Most evenings I turn on the computer and I immediately have an idea (at least) about how I’ll start the day’s dispatch. Not so much so tonight. I stood for a while thinking and again drew (with crayons) a blank. A rare event.

I thought, well, common threads now seem to be 1. The horses. 2. Squalor Holler. 3. My injury. 4. The current political scene 5. The BLBP and the day’s events.

Boring. No wonder my sister Eleanor no longer reads what I write. Well, maybe she looks at the photographs. We have something in common, call it mutual DNA. Once I finish writing a dispatch, I never go back and reread it. Never.

So what’s of interest to me today? The injury. This is a good way to start with this dispatch. My hip was bothering me this morning, so I took two Ibuprofen and did some body work before heading to town. This turned out to be the winning combination. I walked upright all day and had no intense pain.

At the hotel, Natalie, a volunteer, is a retired doctor. I told her the symptoms and she first said that I needed to have an MRI. I didn’t say that I don’t like pre-packaged food. I instead listened as she continued on and said she didn’t think the problem is in my hip, but rather, in my lumbar vertebrae – “maybe this is a nerve problem, caused by a slipped or a herniated disk.”

Natalie made it sound as if getting an MRI is something that people do regularly. Me, I’d just as soon forestall this, since it’s expensive. And lying inert in a closed in tube doesn’t appeal to me either. As a kid, I feared many things, one of them was getting polio and then put in an iron lung. No kidding, the thought of spending my life in one of those things actually terrified me. This was after the post war polio epidemic – seeing photos scared me even more, perhaps as much as the thought of being buried alive.

Natalie is not a listener, so I didn’t tell her any of this. Instead, I listened to her, eager to get as much feedback as possible about my situation.

Right now, because I’m not in any pain, I am feeling optimistic. This could be why, when I got home, I got Raudi out and went for a short ride. I was, in a manner of speaking, testing the waters, in order to see if I was okay. And I was. Odd, that I now realize that her at times being pacey is really hard to deal with.

We had a good ride in a light rain. I says at the Palmer Lions Club meeting that I’d rather live in Palmer than in Palm Springs. This is all I said. I don’t know if the elder Lions got it, that it’s cool here, but hot there.

There, I did it. It took some time because today there were several lengthy pauses.

Next: 195. 7/17/24: Tyra and Hrimmi Chat while eating evening hay