Day 35 - 11 Harrowhouse

Today, I finally finished this book that I've been working on (on and off) for the last month. We watched a movie on Netflix sometime towards the beginning of the summer called (surprise) 11 Harrowhouse. It was so bad, I thought that it had to be based on a terrific book. There was virtually no dialogue, and the narration, which clued us in as to what was going on, was awkward and sounded as though it had been added after the movie had been made. It turns out that there are two versions of this film - you got it: one (the original) without narration, and one (the one we saw) with. HAH.

Anyway, this may be one of the only times I say this, but I think I may actually prefer the movie to the book. Don't get me wrong, the book was well written, but it was the kind of thing that sort of floofed along on this little puff of unreality and then WHAM BAM main characters that we've come to know and love in all their oddities are assassinated in each other's arms and it's over. Oops. I'm sorry. Were you thinking of reading this book? Don't worry, you'd have to ask me to borrow my copy, as it's out of print (Greg tracked it down for me). Which is to say, the difficulty of finding it outweighs the worth of reading it. I'm actually a little bit disgusted that I let myself be dragged along for so long. I did read a few other books in between, but I continued to return to 11 Harrowhouse. Today I finally sat myself down and finished it off. Bam.

Today was a pretty slow and straightforward day. Ken, my physical therapist, came by and we went through my stretches and did some strength exercises. He's funny - I have a great deal of strength in my legs, and I admit, I thought I was stronger than him. He's been letting me believe that for the last few weeks, but today we were doing 'press leg into bed' which is where you, the patient, lie flat on the bed and press your whole leg into the bed. Start at 5 times per leg, and add 5 reps every week until you're doing 15. Don't start at 15, you may hurt yourself. Anyway, the strength variation of this involved Ken holding my leg under my knee and keeping it up while I try to push it down. Normally, I get my leg to the bed with no trouble, but I think Ken was tired of letting me think I was stronger (I would have been too) and he just held my leg there. I was putting my entire weight and leg strength into getting my leg to the bed, and it wouldn't budge. I couldn't help myself: I started laughing. The whole thing was just too funny. I mean, how did I ever think I was stronger than him? Seriously, he's a physical therapist. He does this stuff all day. Plus, he has biceps.

Ken says my progress is 'excellent' and says he'll wait to hear the verdict from my appointment on Monday, but he will probably cut me loose soon. I am slowly developing his addiction to Arnold Palmer half lemonade half iced tea so that he'll have to keep visiting me. I'll write about this later when I get to talking about the weeks when I got home, but just so you can imagine him: Ken is about a half a foot taller than me and is probably in his early-mid 60s. He used to be in the navy, I think (he has an anchor tattoo on his arm, but it's old and the edges are blurred), and wears all white. His hair is white, and he has a crew cut. He hasn't mentioned anything recently, but he tells me that I have benefitted a lot from military treatment of burns, and based on his stories, I believe it. I'm also so incredibly glad that I got burned now and can take advantage of all of that knowledge, rather than 20, 30, 40 years ago. It's terrifying to hear of how burns used to be treated - from applying butter when you first burn yourself (DON'T - it actually fuels the burn. Cold water is the best initial treatment, NOT ice, as some people think.) to methods of cleaning (whirlpools, no morphine. blargh). Yikes, yikes yikes.

Okay - sunken treasure associated with the Taj Mahal just walked into the pawn shop (see Netflix - Pawn Stars)... more later!