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After about 4 or 5 years of only riding my unicycle, I broke my knee last September.

Months of healing and physical therapy and changing seasons later and I am finally exercising again.  But because I am still out of balance strength-wise, I am riding my bicycle this year.  We will see about the unicycle after I get back into balance.

Yes, I can still ride my bicycle.  But there are really some subtle things that you do forget in several years when not riding.  Here's a sampling.

My first rides were on the streets in my neighborhood. Later, on the first day I tried commuting to work on the bike path, I found myself hogging the middle of the path. I was really not confident enough in fine details of steering to ride near the right edge of the path. It has taken a few days of riding the paths to get better about not hogging the middle.

The bike path also challenged me with twisty curves.  Another confidence issue arose with me leaning as far as necessary to make those twisty curves.

Finally, the first couple of rides I invariably shifted the wrong way. Spin! Or else Bog Down! Shifting got better quickly and today on my fourth day of commuting I didn't mis-shift once.

Manuevering confidence is slower to return, but that is moderated by the fact that as my confidence increases, so does my speed, which depresses my confidence.

I'm in a race, strength versus emotional healing. Who will win? I just hope that it isn't gravity who wins. But doesn't gravity always win in the end?

Ah, what a wonderful consumer society we live in.

That means that I got my cheap online glasses yesterday.  They appear to be completely satisfactory for my simple near-sighted prescription.  And they arrived in less than 2 weeks.

Yes, I had to warp them to my face myself, without the benefit of the years of experience that the optician at my local shop has.  I have the disadvantage of having only worn glasses for the last 40 years or so myself.

I will admit to not being greatly pleased with the clip-on sunglasses that I bought with them.  The clips go over the lenses and they are relatively hard to get on without getting gobby fingerprints on them or on my regular lenses.

And I can see the clips. Distracting.

But since the whole purchase was less than 1/6th the cost of my previous, local shop, pair of glasses, I am amply motivated to simply buy a second pair online which is tinted for sunglasses.

New prescription sunglasses.

My inner pennypincher is asking me whether I calculate the savings from buying two pairs for separate purposes against the single purchase I would have made locally, or do I get to calculate it against the total cost it would have been to buy two pairs even though I would never have done that at the 6x price?

It has been a few years since I last updated my eyeglasses prescription.  I haven't noticed any big change, except that my lenses are looking like I use number 6 grit instead of a microfiber cloth to clean them.

But the real reason that I haven't bought new glasses is that, well, to be perfectly honest, glasses are way too expensive, especially new frames.  And I need new frames.

Somehow, I always think of Magoo's Christmas Carol when I'm being a pennypincher, and when eyeglasses are involved, well, there was just no choice.

Regardless, I got my new prescription in writing from my eye doctor, and listened to his horror tales about going to any optical shop except for his.  Still, they were nice enough to measure my inter-pupilary distances for me in addition to the written prescription they had to give me.

Don't think that I'm insensitive to the possible horrors of buying glasses online.  But I can counter most of the horror stories with equivalent problems dealing with local shops.

I did read a bunch of reviews while I was planning this escapade and after discounting the ends of the review spectrum ("+5 marvelous!!!!" and "My glasses were destroyed in the mail--never buy from these guys...") I was left with a couple of online shops that appeared to be what I would describe as regular businesses.

So yesterday, I placed an order.  Now we wait.  It could be 2 to 3 weeks before this test of online eyeglasses reaches the next hurdle.  ("It took over two weeks to get my glasses!  Never buy from these guys!") [My counter is that it has never taken less than 1 week even from local shops.]

When glasses are a huge investment, I end up playing silly games like getting my old lenses tinted for sunglasses so that I can have only slightly outdated prescription sunglasses.  But these days, my local shop is telling me, "Oh, your old lenses can't be tinted.  They aren't made out of this special plastic that we would have charged extra for." That's funny.  I distinctly recall telling them that tinting these when I got my next prescription was exactly what I intended to do.  So why didn't you tell me about the plastic back then? I'm sure that it's only my conspiracy theory generator telling me that they made up this rule later to have another way to ding me.

If these online glasses turn out to be acceptable at 1/6th the price, I will be perfectly willing to buy a second pair that is tinted for sunglasses.  And probably a third pair as a backup.  And I'd still have saved half of the cost.

Tune in again near the end of March.

If that isn't a leading title, I don't know what is.

After a long stressful week, I was riding from work back to my car on my unicycle.  (Because the best exercise is one that you enjoy doing.)  It was a beautiful September afternoon, but something went wrong and the next thing I know I'm watching my glasses dig into my face.  I hit the ground like a 200 pound sack of cement.  On cement.

Cue the crowd of helpful strangers.

Well, I walked the rest of the way back to my car with a nice pair of women escorting me to make sure I was all right.  My right knee hurt a little, but my big toe was really painful.  Driving home was interesting but not really difficult.

I spent the weekend walking carefully around the house.  There wasn't any real pain, but my knee was well swollen.  I drove in to work on Monday and made an appointment to see my doctor to find out how bad it was.

(Health care aside: coverage in the U.S. encourages us to think "I shouldn't go to the doctor unless I am incapacitated."  That is probably detrimental to our overall health.)

The X-ray tech got googily-eyed and told me she was going to take another picture from the front.  (Digital X-rays are a massive improvement.)

Over the next half an hour, nearly everyone in my doctor's office popped in to ask me how much pain I was in. I was getting tired of explaining that it is NOT a high pain threshold if you are not in pain. None of them could imagine that someone with three kneecaps could possibly not be in excrutiating pain.

A rush of medical appointments later and I was in surgery two weeks after the accident to screw my right kneecap back together.

By this time, my brother Stanley had already called me "a special knees child" and claimed that I had an unfair advantage when playing "one patella, two patella."

And I was now in a straight leg brace and couldn't even sit behind the wheel of my car.  Let me tell you, that is no way to live.  Thank goodness, my sister Nina (pronounced "9-ah") could stay with my during my recovery.  Nothing works well when your leg can only be completely straight.  Can't drive a car.  Can't sit in any chair that doesn't have a foot rest. Can't sleep well because the brace wants to hold onto the sheets. And don't get me started about stairs and living in a tri-level house. Everything you need is on a different floor.

After 4 weeks straight legged, I finally got to start bending, 10 degrees more each week.  It was still a few weeks more before I could sit in the driver's seat.

And then there was physical therapy.  4 weeks without using your thigh and guess what? It is gone.  The word "atrophed" is barely enough.  PT went well because I had good range of motion from the start. PT's first goal is to re-establish range of motion.  Then they can start helping you rebuild strength.

15 weeks after the surgery I finally got released from the leg brace altogether.  I walked with a cane for another few weeks while I continued to build strength.

It is now 7 weeks after removing the brace and I'm still doing exercises to build strength.  I really don't recommend breaking your knee at all. Because I am very much aware of the fact that my recovery went extremely well.  I expect that I will be aware of the imbalance in my legs' strength for months to come.

So I've come to the end and still haven't mentioned my big toe.  The toenail was completely black, but otherwise felt fine.

"Oh, you are going to lose your toenail!" Everyone had to tell me their horror story.

I lucked out again. I still have the black toenail, but clean new growth is pushing the black forward.  It's only about 3 millimeters of maybe 12-15 which indicates that it will probably be about a year before the blackness grows out.

I have another sign of the disease that is aging.

I normally exercise by doing part of my commute into work by bicycle. By selecting my parking spot, I can adjust how far I bicycle up to and rarely including parking in my own garage. I do this every weekday for 10 rides per week.

I've done this for years, ramping the distance up over a month or so until I hit a goodly amount and a sustainable rate of exercise. This is usually 2x 15 minute hard rides 5 days per week.

This year, I've been riding since mid-April. But those Friday commutes have been tough.

Last week, I had a flat tire Wednesday morning and missed a commute. I fixed it, but Thursday had a dreary rain all day. Then I took Friday off from work, with the best intentions in the world to make up for missed rides on the weekend. It didn't happen.

So, bright, sunny and warm this morning and out came the bike. I cranked like a demon, shaving a full minute off my time from the same parking space, with less apparent effort. Ahhh.

I just needed more recovery time. Dang. I'm going to have to change my exercise habits to build more recovery time into it. I'm just not bouncing back as well as I used to.

Now I've got to find out whether my body wants a 4-3 pattern or something more complicated like a 2-1-2-2.