras Fault, and not the Hayward Fault, which (a) has been judged to have a 40% chance of a 6.0 or greater quake in the next 20-30 years (I think I got the numbers right), and (b) runs more or less underneath my house. So make of it what you will.