Bright Lights, Blue Sky & Broken Bones

My days and weeks are going by with lightning speed, as we hurtle towards year's end. Thanksgiving may well be one of my favorite holidays but I can't believe it's almost here, b/c that means that December is fast approaching. Even though it was 70 degrees today, Starbucks is already selling its seasonal eggnog lattes, and Christmas decorations and holiday lights have arrived in many stores. Along with the appearance of those things, I'm starting to feel some end-of-semester panic about the progress I need/want to make on my dissertation before winter break. These days have been a mix of good and bad, ups and downs.

1. The good: I had an awesome time at the conference in St. Louis. My presentation went really well. I had never been to St. Louis before, so it was also nice that my hotel was right by the famed Gateway Arch, on the Mississippi River. I flew back home with a layover at the airport in Charlotte, NC. My layover was long enough to make a beeline from the E-gate terminals to the C-gate terminal so that I could have a famed Chesapeake Bay-style crab cake with a North Carolina-style sweet tea for lunch at Phillips Seafood Restaurant, before continuing on to Charlotttesville.

I knew about the Phillips Restaurant in Terminal C based on a hot tip from a friend who is familiar with Charlotte Internat'l Airport. Phillips Seafood takes me back to the summers of my childhood, when we used to take family trips out to Maryland's Eastern Shore/Ocean City. I'm sure we had countless bushels of Old Bay spiced crabs and many many cobs of corn. It was such a carefree time when the summers seemed endless. My biggest worries in the world were avoiding getting sunburned or stung by jellyfish as I floated on a raft in the Atlantic and tried not to get nailed by the powerful, pounding surf.

2.The bad: there are two of them. 1) Remember how I was sent in for an MRI? Turns out, both of my tibias are cracked--bilateral stress fractures, plus the long-standing ankle/arch tendon issue. Stress fractures in not one, but BOTH lower legs? Are you kidding?!? To add insult to injury, today, the nurse asked me to drop everything and come in for an emergency ultrasound to rule out a deep-vein blood clot, which I thankfully did NOT have. Telling you that I'm sidelined from running and all exercises other than swimming is probably like me telling you the sky is blue. 2) My mom fell down the stairs at home (my parents' house) over the weekend, giving Dad a bad scare, and leaving her with a vertebral lumbar compression injury. She's in pain and may need my help when I get there for Thanksgiving break. But, thankfully, it wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been. Still, these things scare me so very much! My parents look young for their age (as many people of our ethnicity do), so sometimes it's easy to forget that they are in fact much older than most of my same-age friends' parents. It's things like this that scare me and make me think deep and hard about a lot of different things that my same-age peers probably won't start to think about for another 10 or 15 years, but that my 40-something year old friends might relate to.

PS, One more good thing (to end on a positive note): I just found out I'll be presenting a paper at another conference in Denver this spring.