one sore sob

Yes, I am indeed one sore son of a bitch. Between playing soccer on Sunday and yesterday's yard work, I'm just about pitiful.

We'll begin with Sunday. We had exactly eleven players show up while the other team had a nice batch of subs. In addition, they had a couple of players who seemed to think this was a professional, international match. I heard a couple of my teammates complain about the elbows, but I thought nothing of it myself. It's one thing to hide the elbow from the ref, but you've got to be good to for the opposing player to not notice till after the play. Or maybe I just play so hard that I don't notice.

Either way, the shot to the hip started hurting pretty quickly after the play, but I thought nothing of it then. I realized later that I'd been privy to one of those elbows, how else to explain it? It quickly turned into a really nasty bruise that will be the envy of Momma's roller derby practice tonight.

As Sunday turned to night and then Monday, I began finding new hurty places that aren't normal soccer wear. These, I'm guessing, are more elbows. They aren't bruising like the hip, but they are random spots, halfway down my right forearm, the back of my left elbow, for instance. Having just checked the elbow, it is bruised, lending the elbow story more credence. These could only have been cheap shots.

The yard work had to be done, and I've finally finished another round of the hellish raking that my procrastination awarded me. We can put yard waste in our ditch in front of the house and know that every other Tuesday, a truck will come by and cart it away. During mostly leaf season, it's a truck with a huge vacuum hose, the sucky truck. During mostly dead stick weather, the truck sports a giant claw.

The vacuum truck sucked up most of the leaves, but plenty more sat at the bottom of the ditch collecting water and worms. My most recent raking episodes, all yard based, were mostly removed from the ditch as well. Yesterday was the day to rake the ditch itself, pulling all the accumulation from one end to the other. I'm leaving next Tuesday's claw truck no reason not to take all the crap this time. After raking the ditch, I mowed all of the front the side and most of the close half of the back.

Then I heard a sound that is more and more familiar each year. First is the kachunk of the blade spinning into something that's not grass followed by the dead silence as the mower quits working. And yes, I've bent yet another mower blade.

So, I can feel each and every muscle in my back as it screams at me to stop getting involved in more activity that my sad body can take. My hands feel deformed from the rake and the mower, but somehow, possibly through magic, there are no new blisters. There's also the place on my ankle, the ever popular soccer play where you and the opponent kick the ball/each other at the same time. I could go on and on.