Aiguille du Midi, late April.

A little photoalbum from the last month, showing family visit and things in the neighborhood from my short walks.

Things are changing incredibly fast every week. Only a week ago I stopped wearing my robo-back-braise-corset, and started carefully driving myself to the physiotherapist.

Last weekend I took myself on a slightly longer walk as Ben came visiting. And ate out at Munchie's, even had a beer at Elevation Bar afterwards.

Monday I went swimming in a super-busy pool. French school holidays. Ops.

Thursday I did my first full proper paid work day again. And got a call from the doctor who had looked at the latest x-ray which I got last week, and told me my bones had healed now!

Friday I saw my physiotherapist again, and asked if it would be safe to go snowboarding again. He gave me the clear! Granted that I was careful and acted sensible and all that off-course. So after 9 weeks and 1 day I found my way up the mountain again. And was rewarded with fresh powder and even some sunshine. Did two great runs with a good crew up there. That was enough, the body isn't used to this kind of activities anymore. But it was absolutely worth it!

Finally got Storify working and collected most of the tweets wishes me well from those first few days after I broke my back. It was really nice to wake up to so many supporting messages each morning.

[View the story "Get well tweets" on Storify]

I've been practising my walking skills lately. Since last week I've begun moving around without my back braise on. It is such a weird sensation paying so much attention to my posture, trying to remember what correct is.

Funny how accustomed I've become to all this rest and recovery. I've been listening to a bit of TED talks, quite a few webby conference talks on Vimeo. Read a number of books both digital and on paper. It's nice to mix it up. Though I haven't gotten through them as fast as I thought it would with all the time I have. I seem to keep falling asleep in the middle of pages... I've managed to get through most of my RSS feeds though. But also of course watched lots of stupid movies, and some good ones. I'm currently working my way through the Star Wars saga. And I've made my way through all 5 seasons of The Big Bang Theory. And then there's Draw Something. It let's me pretend I'm an artist.

When I first got injured I decided I would learn to meditate, which I've been doing. And it's really nice. I've never "had the time" before. It's great, doesn't take more than 30-60 minutes, except when I fall asleep for 3 hours, which is also really nice. Haven't done that in a while though. I've been doing breathing exercises and learning to focus and quiet the brain down. With all this time I've noticed how the brain is constantly chugging away at non-important stuff, and it's so nice to be able to turn it off sometimes.

I've also learnt to recognise when I'm tired. I have a lot of stamina and it's easy for me to push things to far and then become to tired. Having been forced to relax this much has been good for me. It's given me a lot of time to think. Not that it has led to a lot of conclusions, but I'm trying to worry less, and have learned one important thing: The now is really good, pretty much always. So instead of worrying about various 'shoulds' I tell myself that now is good.

At AXA, where we already have our car insurance, we were denied because they insist on us having a credit card, which we don't want, but refuses to give us a credit card, and thus account, because our bills are to high. This took them a good month to tell us, after we'd been to two meetings and filled out more forms then I care to remember.

Next up was Credit Agricole. They want us to provide an electricity bill in order to open an account. But to pay an electricity bill we need a bank account. Fun! Also, our rental contract should've done, but apparently our contract is "the wrong form". The proposed workaround is for our landlord to fill out "the right form", provide a copy of the electricity bill and a copy of his passport!

To be continued.

Dug up another song from my email all the way back in November, by the same visiting artist as my other song.