Just Some More Stuff

Our granddaughter Rachel spent a few days with us last week, her brother was still in school, so she got to come out here all by herself. There is another family out here and their grandson is a classmates of Rachel's, their place is on the pond and Rachel has become good friends with all their grand kids so we spent a lot of time over there with the kids playing and swimming in the pond. After about three hours in the pond the kids had lunch and then I took them down to the pool for about 2 ½ hours, a short break for dinner and they were back in the pond for another two hours, guess who was ready for bed around 8:30pm, ME, Rachel wanted to stay up and watch movies.

A few ladies on our road have been here for a few years and have fantastic gardens growing, a couple of them are thinning them out and have told Cathy to come by and grab what ever she wanted, so she's getting here exercise carrying buckets of flowers back to the lot and getting them planted. She's got the place looking pretty good and homey right now but says that she has a lot more to do before she's satisfied.

A few pictures of the flowers, the garden still needs to fill in a bit, but you can only do so much. By next summer she;s going to be having to thin it out.


















Mean while I decided that with my Chiropractor being a hour and a half drive away I better find a local one, found one about a 20 minute drive away. If you use a chiropractor then you know that they normally have goofy hours, a few hour morning session then a few hours in the afternoon but different depending on the day of the week. My new doctor is part of a clinic and they are open from 8am to 6pm everyday which is going to be great.

Now I've had back pain since my early 20's and have seen dozens of doctors about it, after a few vehicle crashes when I was with the police department they sent me to specialist and nobody has ever figured out the source of the pain. I started seeing a chiropractor on my own in my late 20's and that has been the only thing that has relived the pain when my backs gone out. Today she started out with X-rays of the top half of the spine and another of the lower half, as we were looking at the X-rays, which are now digital, she hit a few buttons and stitched the 2 images into one large picture. She started at the top and working her way down my spine she pointed out different things then she got to the lumbar area which is where my problem is located. She started counting the 5 lumbar vertebra's, the problem was she counted to 6, after 40 years of doctors and specialist she is the first one to notice that I had a birth defect and have a 6th lumbar vertebra. She called it a transition vertebra and the little wings that stick out each side, I forget what she called them, have attached themselves to the hip bone, so instead of being somewhat free floating the 6th vertebra moves with the hip and that is what has caused me all my problems over the years.

When I was younger the muscles surrounding that area held everything in place for the most part, but since I've retired, gotten fat and lazy the muscles have lost their tone and don't support it like they used to. Guess I have two choices one, lose about 50 lbs and get back into my playing shape or two, get lazier and do no type of physical activity at all and just lie around. Damn, I'm going to have to give this some long serious thought.

After my visit to the Chiropractor yesterday I felt so good I stopped at Home Depot on the way home and picked up some lumber and when I got home I framed in the addition to the shed, of course this morning I could barely get out of bed. Some people just never learn!