The Bridge Over the River Exhaustion

I finished my second week of full-time work on Friday, and although I was tired, I wasn’t totally wiped out. Slowly I’m starting to build some stamina. I am trying to park farther from work, so that I have to walk farther; and I’ve been having to do some physical stuff at work – moving boxes and stuff in preparation for shipping to events. But come Saturday, I don’t have much energy, so again this weekend I have spent a lot of time reading.

One of the ways to work a dog to exhaustion is to make him think – we find that if we start training Robin to do some new trick, and spend enough time at it at any one time, he is as tired as if we took him on a long walk.

We had dinner with Sharon and Gary Saturday night, and then they started teaching us how to play Bridge. Taking tricks is nothing – all the important (and confusing) part happens before you ever lay a card on the table. By the time we’d played 5 hands, I was so tired that I totally forgot the conception of a trump card, and was playing as if I was playing Hearts. Fortunately, Gary (my partner) was not only kind, but forgiving also ;-}

This afternoon, Robin was in dire need of a walk. So I girded my, um, feet, and we walked around the block. I’ve measured it in the car, and it is 1/4 mile. Having thought ahead a bit, I headed downhill to start, because then I was walking uphill on the middle of the walk, and downhill again on the way back home. I’m pretty sure that’s the only reason I made it all the way around. Once we got back in the door, I collapsed into my recliner and just lay there for about 45 minutes.

I really need to start getting out with him every day, the way I used to – *both* of us need it. I also need to start working on some strength exercises. There’s a balance between pushing to get myself back to being relatively fit and overdoing it; so far, I haven’t been pushing at all, because it has been such a struggle just to be able to get back into work. Now that I’m back to full-time, and as it levels off to being normal, and not such an effort, I am going to start adding in the exercising a bit at a time. It’s really tempting to start by just doing everything I used to do, but I actually recognize (without having to have a doctor tell me) that I’m not ready for that yet. Patience isn’t really one of my virtues, but I’m working on it, and trying not to let patience be an excuse for total sloth.

It doesn’t help that I’m still having trouble sleeping – I find that I am getting somewhere between 4 and 6 hours a night. I really try to get to bed earlier, but I have trouble falling asleep, so I’ll get up and read a chapter until I feel tired again; then I lie awake trying not to think about not falling asleep; eventually I do sleep, but it’s very broken. I have been having very interesting dreams, though. Guess I’m making up for the lack of sleep by trying to make what sleep I do get worthwhile. Recently I’ve been dreaming about a book I was reading; and last night I dreamt about Robin, and about Brian and work, too. It’ll probably be the only time I ever see Robin go swimming.