My joints are giving me trouble lately. Which is irritating. I bet you don’t realize how much you need two strong hands. I bet you thought you only need one hand to be strong and the other one’s just there for support. You’d be wrong. Because when my right fingers started failing me (joint pain, stabbing pains whenever the fingers are leveraged, dropping things), I thought, “okay well, I have worked with computers for a decade now. I’m overdue for some repetitive motion problems. I will just switch to being left-handed for a while, to give my wrist a break. It will be tough, but totally possible.”

Not so.

How do you lift two medium sized bowls out of your mixing bowl set and then grab the big heavy bowl when only one of your hands is capable of lifting either of those things? How do you carry groceries home when you’ve bought a carton of milk? How do you open your door if you’re holding heavy things in the strong hand and your door requires enough finger strength to push down a latch? How do you lift your four year old into the car when one hand can’t handle any weight on it?

Just thought I’d share those thoughts in case there were other able-bodied people out there interested in learning about their privilege by listening to me whine. (As valuable and compelling as my whining is, it is probably second to the method of actually asking someone with disabilities about their life.)

Anyhow, I thought I’d take a break from computer work this week. “It’ll be good for you to stand up and move around and do some ‘real world’ motion for a couple of days,” I told myself. Besides, I have tonnes of cleaning to do. So yesterday I started cleaning and organizing our basement. Woah. That was a plan lacking in sense. Hey, let’s lift and set down lots and lots of heavy boxes, into awkward places that are hard to reach, using fingers/wrists with possibly compressed nerves or inflamed joints. Oh my.

But my basement looks better than it has in three years.

In addition to the fingers, I’ve got toe, ankle and knee pain. I’m telling myself it’s probably just a combination of computer use (wrist) and dancing too much (everything below the hips). Because it is most certainly not anything systemic. I’m sick of even suspecting those things.

Aside from all that, I’m feeling very accomplished this week.

I took some lovely family photos last weekend (did you notice?). And I have been working on some lovely crafts.

I feel mostly on top of all the dances I’m supposed to be learning and practicing for this summer’s performances.

I have a number of costumes to get sewing, but I have, at least, started on some of them.

My freelancing and web work is hopping.

Also, after much waffling about our mortgage and whether we were going to renew with our current bank or switch to a bank with a better rate, and thinking we were going to have to switch and gearing up for that stupid mortgage application process (which I’ve been through enough times that I find it very nauseating now) but also panicking about whether we can actually finish our current home improvement projects in time for a home appraisal, I called my bank to ask some questions about other mortgage plans and ended up negotiating a rate even better than the one we were considering switching for, saving us another $80/month above the $200/month we would have saved by switching. We’re *this* close to having our credit card debt paid off, so I’m looking forward to this break in our living expenses making this more possible.

We took all three kids for dentist appointments yesterday. Got through it okay.

I submitted our electrical meter reading. That made me feel accomplished.

There is some mystery in our electrical usage in that while on the equalized payment plan for the year, we somehow used 18,000 kilowatt-hours, resulting in a $400 bill at the end of the year. I started tracking our electrical usage after this happened, and according to my data and estimates, we should really only have used 10-13,000 so I don’t even know how this is possible. So, since the latest overage meant that they were going to up the estimates for the next year’s EPP by another $30 and since I want to know what’s going on with our electrical usage and am relatively confident in the predictability of our usage, I have got us off equalized payments and will be submitting actual readings every month so that there’s no opportunity for them to estimate our usage anymore. That way, if there is some mysterious leak or something that causes our usage to double, I will be much more on top of it, and not left bewildered by a huge bill months too late to do anything about it.

While taking family pictures, I even managed to persuade Ian to sit still and pose for some. However, after all that posing work, this unposed one is my favourite picture of him ever.

And here’s an obligatory picture of me.

Ah, pictures and self-perception are so weird. But that’s a pontification for another day.

All my time cleaning out the basement and analyzing mortgages has had me thinking a lot about the past lately. And it’s in a good way. Like, even when I’m saying to myself, “Boy, remember how you never used to sweat parts of a percentage on your mortgage back when your mortgage payment was $300,” followed by hysterical giggling at the thought of a $300 mortgage payment – I then reflect on how much has changed since then and I just feel kind of warm about it all. I don’t regret trading the little mortgage payment for this one at all because it got us in this lovely house where I’m so happy.

Then while trying to find places for all our boxes in the basement, I looked at our lack of storage space and I thought to myself, “boy, remember all that storage we gave up when we sold our last house?” And I followed that with more giggling and a warm feeling because, who cares about storage if living in a 5 year old house in the suburbs is the cost? I’m fine with weeding out our junk and throwing half of it away in order to live in a character house walking distance from everything.

Speaking of which, I should get my wrists and fingers off the computer and go do more cleaning.