Preparing for Lysts on the Lake 2012

Well, it's getting to be that time again. Time to start preparing for "Lysts on the Lake 2012". This year Lysts will be held Friday, Saturday and Sunday, May 4,5 & 6, 2012. There are rumors that there will be a Chivalric Martial Arts International (CMAI) Syposium the week before "Lysts on the Lake" where experienced competitors can hone their skills, and those with little to no experience can learn the basics and compete against each other in a mini-tournament.

Since I am wife to one of the jousters who will be competing and am good friends with many of the other jousters, ground crew and participants, I can't help but become involved with it all. Not that I mind. I love the all the excitement and spectacle of contemporary competitive jousting. I feel honored to play my own small part in the largest competitive jousting tournament in the modern world.

Preparation has actually been going on for some time now. Planning for and participating in an annual event of this sort usually begins as soon as one finishes recovering from last year's event. Jousting, like many sports is not an on again, off again sport. You pretty much have to practice it year round. However, our group of friends began jousting practices specifically aimed at preparing for competing in Lysts 2012 a little over two weeks ago.

Unfortunately, two days before that first jousting practice, I tripped and fell while trying to move around some welded wire fence panels and broke my knee. Just a hairline fracture, but it's still causing me problems. I also did an unknown amount of damage to the soft tissues (muscles and ligaments) in my leg. So, although I attended that first practice at DASH's arena on January 8, I really wasn't paying much attention to what anyone was doing, and I did not get any pictures.

I did notice that my horse, Shadowfax, despite having not been seriously ridden in over a year, did pretty well. Hubby's horse, Ziggy, is 25 years old and although he is still very healthy in most ways, he's just getting a little too old for all the rigors of a competitive jousting tournament, so hubby has decided to see if he can train Shadowfax to joust. After this first practice, things seem promising.

Fortunately, JJ and her husband were at this joust practice. They took pictures and JJ wrote up a nice account of the practice on her blog, Wyvern Oaks: "A Fabulous Weekend of Riding" The first part of the post talks about a jumping lesson, but the latter part of the post discusses the jousting practice.

SG on Saga makes a pass at the quintain.(Thanks to JJ for the picture)

The next weekend, Jan 15, some other friends held a jousting practice to prepare for Lysts in Katy, Texas. I didn't make it to that one in any way shape or form. However, my hubby Foxfire drove down with SH in order to participate. Because Shadowfax had developed abscesses in both front feet, hubby decided not to take him, and instead helped SH train DA's horse Moose. You can see pictures of that practice in Fred Facker's Zenfolio album "Jousting Practice".

My next post will deal with the jousting practice on January 22 at DASH's arena.

Don't forget to put your wallet in the fridge

If you read this blog, you probably know that I raise chickens and sell the eggs.  Well, lately most of the people buying the eggs have been my husband's co-workers.  They'll ask him to bring a dozen or two dozen eggs to work with him so they don't have to go to a farmer's market or whatever to get healthy, tasty, cage-free eggs.  Unfortunately, hubby has a hard time remembering to get the eggs out of the fridge in the morning to bring them to work, so we came up with a system to help him remember. 

The night before he is supposed to take eggs in to work, we put his wallet in the fridge in front of the eggs.  He always grabs his wallet before he leaves, so it forces him to go to the fridge to get it.  Once he's at the fridge, he, of course, remembers to grab the eggs as well.  So in the evening, it's become a common thing for me to say, "Don't forget to put your wallet in the fridge."

Musical Buckets

For the past year or so, our donkeys have consistently followed a very strange pattern when being fed. I don't know why they do this, but here is what happens.

When we are feeding the critters, we always follow the same routine. We feed the goats first to get them into the goat pen and out of the way. We feed Shadowfax next because when we first got him, Ziggy would NOT go into his stall to eat if Shadowfax wasn't locked in his stall first. Then we feed Ziggy. Then once the goats are in the goat pen and the horses are in their stalls, we feed the donkeys in the paddock.

We use three different colored over-the-fence buckets that all contain exactly the same feed in almost exactly the same amounts. (We don't measure that carefully so there might be some slight variation between buckets.) We feed the donkeys along the fence between the water trough and the gate. I place the purple bucket closest to the water trough, then the blue bucket half way between the trough and the gate, then the green bucket closest to the gate.

Tessla follows me to where I place the purple bucket, takes a mouthful from the purple bucket, then gets chased off by Marie and moves to the green bucket. Marie starts eating out of the purple bucket and Kanemura starts eating out of the blue bucket. Then, at some random point in time, Marie decides that she wants to eat out of the blue bucket. She walks over and chases Kanny off of the blue bucket, and he goes and eats out of the purple bucket which still has food in it. So Marie did not simply move because she ran out food. Eventually, Marie decides that the blue bucket isn't good enough and chases Tessla off of the green bucket, and Tessla goes and finishes off the blue bucket if there is any food left. Sometimes there is and sometimes there isn't.

They do this every night.

I have strange donkeys.

C'est La Amour Le Pew

I have outdoor cats, and when you have cats that you feed outdoors, you frequently end up with possums that come and eat your cat food (as well as the occasional deer).  Tonight I was watching tv when I heard a clattering on the front porch.  The cats are quiet when they are eating their cat food, so a clattering means possums.  I don't like possums hanging around my house, so when I hear clattering on the porch, I grab my quarterstaff, open the door and chase the possums off.

Well tonight when I opened the door, instead of seeing a possum, I saw a skunk.  With his tail raised and pointed right at me.  I slammed the door.

I waited a moment then cracked the door and peeked out.  No skunk.  I carefully opened the door further and took a good look around.  My black cat, Bastet, came walking toward me with an innocent look on her face. But now I know better.  She's apparently been having assignations with Pepe Le Pew on my front porch.

A Peek at Lysts on the Lake 2011

Here is a short video showing what I was so involved with that I didn't have time to post. I think you will agree that helping out with a modern competitive jousting tournament is more exciting than sitting in front of your computer and writing blog posts. Not that I don't enjoy writing blog posts, but come on --- It's real live jousting! With real live knights in shining armor! Riding real live horses!

Doesn't that look like fun?

Electric Needles

Sorry for the long hiatus. I got all caught up in preparations for Lysts on the Lake, then working as staff for Lysts, then recovering from Lysts, and then just sort of being out of the habit of writing. I'll try to do better in the future.

Anyway... A while back my butt was healed enough that I was able to start doing sit ups again. I had to do them on the thickest softest carpet in the house, and I couldn't do many of them because it still hurt. And, of course, I was horribly out of shape. Over the past year, I'd gained almost 20 pounds and lost most of my muscle tone and flexibility. It seems like just laying on the couch reading and watching tv all day leads to flabbiness and obesity. I had begun to really hate my body. I've been physically active all of my life and I had been one of those few women who were actually quite happy with their bodies, until this accident happened. So, as soon as it wasn't actually painful to exercise, I started doing sit ups again. I'd tried walking on the treadmill, but that was actually quite uncomfortable. (I now know why it hurt, but didn't understand at the time.) So I just stuck to doing sit ups.

When I first started doing the sit ups, my tailbone was still so sensitive that I sort of did them off center. I was basically putting almost all my weight on my left hip so that there wasn't as much pressure on my tailbone. Naturally, this led to my sit ups being somewhat lopsided. I didn't care. I was exercising again. And it was helping me to feel better about myself even if I really wasn't doing that much. However, as my tailbone became less sensitive, I tried to start doing more balanced sit ups and I noticed that something was seriously wrong.

When I actually distributed my weight evenly between both hips, and did a sit up, as I was in the sitting up position, my right knee was NOTICEABLY higher than my left knee. At first I thought that because I was in the habit of sitting on my left hip, that I was simply not actually distributing my weight evenly. But after several attempts to redistribute my weight evenly so as to even my knees out, I realized that I was actually sitting evenly on both hips, and there was simply something wrong with my right hip that was forcing my right knee up higher. I sort of freaked a little. I wondered if I had actually broken my hip in some way, and that it had healed all wrong and now I was going to have the live the rest of my life with a mangled hip. I kept trying to re-assure myself that there was no way, no matter how good I am at ignoring pain, that I could have been walking around all this time with a broken hip. But I also kept remembering how much trouble I did have walking at first, and how my right leg at times simply refused to do what I told it to.

My husband and DA did their best to re-assure me and I set up a doctor's appointment as soon as possible. My doctor examined me and agreed that there was definitely something wrong with my hip, but that he wasn't sure exactly what it was. He wanted to do an MRI, but we only have catastrophic insurance with a $3000 deductible, so we really couldn't afford that. So we did a series of simple x-rays which reassured me that nothing other than my tailbone was broken. The problem was obviously in the muscles. My doctor then sent me to a specialist/physical therapist to try and figure out exactly what was wrong with my muscles. Turns out that my muscles had been so traumatized by the fall that they basically knotted up and then became so inflamed (swollen) that they couldn't unknot. The muscles in my right buttock and thigh had been continuously flexed for over a year. And what happens when you repeatedly (continuously) flex a muscle? It gets bigger. I now have one ginormous butt muscle.

Even the physical therapist wasn't quite sure what to do to try and fix things. He asked me to do some stretches and things, but I still had enough left over flexibility that the stretches didn't have the least effect on loosening up my poor butt. He decided to try poking it with electric needles. He wasn't sure that would work because the electric needles are actually used to cause the muscles to contract, but he thought that if we made the muscles contract even more, then, when we turned the electric needles off, the muscles might actually relax.

He didn't use the electric needles during my first visit, he just did some heat treatments and sent me home. He wanted to do some research and think about things before actually trying the electric needles. On my second visit, he first had me do some exercises that dealt with balance and theoretically worked the affected muscles in some beneficial way. Then he took me behind a privacy curtain and had me lay face down on a table. He then proceeded to stick a bunch of acupuncture type needles into various places on both buttocks. Though he did place more in my right buttock than my left. The needles were hooked to an electric current somehow. I really couldn't see much from my position. And he turned the electricity on. He adjusted the current by asking me when it was just on the edge of painful. Then he left the electric needles to do their thing for about 10 minutes.

After it was over, my butt was pretty sore for the rest of that day and somewhat sore the next, but on the third day, it actually seemed like it had helped. Of course, ever since I found out that the problem was overly tense butt muscles, I'd been trying to consciously relax my butt and that may have been helping as well. Because of my dance, meditation and martial arts background, I am actually pretty good at making my muscles relax on demand. However, I'd never really focused on my butt muscles before.

Anyway, over the next few weeks, my butt did seem to feel better. I could sit for longer periods of time before it became too painful. And in general, my body was beginning to feel better. I added push ups and squats to my exercise routine and I can now walk on the treadmill even though I still have to be careful with that, and if I feel my butt muscles tensing up, I stop. My body is finally beginning to trim down a little, although I am still pretty unhappy whenever I look in a mirror. But I will keep exercising and sooner or later, I'll get a healthy body back. However, my right buttock will probably always be bigger than my left. (And yes, having uneven buttocks definitely affects my riding. More about that in the next post.)

I really should go back and get another treatment with the electric needles. I'm sure it would help. I just have to make the time.

And next time I get injured, I'm going to a doctor right away. I promise.

How Do You Rate Your Pain?

Yeah, I've been getting that question a lot as I've been seeing doctors and physical therapists who are still trying to fix me from my fall. It's not an easy question to answer.

Make sure you go to the XKCD site so you can read the mouse-over text. (Drag your mouse over the comic and a little rectangle with text should show up. If it doesn't show up at first, drag your mouse way off to the side then bring it back over the comic and stop.)