My hips are sore. It's 3am and I'm awake, eating an english muffin with salmon cream cheese. I figure if you can't sleep and you're hungry, best to go for something posh.

However, I have a new relationship to this pain in my body. It's there because I have fed my soul on wildflowers, marmots (my soul, not my belly, ugh), mountains and meadows. Hip flexors be damned.

The school term is over tomorrow and who knows how the last final will go. It's kinesiology: you show up, they give you a randomly picked muscle, and you have to tell its origin, insertion, fiber direction, actions at all joints it moves, and all synergists and antagonists (muscles that do the same/opposite actions at a given joint). Then you have to go into a room and palpate the muscle, its origin and insertion, and finally palpate any number of randomly chosen bony landmarks on any bones learned thus far. We're not just talking "show me the humerus"; we're talking, "touch the lateral epicondyle of the humerus and tell me all forearm muscles attaching there".

The good news is that I can pass the class with something like a 30% on the final. Sad, I know, but it's not like I won't learn these things if I bomb the test. I'll learn them because I'm just that way: I can't not learn.

It's all in the timing. And now that I've gotten my worry onto the screen and off my chest, and I've eaten my english muffin, I bid you good morning.