(from late October – needed very little doing to it..not sure why I didn’t post it back then)

They say you can’t cure stupid.

You can’t really cure muscle ache either, but you can live with it. Usually.

I’m learning, slowly, how to move without yelping.

I’m also learning to live with stupid.

***

I spent Saturday reorganising my furniture and planting my balcony boxes. That involved, respectively, tugging and pushing and heaving sacks of compost in and out of the car and up the stairs to my flat.

I spent Sunday cleaning and reorganising xDB’s aquarium*. That involved stretching and pulling and scrubbing and heaving waterlogged wood.

I am incredibly unfit.

I don’t remember ever being as unfit as I am at the moment, unless you count 6 months ago, where I was almost exactly as unfit, but a few kilos heavier.

Whatever.

The weekend of “strenuous exercise” meant that this morning I crawled out of bed and hobbled down the stairs where I fell onto a chair and refused to move.

Eventually I had to. Needs must, work called and all that..

I hobbled out to the car and drove an hour and a half across Berlin to my flat. I needed to feed my fish (I hadn’t planned to stay the night so I hadn’t arranged for anyone to feed them). I also needed to change out of my aquarium washing clothes and into something work-worthy. And I needed to do it fast. I was already late for work when I pulled into the yard.

5 minutes later I was back out in the hall, ready to head to the workshop.

<click>

Was there ever a more ominous noise than the door shutting at the exact same moment as you realise you don’t have your key?

Argh.

Then I brightened up. All was not lost. I have a spare door key in my car.

My car key was on the wrong side of the door, but since moving out of Berlin I hardly ever lock my car if I’m not going to be away from it long, like the minute and a half it takes to carry shopping upstairs and come down for the next lot. I live in a fairly rural place, compared to say, central Berlin, or even where xDB lives, and I have a parking space behind my house (off the road). There’s never much worth stealing in it, and it’s old enough not to be worth anything in its own right so I kind of assume it’ll still be there after 5 minutes.

This morning I’d locked it. I must have still been in Berlin-mode.

Argh..

My bike, luckily, was still outside from my last trip.

My landlord had a spare key for my flat from when he was doing some renovation work. Not that I could phone to ask him to bring it over because my phone had died.

I went to his office instead. He was out somewhere, but his secretary was in. She unfortunately couldn’t find the key, but she did lend me her coat which was kind of her 🙂 I’d left mine in the car. She couldn’t do much more than that. Unfortunately she’s at least a size smaller than me, so I couldn’t do it up or stretch my shoulders, but it was at least warmer than nothing ;).

She also asked one of the other employees if he had any gloves.

“Do you have any gloves?”

“Umm… Only filthy, sweaty and gross work ones.. What do you want them for?”

“Jesska’s locked herself out..”

He was completely bewildered and it was difficult to explain the connection without making everything more complicated, and I didn’t really fancy wearing his gloves anyway if they were as gross as he said they were.

***

I cycled to work and back in the drizzle.

I don’t like drizzle, although it was probably better than a downpour or a blizzard. I am most definitely a fairweather cyclist. Besides, I could only just about walk, and all movement hurt. Cycling wouldn’t have been on my list of ways to spend my morning. But I didn’t have a lot of choice.
I’d only cycled to work once before. It had been sunny and I’d cycled slowly, along the river and along a main road into town. I’d had my phone to guide me. This time I had no helmet and no gloves and no battery life left on my phone. I’d decided last time that I needed to find a new route because the main road was scary but I hadn’t really thought about it since and certainly hadn’t cycled it. I didn’t want to use the same route as before because cycling through Berlin on the road with no helmet felt recklessly irresponsible.

I set off along the river, with a plan to choose smaller roads parallel to the main road I’d ridden along previously. This proved to be a better idea in theory than in practice.

Yes. I got lost.

After cycling round in circles for a while I found myself on the road I usually drive down.

There’s no official cycle path for most of it, at least in one direction, so I rode a lot of the way on the pavement. Illegally because I’d rather be illegal than dead.

***

My landlord was still at work when I got home, so I parked my bike and went for a walk round the fields behind my house. That was the perfect setting for an “important phone call” involving long convoluted histories of he said she saids. A walk is the best background occupation for such conversation.

… 2 ½ hours later …

Once I finally got back and picked the key up from my landlord, he suggested he come back to the flat with me to fit the smoke alarms he’d been meaning to put up since I moved in….. Eeek! <Insert slight panic> Luckily he decided against it, in favour of coming an hour later. That gave me an hour to make the place presentable. Which I did. Instead of collapsing into a small heap.

And that was the end of a very busy day…
* It still has some of my fish in it..