I’m back!

Wow, has it really been so extraordinarily long since I blogged? Don’t take it to mean I don’t love all of my readers; there has just been a LOT going on since I last posted. I’m going to have to catch you all up in “7 Quick Takes” style, even if there aren't seven bullet points.

Presenting: The Last Four Months of My Life

1)  I got an apartment! As I pointed out in my last post, driving forty miles round trip every day was starting to get to me. (Even as I type that, I realize how wimpy it sounds. There was a time in my life when I commuted to Seattle at 6 every morning and didn’t drive back until 8pm. Even so, the stress of traffic and the time that I felt I was wasting made me look for an alternative.) Around the second week of October I moved into a one-bedroom place about a mile and a half from the parish where I work. It is much easier to get to early morning masses and stay for late evening meetings when my commute is only five minutes long. When the weather gets nicer, I will probably start riding my bike to work.

2)  I was going to dedicate a whole post to this, but even written as humorous satire, it was too long and tiring to read the whole thing. (To give you an idea, it was entitled, “The Ballad of Molly’s Left Foot".)

Remember that fall I took way back in June? It turns out that I did more than just sprain my ankle; I broke my foot. And, if you had any contact with me at all during the following four months, you know that I had no idea that it was broken. I thought I was developing a bone spur from all the running. (To answer your question: yes, it was broken during the hike on the Appalachian Trail. And it was broken on every long run I took myself on, both in Camden/Philadelphia and in Everett. Even I was impressed with myself.)

My mom gently suggested that I go see my doctor, and I made an appointment only because I wanted official confirmation that nothing was really wrong. About an hour after getting x-rayed, and about four and a half months after the original injury the doctor’s nurse called me and said, “Your foot is, in fact, broken. You need to stop bearing weight and start using crutches immediately.” (I was standing in a movie theatre lobby.)

They put a cast on my leg and I began to use one of those undignified scooters (which are a HUGE improvement over crutches!). It was quite an ironic twist of fate: I finally got my own place on the third story of an apartment building, and within two weeks of moving in I couldn’t even walk up the stairs without help. After a month in the cast, another x-ray revealed that the bone hadn’t really healed; the space between the fracture bones was filling in with scar tissue. After a couple of scheduling snafus, I met with a surgeon yesterday.

They’re going to operate a week from today, and depending upon what they find I should be all recovered and good as new somewhere between two and six weeks after that.

Please keep me in your prayers, but don’t be worried because I’m not worried. My surgeon is one of the best in this field, and I am just so ready to get this injury taken care of. By the time I am totally recovered from surgery, it will have been nine months since that steamy, sultry day in June when I tripped and fell.

3) Living life: Because of the aforementioned injury, a lot of my plans to settle into this new phase of my life have fallen by the wayside. For example: my bedroom still looks like someone just moved into it, I only bought honest-to-goodness dishes a month ago, and I still haven’t eaten a single meal off of my dining room table (which leads me to believe I should invest in a desk...) Also haven’t bought a car yet—I’m still driving Elliot, my parents’ trusty little Honda hatchback. My time will come, but that goal is definitely on hold for now. It would silly to buy a car (especially a manual, which is what I prefer to drive) and not be able to drive it because my foot is injured.

The new place looks a little homier now, although it’s going to be a while before I can acquire the furniture I need to truly make it “home.” For instance, my one bookcase is packed to the brim, and there are piles of other books just lying around the apartment. I may need to wait until I have a more permanent residence to make any such investments, though.

4) The holidays at Saint Brendan’s are a crazy time! Thanksgiving started us off with a bang: I had had my cast removed the day before Thanksgiving, so I was quite wobbly on my feet while trying to conduct the choir and get Mass going. That surprise snowstorm didn’t do us any favors, either; my pianist and half of my liturgical ministers were snowbound at home! Yet, at least 75 people showed up for mass, and mass ALWAYS goes on, even under funny circumstances. Mass is always a prayer of thanksgiving in and of itself, but on Thanksgiving Day, it is that much more appropriate to celebrate!

The Christmas liturgies are a white, hot blur in my memory: so much to do, such HUGE congregations, so little time! I was actually extremely pleased with the way the liturgies turned out—and very little of it had anything to do with me! We have some great choirs and volunteers around here. I was just pleased to be a part of it all.

The whole of December was exhausting for me; between the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe (a VERY big deal in our Hispanic community), Simbang Gabi (a big deal in our Filipino community), and funerals coming out of our ears (more on that later…), and five huge Christmas masses, I worked 26 full days in a row, some of them for 10-14 hours a day. I was VERY tired by the end of it, and worse, I didn’t get to see very much of my family during the holidays. I hope I can find a way to at least visit with the extended family at my aunt’s house next Christmas Eve. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s (Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God) are all days that I must be present at work, and then work in the festivities later.

5) Funerals: There must be something about the wintertime; very many of our elderly and terminally ill parishioners (many of whom were homebound before I ever got here) have passed away since mid-October. We are well into the double digits are far as funerals go this winter. One thing you get used to fast in this ministry is how routine funerals really are (to those of us who work here—obviously, they aren’t so familiar to the families we serve. And thank God for that!). Perhaps that’s a good thing—we handle the preparations and the liturgy itself so smoothly that the families have very little to worry about.

Still, after twenty-odd funerals, you start to get a little sad about it all.

6) Tender shepherd, you forgot to count your sheep: I developed some pretty bad habits as far as my going to/ getting out of bed schedule is concerned. I realized last week that I habitually went to bed at about one in the morning, and then tried to get up, eat, shower, dry my hair, and be at daily mass by 8:30am. Somehow, I wasn’t pulling this off very well. ;)

So lately I’ve been making some deliberate changes in my resting and rising routine. I sleep with the window partially open, both to keep the room cooler (ever notice how hard it is to jump out of bed in the morning if you’re overly warm?) and because the sound of the rain lulls me to sleep at night. For the first time since about the fifth grade, I have a bedtime. (It feels disciplined, yet sounds so undignified. Bedtime…) And I have a morning routine now, too. I think I avoided having one for a while because for so long in my life, my morning routine was built around when and for how long my roommates used the bathroom that we share. Since I didn’t have anyone else to worry about, I figured I didn’t really need an established routine. But one week into this new plan, it’s working quite well. It also helps that I put a clock in my bathroom.

I’m also looking into a dawn simulation alarm clock. I’ve always been sensitive to light when I sleep (not noise, just light), and I’ve come to learn that that’s how our bodies are supposed to operate. We were made to slowly awaken with the gradual light of the dawn, and slowly shut down by the gradual setting of the sun. Yet the traditional way of waking up involves sleeping in as dark a room as possible, and a loud blasting the sleeper awake. This is not how our bodies were made to operate! (But it makes perfect sense—if we all woke up with the sun in the Pacific Northwest, especially in December, we wouldn’t get out of bed for weeks at a time…)

A dawn simulator alarm clock begins to light up gradually, just the way the morning light does. After one hour, it reaches its full wattage and the alarm rings. It should be much easier to wake up because my body will have been awakening for the whole hour, not just at the moment that the alarm rang.

That’s about all I can think of to blog about for now. Look for more posts on a much more regular basis—once I’m laid up, I’ll have little to do but write!