Clever phrase involving “knee”

Well, in fact, I can’ think of one right now. “Knee wall,” though that doesn’t make any sense in this context. “I have enormous kneeds”? Anyway.

For those who may have noticed that I haven’t been blathering on about my bike rides lately, it’s because I’ve been hiding the fact that I’ve been laid up for about three weeks now with a terrifically painful knee. I can only figure it came from raking and bagging — the best job on the leaves we’ve done in about 12 years, 80 bags of maple-y joy sent to the curb, and if you were to look at our little yard, you wouldn’t know we’d lifted a finger, because there are still leaves out there. In fact, the wind is blowing dozens of them into my yard right now. Curse you, wind! So, anyway, I somehow wrenched a tendon that I don’t normally wrench, and the pain was really bad for a couple of weeks. I finally got the nerve to try stretching it early last week, and that worked quite nicely at taking the pain down from about an 8 (waking up in the night screaming like a girl) to a 1 (ouch! don’t do that!), and I could once again lift my leg, which had been too painful to contemplate. But the extreme pain kept me off the bike, like a good boy who wants to ski soon, until Thanksgiving morning. The weather was too iffy to ride to my Mom’s, so I just rode around the neighborhood, out to a couple of cemeteries and back home. (It was wet, and my bike is now crusted with crud, which I should clean off today.) And that didn’t bother it at all, so I figured I was well on my way to recovery.

Then yesterday I finished sticking all those labels on all those CDs, and decided it was time to put them in their proper places in my CD albums (I gave up jewel boxes years ago, kids — there just ain’t enough room once your CDs number in the hundreds). Then the project got huge, as I decided to reorganize ALL the CD albums, mix the homemade CDs in the with commercial CDs, rethink how the spoken word and comedy stuff was arranged, and before too long I had hundreds of CDs and booklets out on the floor, and I sat down there, cross-legged, for hours sorting through it all. (I had a couple of alphabetical setbacks along the way.) And, surprise, surprise! When I got up, there was pain, and plenty of it. Idiot. Stretching helped, but it still hurts more today than it did all week. So today, I get to finish this project like an old lady, at the kitchen table.

It’s actually still warm enough to ride (it’s been in the 50s for a couple of weeks, we’ve been blessed), but it’s windy and gray and I really want to be able to go skiing next weekend, so more rest for the knee is in order. Think I’ll take the kids to “The Incredibles” this afternoon, and wrap up the laziest Thanksgiving weekend in memory.