Yesterday was a tough day for me. Mostly because when I got to work it felt as if somebody was driving a very sharp ice pick into my ankle all day long. I honestly wish I was exaggerating about that. My foot was bigtime swollen, too – it looked like the Underdog’s foot in the Macy’s T-Day parade or something (except all red, not white). This is most likely because I’ve been feeling pretty good lately, and have gotten really tired of just sitting on my ass all the time like a fat lazy schlub. So I went up and down the stairs a few times trying to get a tiny fraction of a few things done over the weekend (and maybe because I imbibed just a wee bit more than my quota on Saturday evening – but, hey, I had a good excuse), and did some tractor-type stuff, plowed the driveway out while it was warm (been kind of neglecting it, and the drifting had made it pretty narrow).

My foot was a little stiff in the morning (actually both feet – my right Achilles tendon has been feeling pretty stiff lately, too), but as I’ve been pretty darn good lately (almost as if I was a regular person who could do simple things like walk without pain) and figured things would improve as I loosened up, I didn’t feel a need to bring any ibuprofen to the office with me (bad move). Things got steadily (and rapidly) worse as the day went on.

Normally, it only hurts when I walk (or maybe when I’m trying to sleep) but yesterday there was a sharp constant pain in my ankle (mostly my ankle, though not exclusively) that refused to go away no matter what I did. Thank goodness my office mate wasn’t there, since I had my sock off and was waving my foot all over the place, trying to find a position that made things feel better.

At one point I pulled a couple of gallon jugs filled with water out of my little refrigerator and stuck my foot between them, which did help some, but not enough. Driving home was very unpleasant (not to mention just the walk out to the car) and when I got home I found the dog had left me a very stinky present in the bedroom (which I really wasn’t in the mood to clean up – all I wanted to do was take some ibuprofen and get my foot on ice.

After a couple of hours in snow water, things calmed down a bit, but it was a pretty sleepless night last night (more so than usual, even). If I could figure out how to sleep with my foot in a bucket of ice water, I would.

Thank goodness I’m working from home today and can rest it, but they say there’s snow coming just in time for the Wednesday morning commute, so tomorrow should suck (and if I manage to survive the commute, I immediately have to go to our stupid monthly meeting). Fortunately the wife is off, so I don’t have to worry about her getting to work and the snow really doesn’t bother me all that much – it’s just the idiots out there in my way who don’t know how to drive in it (I think we must have a lot of transplanted Atlantans up here or something).

It appears that I totally missed Groundhog Day the other day. The media must really be slipping – normally there’s nothing more important going on. But I guess not even Punxsutawney Phil can compete with the Super Bowl. It was sunny out in Punxsutawney PA, so I guess that means there’s another six weeks of winter (which is always the case at the beginning of February, which is why I never understood this whole stupid thing). I can’t remember all the way back to Sunday, so I can’t tell you if it was sunny here or not, but I didn’t see any woodchucks popping their little heads out of the ground so I don’t think we’ll be having any early spring.

So now I’m sitting here at home trying to rehab my foot before I have to go back to work tomorrow by keeping it in a bucket of snow water for as long as I can stand it while trying to get some work done. I got a little chilly (which isn’t a surprise, I guess), so I reached over to switch on my electric heater and I thought, “gee, seems like I saw something similar to this in one of those OSHA safety videos they used to make us watch.”

Better to be electrocuted at your desk than to die in the shower or while takin’ a dump like Elvis was, I guess.

Oh well, my water’s warming up. Guess I’d better go grab some more snow.