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Cackle! We’ve got another excuse to cheat the corgi out of her morning doggy-walk: weather!

Seriously: it’s cold as the dickens out there, with cumulus clouds stacking up all around us.

Now, if I were a responsible grown-up, by now I would have gotten up off my duff and walked the hound around the hood. But…but…that would be a sane thing to do, eh?

We don’t do that kinda stuff!  😀

Seriously, though: the hip has been spavined for several days now. Can’t say it hurts like the dickens, but it does hurt. This provides a handy excuse to claim that I’d better loaf…uhmmm…rest for the day, in hopes that letting the joint and muscle be will speed recovery.

And it probably will. If I actually did injure the joint, it happened in my sleep. I would remember if I fell or tripped dramatically enough to elicit this kind of pain. So the only explanation is that I must have twisted around in my sleep and sprained something inside there.

***

Oh, my! Mountains of spectacular cumulus clouds are piling up to the north of us. And they are beyond gorgeous! What a thing to watch out your bedroom window.

Let’s see what the beloved Wunderground has to say about that: 

Today
Thu 01/08 High 60 °F

84% Precip. / 0.68 in
Mostly cloudy early followed by heavy thunderstorms this afternoon. High around 60F. Winds WSW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 80%.

****

Okay… I’ll buy that! Looks suspiciously like “this afternoon” means “about two minutes after noon.” 😀 The sky is filling up with wonderful, roiling gray clouds. Wind is picking up, then dropping off, then picking up again.

Ruby is now in her Official Loafing Position at the foot of the bed. The Human is in its Official Loafing Position atop a heating pad, which we hope will soon de-spavin the hip.

Jayzuz! Whatever ya do, kid, don’t get old! Old hurts: every which way from Sunday.

Moment of panic: thought M’hijito had engineered a doctor’s appointment today. Ohhhhh gawd: just what i need to make my day….

But no: nothing’s on the calendar. So…I’m gonna hope it’s safe to assume that’s because nothing has been arranged, and I get my afternoon to myself.

And ohhhh, those flying cumulus clouds are gorgeous!

Two excellent reasons to value 

TODAY.

These days, I never know….

😀

Last I heard, we were at the Mayo Clinic, where staff were busy torturing me. That was grand fun.

Did it do any good?

Uhhhhh…well…

In a minuscule way, I’d say. Hammering on the keyboard still makes the fingers tingle. But not as badly (I think) as before.

Hey! Life is short. Tingling is long. Why complain about it, eh?

Shortly after 8:00 p.m. now. Outside, morons are setting off bang-bangs. Fireworks, presumably, but they could be firing their li’l guns into the air. Fine if they’re shooting blanks. I’d just as soon not have one of their bullets cascade down through the roof and the ceiling. 😀

Continuing spectacularly sick here. My guess now is that this ailment is not something that will go away. I’m just gonna have to get used to it. Consider the ear whistling to be a kind of serenade. The lips, the feet, the hands buzzing (in a different mode) to be a welcome sign that I’m still alive. And quit bellyaching about it!

Contemplating those women in my family: those powerful women. The grandest of them — a mother and a daughter who lived well into their 90s — were Christian Scientists.

Apparently Christian Science, back in the day, was regarded as a type of eccentricity verging on insanity. 😀  WhatEVER. That notwithstanding, we did live in a free country — we did then and we do now — where people are allowed to harbor whatever crackpot theories they please.

They were powerfully clean living, those two women, largely as a manifestation of their religious beliefs. They did not drink alcohol. They did not carouse. They enjoyed home-cooked meals that consisted almost entirely of what we would call “whole foods.”

If that was insanity, we should all be so crazy!

They pretty much raised my mother, while her own mother went off the rails. And I think she regarded each of them —  especially my great-grandmother, as like a mother. Wish they’d lived long enough to meet my son: they’d have liked him.

Oh, well. They’d have been well into their 100s by the time he was born…so appreciation might have been difficult.

No outcome from the Mayo yet. They did a few annoying tests, but no opinion as to what ails me has been emitted.

So let us cast our minds back to the early 20th century and ask…if we were a Christian Scientist, what would we think ails me?

Booze, I reckon. They would tell you that the wine I was in the habit of drinking daily — a habit that lasted a good 20 years — was toxic, God-forbidden, and very probably what has made me sick.

It’s as good a theory as any. And since our august Mayo physicians apparently have no clue, we might as well proceed on the assumption that I’ve made myself sick through two decades of daily boozing.

So I’m on the wagon. Again. Still. WhatEVER.

And…is that working? 

Well, in comparison with 20 years of daily tippling, I’d say we haven’t given the teetotaling  anything NEAR enough time to show what it can do. We have a few dry days vs. year after year of daily sniftering… So presumably it’ll take a while for this clean living stuff to take effect.

As we scribble? My lips are burning. My ears are buzzing. My fingers are tingling. The soles of my feet are tingling. But otherwise everything is fine.

Uh huh….

So here we are, trapped in a Mayo lab room imterminably while they pump a bottleful of medication into my arm,

******* OHHH for cryin’ out loud! WordPress just ERASED 3/4 of this damn thing when I hit “publish.” Must not have gone “Save” first, eh.

Welp! Watch this space. 

Just got home. Now must walk the dog from pillar to post. Whenever (ifever?) we get back, I’ll rewrite this thing and post it.

87 gerjillion things to have to do before leaving for the dentist this morning:

Clean teeth
Wash face
Paint face
Comb hair
Make bed
Put dishes in washer (= take clean dishes out of washer & put away)

Hip hurts. What have I done to myself this time????

Pick up DR table (= put away piles of junk
Pay pool guy
Call AC guy: water leak
Track down new lawyer (mine just died) to review deathbed transfer of property and financial instruments to M’ijito
Shovel off kitchen counter

Hip hurts.

Beep beep! Microwave nagging.

Problem: short on patience for doing things that really DO need to get done. Now.

Frustrating to have to fart with all the little stuff when you’re in a hurry…my son is on his way over here…get stuff together for dentist, find shoes, get into shoes, heat mug of cold coffee, find purse, find wallet

Hip hurts.

Beep beep!

Copy and paste a line into this page

Beep beep!

Rinse out coffee pot.
Pour coffee grounds on plants outside.
Rinse again.
Pour out more coffee grounds.

Hip hurts.

Rinse again

Beep beep!

Pour rinse water on plants outside

Beep beep!

Hurt.
Hurt.
Hurt some more.

STOP THE FUKKIN’ WORLD! I WANNA GET OFF!!!!!

And the morning is just getting started. My son is on his way over here to drag me to the dentist. How can I count the ways I can hardly wait for that encounter?

Soooo…. THAT is what my poor son has to cope with, when he shows up at the door ready to trot me out into the wilderness. CAN you imagine? Poor guy!!

RINGY DINGY!

Leap up, run across the room, grab the phone.

Nuisance phone solicitor. To get rid of the  nuisance message they left, you have to click through FOUR stages on your phone.

Oh damm. Here’s the kid! Prepare for more fun!

HORRORS. Today is Tuesday. 

That means this evening is soaked up and f**ked up by the endlessly annoying weekly physical therapy session.

hup hup jump jump roll roll hup hup groan moan hate hate HATE. Boyoboy, do I hate the physical therapy sideshows. 

Not that they hurt. They don’t, especially. But that they are…

• boring
• pointless
• useless (they do nothing for the pain: all that works there is time)
• endlessly reminiscent of the annoying PE classes that used to aggravate me no end in junior high and high school
• time suck for my son, who ends up sitting around there for two hours waiting for them to release me
• and a fukkin waste of time

What is working on the injured limb is
a) the passage of time; and
b) careful, steady, NORMAL use of the joint in walking, sitting, climbing, and whatnot.

For those two obvious, very stupid reasons, the time waste feels even MORE annoying than it normally would

Hmmmm… Almost 6:20. No sign of my excellent son. Maybe I have the wrong day?

One can only hope.

Let us traipse to the back room and look at the old-fashioned paper wall calendar…

****

Hmmm…uh huh! I have that we were supposed to be there at 5:30.

It’s 5:23 now: so saith the MacBook. Maybe it was that Mijito was to pick me up at 5;30. That would get us to Nuisance Central a little before 6:00 p.m.

Call.
Get the Kid.
And yeah: that speculation was…sorta in the ball park.

The enormous value of a healthy offspring is that the critter retains its marbles as you slide deeper and deeper into senility!

😀

Our honored website LET ME IN!!!  At least, it appears to have done so. Haven’t tried to hit “Publish” yet.

Mwa ha ha! That’ll be the acid test, I reckon. Or the beer test. Or something.

Gray and rainy out there: really a gloomy day! But here in Arizona, we don’t bellyache about rain. We’re thrilled out of our hot little minds to see water falling out of the sky.

At any rate: good thing I darted out the door this morning, en route to grocery stores and the like! Got there and back before the skies clabbered up. The spavined hip is fast  getting better: hardly hurt at all to walk up to the store. In another day or so, I imagine, the pain will be about gone.

Meanwhile, I’m finding that having an Uber driver live right across the street from me(!) is JUST THE BUSINESS. Seriously, having this guy and his colleagues in the offing will keep me on the road to all the destinations I’m used to visiting, and probably will rescue me totally from the busses and the streetcars. The Uber guys’ vehicles are clean and seem to be well maintained. And they show up forthwith, whenever you express a desire for a ride. Better than London taxicabs, even!!

My plan now is to hire these folks more often and maybe to have little gifts on hand for them. Tips, of course, are in order. But some other small lagniappe also will help to ingratiate them, over time.

Y’know…when we lived in London, we never kept or rented our own vehicle. Same was true during the entire ten years we lived in Saudi Arabia. We never owned a car! Wherever we went, we got there by cab or bus.

Soon enough, experience will tell us whether hiring a 21st-century American cabbie will do the same for us. Sincerely it is to be hoped: with any luck, most people will never need to own a car. Or want one!

Well. Hmmm….  You might want or need one if you have to ride someplace every goddam day. Going to work, for example.

But maybe not. When we lived in San Francisco, I rode the city bus to school every day. And as a practical matter, it was easier and faster than putting up my mother to hauling the car out of the garage and driving me up to the campus. My father went to sea, of course, so the home-to-work commute was moot. But my aunt, who lived in Berkeley, commuted by train five and six days a week to her job at the Crocker-Anglo National Bank, in downtown San Francisco. And she never owned a car. Or expressed any interest in having one. If they needed to go to a doctor or some such, they called a cab.

So…I’m thinking my son’s car-snatching caper may be one of the biggest favors he’s done for me in a long time. Imagine the amount of money I will NOT have to diddle away if I don’t have a car to diddle it away on!

Seriously: no gasoline, no maintenance, no parking charges, no repairs… Geez!

Meanwhile…heh! Contradictorily enough, today probably would not be the best of all possible days for public-transit commuting. It’s been raining all day. Not hard: just drizzle drizzle drizzle: endlessly soggy.

But it used to be like this in San Francisco about half the time…and it never bothered me. This is why you have a thing called an umbrella. And a raincoat. 😀