Life for me is all about systems, and injuries like my current state of affairs provide tremendous opportunities to develop new systems. For example, I am right at this very moment at Steelhead Coffee trying to develop a system whereby I can comfortably blog in this, my favorite blogging spot. Have tried several different configurations of table height, distance from table, positioning of iPad on table, with less than satisfactory results (very sad face emoji here), but think I can solve this one by raising the iPad by an inch or less. Must pack appropriately sized book in future! For now, honing left-handed typing skills!

I have also modified my “get myself to Steelhead” routine as well. Normally I would walk the 1.65 miles, but in the interest of using this period of low activity to also let my work on my gait to settle I am trying to limit my walks to half-mile segments. My routine this week will be to walk the half-mile to Wardlow Station and take the bus, reversing on return.

It has been really busy at Steelhead this morning. I had the pleasure of seeing Jenni Brandon and catching up with her. Jenni is a fellow graduate of the 200 hour teacher training at Kava Yoga. Jenni and her husband Simon were in the class prior to mine, and while I did it to further my own very new practice, Jenni is all about the teaching. I think she teaches a couple of hundred classes a week (okay, maybe a slight exaggeration) at various places around town (including Kava) as well as subscription classes at her house.

The featured image for this entry is the mural on the outside wall by Yoskay Yamamoto and associates. One afternoon last week I stopped by the Fox Coffee House and found it to be a bustle of activity that seemed to be centered around a young Asian man seated at a table writing in a notebook. On inquiry I found out that the bustlers were filming a documentary and the young man was none other than Yoskay himself! I got to meet him and see that the notebook was a sketch pad. The Fox was used as a location as it is home to another of Yamamoto’s murals.

On Friday, 9/9, I walked the mile from my house to the Surgery Center of Long Beach, checking in just before 8 am for a procedure scheduled for 9 am. Got all prepped and then spent a bit longer than I liked lying in bed waiting for Dr. Warden to finish the operation scheduled before mine which apparently went into overtime. I was finally wheeled in, administered my happy juice, and before I knew it was waking up. My mentor, former boss, and great friend Lynn Winters was there, having volunteered to shuttle me home as she has on a couple of other occasions. I didn’t have a chance to talk to the doctor as he was already working on his next job, but he did tell Lynn that my operation was rather difficult due to a pin that kept popping out. I will be seeing Dr. Warden for my first follow-up on this coming Friday and plan on getting more information then. For now, I am keeping my fingers crossed that everything worked out okay in the end and everything stays attached.

The word that I had from the doctor before the operation was that I would be spending six weeks in a brace. Right now the brace is rather cumbersome as I essentially have a splint over the surgical dressings, and I am hoping that once those dressings come off I will have something a bit less onerous. For the time being I have been being a pretty good boy, spending a lot of time on the couch watching the French Open, soccer games, and episodes of the Daily Show and Saturday Night Live that have been piling up on my VCR. I have a pretty nifty cold therapy machine that I am supposed to be using to ice the arm, but between the thickness of the splint and the bandages the cold does not really get through. Pain is manageable, and I have only taken pain medications at night. Haven’t gotten much in the way of sleep, but have been at least able to rest reasonably comfortably. I did take a short excursion yesterday, walking to the Fox Coffee House for my espresso and Albertson’s for provisions. This morning I got back into my usual Sunday morning route by taking the bus to breakfast at George’s 50’s Diner and then walking here to DRNK Coffee House. Need to keep connected with my people! In a bit I will be catching a bus back towards home for more relaxing.

Whenever I come to visit my family in the Crystal Lake area I make sure to spend some time on the Prairie Trail and its connecting Fox River Trail. The Prairie Trail extends from the south edge of McHenry county at Algonquin Road north all the way to the Wisconsin border, a distance of 26 miles, all of which I have traversed at one time or another on foot, bicycle, or both. At the county line on the south the trail connects with Kane County’s Fox River Trail which extends another 40 miles south along the Fox River to Aurora and a bit beyond, as well as the Illinois Prairie Path that extends southeast to Wheaton. I have also traversed the first 30 miles of the Fox River Trail during various excursions in the area as well as a few miles of the Illinois Prairie Path.

During the last Ice Age northeastern Illinois as far south as Shelbyville was covered by ice, and as the glaciers retreated they left behind a lot of debris in the form of gravel and crushed rock. Those deposits of rock, gravel, and sand are called moraines and those moraines, along with flatter glacial outwash plains, are a dominating feature of the landscape in this area. On Sunday I took a short hike through the heart of one of those areas. The three mile stretch that I traveled began at the southern edge of Crystal Lake at Berkshire Road and about a mile in followed an old railroad right-of-way that ran along and through an area where rock, gravel, and sand are being extracted from one of those moraines.

The second mile of this hike ran though McHenry County Forest Preserve land, and at points along the trail  you can see some of the marshes that are common in this area and piles of railroad ties left over from the railroad tracks that once utilized this right of way. I have in the past seen deer, foxes, and other wildlife along the trail, but on this hike the only significant sighting was the garter snake below who had made to unfortunate choice to bask on the bike trail. As there was quite a lot of bike traffic on this beautiful Sunday I stopped and, ignoring his best attempts to imitate a rattlesnake by shaking his tail, managed to coax him off the trail before he was run over by approaching bicyclists.

The third mile of the trail is on an easement through property that is being actively quarried, and the screenshot from Google Earth below shows the area currently being excavated. Many of the recreational lakes in this area, like the Three Oaks Recreation Area, are former quarries that have been allowed to fill with water.

There are several miles of active conveyor belts in the area, and one of them parallels the Praire Trail for about a half-mile before dumping the output of the quarries into the sorting and sifting plant that marked the endpoint of this particular excursion.

The Prairie and Fox River trails are just two of the components of a very extensive trail system that spans most of Northern Illinois. As you can see from the map below, it is currently possible to travel on existing trails from Park Forest to Moline, almost the entire breadth of the state, with the exception of the Kaskaskia-Alliance segment (about 25 miles) that is still under development (in blue on the map). I look forward to the day when one will be able to make a complete circumnavigation of the northern portion of the state entirely on the dedicated trails (shown in green on the map).

It’s a lovely morning in Crystal Lake, and I am sitting now in my favorite Starbucks. I am a bit sad, however, as normally at this time I would be taking the morning challenge yoga class at Akasha Yoga, my yoga home away from home when I am visiting Crystal Lake. My detached triceps, however, are going to put the class portion of my yoga practice on hold for a rather extended period of time. Yoga, however, is much larger than what we do in class, and since my motivation is to make my life into a yoga practice this injury provides me with an opportunity to further that aspect of my own personal practice. For example, as I sit here typing my spine is erect and with my feet up on the chair on the other side of the table I am working on my dandasana (staff pose); when I was standing in line yesterday to check my bag at the airport I was practicing my tadasana; when I am at the Fox Coffee House open mic’s I stand and practice my vrikshasana (tree pose). There are many opportunities to expand one’s practice outside of the class setting, and now I get to explore even more of them.

I flew in yesterday on Virgin America and had a very comfortable flight; I was a bit disappointed, though that acrobat extraordinaire and pilot David Floyd was not going to be in the cockpit for this flight; alas, he was flying to Boston instead. The gentleman in the seat next to me had the look of a rocker–he was toting a guitar case and had the hair–and it turned out that he was David Brighton, the lead singer in the David Bowie tribute band Space Oddity, who was flying in to do a solo gig tonight, and then on to Denver for a full band performance tomorrow.

As I was driving from O’Hare to Crystal Lake I received a text message from Edna Pestaño with a picture from my classmates from Evelyn Grauten‘s mat Pilates class at Yoga World Studio that really warmed my heart! Thanks Edna, Evelyn and the rest of the class for thinking of me!

Tonight it is a chili cookout replete with a bonfire at my sister Joyce’s house, and then tomorrow afternoon it will be off to Woodstock to celebrate the marriage of my nephew Eric to his lovely fiancée, Brianne. I will be flying back to Long Beach on Monday.

On another note in the “silver linings” vein, a couple of months ago I was reading a story in Sports Illustrated about one of the top quarterback prospects for this year’s draft, and the reporter noted that in his apartment this young man had a state of the art cold therapy system, and I was really jealous. I have found that icing helps many of the aches and pains that aging and an active life style have spawned, and my current system, which involves bags of frozen baby Lima bean, leaves a lot to be desired. When I received my pre-op instructions for my pending surgery I was delighted to see that my surgeon had prescribed a cold therapy system that will likely be covered by my insurance, and if not will be available for a deeply discounted price! A silver lining indeed!

Talking about triceps, here, and talking about mine! You may recall my little bicycle incident from last Tuesday. Well, I did finally see an orthopedist, and as I thought, there is no fracture, but it appears that I have ruptured two of my triceps tendons, and all that I have left to work with is the lateral head. That is a very precarious position to be in. I have a lot of functionality with my right arm, and I can do things like reach the top of my head, eat, bathe, etc, if I exercise proper care. There is an unstable equilibrium in this system that cuts in when the upper arm is horizontal and the lower arm is vertical. If you imagine a strong rubber band that runs from my shoulder (not in picture) and attaches to the side of that protuberance at the tip of my radius. Normally that rubber band works with its two partners to resist bending of the forearm toward the upper, but if the forearm moves any closer to the shoulder, then the rubber band slips around the side of the joint and pulls the arm, forcefully, into a fully flexed position, like a knife blade snapping shut. Hurts like hell, and bangs up the surrounding tissue quite a bit.

The current state is that we are trying to get a MRI authorized, and I have a surgery scheduled for 9/9 to reattach the other two rubber bands. I have not yet boned up on the current technology for doing so. You may have noticed a couple of features in the picture above.

First there is the feature on the inner side of the ulna. That is the button that holds my bicep tendon in place. That bicep was reattached just about four years ago, exactly–part of my four year plan to become fully bionic! In that process a hole was drilled in my ulna, the end of the tendon was retrieved from where it had retracted to in the upper arm (a rather difficult process and more than a little bit traumatic), the end of the tendon was inserted through the hole, and the tendon was attached to the button. You can get a better idea about the size and shape of that button in the picture on the left.

The second feature is the little archipelago floating in the sea of soft tissue just below the elbow joint. Dr. Warden, my orthopedist, was showing the ropes to Dr. Jablonski, who was apparently doing some kind of internship, and Dr. Warden made sure to point out that feature as highly diagnostic. Those, I believe, are little bits of bony matter that were ripped off when the rupture occurred.

So, another learning opportunity for me, and I will be sure to share what I learn with the rest of you. I do have an app that I highly recommend. It is called ‘C Anatomy‘, is a product by 3d4Medical, and is for tablet devices and smartphones. It is not free, but there is a very limited demo version for something like $4.99, and if you want the full version, and I do mean FULL, you can upgrade to that for $49.99. Considering what you get, that is a real bargain, and if you are at all interested in how your body works an outstanding investment.

No need to worry about me as I tend to take these things in stride. I’ve been here before, and this too shall pass!

It’s a Saturday morning here at Steelhead Coffee, and I have been trying to get to this for a while but keep on getting drawn into conversation with the young couple sitting to my right. They are Patrick and Isabella, both recent graduates of UCLA, and in my estimation a couple of pretty smart cookies. Patrick, whose degree is in Structural Engineering, is in his second year at an engineering firm in downtown Long Beach, and Isabella, with a degree in Psychology, is working as a Supplemental Instructor (SI) at Long. Beach City College (LBCC), a brilliant choice on her part. Her immediate objective is to get into a Nursing/Master’s program at UCLA, and in her work as an SI she has the opportunity to work as a teaching assistant for a variety of classes, all of which serve as opportunities to brush up her own skills and knowledge in those areas. SI’s must be certified in each area, and certification can be established by having earned an A in the base class or its equivalent. In Isabella’s case she is certified for Anatomy, Biochemistry, Chemistry, Math classes through calculus, Psychology, Sociology,… and many more. This is an awesome way to both earn a living and prepare for further study. Both of them are intelligent, interesting, and energetic conversationalists and I foresee great futures for them.

But enough about them! It’s time to talk about me. Let’s see…on Tuesday afternoon while riding on the bike path I ran over a skateboard at the same time that my attention was diverted. There was a young couple against the wall on the left, and some rather aggressive making out going on, and I was checking to see if the young lady was in some kind of trouble. My current hypothesis is that the young man’s skateboard got away from him and I rode right over it. The bike, being an off-road capable hybrid, fortunately had a geometry that kept me from sailing over the handle bars like I would have on my road bike, but riding over a skateboard at speed (about 17 mph) created a tremendous jolt that my unsuspecting right elbow was not set up for. The preliminary diagnosis was of a fracture of the proximal end of the radius, but that was delivered by the x-Ray tech (“…there might be a fracture…”) and subject to verification by the radiologist. Haven’t seen that report yet, but I am leaning less towards the possibility of a fracture and more towards some nasty soft tissue problems. I have taken off the sling and the arm has good mobility and the hands mostly work fine. Functionality is strongly dependent on arm angle. With my arm at my side I can get pretty much full flexion and extension, but with the arm at or above shoulder level all bets are off, and bad things happen.

I have an appointment with an orthopedist on Monday, and my suspicion is that this is just a cheap ploy by my body to get some more of that Physical Therapy that it likes so much! Can’t get enough of it!

I went out last night to the Cinema Bar in Culver City to see my friend, Bruce Ray White, do a set with his Random Band. The band yesterday consisted of regular and fabulous guitarist Tom Gramlich on acoustic guitar and newcomer Geoff Rakeness on standup bass. The Cinema Bar (aka, “The World’s Smallest Honky-Tonk”) is a very cool little (and I do mean little) bar on Sepulveda between Venice and Washington. It was actually duplicated entirely for one of the sets used in the short-lived but awesomely good series “Luck” that was on HBO a few years back. Having spent many hours in many towns trying to find good venues for music I know how important they are, and I believe that you can find good music at the Cinema pretty much every night of the week.

Speaking of good music, Bruce and the boys really brought it last night. The sound was  great, crisp and clear, and also well maintained. That was a change, as it seems to me that in the past the musicians took care of the sound themselves, with varying degrees of success, but it looked last night that there was actually a sound man running the show, and the results were awesome! I have the utmost respect for a good sound man, as can be seen in my earlier post on the subject! Any serious venue needs one, and if the Cinema has added one, then that is a big plus!

The band was super tight and all acoustic, and I really liked the sound of this incarnation. Tom really got to showcase his acoustic chops, and Bruce (aka, “The Rhythm King”) kept the joint jumping. This was the first opportunity to hear Geoff on bass, and he too was awesome. Bruce is a very sociable guy, and he knows a lot of very talented musicians, so his gigs seem to connect a lot of very cool people. There are  generally multiple bands each night at the Cinema, so the changing turnover of the band fans, together with the ebb and flow of the local hipster crowd, along with the hardcore regulars makes the Cinema Bar a great  place to hang out around Bruce’s gigs.

Speaking of very cool people, Bruce is one. I have known him since we were housemates up on Mulholland in the early 90’s, and at that time Bruce was just starting to learn the guitar. He is an amazingly talented individual who has mastered pretty much anything he has set his mind to. When I first met him he was the master of the local Cajun dancing scene and there were never any empty slots on his dance card. Somewhere along the way he had also mastered pottery and had some of it exhibited. His current love affair is with guitar building as you can see in Scott Brause‘s profile of Bruce on his blog. I myself am the proud owner of either number 8 or 9 in the “Bruce Ray White” collection, a guitar that Bruce built from a kit for a Martin HD-28 that I had purchased for $400. If you are interested in having a guitar built for you, Bruce is your man! He also makes a wicked paella, and even provides his own pot–his motto is “Have Paella Pan Will Travel”.

The one area where Bruce has been less than stellar in his performance is in the “Working for a Living” arena. Rather than being something sensible, like a music promoter, a road manager for a band, or a master craftsman, Bruce has for most of his working career worked in the billing departments of law firms, a setting that is guaranteed to result in high levels of stress. He has since left that realm and is now selling the services of a company that for a fee will prepare and submit the paperwork required to take advantage of a Federal program to reduce student loan debt. If you are drowning in such debt, give Bruce a call at 310-289-2129 and he will set you up!

You may notice in my picture above that I am sporting a new accessory. No, it’s not the hat–that has been around for a while! It is a splint on my right arm. Yesterday while riding home on my bike along the LA River bike trail between Anaheim and PCH something happened. Details are bit fuzzy. There was a young couple on the left side against the wall and I was watching them when I hit something. There was an impact and my right arm went dead. That caused me to lose control of the bike. Luckily I was able to bleed enough speed so that when I did go down I only suffered an abrasion on my knee. My hypothesis about what happened is that the young man had a skateboard that had found its way onto the path (he was pretty preoccupied with the young lady) and I hit the end of it which catapulted it into the air where it whacked my elbow and caused me to lose the use of that arm. That’s my story and I am sticking to it!

My elbow–ouch!

Many thanks to Edna Pestano, who was kind enough to come and pick up myself and my bike and ferry me to the urgent care facility. They took an x-Ray which seems to show a small fracture to my radius, patched me up and splinted my arm. Haven’t yet seen an orthopedist for the final verdict, but looks like I am going to have yet another opportunity absorb yet another injury. Next steps: deal with it and move on! The good news is that on my walk to Steelhead Coffee this morning my right leg and right foot, the site of much angst over the past several months as I reworked my gait, were performing quite well, which is a great development since I am likely going to be doing mostly walking as my exercise for a while!

Yesterday otherwise was a great day. In the morning at Steelhead I was sitting next to two men who seemed to be conversing about some kind of athletic training, and then they were joined by a lovely young lady who had a bag of goodies (mostly Bluetooth devices like headphones, etc.) that she was giving to the younger of the two men. It turns out that the younger fellow is a slope-style skier named Noah Wallace (@noah_wallace on IG), the other fellow was his agent, and the young lady a representative of a corporation that is providing him with sponsorship.

After that it was off to LA Fitness with another great yoga class with JR Johnson, followed by some light weight work and my treadmill and elliptical work for my gait. Then it was down to the beach at Belmont Shore on my bike. I have been hanging out there at 2nd and Bay Shore watching the swimmers come and go, and trying to summon the gumption to add swimming to my training regimen. I was getting pretty close, but it looks like that may need to be put off for a few weeks at least.

On the way back I saw that play for the Asics World Series of Beach Volleyball event had begun, so I stopped off there and saw a couple of matches in the qualifying rounds. Early in the tournament is a great time to go there. Not many spectators there, a chance to rub elbows with the top beach volleyball players in the world, and an opportunity to see the sport from very close up. On the women’s side, Kerri Walsh Jennings and April Ross will be playing, along with Larissa and Talita, the Brazilian pair who lost to Jennings/Ross in the Bronze medal match. Also present are the top-seeded Dahlhouser and Lucena men’s team, who will be challenged by the top-ranked men’s team from Latvia. I plan to take in some of the action today, and will be heading down there shortly.

Update from the future: August 23, 2018

It turned out not to be a fracture, but a rupture of two of the three heads of my triceps. The young man’s skateboard had rolled across the bike path, and I rode right over it without any knowledge it was there. The resulting jolt was sufficient to cause my triceps to pull a bit of bone from my elbow. I had surgery 11 days later to reattach them, was in a rigid splint for 3 months, and am still, two years later, not quite up to speed on that arm.

It’s Sunday morning at DRNK, and things are starting to look up a bit. I may have mentioned in an earlier post that I have been feeling a bit frustrated with my lack of progress since returning from my cross-country journey. Last weekend was particularly trying. I took an ambitious hike that Friday (8.2 miles with a trip over the Hollywood Hills) and my feet were not happy with me. Last Saturday’s ballet class at Elevation Studios was a bit of a disaster as my right ankle did not want to work at all, and during the week I had to cut back on my walking and get back into doing the therapeutic work that had served me well in the past.

This weekend I decided to try a bit more of a cautious approach, with a hike that was still 7.2 miles but with a bit less (400 feet) of elevation gain, and my feet made it through with flying colors. Yesterday in ballet class I was not only able to handle the barre portion with aplomb, but was even able to function well in the across the floor portions. I was even able to do jumps, something that my knees have not allowed for the past eight months, and which made my teacher, Carri Burbank, very happy! Next on the agenda is yoga with Ramona at Yoga World Studios at 11.