They're Killing Me!

At the end of the Sex and the City series, in the midst of a miserable move to Paris with her Russian lover, Carrie returns to some bad habits. She eats too much. She starts smoking again.

“I like the smoking,” the Russian says as he’s about to run off for work. “Very sexy.”

“It’s killing me!” Carrie yells after him.

I might not have a bad habit with quite so many bad health consequences as smoking, but there’s an ugly habit of mine that resurfaces every summer which I really need to kick.

Yup, flip-flops.

I’ve had crummy knees for a while. And there’s been a funny correlation between my knee pain and the summer months. I could never figure out why. Hmm . . . . Could it be the completely unsupportive shoes that require nearly constant toe clenching to stay on that are my go-to footwear during the summer months?

For the last couple days I’ve been running around almost exclusively in flip-flops. I love the freedom of my toes in the shoes and they’re so easy to quickly slip into when they’re sitting next to the door. But at the end of the days, my knees ache. Turns out the flip-flops are killing my knees.

I have no idea why.

There are other reasons for sturdier footwear. The cabin remains a construction zone as Andy continues with the shed. I’ve helped glue the floor down and get some walls (we have three now) up.

Andy saw a fledgling Northern Saw-whet owl when he swung into work this morning on our way to do laundry in town. What is it recently with seeing something you don’t see everyday . . . everyday?

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Pythagoras and Black Flies

I’m a fan of the smelly stuff. I’m not into expensive perfume, but I do like to start my days with just a touch of lovely smelling body spray. I’m just anal enough to have a winter scent and a summer scent. I once had a coworker kindly describe this personal quirk of mine as “sophisticated.” I think that “eccentric” and “crazy” are probably more apt descriptions, but nonetheless, when snow starts to melt, I reach for my containers of cherry blossom products. When the autumn nip returns, the cherry blossom stuff gets shelved and the vanilla scented products come out. But what I really, really need to learn to do is to stop reaching for the smelly stuff during the summer.

If you’ve spent any time in northern Minnesota in the spring, you know where I’m going with this. Biting insects are fans of the smelly stuff too. “Mmmm,” the little black flies and mosquitoes think when they smell me coming. “What is that . . . a bit of cherry blossom mixed with . . . what’s that? Ohhh, my favorite: BLOOD!”

The black flies made their spectacular entrance into Summer 2010 this week. As I dig in the garden or shovel around gravel in the backyard, the black flies get all riled up and hungry. Right now I’m itching away behind my ears, one of those lovely little spots (ankles are another great place) where the blood is close to the skin and black flies belly up. I know the black flies pollinate the blueberry plants, but I wish they would take a lesson from their fellow pollinators, the bees, and only take a nice chomp out of me when I’ve actually committed a crime against them.

Since I feel the need to spritz myself with a bit of body spray every single morning (if only I could be so consistent with taking my multivitamin) maybe it’s time to replace the smelly products in the bathroom with a big ol’ basket of bug spray.

It seems smelly stuff + black flies = bug bites is theorem nearly as infallible as a2+b2=c2. We’ve been testing out Pythagoras as of late around here. That’s because Andy’s building a shed in the backyard. So far my job in the project is grunt worker and mathematic consultant. Since I took a class entitled “Logic” to complete my analytical reasoning requisite at college, this is pretty terrifying. But it turned out my distant memory of a2+b2=c2 was pretty useful when it came to setting the shed’s corners. Those diagonals can be really helpful!

That’s good, because it’s pretty much all on Andy to turn this into a shed.

I’m sure he’s up to the challenge. I’m happy to help where I can, but I’ve probably pretty much exhausted all and any assistance I have to offer.

It’s been absolutely gorgeous up here, with highs around 80 for the last three days. Kind of a strange time to finish up a sweater, but there you have it.

I’m still trying to gain my equilibrium with the new job. I’d gotten pretty good at the self-employment gig (well, should probably have been making slightly more money) and now it’s time to figure out what this new challenge I’ve taken on is all about.

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