Cat's outta the bag...

I got up this morning, went for a jog around the school track, came home, took a bath/showered, made and ate breakfast (and by "made" I mean: yogurt with granola and coffee), worked on my HIV/AIDS lesson for Wednesday, answered emails, did a little Facebook creepin', and worked more on lesson planning.  I then put lunch in the oven (baked potato with one of my veggie burgers) to warm up, ate lunch, got finished getting ready for work, and was out the door by 12:45 pm.  There are 7 stairs outside of my door (I guess I'm kinda on floor 1.5?).  Somehow in the process of going down the said 7 stairs, my ankle gave out/rolled which meant my knee gave out and I basically ended up crumbling on impact.  I'm completely fine because this is a somewhat normal occurrence for me (maybe once a month?).  I was more mad at how DIRTY my pants now were from the horribly graceful fall.  {sidenote: the stairs have probably never been cleaned in my lifetime.  Luckily, I was wearing jeans as opposed to my black pants that I almost put on today.}  Back to the story...

I don't understand why I have weak knees and ankles, but I do, and I've gotten used to it in my lifetime.  My friends in high school used to knock the back of my knees under and I would instantly crumble to a heap in the middle of the commons.  They quickly learned that they had to be ready to catch me, which they did (and for that, I'm very grateful!).  I'm pretty sure Darren or Bert loved doing this.  Also during that era, I would be in the middle of bell practice, and Bennett or Cameron (maybe?) would do it WHILE I WAS PLAYING.  Not very funny when you have 4 bells in your hands.  I'm pretty sure Kyle Haskett also did it at church events.  It was a fun game for everyone though and I laughed...as long as they caught me :)  

So, when I moved to Ukraine and was thrown into a group with people I don't know, you don't want the first words out of your mouth to be, "Hi, my name is Lydia and I have a tendency to fall, even while simply standing."  I managed to keep this lovely Lydia factoid a secret until our first trip to Kiev.  In big cities in Ukraine, there are not crosswalks above ground; instead, you go down a staircase, cross under the street, and then go up another set of stairs.  During that lovely first group field trip was when my secret slipped out: my ankle gave out when I was about 4 or 5 steps from the bottom.  Luckily, Mark was in front of me and I managed to grab ahold of him instead of crashing straight to the floor.  Pretty sure Jamie was right behind me too and tried to make an assist.  It was an epic,

"Ohmygoshwhathappenedareyouokay?" 

moment where I was thoroughly embarrassed but had to laugh about the situation because the cat got out of the bag!  We still laugh about that moment to this day.  And, my loving cluster embraced my clumsiness (if you can call it that) and probably stood a bit closer to me after that day just incase another episode occurred.

Today, when this happened, my first thought was that I was going to be late for work.  This isn't a big deal, but if I am going to be late, I like to let them know.  But how do I explain why I'm going to be late?  I came back in, turned back on my computer, opened up google translate (lifesaver) and typed in an explanation that I hoped Olena would understand.  I called her and tried to get the message across...but I'm pretty sure she thought I broke my ankle or something of the like.  I kept saying that I was fine, I just needed to find my ankle brace, and that I would be late.  I finally emailed her what was going on in English, she google translated it to Russian, got the idea, and wrote me a message back saying: rest, don't come to work today, get well, and eat more foods that contain calcium.  Loved the calcium part :)  I laughed, called her back, and told her that I really was fine to come into work.  So, here I sit at home doing some work from here for the day.  I'm going to go into work for a club meeting in a few hours during which word will probably have spread that I broke my leg or something like that. If I were still in Oster (my small training village), every babushka in town would already know what happened.  Just another day in Ukraine :)