My words are gone to the darts...? Whatever.

Hidely-ho!

It's been a pretty quiet summer with lots of house arrest while the pooch recovered from two knee surgeries. That put me home quite a bit, but I managed to complete the August geocache 31 in 31 challenge - a cache a day every day for a month. I think Nance and I ended the month with over 50 finds, so all in all, a neat experience. Not one I'm eager to repeat since you're forced to work around regular life and some days you find yourself using your 18 spare minutes of the day to stand in the pouring rain, looking for a tiny magnet hidden somewhere on a giant memorial gun, and wondering why the heck you're not at home having a nice glass of wine. More fun than not, though.

We've been caching with renewed interest this summer, and I've brought my total finds to over double what it was at the start of the year. In addition to slogging around town looking for tiny hides, we found a few in PEI and Quebec so it was neat to grab those provincial profile souvenirs.

You'd think that the forced caching would mean I've been more active than usual, but when you have to get a cache a day, you tend to pick sure things - the ones you know won't take hours to find. So, all in all, I've been less active and my body is very aware of it. I've been low level symptomatic for a bit now (random numbness, limbs falling asleep much easier than normal, very heat intolerant, blah+blah), so I'm back on the activity wagon and have been trying to get moving again. It'll be that much easier once we get the go ahead to increase the yellow hound's activity level too. Hopefully we'll get the green light late this week! Fingers crossed. 

This whole "dog destroyed 2 ligaments" summer has had silver linings and the biggest plus has been that Abbey is loving being handled more. With months and months of massage, range of motion exercises, ice and heat compresses, she has learned to loooove being rubbed. It may sound strange for a dog, particularly a goofy lab, but she was never one for physical affection and we had to clicker train her into accepting head touching when she was younger. So, when I'm sitting next to her and she goes belly up and whomps her massive tail as a request for tummy scratches, I have to admit that my heart gets a big squeeze. 

In other life news, work has been good. Busy. Challenging. New perspective. Being symptomatic hasn't had an effect on that side of things, thankfully. I'm not sure how I'll cope if and when that ever happens. I know cog fog (receptive dysphasia - difficulty in comprehending communication) can be a career killer for many with MS, but I have none of that unless I am completely exhausted. I do, however, have a sprinkling of expressive dysphasia from time to time. If you're not familiar with it, it's this odd little quirk (actually brain damage, but let's call it a quirk for the sake of my own comfort) that makes me say words I don't mean. I may try to say "pencil" but "table" comes out. Or I may ask Nance if she's seen my "handle" when I mean "brush". The dog's "tail" is a "wing". (Sidebar: can you imagine if lab retrievers could fly?) It's a really weird feeling, but I can see the humour in the situation most of the time and N will joke about it in a way that works for me. It mostly happens with single or double syllable nouns. It has happened a few times when out with friends and I haven't bothered to explain it yet. It usually gets a laugh and is dismissed. I'm not sure if anyone realizes it's an MS thing or not and I really don't care to make every slip up an education session. If you have noticed my word replacement, that's what's going on. I can honestly say that I mind it a lot more on the phone than in person. For some reason, it's easier to let it go and laugh about it when the listener is in the room. Thankfully, I don't spend a lot of time in phone communication. It doesn't happen when I type, so I'm lucky in the sort of work I do.

Anyhow, work has been good. Life has been quiet, but good. I'm still chugging along on Avonex injections and they seem to be working okay. I'm another year older and am still feeling great, just don't be surprised if my phone rings and I ask you to pass me the remote.