My favorite place in our house isn't actual in the house. It's the sunroom that we converted to an open-air balcony back in September.

While it's not a traditional room, it's definitely the place I spend the most time, as long as it's not raining. Even on cold days, it's pretty nice on the balcony because we get such good sunshine out there and it's protected from the wind. 

And it's where I worked on this spring-like February day.

When we moved into our house, this space was an enclosed sunroom. It was nice extra space to have, and early on in the pandemic it became our gym. 

But pretty quickly the sun beating through those big glass windows made it rather insufferable out there, and we made the decision that this space would be so much better as a fully outdoor space. 

Also, if you noticed the windows were not in good shape and if we wanted to keep the sunroom, we would have had to replace them. Since we weren't looking to spend tens of thousands of dollars on massive custom glass curvy windows, this made our decision to convert this space even easier. 

It wasn't raining the day I took this picture. The windows were just in really bad shape.

We also knew this was not a DIY kind of job. Removing all that glass, ripping out some electrical work and waterproofing and weatherizing other areas were a bit more than we was willing to take on. 

So after getting some quotes, we hired a general contractor and got on his schedule for the middle of September. 

The first thing our contractor did was remove all the windows. 

The small ones at the bottom were pretty straight forward and didn't take too long. By lunch time the first day, they were all out. 

The large, curved windows at the top were a lot more challenging. Plenty broke, but they were eventually all removed. 

That just left the black metal frame that had been holding them up, which our contractors made quick work of disassembling. 

By the end of the first day, I could actually see the trees outside our house clearly with that terrible glass gone. 

The next part of the project is where things got interesting. You'd think ripping up hard wood flooring would be pretty straight forward. But our contractor found an unpleasant surprise. After he ripped up the hard wood, he found another layer of hard wood underneath it! 

Yes, that means at some point someone had put down hard wood flooring on top of existing hard wood flooring! 

Ripping up another layer of hard wood wouldn't have been too bad, except the person who laid the original flooring used an excessive amount of glue to attach it to the concrete exterior balcony floor. So much glue that the hard wood wasn't coming up easily, and even when they eventually got all the wood off, there was at least an inch of disgusting glue all over the floor. 

This was my attempt to capture the glue all over the floor. It's kind of hard to tell in a photo, but you can see some places where the wood didn't even come up all the way. 

It was a freakin' mess, and it took our contractor several extra days to get all the glue off. 

This is an after picture once most of the glue was off the floor and the front wall. Again, not the easiest thing to see in a photo, but I think you can sort of see that it's a bit smoother in the second picture.

After sanding everything down, he gave everything a nice coat of paint. 

Doesn't it look so much better?

Once that headache was finished, our contractor really just had to put on the finishing touches. 

He installed a weatherproof door to the outside closet. 

He weatherproofed our electrical outlets and installed an outside lighting fixture. 

The last thing we were waiting on was the safety railing, which was on super back order because of the pandemic. 

We still made use of the space for a little bit here and there before the safety railing was installed. I guess the positive of the pandemic is that we weren't having a bunch of people over that would be at risk for falling over the ledge. 

My 20-miler celebration picture was the first picture I took out there. You can see there's no safety railing behind me. 

But still, I was very glad several weeks later when all the parts came in, and our contractor came back and got it installed. 

You can tell the seasons had changed based on the leaves.

We pretty immediately ordered ourselves some patio furniture, which luckily was not on insane back order.

And now, this has become one of my very favorite places to spend time. 

At the beginning of the year, I said I wasn't setting specific workout goals because it's just too hard during a pandemic to know what sort of workouts I'm going to be in the mood for. I didn't want to set a bunch of goals and lock myself into something that I suddenly had no desire to do. 

So instead, I just committed to some sort of regular movement. 

In January, I took on a four-week strength training challenge through OpenFit. I've come to really appreciate lifting heavier weights during the pandemic, and I was excited to see what four weeks of focus on just that would do in terms of my strength. 

While I'm somewhat limited in what I can do with upper-body weight lifting because of my shoulder, I was still really excited that by the end of January, I was regularly able to do squats, lunges and other lower body-focused exercise with much heavier weight. 

Even some shoulder-friendly upper body exercises showed improvement. 

I did start to miss running a little bit in January though, while I focused so intently on strength training. 

So in February, I decided I wanted to try to find a better balance. I wanted to continue to build my strength because I know it will prevent running injuries, but I wanted to make time for more running. 

Mixing the two has always been a challenge for me because I find myself favoring one often at the expense of the other, or I try to do too much don't leave enough recovery time.

So my mini-goal for February is about finding some sort of balance. 

I'm doing OK on that front, but the weather hasn't been so helpful -- especially on the weekends when I'd prefer to get outside for runs.

I don't have a treadmill so the only way for me to run is outside, and we've had a lot of ice this month. 

Despite that I did manage to do two runs each the first two weeks of February, and I think about three strength training workouts each week. 

I'd like to try to get in another run (ideally on the weekend). I'd be happy with a balance of three strength workouts, three runs and at least one day of pure rest. 

We'll see how things go the rest of the month and if the weather cooperates enough to let me do that. We've already got another ice storm in the forecast for later this week, so who knows.

Thinking longer term, if in-person races come back in the fall, I'd love to run an in-person half marathon. It's hard to say that that's a goal for the year because I don't know where things will be pandemic-wise in the fall, but it'd be nice to have a real race to look forward to for some extra motivation. 

January was a really subpar month of reading for me. I felt like I was in a huge rut similar to what I experienced early on in the pandemic when I just couldn't sit down and focus on reading. I still managed to read a bit, but other than one or two of these books, I really struggled to get through most of them. 

Four Stars

Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I saw Elizabeth Wetmore speak at a virtual book festival back in the summer and had been looking forward to reading her novel since then. This book opens with the brutal rape of a 14-year-old girl and follows what happens from the time of the crime to the court case. This book is told from the points of view of many different characters, and I found it really interesting how little the 14-year-old got a voice in the book compared to the other characters in the town. This was a good, but sad read.

The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book was the twisty thriller I needed to help pull me out of my January reading rut. It follows Jane, who has recently moved to Birmingham, Alabama, ready to start over. Jane meets the very wealthy Eddie when she's walking dogs in the neighborhood. Eddie's wife and her best friend have recently gone missing after a boating trip, but he and Jane strike up a romance anyway. Jane has her own secrets to hide too and things heat up quickly.

Three Stars

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I flew through the first part of this book, but then really struggled to get through the second half. Not sure why, since I found the overall history of Instagram to be an interesting topic. It could have just been that a lot was going on in the world in January and I had a hard time focusing, which is likely impacting my rating.

Mr. Nobody by Catherine Steadman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I didn't enjoy this nearly as much as Something in the Water. I picked it up thinking a fun thriller would jolt me out of my reading funk, but this book didn't really do that for me. It was an interesting premises: a man wakes up with no memory, and the doctor sent in to treat him begins to realize not everything quite adds up. I found parts of it slow, until the action really picked up toward the end.

Two Stars

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book got such great reviews and I had been so excited to read it, but it was painfully slow. It looks at what happens when a student and a teacher have an affair, and years later the girl still doesn't see that there was anything wrong with the relationship -- even as other women are coming forward, claiming the teacher was a predator. This book has potential, and parts of it were good, but it just moved way too slowly.

Cobble Hill by Cecily von Ziegesar
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I got all excited to read a book by the author of the Gossip Girl series. While I never read those books, I really enjoyed the show and was expecting something equally great. This book was not that. It wasn't bad, it was just sort of weird. It's set in Brooklyn and follows a bunch of different characters and their kids trying to prove themselves worthy of living in Cobble Hill. But the characters were written to such extremes that none of them were super likeable and that made this book kind of meh for me.

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As we all know, patience is not one of my strongest personality traits. So when I started physical therapy for my frozen shoulder back in December, I was hoping to see some faster results. 

But more than a month and a half in, I'm still just making baby steps. 

Every article I've read about frozen shoulder pretty clearly says the condition can take 1-3 years to clear up, and my orthopedic doctor said the same thing. But he also seemed to think this could have started about two years ago when I started noticing stiffness and pain in my shoulder when I was throwing a softball. 

If he hadn't said that, I probably would have guessed this started in August. That's when I noticed the most pain and the drastic reduction in the range of motion in my arm. 

So depending how you count, I'm either about 6 months in to the 1-3 year clock or I'm like 2 years and 6 months in. 

Physical therapy is supposed to help though, and so that's what I've been focused on for now.

Because of covid-19, I started with a program focused on at-home exercises to minimize the number of times I had to go into the office. I was pretty religious about following the program my therapist gave me, doing the exercises at least once, if not twice per day. 

Despite doing what I was supposed to do, when I went back into the office last week for a follow-up appointment, my range of motion had only marginally increased. 

So my physical therapist decided we needed to take a more aggressive approach. Starting this week, I will be going in twice a week for the next three weeks for hands-on manipulation. So basically, my physical therapist will move my arm in ways that are probably too uncomfortable/painful for me to be able to do myself. 

While I'm not excited about the discomfort, I'm hopeful that this new plan will have me seeing some faster results. 

Not being able to move my arm much has been pretty limiting, both in every day life and in my workouts. 

Depending on how things go these next three weeks, I'll also be thinking about the timing of a cortisone injection. My doctor had offered me one back in December at my first appointment, but I wanted to wait and see what happened with physical therapy before getting a giant needle shoved into my shoulder. But I've heard good things from others who have had cortisone for this, and with my patience running out and my frustration with my pain and limited range of movement mounting, I'm giving that option much higher consideration than I had before. 

So that's where we are. I'm hopeful these next three weeks will help move the recovery process forward more quickly.