A Bit Slower

The cold seems to be here to stay without much of an Indian Summer to speak of this year.  Well, okay, it's not freezing cold, but the chill goes pretty deep these days.  Steve Williams over at "Scooter in the Sticks" wrote a recent post in which he suggested that one of his relatively new heart meds might be making him feel the cold more keenly than in the past.  Finding myself now on the same pill I'm wondering if that's working on me as well.  I'm the guy who's opening windows while the rest of the family is turning up the thermostat, but it's only autumn and I'm feeling cold, even sitting here at my computer desk with a toasty 69°F reading on the thermometer next to me.

Nevertheless, I'm still taking off on the scooter as often as I can to the usual places that are nothing special except that they're nice enough places to ride to.  Nobody can tell the number of layers I have on under my sweat jacket, but it's fewer than Ralphie's brother sports in "A Christmas Story."

Since having the heart repairs I'm supposed to walk daily.  The trouble is that now that I can breathe more easily I'm much more conscious of the pain in my bad knee.  When I mentioned it to my family doctor when I went for my check-up a few days ago, he wrote me a prescription for a walker.  He was right that it would help me not to waddle from side to side as badly, and to stand straighter than my usual bit of a forward tilt.  Though I don't need it yet every time I get on my feet, without it, walking for more than a short distance is practically impossible.

 

For my inaugural walk with the walker I chose the tee shirt I've had for years that features the silhouette of an old lady using a walker and it reads "IT'S GO TIME!"  Urban dictionary says of, "It's go time," that it's a phrase meaning, "I challenge you to a streetfight," usually accompanied by the challenger assuming a fighting stance.  I guess this is my fighting stance against more heart disease of the potentially fatal kind.

Now all I have to do is rig up some kind of carrier so I can take the walker with me on the scooter because I'd been liking taking the scooter to where I planned to walk each morning, preferring to check out different neighborhoods here in "da valley" rather than to walk my own neighborhood where I've lived since I was born.  It's a little easier carrying a cane on the scooter than the walker will be, but I'm going to give rigging a scooter rack a try.  Maybe in the spring.