Pretend It's October...

Well after yesterday's blog about my memory slipping this is super appropriate. Realized that I never posted my end of October catch up. 

So how did it go? 

I'm still in that space of wrapping up all of my goals set for 2023 while settling into the idea of no goals for 55. Which I know sort of doesn't make sense, but it will all slot in in January when I'm done with past commitments. 

Reading: Upped my Goodreads number again when I hit it again. So this year should be a hitting my reading goal number three times year. Which is sort of fun, not going to lie. Oh wait, just looked at Goodreads and I'm upping it AGAIN so four times hitting goal. 

I talked about the self help. Bittersweet by Susan Cain Disappointing because I had such high expectations for it, but still I liked the idea of it. The bio was Sure I'll Join Your Cult by Maria Bamford which was sort of bonkers but also enjoyable and tied into all of the self help books I've been trying out this year by equating them to cults. So that was fun. I read the September Stranglings book because of timing and so I'll also be pushing the October Stranglings to November but it all worked out with the add last month from one of her other clubs. ANYWAY...Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang. Not my favorite.

I did take Brent's advice and pushed the combo self help/bio out to December. I can see winding down the year with the least amount of things left to do to wrap everything up. 

Writing: I wrote about hitting my goal number for the over all blogs last week. I've still got a few fiction pieces left to write or pull from my archive and post. Also have done well getting Dana her extra piece every other week. And I've kept to writing more days a week than not. Which is why the counts are going to be higher (at least in nonfiction) than what I had worked out. I didn't think I'd keep that pace, and I was going to be happy with 3 out of 7 days. So that's gone well.

Workouts...RECORD SCRATCH....

After months of being really consistent working out the little niggling pain in my elbow finally got to be bad enough to go see a doctor. It's lateral epicondylitis, or tennis elbow. But I don't play tennis so it really bums me out. Super common, not easy to treat without isolating the muscle, basically not using the arm. It's my left arm so that's crazy talk. Especially when looking at the timelines for how long it takes to work. So I'm going in next week for PRP treatment, platelet rich plasma. Basically they are going to draw blood from my right arm, spin it up to isolate the platelets and then inject it back into my elbow joint on my left arm where they will (hopefully) get to work mending the bunged up tendons. 

The doctor was really honest that it's going to hurt. A lot. It causes inflammation as the healing starts so it's going to be pretty unpleasant for a bit. Which means I'm really happy that I'm ahead in my writing since I might be out of commission the second half of next week. And I might just miss my first Dana piece depending on if I get it done early or not. 

But with the injection and then the follow up physical therapy hopefully I'll be all healed up and will be able to grip things again without pain and feeling like they are going to slip out of my hand at any second. 

So workouts...no weightlifting. Which has been a bummer. But I did start jogging. Slowly and only sometimes. I am not a runner, never have been a runner, but I figured if I can't lift for awhile I should do something else that's sort of challenging just to keep from getting really bored. And part of me hopes it helps to reshape my legs a little bit. I love the muscle definition on runners legs, and though mine are strong enough to kick down a door, I've never had much visible tone. Maybe this will do it? If not it's at least been giving me a new challenge to focus on while I workout so I don't just turn all sloth while I heal. 

One more month down, two more to go. 

(we now rejoin your regularly scheduled November already in progress)