Things are still going well. I managed to only plump up a slight bit over the Thanksgiving holiday which took some willpower and effort on my part. Well, that and four solid days of walking around LA probably helped a bit too.
Still feeling pretty good - even impressing my coworkers with my energy and willingness to 'hang tough' at the late night holiday parties. I'll admit it's a very different perspective to be the sober one in the crowd, but it's been fun none-the-less and I feel good right now, so I'm eager to take advantage of all the social activities I can fit into my calendar. I have a feeling that I may be in for some tougher times in the months to come.
As a bit of foreshadowing I'm beginning to ache at the end of the day as my hips and knees soften up from the hormones and my back always feels like it needs to crack, but I don't have enough range of motion to pop it anymore. The toughest part so far has been the heartburn and the vicious charley horse cramps that wake me up from a dead sleep.
Got me wondering the other day about how odd that term "charley horse" really is, so I did a little research and what I found out is... no one seems to really know the origin. It's an American colloquialism that seems to be rooted in baseball, but that's about all the research seems to agree on. Here are some of the more common theories which I found pretty amusing :
- A lame horse named Charley pulled the roller on the Chicago White Sox ballpark in the 1890s. That's the most commonly repeated version but appears to be false because the phrase appears to be older than the horse.
- Policemen in 17th century England were supposed to be called Charleys and the term migrated to America. The amount of walking the police were required to do gave them aching legs. This seems fanciful. I can't confirm the use of the term Charleys for police in England or America and there seems nothing to explain the link with baseball.
- The pitcher Charley Radbourne was nicknamed Old Hoss. He got cramp during a baseball game in the 1880s. After that baseball players refered to leg cramps as "Charley Hoss". This at least is plausible and has no obvious fault to rule it out, but that's not enough to prove it is the origin.
