What I’ve Been Doing Since January

I feel guilty about my three-month blog absence, so I am going to explain where I went after January 19.

Scott’s birthday is February 3. The three weeks in between that time, I spent on his birthday gift, which, since it comes so quickly after our anniversary and Christmas, is kind of a bite in the ass to buy for. It was rainy and gross on January 18, Scott had bought a new hockey stick on January 17, and out of sheer boredom, I somehow convinced him to pose for a photo shoot — with the goal being to take the kind of ridiculous images they use at NHL games to introduce players on the Jumbotron.

The thing was, the photos ended up coming out really well. So well that I got inspired — and decided to use said photos as my birthday gift to him. I wrote an article about him in the style of ESPN the Magazine, hired a graphic designer, and, on February 3, casually presented him with said article printed in full color and tucked inside the most recent issue. He loved it, and JPGs of the spread are below. The text is too small to read, but it’s half-truth (our hockey team was poised to win the league championship, which we did end up winning on February 6) and half-ridiculousness (the paparazzi are mentioned, and the author is R.D. Garcia, which equals Reno Diego Garcia, i.e., our gray cat).

Anyway. Two weeks after his birthday, a new hockey season started, and I made the foolish decision to play in two leagues, which meant I was playing games three nights a week, sometimes two games a night. That ate up a ton of my free time.

That pretty much covers life up until this past Sunday, March 22, when, during my first game of the night, I felt a big pop in my right knee. It didn’t hurt, so I kept playing. Three-quarters of the way through my second game of the night, my thigh and calf basically said to each other, “I’M NOT WORKING TOGETHER WITH YOU ANYMORE,” and I said to Scott, “I think something might be wrong with my knee.” I finished the game, iced the knee, went to bed, woke up the next morning in pain, saw an orthopaedist, got an MRI, was diagnosed with a torn meniscus, and scheduled surgery for May 1.