The agony of the hands...

Sometimes feels like defeat.

I apologize to my faithful blog readers. I am suffering from a severe case of sudden onset carpal tunnel syndrome, (socts - if you like acronyms - though I made that up) and it is excruciating. I am not sure exactly why it has happened so suddenly. I have worked at the same workstation for several years with no ill effects, but now, no amount of adjusting my computer, mouse, chair, keyboard, etc. seems to alleviate the constant pain that throbs from my thumb and the base of my wrist up to my elbow. And the pain persists even when I am not at the computer. To be completely accurate, the pain did start gradually a few weeks a go, but it was easily ignored. Last week, it went from easy to ignore to unbearable in one agonizing moment.

My husband, an expert in pain and suffering, bought me a great wrist brace and a giant bottle of advil, which both seem to help a little, but given that I sit at a computer for eight hours a day pounding away at keyboard and mouse, they are not enough. Perhaps a full-time masseusse and a bottle of vodka would work better. I'll let you all know.

In the meantime, I am posting this picture that I found last week while walking Max. As I've mentioned many times, our walk takes us along a number of paths around our local grade school and high school. It is an odd phenomenon that I've observed through two late spring seasons now that as the school year winds down, the bike path is strewn not just with spring buds and maple seeds but also with the remnants of desks and lockers, as if students cannot wait to shed the homework and school projects that have weighed them down all year. So it did not startle me to find a poster project, highlighting the life of Johann Sebastian Bach, unceremoniously dumped against a garbage dumpster near the junior high school last week. It had obviously sat out overnight, as the images and photos attached to the board curled at the edges and were discolored by the elements, but I loved what the damage had apparently done to this picture of a violin, so I tore it from the poster and brought it home, to find new life on my blog and in a digital collage that I have yet to create.