Messy Monday – Painted Skulls and a Broken Nose

I had an epic fail on Friday.

Pixie and I were jogging on a local trail, anways behind Princess’ cross country team. The trail in question is steep, with lots of big tree roots crossing it, along with the occasional heavy wooden beam to shore up the steeper parts. Pixie was jogging with the coach’s dog, while I jogged along behind her with Gibbie. I was doing pretty good, jogging faster than I have in a while. I was feeling pretty good.

Then I caught my foot on a tree root and slammed face first into the ground.

The good news is that I did not plant my face into a wooden beam. I hit that with my ribs, instead. The bad news is that I hit the ground HARD, and I knew that as soon as I hit, I had broken my nose.

Apparently, my crash landing was so tremendous it scared the young lady running ahead of me. After checking to see if I was okay (I was laughing as I sat up, despite my smashed nose), she ran off to get Pixie and the team coach. I told the coach I was fine and sent her off to keep track of the girls still running. Pixie stayed with me. According to her, I walked over to a nearby bench, sat down, then tumbled over ass-over-tea-kettle as Inpassed out. I don’t remember doing that, but I do remember having a very brief, pleasant dream that ended with me waking up staring at the grass and Pixie asking me if I was okay.

“Uh, yeah. I’m fine. But why is the world sideways?”

I was able to pull myself together after a few more minutes, and Pixie and I walked a mile back to our car. My nose bled the entire way. As soon as the cross country team came in, I grabbed Princess and we drove home. It took me an hour to clean up. I was covered from head to toe in dirt and dead leaves, along with blood, bruises and scrapes. But I was still laughing, so I was okay.

Later that day, Princess and Pixie asked why I had laughed through all this. I was a real mess. In addition to breaking my nose, I also tore up both knees and one elbow and I broke the big toe on my right foot. Why would I laugh when I did all that? Good question. I’m not really sure of the answer, but I hope it’s because I chose to laugh instead of cry. Yes, it all hurt like hell, but I think crying or even just complaining would have made it much worse. Laughing as soon as I got up seemed to make it feel better. And I think I chose to laugh because I knew that, but I knocked myself so silly, I can’t be sure I actually made that choice.

In any event, I have a couple of photos of the skulls I’ve been painting. I’ve gotten farther along, adding dots of white paint to make patterns. Over the white, I’m adding a bit of metallic paint, and then I plan to add some jewel-tone paints on top of that. What do you think?

Blue skull

I tried making the dots with a paint brush, but found a stylus works better.

Pink skull

This one is my favorite so far!

Yellow skull

This one’s a bit messy, but I’ve gotten farther along with it.

 

And there you have it! This week’s mess. Yay!

ACW Episode 282 – Run, Princess, Run!!

Webcomic!

Click on the image above to see it bigger.

Yes, it took me forever to get this one done. I apologize. I started this at the beginning of October, which turned out to be one of the busiest months I’ve had to deal with in a loooooooong time. It was so busy and so hectic, in fact, that I look forward to the peace and quiet of Girl Scout cookie season.

Yes, I actually said that. And now I’ve put it in writing.

What kept me so busy? Well, Girl Scouts was one part of it. In addition to our troop meetings, we also had an archery trip and a murder mystery party. Then there was Halloween and All Saints Day. The girls attend Catholic school, and this year Pixie’s class held a “Courtyard of Saints,” where all the students dressed up as different saints and gave a sort of living history presentation. Pixie was Mother Teresa, so I spent a week sewing that costume for her. And then, since we can’t visit one end of the spectrum without seeing the other, I also had to sew her a Kylo Ren costume for Halloween. Princess wanted to be a Jedi, so there was that to sew. And of course, I was busy working on the October Crochet challenge. But what kept me busiest of all in October was…

Cross Country.

Princess was encouraged by her friends to join, and I’m very glad she did, because it was a great experience for her. She went from barely being able to run a mile to running 3 miles, and over the course of the month shaved 4 minutes off her mile run time. Thankfully, though, the Cross Country season ended before Halloween, because practice was 3 days a week with a race on top of that, so just about every day after school, we were running somewhere for 2 hours at a time. Well, Princess was running. I opted to do lawn work at the school (we do school service hours every year), or drive kids to races and chaperon at events. It was time-consuming, to say the least.

But now Cross Country is over, and November’s challenge is drawing, so I’m going to get back to regular work on the webcomic. I can’t promise weekly updates, but I certainly think I can do better than once a month!

Enjoy the webcomic! Later today, I’ll post another update for the November drawing challenge.

Move It Mama Monday! For your information…

Just so you know…

After a couple of weeks with the new Vibram shoes, I am now running up to 5 minutes at a time, with a minute of walking in between. I still get sore in my calves, but again, knee and hip pain is at a minimum.

Just Dance 2 comes out this October! Up to 40 new songs and apparently 8 people can play at a time, though I don’t know all the details on it yet. I will say that if James Brown’s “I Feel Good” isn’t one of those new songs, I will be sorely disappointed, especially after seeing this promo video.

Finally, an hour-long B-52s concert counts as three cardio-vascular workouts, so this mama does not plan to move anything today. I shook my cosmic thing so hard last night, I wore it out.

And that’s the news on the Move It Mama Monday front for this week. Ciao!

Move It Mama Monday! Too many choices?

I’ve always been of the opinion that it’s good to have choices when it
comes to exercise. Relying on just one activity for my daily exercise
needs is not a good idea. For instance, if I only swim, then what do I
do on the days that the pool is closed? If I only run, what do I do
when my knees hurt to bad to jog even five minutes? If I only do Wii
Fit Plus, how will I get my upper body workout in (an area that Wii
Fit Plus is still sadly lacking in)? No, it’s best to have choices,
that way when one kind of exercise won’t work, I can simply turn
around and do another. Good, yes?

Except that lately it seems like I have too many choices, and I’m not
getting much of any exercise done at all.

My problem is that I want to exercise all my options, and I really
only have time for one a day. I can’t run and do Wii Fit and go swim
at the Y all on the same day. Or rather, I could, but then I wouldn’t
have time to do anything else, like work or clean or even eat. I’ve
put on a few pounds lately, so I’m chomping at the bit to go, go, go
exercise, but I simply can’t do it all. Add to all of this the fact
that my schedule has been so erratic lately, I’m having a hard time
figuring out what it is I should do when I finally do get time to
exercise. In the face of all my choices, I sort of freeze up. I can’t
decide which form of exercise would be best to do right then, so I end
up doing nothing at all. This all results in a very frustrated,
unexercised me.

So what to do? In my case, I’m assigning specific days and times for
each activity. On Mondays and Fridays, I plan to go to the Y and swim.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I’ll take karate class. On Wednesdays and
Sundays when I’m home, I’ll hop on the Wii (and if Wii Fit Plus has a
problem with me not training with it every day, then it can go soak
its head in a bucket). That leaves one day, Saturday open. In theory,
I could take black belt class at the dojo that day, and I will
probably try to fit that in as often as I can, but if I only get to
two karate classes a week instead of three, I’m not going to sweat it.

Beyond that, I’m wondering if I should continue to do my
mini-workouts. I’ve started running again lately, and I’m back to
running the entire neighborhood in just 20 minutes. I’d like to keep
doing this because it’s the best exercise for me when I’m trying to
lose weight, but I can’t figure out yet when during the day I’d fit it
in. It will take some thinking to work this out.

Anyway, that’s my dilemma for the week. If anybody has any thoughts or
ideas on this, let me know!