Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

This started as a comment in elisem's journal:

I had a very outdoors childhood, in some ways. There were two other families with children on our block; we played with the two girls (one in each family) who were near our age all the time. And I'm not sure I was ever in Veronica's house, or in Marie's until her family sold it and were moving out. We were always in and out of each other's backyards: I picked berries in both of their raspberry patches (mine never took well enough to bear). We went sledding together on the hill across the street when it snowed; I'm not sure what else we did in the wintertime, probably spent less time together. We were also frequently in the backyard of our neighbors on the other side, whose children were grown and gone before we moved in: they trusted us not to damage things, and we didn't.

After the Strunks (Marie's family) moved, the new neighbors were first-generation immigrants from China. They didn't know quite what to do with all the plants left behind by the German farm family they'd bought the house from. I was welcome to pick raspberries and gooseberries--they'd never seen either. I never did get the adults to try the raspberries, but I convinced their daughter to, and she liked them. I hope she wound up picking and eating them herself. They eventually cut the cherry tree down, because they weren't eating the fruit and it was attracting teenage boys they didn't know and who didn't ask permission to enter the garden or climb the tree to pick fruit.

It was definitely an urban upbringing: my parents picked that house in part because it was two blocks from the subway station, and I took the subway to school for six years (ages 11 to 17). But we played outdoors. We read a lot, and might do so either in our rooms (or the living room, though TV was a distraction, and my brother would insist on having things like Gilligan's Island on) or out in the backyard.

No wonder I'm thinking that a house like that, with a piece of yard to garden in or just hang out and do nothing with, would be nice.

I overdid it with the leg exercises on Monday, and my groin muscles were still sore when I got up this morning (despite two nights' sleep, and a hot bath yesterday). But I decided to try a mostly upper-body workout this afternoon.

I did a few stretches, cardio, minimal mat work, and two count them two upper-body exercises, the second of which I abandoned after two sets, and headed for the showers.

( the gory details )

That was little enough that if my groin doesn't hurt tomorrow, I can do an almost-complete workout, rather than needing to wait until Friday.