Friday Goofy

When the bartender first set that salad down, I thought I was falling over. I'm sure that pomegranate margarita was partially to blame.
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This next picture is for Jazz, because she wanted to know:

The Bad Wave Cycle + A Fun Road Trip

I clearly wasn't thinking clearly when I got all my hair whacked off. Which makes sense because when I become too hot, my brain does not work at peak capacity. When I met with the new physical therapist, he said I should be able to touch the top of my head soon. I was all, "Damn! If I had just waited a few more weeks, I'd still have my hair." But that's not the main issue. The main issue is I am going to go this afternoon to get a new driver's license. With this hair. A new driver's license with a new picture with this hair and not only that but I will probably have it for TEN years. The driver's license, I mean. Not the hair. And the very worst part is I am on a bad hair wave cycle.

I made a very rudimentary graph to show how curly hair grows. (I should have deleted the amplitude and displacement words but I guess I wasn't really paying attention.) The vertical green lines represent the hairline at the top of my forehead as viewed in profile. The red lines represent my hair growth cycle. My nose would be pointing out of my head in the same direction as the distance arrow.

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Line 1 represents where I am now. My hair is growing straight down my face and curling back upward. Line 2 is my good wave cycle where my hair is growing upwards and curling down. I have accepted the fact that I will have a bad driver's license photo, but I still want to whine about it.

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Fun News: On Saturday past, we did our goofy little road trip to Louisiana to buy Covington Strawberry Ale. It was a beautiful sunny 80° day. We left around 11:45. On one of My Sweetie's satellite radio stations they were playing Kasey Kasem's top 100 countdown from 1974. After about the first hour, it didn't even look like the Texas we know. East Texas is far greener and lusher and has pine trees, very similar to North Carolina.

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We went straight to the liquor store in Shreveport and when we walked in, there was a little dolly with three cases with my name on them. Literally. Just a mile or so down that same road on the way back we stopped at another liquor store that the distributor had mentioned and got another case. I hadn't even called those people so it was a nice surprise that they had a whole case.

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The whole trip took exactly 7 hours. We didn't even have to stop for lunch because I had packed roast beef sliders and strawberries and pretzels. It was a fun trip. Good company, nice scenery, good music and best of all, it was a unique experience. Oh, and now I have lots of strawberry ale. I'm drinking one right now and it is delicious.

Physical Therapy News

I wish I had run my hands through my hair before that picture was taken. I'm not crazy about the super short hair but I've been able to make it look decent. I was in a good mood, though.
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I haven't posted about my physical therapy because I hated it. There were many aspects that irked me to bits. It's a long grouchy story and I was full of salt and vinegar (and all the grouchy stories) when I went to my doctor today (Tuesday). But he nipped it in the bud. I told him one little thing and he said, "You should go to a different physical therapist, perhaps one closer to your home." I told him I already had an appointment for an hour later and he said, "Just cancel it."
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So that was it. I was all fired up with all my contained ire just dying to burst out and just like that, it was over. I felt oddly unfinished and yet quite relieved. I'm hoping I can get into one particular one. It would be ideal. I'll find out soon. That one is right by where I eat lunch on Fridays after Meals on Wheels and it would be nice to do all of that in one day.
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If I can't get into the Friday one, there's another one closer to my house that I can try. I'm looking forward to going to a new physical therapist. I just dread filling out new paperwork. I hate paperwork. I mean I really hate paperwork. That right there should tell you just how much I did not care for the physical therapist I had. To him I say, "...Oh wait. I don't want to say that here. It was a bit crude.

Aww, Hair No!

I mentioned before that I can't put my hair up. And neither can my husband:
Well, the weather has gotten warmer and warmer and so I had to forsake vanity for comfort and have most of my hair whacked off:

It had gotten pretty bad. I usually do quite a bit of trimming of my bangs and the hair around my face between haircuts and I had not been able to do that. I remember about a week or so ago thinking the top of my head looked like it had been possessed by Donald Trump. I was all "Aww, Hell No!" So I did what I had to do.

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I will try to get someone to take a pic of me soon. I have been bad about pictures lately. But at least I am not so hot anymore and thank god I don't look like Donald Trump in drag anymore.

Friday Puzzle: OGA

I do puzzle books all the time. I love word puzzles and cryptograms and other various ones. Today I had a really hard puzzle. I'm usually very competitive and never give up, but this one was too hard for me.
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The challenge was to form as many words as possible with OGA in them. The letters had to be in that order and together as shown, but anywhere in the word, i.e. beginning, middle, end. The puzzle writers had come up with 10. I was able to only come up with 4 before I gave up and looked up their answers. I felt pretty bad having only managed 4 words until I looked up their answers. I had written down a word that they had not! Go me! It made me feel a little better.
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Give it a try. (No plurals, foreign words or proper nouns.)

Pretty Food & Family Pictures

I really love it when food turns out pretty. My Home Ec teacher was Mrs. Tippett and she stressed color and color variety on a dinner plate. To this day when I make a bland plate where most of the food is the same color, I'll say, "Mrs. Tippett would not approve of this meal." I think she would have loved my tamales and avocado salad.
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Speaking of Mrs. Tippett, when I was a junior in high school, my friends got word of a big New Year's eve party at a house in town. I'm sure it was one of those parties that got out of hand and I'm sure the girl didn't mean for everyone in the world to show up. None of us knew her. The streets were jammed with cars and we had to park a few blocks away. I think there were seven or eight of us in our car. The house was jam packed and I remember finding an uncrowded room to escape to. It was one of those formal front living rooms that no one uses and I guess all the southern people there had been raised that way, because no one was in this room. Since my family never had the unused formal front room, I didn't have that ingrained aversion of such rooms. I was happy to be out of the throng.
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One wall had a batch of large family photos. I saw the girl whose party it was, because I recognized her from seeing her earlier in the kitchen. And then there she was in another picture with Mrs. Tippett! I realized she was Mrs. Tippett's little sister and for some reason it freaked me out. I was in Mrs. Tippett's parents' house partying like I was in the Delta Tau Chi house from Animal House! Suddenly I felt like I was committing some gross violation like I was robbing a bank or something. I spent the rest of my time there trying to round up my friends to GET OUT of THAT HOUSE.
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On the road very close to my house was a "slippery when wet" sign - it's a picture showing a car swerving - and in my foolish drunken state, I said, "Hey Tim! Didn't you see that sign? You're supposed to swerve." Well he did, we all laughed, he turned into my street and then we saw the blue lights. He pulled over and said, "You get out and say you were driving, since it's your fault I swerved." I was in the middle of the backseat! How would that be believable? Instead, I got out, walked back to the cop car and told the cops the stupid sign story, told them who my father was, dropped about five names of cops we knew, and told them where I lived and said that we were all going there to sleep for the rest of the night. Since we were now on what was basically a dead end road with my apartments at the end, the cops let us go. If they had known I had been partying at Mrs. Tippett's parents house I'm sure I would have gone to prison for six years. Just for that. But I try to make colorful meals, and maybe that's because I'm trying to make it up to Mrs. Tippett.

30 Days

As I write this very, very late on Sunday night (although many would call this Monday morning), it has been 30 days since my surgery. I have often bemoaned the ridiculously quick passage of time that happens after one reaches a certain age, but when it comes to post-surgery, I'm all for it.
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There are stages that you go through in post-surgery and that worst one was horrible but, it too, passed after a decent night's sleep. That very worst stage is a feeling of deep depression, but because my whole system is anti-THAT, it lasted just a few hours before I fell asleep. Plus I think I had some mild insanity from stopping the heavy pain killers, which I did pretty early. I remember one night, mashed into my pillow, on my back, of course, and feeling like my hair was attacking my head and was going to swallow my face. It was so overwhelming I was thinking I should get a buzz cut.
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Last Tuesday, I tied my shoes and was so proud like a four-year-old and was telling everyone, "I tied my shoes today!" Speaking of Tuesdays, that's when I do my physical therapy. The girl was working on turning my arm out and I told her my arm didn't do that much turning out to begin with and that I was far more interested in turning my arm in. I will never be fully independent again until I can hook my bra. My neighbor hooks my bra for me on Tuesdays (Thanks Carole!). And My Sweetie does it on the weekend when we go out.
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And we have gone out the last two weekends and it was nice to get out. I even got new shoes. It felt good to do normal stuff. I still have a long way to go to get full function in my left arm, but I can aways do a little bit more every day and I like that. Life is good and time passes and right now, time passing is not a bad thing.