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In a way, it's great to age. There's so much stuff you can't do anymore, the upside being that you can't berate yourself for not doing them. One of my sisters finds herself unable to vacuum because of the arthritis in her back. Do you think that bothers her? No, indeed! She lounges around eating bonbons while dust kitties collect under her counters. I myself can no longer bend to empty the cat litterbox. Bummer!

Some things, however, are tough to bid goodbye to. Trampoline jumping, for example.

We bought this trampoline at a yard sale five years ago, and every summer I'd say, THIS is the summer we're putting the trampoline up. Well, the years went by, the trampoline parts lay around in boxes or in less intelligent storage places, like the yard, and I got older and fatter and sorer.

It finally happened, though, and yesterday the trampoline rose like the phoenix as my husband and I dodged wasps and slapped mosquitoes and got really hot and sweaty, not in a good way.

At last, it was ready for the test. After five long years, so was I, and up I climbed.

Maybe this shouldn’t have surprised me, but the experience was not like I remembered from high school. When my feet left the trampoline surface, my skin and its underlying material (a.k.a. "blubber") seemed to leave a split second later. I could almost hear parts of my body faintly crying, "Hey, wait for me!" like a kid following her big brother. When I came down, my outsides -- two items of which in particular are quite substantial -- were still on the way up. It's like two of me were rising and falling in a slightly unsynchronized fashion.

As if this weren't enough, I think the bouncing affected my sinuses. Even 24 hours later, my face hurts and my eyeballs feel like they've been put in a blender on high.

So which comes first: getting in shape -- including strengthening my eye muscles and undergoing breast reduction surgery -- to be able to bounce on the trampoline, or bouncing on the trampoline to get in shape?

I don‘t really care, because frankly, it makes me ill now just to think about bouncing. I've got better things to do, anyway, like figuring out where to build the shuffleboard court.