Hanging Out at Home

You wouldn’t think that staying at home doing rehab exercises after knee surgery (see Waiting for Surgery and Aftermath on my blog Hedera’s Corner) would be any different from staying at home as a retired lady doing volunteer stuff on the computer; but it is.  For one thing, I have to do those exercises twice a day, which means I can’t settle into something really detailed and forget about everything else for four hours, the way I often do.  I have to do stuff I can drop at regular intervals and do my short arc quads, et cetera.

For another, I always (this is the third time I’ve been through this) seem to spend my rehab re-reading novels from my collection.  I distinctly remember, while recovering from my first total knee replacement in 2001, re-rereading the entire Brother Cadfael series (by Ellis Peters), in consecutive order.  Yes, I do own all of them, mostly in paperback.  Oddly, I can’t remember what I read in 2005 for the second round of rehab.  This time I’m going through my Agatha Christie collection, mainly Hercule Poirot with a small amount of Jane Marple.  My world has been expanded, though, by the Rockridge Branch Library, which has an entire set of Christie in matching bindings, including all the stuff I never bought; so I’m working my way through that, too.  Some of the ones I hadn’t read before are very odd indeed.  Let’s just say that The Murder of Roger Ackroyd isn’t the only book Christie wrote in which you suddenly realize in the last chapter that the narrator you’ve been comfortably listening to for 200 pages is actually the murderer.  In fact, I think the reason I stick with Christie’s “detective” novels is that they’re the only ones where I can be reasonably sure that won’t happen!  (Reasonably sure – Roger Ackroyd, after all, is a Poirot novel!)  I find it disturbing to realize that I’ve developed a sympathetic relationship with a murderer…