Posts

Posted on

Books In Your Pants

Someone started this up on Twitter and I had a little too much free time on my hands…

The Dark Tower In Your Pants
The Secret In Your Pants
Genius In Your Pants (which I dedicated to someone)
Much Ado About Nothing In Your Pants
The Fountainhead In Your Pants
Big Trouble In Your Pants
Catch-22 In Your Pants
Life, The Universe and Everything In Your Pants
Napalm & Silly Putty In Your Pants
Desperation In Your Pants
Moby Dick In Your Pants (too easy, but I wrote it anyway)
The Sound And The Fury In Your Pants
The Turn Of The Screw In Your Pants
Something Wicked This Way Comes In Your Pants
Inferno In Your Pants
The Divine Comedy In Your Pants
I Rant, Therefore I Am In Your Pants

Posted on

The circumstances had to be just right

Well, the results of my PT appointment weren’t what I’d hoped, but given the nature of what happened during the game yesterday, it’s not like I had high hopes to begin with.

As soon as I got there, I told Chad (the physical therapist) that I had a question unrelated to my shoulder. He didn’t know about the knee surgery, so the first thing he did was have me lie down and bend my knees so he could pull and push my legs in different directions. The ACL graft and knee structure are about as symmetrical as they can get, which meant there wasn’t an obvious reason for the right one to lock up like it did.

His best guess: When I got hurt, there was a slight tear in my meniscus along with the torn ACL. Since it was slight, the doc didn’t trim anything off since the pad between your knee bones doesn’t grow back. It’s possible that the tiny flap moved in just the right (or wrong) direction to start getting pinched between the bones. As soon as that happened, the muscles locked up to protect it, thus preventing the tear from getting worse as well as allowing my body to tumble to the ground.

It’s a feasible explanation and doesn’t rule out the possibility of a repeat performance. I’m willing to take that chance—something as simple as this isn’t going to keep me off the soccer field—but if my knees become totally symmetrical and both start locking up at random times, Chad may have to come up with a new best guess.

Posted on

Thank God for physical therapy tomorrow

Because I have some questions.

I’ve been going to PT because of a strained rotator cup in my left shoulder (compliments of the car rollover). My next appointment is tomorrow, so I’ll be able to tell the therapist what happened this afternoon and maybe he’ll have some ideas. I sure don’t.

I was playing soccer—absolutely gorgeous outside, 73 degrees and sunny—even though I’m still a little beat up. My knee is okay, but I feel an occasional tweak when I twist the wrong way. I move, the tweak goes away, the game continues, no big deal. This wasn’t a tweak. I don’t know what it was. I do know that there was no popping or tearing sensation, so while it might be sore, I’m not worried about severe damage.

It was almost the end of the game, I had been running around all over the field and was sprinting forward to try and keep the ball from going out of bounds. You all know how your legs move when you run: push off with one leg, bring your other thigh up and extend your lower leg, put your foot down on the ground to push yourself forward again, repeat as necessary.

This time, I pushed off with my left leg, brought my right thigh up and started to extend my leg. Then my knee reached about a 120 degree angle and said, “That’s far enough!” It just stopped moving. Momentum + no foot to land on = Shawn falling to his arms and knees + panicky teammates.

It took me a moment to recover (no screaming and writhing around in pain, thankfully), then I got up and hobbled a couple steps to reach the sideline. From there, it was a long walk around the field to the other side. When I got there, people were asking me what happened and I didn’t know anything beyond the fact that I fell.

After talking to the physical therapist, I hope I’ll have an answer. An answer and an assurance that it won’t happen again. If not, I might have to avoid what I did after soccer this afternoon: bowling. I opted out this time because of my knee, but if it could lock up at any time (say, while I’m striding up toward the lane with a 16-pound ball attached to my fingers), I might have to worry about more than just a strained rotator cuff.

Posted on

Blog under construction, Part II

I finally got all the old entries posted (I hope) from back in 2006-07. Thusly and therefore, if you want to read some “new” material over the next couple hours/days/weeks, flashing back to that period of time will be a good place to look. (Some of them may have dead links—they try to send you to websites that no longer exist—but I didn’t want to mess with the original material too much.)

Alas, my work is not done. I’m trying to trim down the list of categories, then add tags to a bunch of the entries so it’s easier to find specific things (e.g., labeling Beauty and the Geek entries by season instead of just keeping them clumped together). It feels like I’m making good progress, so I’m hoping I’ll have good results when I’m done, too.

Posted on

Blog under construction

I’m making more changes beyond playing with the theme this time around. For starters, I’m finally reposting the entries from Feb ’06 to Feb ’07. I saved them all onto my computer when I first wrote them on shawnbakken.com, but for some reason, I didn’t get that entire year’s worth of material on here.

Second, I’m going to play with the categories a little and add some tags to make it easier to surf through entries to find various topics. Even I don’t know the different kinds of posts that are in the Blatherings category and I’m the one who made it.

That may be the extent of the changes, but getting it all finished could take a while. Thankfully, I’m between classes at Augsburg, so it won’t be interfering with classwork. I’ve got the next couple days free to use at my discretion and this stuff has been on my plate for a while. Hope you enjoy the final result when it’s finished. (I hope I do, too.)

Posted on

Do you have any bumper stickers on your car?

I got a summons for jury duty back in February, notifying me that I was going to be on call for two weeks starting on March 28th. (Dakota County has a phone-in system and people are divided into groups so they don’t have everyone drive to the courthouse every day for two weeks.) I’ll admit, I was concerned about it. Continue reading “Do you have any bumper stickers on your car?”