One thing that hasn’t changed about DC in five years is that traffic still stinks. Truly painful.

I’m in DC for a conference and for once I didn’t travel with a laptop. Since I have my Blackberry I have no problem keeping up with email but surfing Ze Web ain’t exactly easy. It’s also a pain to blog this way, but it beats toting around a laptop so I won’t complain too much.
Really the biggest hassle is that I can’t figure out how to link to anything with the mobile version of Typepad. I’ll bet it’s possible but I’ll be darned if I can figure it out.
FYI, if you’re in DC and are looking for a great dining experience you should check out Fogo de Chao on 11th and PA Ave. It’s a Brazilian restaurant that features 15 cuts of various meats (beef, lamb, pork and chicken) that the servers bring around and slice for you. They keep coming until you tell them to stop and unless you’re a vegetarian you’ll have a hard time asking them to stop. Honestly it’s some of the best meat I’ve ever eaten. Oh, and the salad bar is insane; hearts of palm, asparagus spears on steroids and vegetables I’ve never heard of before. I also highly recommend the dark Brazilian beer that I think was called Xingu. It’s not heavy at all and has a really unique flavor.Of course dinner and drinks tasted even better because the tab was being picked up by a sponsor. Believe me I enjoyed it while I could.

So I was catching up on my reading and I came across a recent post by Helene that mentioned one of those fun online doohickeys that I just can't resist. In this case it's a little quiz that you take and it assigns you a Dewey Decimal number and below is the result for me.  Actually it's one of three results and they're all so random that one of them essentially has to describe you (think horoscope) but it's still fun.  FYI, besides the one below he other two assigned to me were 879-Literatures of Other Italic Languages, and 013-Unassigned.  Here's the one I liked best:

I've had a Google Alert set up for "jon lowder" for a while now, and usually it doesn't return anything other than a blog post I've written or something related to work.  Every once in a while I do get alerts that cause me to sit up and pay attention.  One came last year when I apparently hit a home run in a high school baseball game in Oklahoma or some such place.  Ends up there's a high school kid who's a pretty good athlete that shares my name.

This morning I got an alert that I'd lost my job.  Of course that perked me right up and I quickly clicked through to the article referenced in the alert.  It appears that there's another fella with my name who's about five years younger than me and living in Colorado.  He lost his job over the summer and he was being interviewed on CNN about the presidential election.  So, while I feel for my namesake I'm glad to know that I have my job for at least another day.

As I wrote a couple of posts ago I recently managed to damage my index finger while assembling an incredibly easy to put together piece of furniture.  As a result I’m under doctors orders to keep the damaged finger clean, dry and splinted in order to speed the healing.  Since the finger is on my right (dominant) hand I’ve discovered that’s it’s a royal pain in the butt to live one’s life with your finger in the air.

First of all it’s almost impossible to do anything quickly.  Ever tried to brush your teeth with your off hand?  It ain’t easy.  I tried to use my right hand to do it while keeping my finger in the air, but poking myself in the eye at 6:00 a.m. cured me of that.  I won’t discuss another, uh, grooming matter that’s difficult to do with your off hand, but suffice it to say that it sets one off kilter if you know what I mean.

While I was struggling with my personal grooming it occurred to me that I should have forced myself to live left handed for a week when my kids were toddlers.  I would have been SO much more sympathetic to their efforts at brushing, wiping and dressing.  I remember being very impatient with them and it never dawned on me that maybe they were so much slower than I wanted them to be because they’d had about 1/1000th the experience I had and their little muscles weren’t exactly coordinated yet.  I’m thinking that maybe one of the things they should teach expecting parents at those God awful birthing classes is that when the kids enter the toddler stage the parents should spend a minimum of a week living without use of their dominant hands so that they can be empathetic with their children.

I’ve also been pondering my finger as a metaphor.  If my life has slowed down with my finger literally stuck in the air, then it stands to reason that I am slowed down when I constantly keep my finger in the air figuratively speaking.  Does it really matter who said what about which presidential candidate?  Do I really need to pay attention to all the windbags out there telling me that the end of the world is ‘nigh?  Really I don’t.  Always trying to see which way the prevailing winds of public opinion are blowing is a suckers bet, and I think I’ve tended to take that bet too often.  I’m thinking that the time has come to tune out the noise and concentrate on what matters; family, friends, job, community.  If I do that then the rest should take care of itself.  Besides, I need all my concentration to learn how to live left handed.

So last week I posted about playing soccer again for the first time in over 20 years.  Yesterday was the last game of the season and once again I started out playing goalie.  I had one save, but for the most part we dominated the action and kept the ball on the other end of the field.  In the second half the guys let me play in the field and all went well for the first few minutes.  In fact I got an assist when I crossed the ball from the right wing and Wayne was able to head it home for our first goal.  Twenty minutes later I was playing defense and went to cut to my right (off my left foot) when I heard an ominous pop and went down like a sack of stones.  I also heard a loud, high pitch squeal which I quickly realized was coming from me.  I quickly squelched it, but the damage was done to my ego.

I was done for the day for sure, but I wasn’t so sure I wasn’t going to be done for several months at a minimum.  I was going to just go home and ice it, but Celeste came to pick me up from the field and she talked me into going to the emergency room.  We headed down to Davie Hospital in Mocksville which is a 1/2 hour drive vs. the 10 minute drive to Forsyth Medical Center, but there’s never a wait there and it has the advantage of being considered an urgent care unit until 10 p.m. which means that it’s billed at a lower rate than an emergency room.

Within 5 minutes of arrival I was done with paperwork and had a nurse taking my history and vitals, and within 15 minutes I was lying on a table with a young doctor manipulating my knee in all kinds of unnatural ways.  I was heartened by the fact that he looked like he’d played football or some similar sport in his day (he had the look of a halfback about him) so he was probably familiar with the concerns of a middle-aged weekend warrior.  After examining my knee, then sending me for x-rays and then re-examining my knee he informed me that the "integrity" of my knee was very strong, hence the reason my knee is not qualified for public office, and he said he thought I’d gotten off lucky. He suspects a "Grade 1" i.e. minor tear of my LCL, maybe a little worse, and said that he’s almost certain that I have a non-surgical recovery in my future.  I told him that the only negative of this news is that I now consider myself a huge wuss for squealing like a stuck pig over a "minor" injury.  He did his best to reassure me that I’m not a wuss, but I sensed that he truly thought I was.

So I’m off my feet for a few days, with my leg elevated and orders to keep my knee iced today and maybe tomorrow.  Once again I’m becoming intimate with a bag of frozen vegetables; my brother will remember my stories involving a certain surgical procedure 12 years ago that required I keep a bag of frozen succotash in my lap for a couple of days and I’m sure he’d happily recount it for you.  This time I’m feeling the cooling love of frozen peas.

Hopefully I’ve dodged a bullet and will be back to no good in a month or two.  If the doc’s wrong then I’ll be seeing an ortho in a week or two and we’ll take it from there.

Silver lining: I have a legit reason for being a couch potato for a couple of days.

So I joined up to play in an over-40 soccer league.  I’m thinking, "Hey, I’m on the younger end of that spectrum so how bad can it be?"  I played the first couple of games and discovered how truly out of shape I am.  Since I haven’t played competitive soccer in over 23 years and I’ve put on more pounds than I’d like to admit, those 40 yard sprints ain’t to easy to recover from.  So this week when they asked me to play goalie I thought, "Hey, why not?  At least I won’t feel like I’m gonna pass out after five minutes."

Sunday I stepped into goal and little did I know that the team we were facing was a perennial power in the league.  Thus I found myself flopping around like a fish on land as I went after shots, crosses, through balls, etc.  I really enjoyed it, but yesterday when I woke up I felt like someone had beat me with a 2×4. Then on top of that I got hit with a mild case of the flu bug which engendered me not venturing too far from the facilities all day long.  By last night I had the shakes something fierce and all I could do was lie in bed under several blankets with a heating pad on my lower back.

Thankfully a good night’s sleep seems to have cured all that ails me, with the notable exception that I’m still over-40 and wondering why I can’t party like its 1984.