5/10/26 – Power Combo
Okay! So! This is interesting! Legs are heavier, more stretched out, and my lower abdomen as of last night was waking up like never before! This is really incredible! I can’t wait to do some cardio on the Handcycle and walking with the braces! I have a feeling this combo is going to be amazing for my body and recovery! I need these quads to keep working, kicking in, and overcoming the tight hamstrings! This is perfect work to help my legs get comfortable with extension, let my quads learn their proper place, and help my adductors learn not to be so overpowering!
I’m laying supine right now, feeling my tight hip flexors really trying to learn to melt into the bed. They’re safe. My glutes really just need to fire up! They gotta help stabilize the joint too!
I’m gonna see what I can do for adjusting the backrest today! I really need to get that better dialed in, so I can actually try to work myself to my limits! As opposed to just getting sore, and needing to stop because my neck was sore, back was sore, and I was uncomfortable!
I really want to progress my whole body in extension with this work on the Handcycle! I am feeling all the changes kicking in! Plus, as soon as I got up from the ground and back in the wheelchair, I was already noticing changes in my low back! Which is huge!
Good walk!
5/11/26 – What Do You Do With More Dreams?
Welp, you know what you gotta do…. Now the tricky part is always finding time to incorporate it throughout the day. Ugh.
I slept like absolute shit last night and my body (mostly my low abdomen and hips) are really feeling it this morning. Which sucks. Ugh. I didn’t lay prone last night, before I went to sleep, and it definitely shows. It sucks.
I also feel like I haven’t done morning notes in a while. I really want to see how each day walking and getting cardio in is gonna go! I can feel how the cardio and moving the blood really helps! So I gotta just stack those when I can! I know it’s a lot, but it’s looking good!
I gotta get up because I turned my alarm off and tried to sleep for an extra hour. I probably very much needed that, having to get up 3 times throughout the night and never feeling like I could fall asleep. One day at a time.
I just don’t get why this left side gets so aggravated!?! What is happening inside of those muscles and fascia?!? It just doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense! The CBD balm I tried last night in that area really helps! But why, after it wears off, does it almost feel like my muscles come back tighter and with a vengeance!?!
I’m really gonna have to get riding this bike here as many days out of the week as I can! This is on a be tight trying to train for ToAD over the next month!!!
OT/PT went well today! I really need to work on left shoulder retracting and depressing, because it’s throwing off my left leg in stance so bad! I need to work in external rotation, and horizontal abduction, to get this sucker glued to my spine!
It’s so interesting too, what we tell myself about what our body can and cannot do. Like for instance, I ask Joni, “is this gonna break my body?” Referencing me leaning at my hips before I pull myself up into standing at the practice sink. It’s so weird?! Almost like the more we tell ourselves our body can do, the more it can actually do? Like that belief in it actually does something and helps?!
I honestly can’t get over the beauty of Lake Michigan. Every day, the blue changes with the weather. With the seasons. With the time of day, temperature, wind. It’s calm. It’s turbulent. It’s honestly so breathtaking, noticing how much of the surface of our planet is covered with water, but water that’s not similar to the water we have here. It’s Freshwater. It’s not like the oceans. I can only imagine being a Native American, and finding these lakes, and feeling like they could live here and stay forever. Because they always had clean water to drink.
You know, Native American names, like Chief Hole-in-The-Day. “The name refers to a dream in which the guardian spirit was seen through an opening in the clouds.[citation needed] It also refers to the Anishinaabek name for the constellation of the same name, also known as the Pleiades.”……. Dreams…. Names….
What do you do when you have more dreams? When you spend more time in a sleeping state?
The three instances of stepping back and trying not to say a lot… at work, with Joni, and then this quote:
Making something from nothing – poems / ideas / new — all of these ideas are worth noting because they are simply trying to achieve just that, “Making Something From Nothing”
5/12/26 – Lightning Over The Sky
It’s interesting how my body is constantly changing. This past weekend I had the first sneeze where it didn’t hurt, but rather felt good for the first time since the accident!
Lightning
Over the Sky
Lighting the night
Into day
Across your eyes
My heart and body grow heavy. I am having the hardest time right now. I need rest.
5/13/26 – Spread Thin
I can feel my glutes really firing up! Especially on my left side! This is wild because I can feel how hungry they are to help hold me up in extension, and I found this connection in fixing my left shoulder position, and how it relates to my entire posterior chain! That area is waking up so much!
I’ll tell ya what, it sure is tricky sometimes working on so many projects at once. Something’s gotta give!? My mental and physical bandwidth can only stretch so far, it’s really difficult to stretch myself across so many different fronts! It’s hard. Goodness.
All day yesterday I was really focusing on keeping my left shoulder retracted and depressed, and the compression tops really help with this! I have to keep playing around with this because there is something there!
Also, keeping my left shoulder depressed and retracted is also affecting my left hip spasms too? This is very interesting! Left leg still isn’t fully in extension yet, but boy is it working that area and trying!
I haven’t been spending as much time working on my writing in the mornings as I usually have. It’s so interesting how I feel the difference. It helps center me, focus me, and keep my intentions straight for the day. Like yesterday I felt scattered for a large portion of it, and then I didn’t get to go for a walk or a bike ride. Almost like this helps me make sure I find time for myself each day, as opposed to letting me go.
I have to always work on that, because it’s not always easy, with how much I’m doing and working on. And also what I like to do too. I am quite the talker, and I guess this is a form of talking, if not just to myself?
Whatever you want to call it, it helps. I just need to keep slowly working on it, because I like the ideas my mind puts together. Last night I had some interesting ideas about what happens to us after we die, and the connection with our dreams? This is a big reason why I wanted to read Freud’s book on dreams. Maybe I will pick that one back up next.
Either way, keeping this left shoulder down is really mixing things up for my left hip flexor. He doesn’t know what to do. I need him to be relaxed, active, and ready. not responsive, jumpy, and tight. Fixing my body’s alignment seems to be overflowing into the rest of my connections. I seriously am feeling my legs and feet way more because of all this work! And prone work!
Okay, today was a huge day:
- standing frame 3-4hrs
- Spinal Stim
- Brace walk
- Handcycle ride
- Yoga prone time
My legs feel absolutely wild right now. Extremely full, quads are kicked in, and I’m feeling exceptional in my lower body like never before? This was such a high amount of attention and work my legs received today! I’m honestly stunned I fit all this in, in a workday! This was crazy! Need to get some electrolytes, and get the balm on my lower left abdominal region! The compression top really helped my shoulder and scapula stay connected with my torso too!
GOODNESS MY LEGS FIRED UP LIKE CRAZY AT 9:51pm to get me back up from the ground! This is insane! My body is doing tremendous things right now!!
My low abdomen isn’t tight, legs are strong and responsive, this is amazing!
Also getting on the floor, my legs helped slow my fall and made that I think my most graceful drop ever to the floor! That was incredible!
Getting into bed, my legs shot up like never before! I need some rest and sleep for today! What a day!
5/14/26 – AFTER a Bike Ride?
It sure is interesting! These legs and quads! My ankles! The circumferential change in my hips!! It’s all waking up and putting things together!
Busy day ahead! I better get moving, I wonder how my legs do AFTER a bike ride?!
This is wild! My left shoulder is retracted and depressed! It’s almost like compression tops are really working! I was really noticing it during the bike ride yesterday, even though the backrest is out of whack and shoulders are holding themselves better! Also, it’s interesting, my left pec muscle is evening out because of this too! Like it’s almost like yesterday was a day of hyper activation for my entire body?!?
I would like to learn more about how central pattern generators are formed! It’s extremely fascinating of a topic!
Doing my Pelvic floor work this morning, I had so much overflow in my glutes and quads for first time!! That was huge!!
Also rolling my shoulders backwards while contracting caused my legs to adduct and stand to attention a little better?
Is there something to these progressive contractions? Because I think my legs need this type of work too!?!
Busy day – bike ride
Folks in town!
Late night standing frame
5/15/26 – More Extension Work
My left hip flexor is being a menace, but I’m trying to just think about my left glute and glute med! Not the hip! Keep my shoulder positioned, and then everything down chain is following suit! Hard to get a breath last night in the standing frame. I was tired.
Hard to sleep past my regular wake up time. Need to carve out more rest earlier in the evening.
My left oblique/ flexor / illiopsoas, get so tight this past night for some reason? Almost like they’re compensating so much for glute undersctivetion, so they are working eccentrically more because my glutes aren’t working so well in contraction? Almost like there is a tug of war/ give and take of muscles for eccentric and concentric contractions, and their abilities to do so when the muscles are waking back up? Like on Wednesday, I had a hard time kicking my leg forward and my glutes were trying to fire up more? So everyone down there was fired up and co-contracting? Maybe?
It’s a tough problem to be working through, I really wish I had more opportunities for extension work though. But I think this Handcycle is an opportunity to help increase that?
5/16/26 – If You’re Too Good For Pulling Weeds
Goodness these have been some rough days for my body and not moving around much! I need to get in my braces today, go for a bike ride, this would all help so much! I gotta grab the walker, knee pads, that lumbar piece of foam, some Velcro strips, to help modify the backrest. I gotta get that dialed in so I can actually go for a ride!
I need to get up and get moving! Boy oh boy today is on a be a busy day at the house! Laundry room is wrapping up, doorwall is going in, the ramp is in, bathroom is getting closer every day! We are getting closer and closer to moving in!!
Gotta keep up on my body tho, it sure is tight after days like this, hard on all the progress I’ve been making!
These days have been tough on my body! A lot is getting done on the house, but it’s really taking a bit of a toll on me! I did pull some big ole thistles in the grass in the backyard today on my knees! Which honestly was a way bigger workout than I was honestly expecting that to be! But hey I did it! Like I always like to say, “As soon as you’re too good for pulling weeds, you’re probably no good at all.” Today put a whole new meaning to that phrase! Honestly kept me humble as I’m literally crawling around in the backyard. Not exactly the easiest task for me these days!
It’s so interesting because that phrase has stuck with me for quite sometime. Essentially meaning, “don’t be too good for any part of the job.” Type meaning. It really stuck with me as a high schooler at some point, seeing my boss, the owner of the business, Ed, with his own battles to fight, getting down on his hands and knees, in who knows how hot sweltering heat, (if you work in a greenhouse, or a rainforest, you know..) and pulling weeds with the young high schoolers, to help them (me) finish up the job.
It’s crazy to me because it feels like the world I am living in is getting so disconnected to this idea. It’s tough because it’s such a hard idea for people to concept unless they just try and do it themselves. Almost like the phrase, “blood, sweat, and tears” has a lot of meaning, even if the visuals don’t fully justify the phrase.
But that saying, really means a lot to me. A lot to what I’ve always done in my life, and what I’m constantly trying to do. When we all work together, and try to help pick up the slack or other loose jobs, it helps the world go round.
It’s too big of a planet to not realize we have to work together, and sometimes that means us having to do dirty jobs sometimes. Like the show might not have fully justified the jobs it was helping portray, and we all need to realize it takes more than just us, to Tango. It takes a village. And today’s day and age, that village is huge. I’m trying to think of how many people are involved with a singular Amazon transaction, and that number has got to be huge. It does?! All the people that are required to fulfill a singular package with only 1 item (not to mention the multiple items per order!) has got to be insane! I wonder what that number is?
On the Amazon question — the number is genuinely staggering. A rough estimate for a single-item order touches something like 50–100+ people when you trace back and check the full chain:
• Warehouse workers (receiving, stowing, picking, packing, quality checks)
• Transportation at multiple legs (fulfillment center → sort center → delivery station → your door)
• Software engineers keeping the system running
• Demand forecasters who made sure the item was even in stock near you
• The seller or manufacturer upstream
• Returns infrastructure, just sitting ready
Some estimates put the fulfillment-center-to-door leg alone at 15–20 hands. Add the upstream supply chain and it’s easily over 100 for anything manufactured abroad.
The wild part is that Amazon’s whole brand promise is making that invisible — you just click and it appears. The more seamless it feels, the more labor is actually behind it.
What about all the actual producers of said good, as well?
Take something simple, like a basic water bottle. You’ve got:
• Raw material extractors — mining the aluminum or refining the petroleum for plastic
• Processors turning raw materials into usable stock and materials
• Factory workers stamping, molding, assembling
• QC teams at the manufacturer
• Packaging producers — that box and those air pillows are their own whole supply chain
• Freight workers moving it from factory to port to container ship to port to distribution center
• Customs and logistics coordinators at every border crossing
And that’s before it even touches Amazon’s network.
For something more complex — electronics, clothing, food — you’re layering in farms, chemical plants, textile mills, dye houses, semiconductor fabs. Each of those has their own version of this same chain.
A realistic number for a single manufactured good, cradle to doorstep, is probably somewhere in the thousands of human touches. Maybe tens of thousands for anything with a circuit board?!
It’s one of those things that’s almost too big to hold in your head. Every “simple” purchase is the tip of an iceberg that goes down for miles. The disconnection — people not realizing it takes a village — makes a lot of sense when the whole system is engineered to hide exactly that. Hopefully people will realize that more and more, and a little more empathy will be given? Who knows we will see!
This is all I got, I need some rest!
Works Cited
1. Amazon’s logistics network (1.25M workers, 2,000+ facilities)
2. Fulfillment center staffing (1,500+ associates)
3. Supply chain stakeholder breakdown
4. 4.2 million US warehousing & transport workers
The Astronaut on Earth 
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