The last time I posted here I mentioned I was trying to get a response from my doctor's office about an X-ray I'd had taken. They finally got back to me, a full seven days after the X-ray was shot, to tell me there was no sign of a fracture. That was nice to know, though I sure would have appreciated getting the information in a more timely fashion. I asked them if the image shed any light on my continued coughing, and they said no. It's now been more than a month since I first got sick, and while I think the coughing is getting ever-so-gradually less frequent, I'm still having some occasional fits of it. It's at its worst when I get up in the morning, when I'm expelling all the gunk that had collected overnight. My friend Rob who rents the little studio apartment in the rear of my building told me that he's been praying for me because he's heard me coughing so much. I genuinely found that touching.
Since learning that I had no broken bones in my chest area I've been easing myself back into some physical exercise. I did a couple of 50-minute paddles toward the end of the week before last, week and paddled for 60 minutes on Tuesday and Friday of this past week. My stamina was probably down a tad, but in all I felt reasonably good in the boat.
I woke up this morning with an inexplicable sharp pain in my left wrist--I don't recall doing anything yesterday that might have caused such an ailment. I went on down to the river hoping for the best, and was relieved to find that I could paddle with no real pain. I did another 60 minutes, and even got to do some barge-wake surfing. The waves had a long wavelength and a small amplitude and seemed to require a bit more speed than I could generate, but I did get a couple of okay rides. The best thing was that I felt good after doing some hard sprints--a sign that maybe I'm getting some stamina back. By the time I finished paddling my wrist seemed to feel somewhat better, so maybe it just needed some exercise to loosen it up.
Wednesday morning I did a 75-minute bike ride. I went out the Greater Memphis Greenline to its junction with the Wolf River Greenway, and then rode down the Greenway to where it makes a loop just south of where it passes under Walnut Grove Road. I traversed the loop and retraced my path back home. I felt like I'd lost a bit of fitness on the bike too, particularly in the last 20 minutes or so when I had almost nothing left in my legs. At least there's plenty of time to get that back.
How is the Mississippi River doing these days? Well, in a post several weeks ago I said that the catastrophic floodwaters in the North Carolina mountains "might have saved the lower Mississippi River from dropping to record-low levels for a third year in a row." And might is the key word here. The lowest Memphis gauge reading ever recorded is -12.04 feet on October 17 of last year. This fall the level had been below -10 feet before the floodwaters brought it up to about 6.5 feet a little over two weeks ago. That's almost a 17-foot rise, coming mostly from a small area in North Carolina. Now that surge of water has moved through, and the level is back down below -8 feet. By the time I got down to the river on Friday my dock was starting to run aground:
The current forecast has the level holding steady for the next couple of weeks, and the hope is that it will stay above super-low levels until the wetter season settles into the Midwest. "Super-low" water makes things tough for the barge-shipping industry, and its struggles can eventually ripple through the greater economy; it also causes damage to our marinas and other infrastructure that local river users depend on.
The weather has been just plain gorgeous lately, with plenty of sunshine. We had our first cool spell of the season in the middle of last week, with the temperature just barely reaching 60 degrees Fahrenheit during the day. But it's warming back up now and we're expected to have highs in the 80s for the next week.
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