A little coordination goes a long way

It seems these days that anything requiring coordination is giving me grief.
The first thing is the ‘Indiana Jones’ LEGO X-box game. Robin and I have been playing it together the last few days. I’m not sure if it is a relationship-building exercise or a relationship-destroying one, because it is very frustrating for my talented husband to play with me, as it turns out. He gets to be Indiana Jones and I am one of the other characters from the movie (his sidekick). We run around, blow things up, fight bad guys, build things, solve treasure maps and little puzzles, and jump and swing on rocks and buildings. All this with 4 little buttons and 2 toggle switches that you play with your thumbs.
Compared to this, the heart surgery I helped with last summer was child’s play. Inevitably it comes to a difficult move where my little lego man was to swing from a hanging vine, onto a building and then leap in sequence across obstacles and I end up killing myself repeatedly and killing Indiana Jones, too. I asked Robin last night if he thought I’d improved, and he said it was hard to tell.
The second coordination problem is our truck. Now, I personally don’t believe I have a very significant coordination problem, but since we got our pickup this summer it has been a steep learning curve for me in driving standard. The curve has plateaued recently which means that I’m still driving as badly as I ever did. Depending on your point of view, one could say that our recent truck issues are related to my skill in driving.
Last night I was on my way to work when suddenly the truck made a horrible grating noise and then the stick shift moved all by itself and the truck stalled. I managed to pull off the highway and coast to a stop on a side street. It wouldn’t even turn over. I popped the hood and there was a funny smell and everything looked okay, but I knew that was it. I called my boss on my emergency-only cell phone and since I was so close to work, she sent the secretary to come and pick me up. After work I called my brother Sam and asked him for advice. Get it towed home, he said. I called BCAA (let me advise getting a membership- it is one of the best investments I’ve ever made) and the secretary drove me back to my truck to meet the tow truck.
He hooked it up and on the way back to Kelowna we chatted about alternators and solenoids and the weather and families. When we got home he pulled into the parking lot across from our apartment. I jumped out and looked over at our apartment. I could see Robin sitting at the table, looking out the window at us. It was dark but the tow truck lights were flashing and I stood there as the driver unhooked it, thinking how I was going to explain this one.
When I got in he asked, “Was that our truck that the tow truck brought in?”
To make a long story short the truck is still parked there and hopefully my dear brother will be able to fix it for us.
The third area of coordination that is a nightmare is my aerobics class. Today we jumped around and did a move called the grapevine step. I shouldn’t say ‘we’, actually, because I never got the hang of it. Not only were all the people moving their feet in this complicated step, but they were also doing something with their arms. I struggled to keep up but for the entire class I felt like I was going the opposite way from everyone else, stumbling over my own feet. At one point we were marching across the room while waving weights over our heads in some kind of pattern and I heard the instructor say to the class, “Why don’t you make it worth your while and use heavier weights?”
I realized I was the only one with 3-lb weights; everyone else was carrying 5 or 10 lbs. I gave it my best shot, but by the time I was done I had to limp home.
I don’t know if there are any things you can do to improve your coordination, but I’d like to try. I’ve been reading a book about mathematical puzzles and I am struggling everyday to stretch my mind and figure out how to do them. Most of the time I can barely understand them. (And anyway, why would it be fun to try to solve a math problem that no one has ever figured out before?)
Well, I’m going to keep at it. More LEGO X-box tonight, if Robin can put up with me, and I’m going to keep up with the aerobics.