Happy Appendixaversary

A year ago to the day, my son had his appendix out.  We drove to the Urgent Care Clinic only to find it was not open until 2 PM (huh?) and so we drove down the freeway to a different Urgent Cafe Clinic, which turned out to be a good decision since instead of ruling out appendicitis, they ruled it in and wheeled him over to the hospital side and later that night, into surgery.

He handled the entire situation with good humor and cheer–except for the next day when he could barely stand upright and creep to the bathroom.  Then it was less fun.

Anyway, I only really know that today is the appendixaversary because Facebook told me so.  I love that “On This Day” feature of Facebook and not just because it reminds me of the days when my daughter was young and still thought I was The Best Mom Ever.  The picture yesterday was when she was four.  Well, here.  Just look.

In other news, I am working on increasing my fitness and so I started wearing my Fitbit and tracking my steps again.  “They” (the experts) say that we should all be walking 10,000 steps a day.  My baseline, before I started going for walks, was more like 3,000 steps a day.  I added 1,500 steps a week until I reached the magical 10,000 steps per day goal.

I am super mad because after a solid two and a half weeks of hitting 10,000 steps a day, I forgot to get up and pace around the house for a few minutes the other night and at 12:30 AM, I remembered but then it was too late and I had only 9,673 steps for the day.  (I know, this is boring.  But I have a story.)

The story is this.

A couple of days ago, I was walking around my favorite trail.  It loops around a park and has wide paths.  I was about halfway done, so I’d been walking about 20 or 30 minutes and was happily listening to a podcast and suddenly, a kamikaze bee flew into my chin, near my lip and stung me.

I brushed it away from my face in a panic and accidentally yanked my headphones from my ears.

Then I heard it buzzing at the back of my head, so I smacked myself in the head over and over again, trying to kill the bee or at the very least, get it away from me.  I started to freak out, thinking maybe it was caught in my hair.  All I could hear was the buzz, buzz, buzz and soon I was slapping myself in the head with both hands.

And the buzzing continued, so I began running uphill to get away from the bee while continuing to hit myself in the head with both hands.  At some point, my hair came completely loose from its hairband and the buzzing stopped and so I stopped, too, and caught my breath and rued the loss of my hairband because now my hair was in complete disarray, fuzzy and stuck to my sweaty face.

And that, my friend, is what they refer to as “High Intensity Interval Training.”