In Which I Am Uncoordinated.

When you spend a big chunk of your day in a chair, getting up and moving around isn't just a nice change of pace; it's a back-cracking necessity.  Now that I'm doing a lot more writing, I'm faced with the challenge of finding time to move.  

You know how it is.

Since it's July in Kansas, the outdoor temperature is roughly equivalent to six feet from the sun.  Ain't no way I'm gonna go move around in that.  After discarding several options as too far, too expensive, or too gas-hogging, I settled on a brilliant idea.  I bought a hula hoop.

Wait, it gets better.

Confident in my abilities, thanks to a dim memory from childhood, I stood in the kitchen with a sparkly plastic ring around my waist and prepared to hula away.  Slinging the hoop one way and twisting my waist the other way, I managed a pretty good imitation of a bad case of Saint Vitus' Dance.

The hula hoop clattered to the floor.

After half a dozen or so repeat performances, I began to mutter bitter nothings.  Leaving the hoop on the floor (where I may or may not have kicked it), I fired up the computer to seek advice.  "Why can't I work a hula hoop?" I asked Google.  I hit the "enter" key, and seventy billion hits popped up.  I am apparently not alone in my hula hoop-challenged state.

I turns out that it is physically impossible for a grownup to use a child-sized hula hoop.  Bigger people need bigger hoops, and the first person to make a crack about bigger hips is gonna get a punch in the nose.  I went back to the store and bought a new hoop.  It's cool.  Grownup-sized, weighted, and padded.  I stood in the kitchen and gave it a whirl.

Golly!  I managed almost four revolutions before the new hoop ended up on the floor.  This is progress.  Now I just have to wrestle it away from Junior when I want to use it.

"I want da 'zewo' please, Mama!"