My latest surgery was this past June 22nd.  Things were going very, very well until my 3rd week of physical therapy.  Something happened that my doctor described as a minor sprain.  I have been alternating between babying it and trying to work out on it to strengthen it.

Three days ago my knee had enough of me and decided to try to kill me with pain.  When you go to the doctor and they ask you about your pain level, you have to rate it between 0 (no pain at all) and 10 (worse pain ever, going to the hospital now).  I have been between 7 and 9.9 for three days.

I can tell that it’s bad.  I actually want to take Percocet.  I got a prescription after my last surgery and took it only once.  I don’t like how it makes me feel.  But now?  I’ll be happy to put up with the loopy feeling and the insomnia and itching skin for the couple of hours of 2 or 3 pain level that it gives me.

Is it bad for a grown woman to sit and curse at her knee multiple times in a day?

Women don’t wear nylons any more.  When did this happen?  Now, I know I’m a “women” and all, but I don’t wear dresses.  Ever.  So the issue has not come up for me since the 80s when we had to wear business dress clothing to work.  Since we went business casual, I gave away all of my skirts and dresses and never looked back.

This is really just an idle concern for me since I don’t plan on wearing a dressy dress for the rest of my life, but I don’t think I could do the dressy dress with no nylons.  First of all, my legs are the color of marshmallow fluff and I would surely blind someone from the glare.  But secondly, I hate to wear dress shoes with nothing between my foot and the inside of the shoe.  I have trouble enough wearing sandals, but I don’t think I could do the dress shoe minus the hose.

I guess my future is set for sure now.  There are no dressy dresses in it at all.  Sweet!

Every year on this day, I remember our adventures in Baltimore, running to make sure we got to City Hall before it closed so that we could GET MARRIED!

I love that memory and I love my husband.  It’s been 19 years and it feels like we’re just getting started.

Happy anniversary, honey!!

Ah, well.  We keep plugging away at it.  Our latest project was to replace the dinky, cheap-ass kitchen island that came with the house with something bigger, more functional, and more to our liking.  We finally got that all done yesterday - woo!

Back in May, we ordered a kitchen island to be made from reclaimed barn wood and it finally, finally arrived.  We began to be afraid that it might be too big or really outshine the rest of the kitchen, but it’s not too big and, really, we just ignore the rest of the kitchen now while we make googly love-eyes at the island.  We haven’t put all the stuff in it yet but we’re making slow progress.  Here’s a picture of it right after it took up residence…

The piano traveled with me far and wide as I moved around over the years.  It didn’t get a lot of love or attention.  I tried to have it tuned once and the tuning dude told me that it would take 3 tunings, to the “tune” of $100 each time.  I had it done once. 

That was something like 15 years ago or so.  The poor thing had gone from bad to worse and I couldn’t stand to play it because it was so out of tune.  So it sat and collected dust.

Then the old stirrings started and I wanted to play again.  So we found a new piano tuner.  He’s pretty much just starting out and he’s local.  He came over the day after I contacted him and tuned the piano.  Once.  For $100.  He told us that the dude who told us it needed to be tuned multiple times was shady. 

I like this guy.  He seems quite honest, everything’s on the table up front, he’s 10 minutes away from me, and he told me that I only have to get the piano tuned every six months or a year.  That seems reasonable to me.

Now, however, I’ve found that I can’t really play very well any more.  So I dug out my old scales lessons books and I’m getting back into it.  I am really enjoying it, too - now that the piano sounds good again!

Oh, and we found out that this piano was built in 1957!  It’s actually older than me!  Ha!!

Fiddy years old.

According to my husband, I’m one-third through my life.  I checked life expectancies in my region.  They were not 150 years old.  I reflected on my last 50 years.  Am I ready to be done living within the next 40-50 years?  No.

So, I choose to go with the one-third theory.  I’m just getting started, baby!

It was a good #2 pencil.  Just the right length, the eraser was perfect, it wasn’t chewed up or anything.  It was perfect.

Harumph.

Our potatoes - which we have grown superbly in the past - were all failures.  They have some sort of black rot and the teeniest insects crawling on the potatoes themselves - not the plants.  The ground where they grew is chock full of grubs.  All potatoes were lost.

Our shallots are not doing well.  The first batch we harvested rotted.  We have a few more drying now so we’ll hope for the best.

Our onions simply didn’t grow.  They’re very, very small.  The biggest one we got was about the size of a tennis ball.  But we got 100 pearl onion-sized ones.  They’ll be going in a stew or two.

We got a few strawberries at the beginning of the season but they were not sweet and, although the plants keep producing fruit, they’re all weird shaped and colored.

Our lettuce decided not to grow.  We got a few leaves and that’s about it.

Our scallions are dwarves.  But since they’re in the same box where the potatoes were, I’m not going to trust them and I’ll just toss them, too.

One cucumber plant survived but it’s not doing much of anything.

Our carrots look promising, but we’ll see.  I never did get to thin them so they’re probably going to be all stunted and intertwined.

I’m happy with our Earth Boxes on the deck for the most part.  We have a lot of peppers and tomatoes and our herbs are doing fairly well.  The basil is taking over so I’ll be making more pesto this weekend.  The tarragon, thyme, and oregano are all doing very, very well.  Too well, in fact.  I need to chop some of that back and dry it.  Our parsley is shy.  After I cut some off to use it (which is the sole purpose of growing parsley), it decided not to grow much more.  The dill was wispy and the chives are slight.  The rosemary is beautiful but not plentiful.

So there you have it.  Very little is good, much is bad with the garden.  Maybe I’ll just buy my produce at the grocery store next year.

There is nothing in the house to eat.  I know this because I worked from home yesterday and discovered that there was nothing to eat then.  (I ended up eating a can of sliced new potatoes that I heated up with some butter and chives.  Freeze-dried chives.  Not even fresh chives, which I have.  I’m so bad at this.)

Tonight, I opened up the refrigerator and pulled out all of the drawers.  Yep, still nothing to eat.  No easy microwave things in the freezer.  I headed for the pantry.  My eyes fell upon the peanut butter.

So I made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  And ate it with a glass of milk.  Yeah, I’m grown up.

Sponge baths.

I truly hate having to take sponge baths.  They’re messy, inefficient, and I harbor a secret fear that I smell like a decomposing rodent.  A small one, to be fair, but a rodent anyway.  Oh, how I miss my shower!!  And I’ve got a few more days ahead of me before I can actually get into the shower and, even then, it won’t be fun.  I’ll have to come up with ways to keep the surgical dressing dry while in the shower.  (If my doctor had his way, I wouldn’t be in the shower for S-E-V-E-N days, but that is a physical impossibility while I’m still ambulatory.  I give him four days and that’s it.)

I went back to my old posts from a year ago when I had the same surgery on my other knee, hoping that I would have recorded exactly how I ended up with a system that worked to keep the dressings dry but was I at all helpful to myself?  No!  I’ll tell ya - what good am I?  So I’m bound and determined, since I happen to have a degenerative condition in both knees and will probably need to do this all again before I’m dead, to keep a record of how I successfully packaged up my surgical dressings and took a shower. 

This may not be interesting to you but it will help me down the road.  And who knows?  Maybe some poor soul will wander by, hoping to find the answer to keeping surgical dressing dry in the shower and maybe I’ll help that person to have it just a little bit easier. 

And then I’ll earn my halo.   

When I was cleaning the snow pea pods in preparation for dinner, I noticed how fine the threads were down the sides of many of the pea pods and had difficulty removing many of them.  At that point, I figured that they were fine enough to not cause an issue.

I was wrong.

Right there at the end of my dinner, I felt something strange in my throat.  After a couple of hours, I determined that I must have gotten one of those fine threads caught in my throat somehow.  I coughed and coughed, I gargled, I drank a gallon of water - hell, I even ate ice cream to get it to dislodge but I was unsuccessful.  I went to bed hoping that my body’s natural acids would take care of it.

When I awoke this morning, alas, my body let me down.  It was still there.  So again, I coughed and coughed, I gargled, I drank a tiny Dixie cup of water, and what do you know?  That did it! 

In the back of my mind, I had the feeling that it couldn’t actually be the thread from a pea pod, right?  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stated that it feels like I have a feather in my throat, but it’s never really a feather.  But this was really the thread from a pea pod.

Weird, huh?

Now I’m scheduled for my third knee surgery. 

So screw it all.  Yes, I wear old woman perfume and I could very well benefit from something from the Scooter Store, but such is life, dammit!  I still feel young - my body’s just not keeping up with me!

Happy Birthday, Jesse!!

Today is my youngest son’s birthday.  My “baby” turned twenty-five today!  It hardly seems possible that a quarter of a century has passed since he was born.  Where does the time go?

Happy Birthday, Chris!!

It’s almost 1:00 in the morning.  Saturday morning.  And here we are - wide awake.

And why?

It’s not because we’re up late and partying, no!  It’s because we were jolted out of sleep by the sound of screeching tires and something being hit.  Hard.  After heart-pounding minutes spent searching, we saw something black at the front of our yard.

They took out our mailbox.

Somehow.

Again.

*sigh*

At least it wasn’t a dog or a person but still.

I really don’t want to have to get a post office box!  I hate our post office - it’s difficult to get into and out of - and I never, ever go over into that part of town.  For ANYTHING! 

Shit.