Rolling and Falling through Life

It wasn’t even a week ago that I woke up sore all over. There had been a full week of core strengthening that left me sore to the core. It was the kind of sore you get when you lift weights after a long hiatus. Today I woke up sore again but this sore was different, achy. As I tossed and turned all night I couldn’t for the life of me think which day was a rest day this week but decided no matter what the calendar said, it was going to be today.

My neck hurt. I mean it really hurt. And my shoulder hurt so bad I couldn’t use my arm. Before my coffee was gone, I had booked an appointment for a massage. But life goes on even for the wounded.

After breakfast I cut the grass. My lawn mower doesn’t work on gas or electricity, which is ok by me. Sticks and small rocks get caught in the blade but it doesn’t bother me…usually. Today it was torture to bend over and throw them up the hill. And every time I threw one, Mr. Boggs would climb up and bring it back down.

My sister-in-law is coming to stay with us for a few days so my next stop was the little guest house. We haven’t had company for a couple of months so I decided to put on fresh linens. Mr. Boggs followed me to the door but he had wet feet so I told him to wait outside.

The old screen door doesn’t latch properly and being the smart little booger that he is, he wiggled it until he got in and swaggered right into the bedroom. He set his chin down on the edge of the bed just as I was smoothing out the clean top sheet.

We’re beginning to think his mom had a little fling with a Saint Bernard and he left the typical muddy drool on my clean sheet. I started over with the bed.

By the time I got to the massage table, I could have stayed there forever. There is nothing like a good massage to identify the evil that lurks just beneath the surface. I had so many knots, it took half the hour to get past my shoulder-blade.

I’m not sure of the culprit of my agony this week, but I have an idea.

We practiced our falls and rolls again in Kung Fu on Tuesday night. Sifu suggested we move right into the diving roll and he demonstrated by having three of us kneel in front of the mat. He dove over us landing in a perfect roll that brought him to his feet in a perfect fighting stance. Ugh.

I did ok on my right side but got a bit of a mental block when we switched to the left. The most trouble we had, however, was with the fall. We all wanted to land on our hip and then our shoulders. The proper way to fall is with the weight evenly distributed between the two so your entire side takes the weight of the fall.

We joked that we would go home and practice our falls into bed but by the time I got to bed there was no way I was flinging my body onto anything else.

I’m sure like everything else, I’ll get the hang of rolling and falling. But for the rest of this week, I’m going to just run.