weekend and stuff

My weekend was pretty nice. I spent Saturday with a couple of friends - we drove up north through the Cascades and bought some fresh peaches and apple cider. We stopped and did a short hike through Deception Falls, which was pretty. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me... I spent most of Sunday relaxing and reading some of Harry Potter (yes, I finally started the last book). Sunday night, one of my friends helped me obtain a free TV, and then I grilled us some salmon with peach chipotle salsa. Yum.

I made myself take it kind of easy this weekend because the side of my knee is starting to bother me a lot again. I mentioned it to one of my physical therapists last Friday, because I noticed it getting worse Thursday night. It swelled up and felt squishy. When I pushed on it, it kind of looked like poking a water bed. My therapist seemed concerned but she said it was just swollen. So I took it easy over the weekend... I went back to PT today (or by now I guess it was yesterday). I had the other therapist, and I mentioned that it was still bothering me. She did a bit of deep tissue massage on my quads and realized that my lateral quads are REALLY tight. She spent about 10 minutes massaging my thigh, and it was ridiculously painful. My thigh has been really tender to the touch ever since I broke my femur (which effectively ripped up all the muscles). So yeah, not fun. She told me I'd feel fine once she stopped massaging, but when she stopped, the pain continued. It hurt pretty bad for the rest of the appointment, even after icing it. It still hurts a lot. I hope it'll start feeling better once the irritation from the massage wears off. I'm a little worried because it feels about as bad as it did when it was at its worst, and then I had to pretty much stop doing any activity for a while to get the pain/irritation back under control. My therapist said she thinks it hurts so much because there are so many factors involved - my quads are tight, my hamstrings are tight, my IT band is tight, my kneecap doesn't move correctly, my tibia doesn't rotate like it should (as she discovered today), my fibula doesn't move, and I have craploads of scar tissue in that area. How frustrating...

Oh, and you know you're in Seattle when you go to your PT appointment and one of the other patients in the gym is a member of a famous band. I probably shouldn't say what band, but it starts with "sh" and rhymes with "pins".

In other news, tomorrow (er, today I guess), I have an advising appointment. I hope I'll be able to kind of figure out what to do with my schedule. I guess people usually don't have their schedules sorted out until after the first week of classes, but hopefully after this appointment I'll have a better idea of what's going on. It's kind of annoying that I don't know my schedule yet, because I'm trying to figure out when I can plan a trip home.

I'm not looking forward to placement tests. For those of you who haven't had the joy of studying for them, it's basically a bunch of theory & history tests to make sure students don't need any "refresher" courses before starting grad level work. It wouldn't be the end of the world if I had to take a refresher course, but it would suck to pay for a class that I've already taken and audit it. I've never been very good at history, so I've been spending most of my time studying that. I'm not going to stress too much about theory, but I think it would be sort of embarrassing if I had to take undergrad-level theory as a theory grad student.

I guess that's about it for now.