Treadmill Of Life

My top New Year’s resolution is the same one I make every year: take better care of myself. In an effort to firm up the body parts that tend to be losing their elasticity, I joined a gym for women last January. At first I was attending regularly, at least three times a week, but then something happened and I missed one week, then two, then three. Well, you know how it goes.

I talked to a friend of mine and mentioned my membership at the gym. She asked which gym and when I told her she replied, “I don’t belong to that one, but I do belong to three others.”

“Wow, I’m impressed,” I said.

“Don’t be. I don’t go to any of them on a regular basis,” she said.

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not. I have really good intentions but those intentions don’t get me very far,” she said.

I did get back to the gym and went back to working out three times a week. Then I started having dental problems, lots of dental problems. What began as replacing a lost filling escalated to a root canal, and then several weeks later an abscessed tooth. It took four hours and three people to remove that tooth. I took it home and slept with it under my pillow for a week but the tooth fairy never came.

After that episode I got back in the saddle again, or should I say back on the treadmill again, only to come down with a sinus infection. I recovered from that, then we decided to build a house, sold ours, then the packing up/moving process began.

During that chaos I had a root canal, mysterious pain in my face and jaw for three weeks, and then another root canal. Because I couldn’t identify exactly where the pain was coming from, we did the wrong tooth the first time. That’s right—two root canals in one month.

One of the walls at the gym is the Wall of Fame with pictures of members who have achieved their goals. I ran into the owner of the gym the other day and suggested she create a Wall of Shame next to it with my picture beneath it.

So again this year, my New Year’s resolution is to take better care of myself…and to take out more dental insurance.

Happy New Year, friends.