The Burrow

Enough whining.  Enough whingeing.  Enough pouting. It is what it is.  Appointments have been made.  Exercises have been undertaken.  Massage is at hand.  All that can be done has been done.  It's time to smile and move on. Luckily for everyone concerned, there is something equally potent on my plate right now.  It's a major undertaking. It involves multiple venues and vendors and dollars.  There are almost-but-not-quite too many cooks tending the broth and thus far none of us has spoiled it for the others. We're planning a wedding. January 6, 2009.... from my backyard SIR and Little Cuter have gone through several of these United States in their wedding-brains before settling on the desert Southwest and our brilliant Tucson sunsets. Our house will be a refuge on the wedding day and a venue before and after.  The actual event is being left to professionals. Thus, a venue must be secured. Apparently, many other bride...

I'm not sure where I'll end up at the end of this post. My recovery was coming along nicely.  There were plateaus and progress was slow and bending over was often an issue, let alone getting up from the ground once I got down there, but I never went backwards.  I was continually getting better. It became part of my persona, the getting better.   You might have seen me with a cane one afternoon, but that looked awesome because last month you saw me with a walker.  Your joy in my accomplishments helped me smile when I was down, and reinforced my belief that I was, in fact, getting better.   I chose to believe you and it felt great.  It was what I wanted to believe.  It was also true. I have no ostomies, no paralysis, no aphasia.  There are no foreign objects lodged too close to my spine to be removed.  I am well aware of the fact that things could be worse. My limitations are emotional and neurological, in the sense that my numb thigh i...

Volunteer with power sander A lot of the work went on in small spaces. Becca scraping by hand There was sanding.  Lots and lots of sanding. Becca thought that the hand tools were more efficient than the power sander, and she was covered with the detritus to prove it. There was plenty of time to get to know one another. Workers were up top and underneath. Some even bothered to read the directions. Some of us were too short to reach our assignments and needed ladders and ladder holders to achieve our goals. There were wheelbarrows of dirt to be toted. And Christina-Taylor's girlfriend had plenty of time to supervise her elders. Allstate's big wigs weren't afraid to get down and dirty. "That's my supervisor" with the jack-hammer. She has some serious construction skills, wouldn't you agree? Volunteers came prepared with belts and tools. Some of us used scissors to remove ...

The Shopper is taking the week off.  Stationary will be featured next week..... some of it still has to arrive and be photographed for your visual pleasure.   Enjoy the Random Thoughts..... Shopping Secrets will return next week. Everyone is excited about planning this wedding... right up until we actually start to do some planning.  Then we all go our separate emotional ways, it seems. My way is straight to panic and confusion.  I want everyone to be happy.  I want the cost to be small and the joy to be huge.  I want perfect weather and 100% yield on the invitation list so that we can be surrounded by everyone we chose to invite.... everyone we love. Who knew that even in Tucson there would be only 2 Fall weekends left from which to choose? ***** Arizona lost badly and Arizona State won deliciously and suddenly I realize that I have no idea how Cal or Stanford have fared this season.  It seems that I am truly a resident of the Grand Canyon S...

Who Are We? Have we really become a nation that would leave a 30 year old uninsured coma patient to die on the side of the road? Worse, have we come to the point where answering YES to that question in a crowded amphitheater results in cheers instead of stunned silence? Have we really fractured our social contract to that extent? After 9/11/01, it was impossible to walk down the street without exchanging smiles with people you passed. There was a ruefulness to the grins, a piece of we're here and it's scary but we're in it together, that bound us together as Americans. It was wonderful. Neither skin color nor a thick accent got in the way of the feeling that we were on the cusp of something new, that we were starting to see one another as members of a beleaguered group, as people who needed one another in order to survive. Bush 43's failure to capitalize on that sentiment is at the top of my Things He Screwed Up list. I imagined a call to ...

A meditation on food doesn't appear that often in The Burrow.  I'm not a big fan of cooking for myself, and I'm even less of a fan of preparing meals for others.  Hence, when no one else is around, I take myself out to eat. This worked quite well for me when I was a single person and responsible for no one's belly but my own.  If I didn't feel hungry, I didn't eat.  Even if the clock told me that lunchtime had passed, if my tummy wasn't rumbling, I ignored the time piece and went on about my day. Sometimes I'd have breakfast 3 times a day.  Scrambled eggs is my go-to staple for hunger pains when there are no other interesting items hiding in the refrigerator.  With or without toast, it soothes my soul.  It was the first meal I ate in the hospital after I woke up from 5 days of anesthetized stupor.  They were delicious, all piled up on the plate, yellow and fluffy and soft.  My throat was very happy. Then, again, someone had cooked them ...

I'm feeling blue these days.  My hip is acting like an inflamed joint  according to Marcus the Master Manipulator.  I've been avoiding doing anything that hurt in the gym in an effort to reduce the inflamation.  It doesn't seem to have done much good.  My range of motion is expanding, and that's a good thing.  My strength and stamina and pain are about the same. That's right, pain.  I'd stopped using the word for a while.  The memory of the real pain that I felt in the hospital and those first months at home was still fresh in my mind.  But now, two-thirds of the way through my first year of living with perforations, I'm willing to concede that the sharp, stabbing sensation radiating from my mid-thigh up and down every nerve ending within synaptic distance... it's pain. I'm taking Aleve; cycling off it just makes me hurt more.  Acupuncture has been wonderful in releasing some of the tightness and bunching up  feeling that has de...