Plunder!

Here’s a delightful surprise: The spoils of the latest little drama have been pouring in, and they’re quite nice.

My friends at our business group came forth with a giant bag filled with plants. Two calla lilies — I love calla lilies, so Diego Rivera — and then…well, you’ll have to see it to believe it.

Both little pots of callas now occupy a beloved glazed pot whose occupant I recently killed. Leave anything outdoors in a glazed pot, and what you get is a fricasseed plant: in Arizona’s heat and sun, glazed pots behave exactly like slow cookers. It’s in the house, at least until the weather cools, and tall enough that I don’t believe Pup can reach the toxic little plants.  Well. She can, but I doubt if she will.

Now, check out THIS thing:  (Click on the images, as usual, for a better view.)

That is a pineapple plant! Complete with a baby pineapple growing on it!! Have you ever seen such a critter in a florist’s shop? How cool IS that?

So this morning after breakfast I decided I’d better get them potted up, lest they parch and die in their  little plastic pots. And I’ll tellya, the last thing I felt like doing was dragging potting soil and heavy pots around. This is the kind of  project that spawns new side-projects as it goes…today, we had to pull old dead lavender plants out of another glazed pot; then decide said glazed number would surely kill the pineapple; then find an unglazed terracotta pot and transfer dirt from the Deceased’s pot into the terracotta pot while the sprinkler was running on the other pot filled with completely dried-out, utterly parched sawdust-like new but much neglected potting soil and while we were at it pull out the dead salvia and some more of the dead wire-like Mexican primrose and untangle the stupid fence thing we put in to keep the dog out of the pool which now keeps us out of the flowerbed and has created a woven mat of weeds and dead plants and real, metal wire and plant the pineapple and figure out where to put it where the blowtorch sunlight back there wouldn’t incinerate it but maybe it would get enough light to survive, it being a high-luminosity sort of plant and discover that running the sprinkler on low into the other pot did NOTHING to saturate the dessicated potting soil and so have to hunker down and stick our paws in the dirt and stir and mix and squeeze and stir until the soil was moistened and then plant the callas in that and then drag the (heavy!!!) thing into the house and try to get it as close to the door where it’ll get some light as possible without having it block the door and…

Well, by the time all these antics were over, I was dripping sweat.  Possibly this is not good for a patch of skin over which one’s doctors have plastered a layer of super-glue.

On the other hand…some sweat was undoubtedly in order. In the past three days, since the morning of the surgery, I’ve put on four and a half pounds!!!!!!!!!

Almost fainted when I stepped on the scale this morning.

There’s a way to lose weight, though: fall into a swoon on the floor and the scale will quit registering those pounds. Any pounds.

It’s been a perfect storm of de-dietification.

To start with, I’ve been craving comfort food, as one would expect. So when my son came over on Wednesday to drive me out to the Mayo so they could inject radioactive things into me, I fixed him some fried scampi over pasta, with lots of butter and garlic and…stuff like that. Num!

Pasta makes me bloat up like a balloon.

Then at some point I was flying around, not having had time for breakfast, and I shot into my favorite local coffee house, Grinders, where the coffee is superior and the food is usually skimpy. Starved, I grabbed their last croissant and…I don’t know where the boss got that thing, but by gawd, it was the best croissant I’ve had since I was in La Jolla! You know what that means, of course: butter folded into white flour folded into butter folded into…yes. So, so, so good to eat.

White flour makes me bloat up like a balloon.

La Maya and La Bethulia showed up with mountains of magnificent food to tide us over the crisis. Oh. My. GOD can that woman cook!! Arroz con pollo and real gazpacho and asparagus soup that must have more cream in it than asparagus and real hummus made from scratch and real pesto made from scratch and holy mackerel.

Mountains of magnificent food make me bloat up like a balloon.

To go with it, my son dropped by Karl’s Bakery and got us a beautiful loaf of crunchy-crusted bread. So, so freaking good to eat.

Bread makes me bloat up like a balloon.

Yesterday afternoon M’hijito and I decided nothing would do but what we had to have ice cream. So he took us to his favorite extravagant gourmet ice-cream shop down in his neighborhood.

Ice cream cones make me bloat up like a balloon.

This perfect combination — the only one of my favorite bloaters that we didn’t have was beer! — did the  job on the scheme to keep the fat under control.

Helles Belles. I thought I’d lose weight from all that trauma. What, two whole days without a bourbon and water? How can anyone possibly survive such deprivation?

Four and a half freaking pounds.

A side effect of throwing myself around this morning is that weirdly, I suddenly feel a lot better. It’s like I needed to get off my duff and start banging around again.

The boob hardly hurts at all today. There’s much less bruising than from the biopsy — really, hardly any, comparatively — and the incision looks like it was made by a plastic surgeon. It’s barely visible! You can’t see where the stitches are at all, and the cut itself is just a tiny little line. Amazing.

Anyway, so it’s back to a miniature piece of steak and a giant pile of salad for the typical Meal of the Day. Lucky I happen to like steak and salad. 😀