Tuesday, June 19, 2007

A Little Blue (ICE)

I have been told that Mercury is in retrograde. I have no idea what that means, but it's supposedly bad juju for all of us until Mercury turns around and starts heading through the zodiac the right direction. Supposedly, this retrograde business screws up all kinds of things like, say, hard drives (Mercury especially relates to all things regarding communication, like computers and such). So now I know why my hard drive went kaput, I blame Mercury. And since today pretty much went down the toilet at 10:49 am, I think I'll blame Mercury for that one, too.

In karate class today we were doing flag sparring as our game at the end of class. This involves everyone sticking a small flag in their belt and then you run around trying to steal everyone else's flag before they can get yours. Apparently, I am getting somewhat of a reputation in class for being, well shall we say just a wee bit competitive at this sort of thing. You know you're trouble when the teenage boys start cheering when you are selected to be on their team. So I can't help it, I'm a gigantic kid at heart. A gigantic kid with an even larger competitive streak (my previous post about taking the easy road with Coach Joy notwithstanding). So there I was running around like a crazy fool trying to grab other people's flags when this guy and I face off. He lunges for my flag, I lunge for his (remember they are tucked into belts at waist level). My right eyeball comes directly into contact with his lunging hand, it's shiner time for me.

Luckily I managed to get some ice on it quickly, head for home (with my head feeling like it was splitting in two the whole way) and down some arnica to help with the bruising. A friend came and took my kids over to their house to play and I lay down on the couch and promptly went to sleep! This is a very unusual occurrence. Aside from my pregnancy-induced narcolepsy years ago in which I famously fell asleep in meetings at work, I can count on my fingertips the number of times I have slept in the middle of the day. Even Ironman training could hardly induce my body to take a much-needed nap. Now my husband can and will fall asleep the second he sits down and stops moving (probably a holdover from his Army days, that), but me? No way. Sometimes I think though when your body goes through some kind of shock or brief trauma, it lets you check out for awhile and so I didn't wake up for over two hours. I'll probably be up until 3:00 am but for the first time in ages we have absolutely nothing to do tomorrow. Nothing! So I will sleep in, and hope my eye doesn't look too Rocky Balboa on me.

2 comments:

LongTime said...

Maybe the worst thing about a black eye is explaining it to everyone you see, you know, to dispel suspicions of something sinister. I can't stay awake after a long workout or race, unless it's a sprint. At other times a nap just messes up your sleep cycle, and as you say you're awake at 3 a.m. It seems like every other commercial on TV wants to medicate you for sleep, too.

TriGirl 40 said...

That sounds like it will be an impressive shiner. Hope it heals quickly - but at least you got the joy of "the nap" from it!