A long walk

I really enjoyed yesterday.

First of all, I managed to get up, get dressed, and get out of the house, all without having any particular reason to do so.  Hopefully this won't become a hard barrier to cross, but it does make me uneasy sometimes how easy it is to just sit around.  Typed right now as I sit on the couch, past noon, still in my pajamas...

Every other Friday afternoon we have someone come by for a couple of hours to clean our house.  For years I felt self conscious about this, and I was reluctant in many cases at the notion of hiring anyone to clean up after me.  Maybe some of it is a class guilt thing, and it feels weird to have any kind of servant.  And I hate the time/money argument, that my time is more valuable and it just makes economic sense to pay someone else to do the job.  Maybe it's somewhat my general DIY nature.  And maybe my parents should get some credit for bringing me up with the notion that I should take care of myself.  But ultimately, even if we *can* clean the house ourselves, the reality is that we never get around to it as often as we ought to on our own.  And having a cleaner come in is a forcing function for us to straighten up the clutter.  So I've come around to accepting it, and it sure is nice to have the nice all clean and spiffy.  For at least the couple of minutes before Dylan starts tearing it apart again.

So I somewhat lied about the no particular reason part, because we did want to get out of the way of the cleaner.  But we didn't really have a particular plan.  Just to take a walk, wander around, maybe do some errands, let Dylan play, whatever.

To a first order, we just walked to downtown and Berkeley and back.  But it was a fairly meandering route.  We stopped by the German bakery -- where to my dismay they didn't actually have any pretzels today.  We did get some pretzel croissants, which are basically croissants that taste like they've been crossed with a pretzel.  I'm not sure if it's what I'd want most of the time, but I have been having salty cravings, and I found it very tasty.  Thank you to Becca and Mikey for showing those to us.  Then we took advantage of a few other shops on the same block of University Ave. (which seems to have improved in the past few years), sharing a lunch at Slow (another thing we shared with Becca and Mikey when they were here), and having a taste at the fancy chocolate shop that I had never been to.  We also picked up a sort of pop-up book featuring colors and trains for Dylan at Half Price Books.  And Lorien got some coffee at the Italian bakery.  And I bought an under the helmet skull cap at the Missing Link so that my head isn't cold when I'm biking, now that I'm sans hair.  And Dylan played in Ohlone Park.  And I browsed for new glasses at some overly fancy shop that didn't have anything I liked.  And I picked up a prescription at the pharmacy.

And we bought a few things for Dylan at Mr. Mopps.  Lately he's been eagerly pushing around our broom, so we got him one that's a bit more his size.  I'm trying to overlook the possibility that it may have actually cost more than our real broom (although it is really functional) and that I should have perhaps just cut down the handle on an adult sized broom.  (Which I guess is harder to do now that they're more commonly plastic rather than wood.)  Dylan is also obsessed with balls.  He has a bunch, in various sizes, and despite my general lack of ball playing ability (which I'm in retrospect attributing to my effective lack of 3-D vision -- have you ever tried to hit or catch a baseball with one eye closed?), he's pretty good at throwing and catching.  We've been trying to keep inside and outside balls separate -- both for reasons of cleanliness and household destruction.  His outside ball has been a tennis ball that our neighbor Susan gave him.  And we've learned that we shouldn't go on any journey without a ball.  He went to the park a few days ago without it, and despite all of the opportunities to play there, he kept complaining that he didn't have a ball.  But the tennis ball gets a little nasty in wet weather, so we bought him a whiffle ball.

Google maps says the entire journey was about 3.5 miles, which I guess for me is a decent amount of exercise.  And I pushed Dylan the whole time, in the umbrella stroller.  (Our bicycle trailer also can turn into pretty stylin' stroller that pushes extremely easily, but it's kind of huge so we try not to use it for expeditions that will involve much going into shops.)  I was somewhat winded at times, but it was really good to get outside for an extended period of time.  I had been trying in the past to make it a point to at least have a small walk every day, although the rains somewhat put a damper on that.  I shouldn't let that get in the way, though.  I went for a walk in the rain with Dylan and my Mom when she was here, and as long as the rain is light enough and it's not too cold, I can actually find that quite enjoyable.  (I do need to find where my rain gloves went to, though.)

This was, however, the first day in a while that I hadn't had an afternoon nap, so I suddenly was overcome by exhaustion by the time we were done dinner, and ended up somewhat inadvertently falling asleep for a little bit on the couch.  But that was enough to give me the energy to finally (mostly) catch up on email last night.

This is all possible because I have been incrementally feeling better day by day.  So maybe my week 2 badness will be limited to a few days, rather than a whole week.  There were a few times that my stomach felt a little bit wrong yesterday, but nothing that was really all that uncomfortable, and nothing coming anywhere close to painful.  And I'm also hopeful that as I move further from the chemo drugs in my cycle, that the sleep situation will continue to improve.  I have managed to get a reasonable night of sleep the past couple of nights.  Although that was still with some pharmaceutical assistance.  I am still of the opinion that I don't want to be doing that continually throughout the entire cycle, but I am becoming a little less wary of it, at least while it's working, and I have multiple options to bounce between if necessary.  The doctor's opinion was that me getting plenty of rest to be able to heal was important enough that I shouldn't worry that much about becoming dependent on sleeping pills.

And now I probably should stick to my principles and pull myself away from the laptop, get up off the couch, put on some clothes, and get outside during this perhaps brief window between the rains.  Dylan is also standing by the door trying to put on shoes, so I guess it's time to go out.