Theodora Elucubrare

I was off work for illness yesterday (about which there is more to be said, but mostly along the miserable tightrope of not genuinely wanting a serious illness, but wanting there to be something tangibly wrong so that something can be done about it, instead of a general miasma of feeling generally physically awful settling on and around me) and R --- n had to be at work at 6 am, so we missed our morning exercise, but when he got home he cajoled me into going to the gym, and it was, I hate to report, wonderful, though I'm worried about i) pushing myself too hard because I know what I used to be able to do; ii) him pushing himself too hard to try to keep up with me; and iii) that I'm not doing enough because it feels too easy;

but since it is 60 degrees Fahrenheit here, and the pool is right there, I went in after the workout, and the pool is outdoor, unheated, and very lightly, if at all, chlorinated, so even though it's tamed water it had some of that feeling of breaking ice, a crispness throughout your head, that you get when you've jumped into a very cold lake and broken the surface;

and I still haven't made a lasting truce with my body, but for a moment it was all right.