SI joint?

Whatever an SI joint is (sounds like something you would get detention for) I have dislocated mine.
I have prescriptions in abundance, and they make me nervous.

Back again

Today I'm pretty happy and content overall. Still recovering from the gall bladder removal,of course and getting over the head cold that seemed to land on David and I both with a vengeance while we were at Home Depot this weekend getting mulch. More than anything, though, I'm all awash with ideas for the gardens (in all their plurality). Not able to get out and till the earth or walk the land while i recovered, i got out the pencil and graph paper and designed two new garden plots and expanded the existing vegetable plot (as we seem to do each year). David likes the designs enough that they seem to be worth the labor required, and we are talking quite a bit about what we are doing this year to the land. I'm liking the planning and looking forward to the putting into place part. There are some new, lovely and quite fragrant roses out back, and a picket fence on the way. I couldn't ask for a better way to spend Mother's Day than gardening. Honest.

At Home Depot we also picked up some fence posts and 2x4 for making some fences-as-screens and a grape trellis. We scheduled the delivery of a ton of lime and I can't wait for it to arrive this weekend. We decided on a tandem load of topsoil to be delivered as well, and haven't quite figured out the date on that beyond "soon." It would be nice to have that this weekend as well, and just give ourselves over to the front yard and fields. Even small projects are making a big impression on me, and we are planning more and more of the year ahead with an eye toward living there forever together, and not just what needs to be done maintenance-wise.

Just finished Stephanie Meyer's Twilight which is the first in a series, and is a high school girl-falls-in-love-with-compelling-dangerous-boy (who-is-actually-a-vampire (but-it's-okay-he's-one-of-the-good-guys)). I'm not certain I'm interested in reading the rest of the series, especially after having recently been spoiled on the great voice and craft of Richard Matheson in I Am Legend and Earthbound. Now those were some good otherworldly books. David read I Am Legend while I was reading Twilight and one night at bedtime I asked him "How are your vampires?" and he laughed. It's good to feel like a couple again, in a lot of different, little, but significant ways. Now that we have both finished the book version, we are looking forward to watching Will Smith in the movie adaptation of Matheson's vampires, and I'm hoping that Netflix delivers it for this weekend.

Note: the month off absence? Gall bladder issues starting April twelfth, incorrectly diagnosed by the same Emergency Room doctor not once but twice (despite being accurately identified by the urgent care doctors both times and an ER follow-up physician) which was finally removed on the twenty-third. The past four weeks have been a blur. It's good to be back. Mostly, it's good to be able to laugh again. Goodness, but that was difficult.

recent events

The boys seem to have been out of school the past two weeks more than they have been in it. Between dental appointments and weather closings, this has been the strangest back-to-school month I think I have ever seen. On the positive side, we love our new family dentists. Dr. Mills specializes in children's dentistry, and the boys can't say enough wonderful things about her and her staff. Given that they used to lose sleep before seeing a dentist before meeting Dr. Mills, I think this is simply marvelous. Yesterday school started at the scheduled time for the first time all week. Of course, we ended up needing to take Ethan to have his hand x-rayed just to verify that Tuesday's fall wasn't any more serious than soft-tissue damage. Ethan and David went to an immediate care clinic in Salem together, and made the best of it, enjoying a late lunch at Five Guys before trucking back up the mountain to school. For his part, Ethan was a real trooper through the whole thing. David rescheduled his own appointment and does indeed have a serious sinus infection that has decided to make itself known in his lungs as well. He felt horrible this morning, and I'm keeping my ear out for pneumonia, which aside from being A Really Scary Thing to me, is also pretty serious. Between school weirdness, weather, dental and doctor appointments, David and I do somehow manage to show up to our jobs on occasion, mostly through tag team efforts¹. My job is going quite well, and I’m enjoying adding additional products to my testing responsibilities. I’ve just been ‘officially’ given my second piece of software to manage and I’m enjoying figuring out how it all fits together. It has a quite intricate interface, with multiple drop-in components, each with their own configuration, so I certainly haven’t any lack of intellectual work in front of me. And, as always with software, there is a release deadline sitting right on top of another build, so the pace isn’t anything to sneeze at, either. David has likewise seen his lab get into some serious R&D stuff, so the schedule there is tight and demanding and weird as only a biological lab would be. On this upside, they are doing some cool development stuff, and chatting about work is far from the typical ‘how was your day’ fare. We are also enjoying our time at home, weirdly scheduled though it might be. This past weekend we took yet another trip to Floyd, this time with the boys, and visited School House fabrics (which the boys tolerated), the general store (which the boys loved) and a custom woodworker’s storefront. We had dinner at the Mexican restaurant and ended up poking around in the clothes store, where I picked up a new pair of pants and a sweater than I just fell in love with. We ended up designing ever-so-many things, and it was a nice outing, all told. Sunday we had plans aplenty from which to choose: we ended up scrapping them all, staying inside and making a carrot cake. How yummy and cozy was that? The boys are looking forward to more snow, as the recent acquisition of snow-discs had them howling with glee on Thursday and Friday as they turned the driveway into a slalom course. David took the tractor and scraped the snow into banks around trees and at the end of the driveway, and I swear they would have stayed out until hypothermia set in if we hadn’t tempted them back with warm food and hot chocolate. At home we are watching netflix and library selections, with a few randomly selected episodes of Firefly just for fun. David and I watched Babel (not so great: quite dislocated and dislocating, perhaps by design) and The Devil Wears Prada (wonderful and funny). From the library the whole family watched Holes (outrageously funny and cute), The River Wild (a touching and exciting tale) and The Dangerous Lives of Alter Boys (serious and thought-provoking, despite the humor; an entry on the Must See List). Those are all on their way back, and I'm looking forward to our next installment this weekend. 1. More than ever, this month I feel as though we are the Wonder Twins, assessing the latest split-second development, declaring "Form of. . a taxi!”" and dashing out the door in our various directions.

breifly dispatched

Staying home with the boys this summer, up the mountain, and sort of getting that secluded, where-the-hell-are-the-adults feeling. Looking forward to getting a contract doing damned near anything after Labour Day. The boys start school again on the 22nd of this month, which seems practically criminal until you see how many snow days we always use.

I'm pretty let down about the restaurant. The owner was asking nearly three times the worth of the place, and failed to tell me about all the water damage. So scratch that.

Went to the DMV for license stuff yesterday and sat around in the otherwise deserted mall for 90 minutes. I swear that if i don't get a contract I'll just open a small hot dog and coke stand in crossroads. probably make a killing before it drives me nuts.

Things are going well at home. On Saturday we looked on a lark in a jewelery store that was going out of business, and i swear we almost walked out with some shiny stuff. It was odd-but-fun that we both got caught up in it, as we usually aren't really interested in bling sort of stuff. Then we came to our senses and left, continuing our journey to Uncle Charlie and Aunt Barbara's house for a family dinner. Gracious sakes I like these people. Morris gave us a ton of green beans and other harvest from the garden, along with some new & improved deer repellent.

TheEx is still a jackass of course. He has been screwing around with visitation and support, so i put a call in to my lawyer and we're going to go into court Once Again.

As for the absence, i fell at Wendy's -- i swear the title will be "I always knew fast food would kill me." It was raining, I was nicely dressed, and the only way in or out was over a concrete ramp which was slicker than dog snot on a doorknob. I slipped - duh - and went airborne before crashing into the pavement, hair shoes and glasses all over the place. I sat trembling with pain while i waited for David to come get me and the boys, and the rest of the day was taken up with the emergency room, both of them actually. I went directly to Community, but then was taken over to Roanoke Memorial to be seen by the orthopedist who had been in surgery all day. The RMH facility looked like it was a war zone, given the construction, what with plastic sheeting hanging about, construction materials and the lack of bed space. I was parked on a guerney alongside the nurses station, and David held my hand while the orthopedist set the arm. Honest, I don't think i've been through pain like that. Many thanks to Michael for taking the boys off our hands and heading to see Transformers on the day of the incident, and for being The Man while I had surgery during David's Big Honking Presentation. It's good to have family.

I fell on the 11th.A week later I had surgery, and a week after that I got the cast-splint-thingy removed. The break sucks, and i have a plate and three screws to rebuild it. the plate will likely have to come out in a couple months, once the bone has knit. Of course, I have no insurance, and I'm going to have to get a personal injury lawyer, since I think the whole of Wendy's corporate is so confused they don't know how to deal with me, so they are electing to do nothing at all. Fun.

We haven't been to the beach as yet, or taken anything like a typical vacation, given that so many of David's vacation days have been used to stay home with me or tote me to surgery or appointments. I'm thinking it would be fun to go for an extended weekend around Graeme's birthday, and then come home and flop while they are at the first week of school.

We have Harry Potter on audio and are listening to it together as a family in the evenings. It's very cool to do, and we're all on edge as we listen. Kinda cute, and reminiscent of the tales around the radio from the 30's.