Today marks 30 days since my shoulder surgery. I’ve spent most of it sitting in this big, blue, leather chair and more often than not I’ve also been working on one or the other of my laptops.

(I spent a lot of time trying to think of a better word than ‘working’ in that last sentence and came up empty. ‘Typing’ is too menial; I wasn’t entering data. ‘Messing around’ implies lack of focus; not true. ‘Using’ sounds like I exploited it. Well in a certain sense I did but the word just doesn’t work. ‘Multitasking’ was pretty true but it sounds too unfocused and managerial. On the company’s laptop I worked. On the other laptop I did stuff. That sounds like wasting time, but it wasn’t really. Not much web surfing or Facebook. I built a website for my Kilimanjaro book. I pretty much finished the book except that it could use a catchy cover photo. I found a site to host and sell the book from. I linked that site to mine. I cleaned up and rebalanced email accounts. I installed Dreamweaver and started to learn it. I wrote a little in my blog. I did my Christmas shopping. The right word isn’t coming.)

I slept in the chair the first few nights after the surgery and ate my meals there as well. I watched a fair amount of football on tv but usually it was in the background. I watched a few movies including Lord of the Rings. (This year I just wasn’t up for the mostly-annual back to back to back marathon but we did get through them all.) Harry slept in my lap a lot, which probably seemed fair to him, since by the simple measure of having spent more time in the chair up to this point than anyone else in the family, he has a claim to it.

Recovery from this kind of thing is slow. I’m not used to being sedentary. But there are so many things to keep a mind occupied and a computer is a portal to a gizillion of them. TV is so inane by comparison. I tried out daytime TV the first day after surgery and all it took was a brief surf on one frothy wave of hyperbole, controversy, and commercials to turn me off completely.

It’s a good chair. I’m glad that 10 years after we bought it someone other than the cat got some good use out of it. I think I’ll take it to the old folks home, if that winds up being my fate, and bring along my large-key, large screen computer. It’ll be awesome by then.