Bones

Would anyone like to take a guess

 (without peeking on Google) 

how many bones there are in each of your feet?

                           Okay:  good guesses all 'round!

The human foot has 26 bones, each foot!

When you put both feet side by side, you are looking at (or would be if you had x-ray vision) 52 tiny little bones.  And that (which I just learned five seconds ago) is 25% of all the bones in your entire body!

When I was a little kid in Georgia, we used to put our fast-growing little feet in X-ray machines at the shoe store to determine our shoe sizes, even when all we were buying were $2.00 Keds.  Today we'd probably cock our heads in disbelief if someone suggested getting an MRI to figure out what size hat we wore, but back then, in the Fifties, nobody thought it strange at all.  

The Internet further informs me that each foot has 33 joints and 19 muscles and tendons.  I wish they had taught us this kind of stuff in school instead of, say, the population of the Netherlands. The number of bones in the foot is, best I can tell, a constant.

There's a track to follow somewhere, you're thinking?

So this morning, when I finally pulled the plug to let out the water from my long soak bath, that same water somehow came surging out from under the toilet, seven towels worth.  I made a few phone calls and was told that today was not the best day to have a plumbing emergency, as they seem to be all the rage today in San Antonio.

But finally--thanks to Kate--I got the number of a plumber who is even now doing noisy enough things in my bathroom that I'm pretty sure it will lead to a costly and semi-permanent solution. 

But back to the feet:

Several of us have, on various occasions, discussed the fact that it takes as long to recover from a trip as it does to take said trip--a factoid that would mean I still have thirty-something days to go before being "back to normal"--physically speaking. 

However, during the limbo hours between plumbing disaster and repair, I decided to do what maybe everyone decides to do when a problem is out of one's hands: I got a pedicure.

This was not an ordinary "paint your nails" deal; it was a recovery-accelerating treatment extraordinaire!

Complete with paraffin and green tea lotion, finished off by someone you don't even know massaging the 19 muscles and 26 bones in each foot, this procedure is exactly what you need for re-entry after any journey.  I'm just saying….