18 and life, you got it

It's surgery time for my Nala, as she again has an enlarged anal gland and this time flushing didn't help. It feels to the vet like there's a mass. An irregular mass -- that word is always, always bad in a health context. So we're being referred to a specialist, who will see her for a surgical consultation on Monday at 9AM. That's about as soon as we could possibly hope for. Under the knife she will go, my 18.5-year-old kitty, at some point after that, and probably only then will I find out if the gland contained an abscess, a benign growth or a cancerous tumor.

Watching her jump around between the giant bean bag and the cat condo we recently sprung for, it sure doesn't seem like she's very close to checking out. Surgery is scary though. General anesthesia is bad enough, and surgery can so easily lead to "we didn't get it all" or "we found something else while we were in there".

New coach, creating systems, not partying

It's been a strange day. Bad news in the morning, as posted, but then in the afternoon I saw a new coach for an assessment of my press handstand work -- someone I know from the Toledo world but hadn't worked with professionally before. He's completely confident that I'll get my press, and also gave me a drill that's new to me and feels like a missing link. We're going to work together in a project-based way: I go at my own pace, I do his drills, and when I've improved the critical drill by an inch (that's an inch of hand placement away from the wall, likely to be a several-week project) I go back for round 2. This seems very very good, and non-intrusive in terms of not messing up my existing training.

I also made a lovely sheet of paper with columns for all the fitness benchmarks in this post that I am putting in maintenance mode. I've only fully done one of those things this year so far, but expect I can cross off a couple more tomorrow, and I feel good about that approach too.

Have I mentioned not being able to QUITE shake this horrid virus? Yes, I've been sleeping extra, and I'm happy to be having a low-key weekend of (mostly) catching up on work and stuff. But I'm oddly aware of it being a Big Big Weekend for many people and, in fact, if norwoodbridge were not on a cruise with his family, I'd be at a giant weekend-long party right now... with him, and also seeing the only two people I met in 2016 who I'd actually like to know better. Sigh. I'm know I'm not up for that right now, or the giant science fiction con either, but the contrast between what I could be doing and what I actually, given real life and limits, am doing, is stark just now. I suppose this is minor FOMO.