Back on the court!

Encroaching on my 6 month anniversary of my surgery (March 21), I have officially gone back to the volleyball court. I played my first game since being out since December this passed Sunday. I must admit I was very nervous going in to play. All I have been doing prior to playing was going to PT, doing some running and that's about it.

Given that playing volleyball doesn't take a big amount of cutting (like football or soccer), my Doc gave my the go-ahead to play. He doesn't want me to do any major cutting activities until my 9 month anniversary.

Once I got into the game, and that first whistle blew, my intentions of "not playing too hard" were thrown out the door. Of course, it didn't help that we only had 4 players on the court against 6. Overall, the experience was positive. I was able to play pretty much to my expected potential. My timing is WAY off with my ball striking, and my serving is still pretty rusty. I did experience some soreness in my knee though. The good thing is that the soreness is due to my patellar tendon, and not my ACL. The patellar tendon is where they harvested the graft for my new ACL, so there is additional scar tissue in the area causing it to be much more taut than usual.

I told my physical therapist about the soreness, and she is concerned about developing tendonitis. She taught me some massaging techniques to use on the tendon to keep the blood circulation good, and to keep the fibers in proper alignment. It also helps in breaking down the scar tissue. After she performed the massage, my knee felt significantly better - so I know what I need to do to keep my sanity at a reasonable level :)

It will be a while before I hit the sand courts though - at least another month.

Our House, 6 years later

After mowing the lawn this morning, I realized I haven't really taken any pictures of the house since we were taking frequent pictures during it's construction. Here, you will see the house during it's final stages of construction.

The trees are still very small, the bushes are small and the garage door still isn't even painted. Fast forward to this morning...

I would say that the grass looks pretty darned good 6 years later :) We lost our first tree that was in the lawn from a storm, so we put in a new one in a slightly different location. The bushes have gone through many iterations of trimming, we expanded the driveway and put in a small patio in the front. The exterior of the house has been repainted to get rid of the awful rose/pink hues that were very apparent in the original paint job. The basketball hoop was put in when we got the driveway extended as well.

All in all, the house is holding up fine. I wonder how big the trees will be in another 6 years...