Stupid Shoulder

It was weird looking at the inside of my shoulder. Some pictures make me think of steaks and pork chops and others remind me of a big slice of roast:
I made an appointment and while it's at my hand doctor's office it is with another doctor. Apparently my hand doctor is a hand doctor after all. The appointment is at 10:40 am tomorrow (Thursday). Yuck. I will have to get up very early. Anyway, I had to go pick up my MRI from the imaging place to take with me.
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Not only did I get to look at all the images, but there was a detailed written report. It's looong. Apparently there is a lot more going on than the one tear. My Sweetie looked up most of the words and apparently of the four rotator cuff muscles, I have tears in three of them, as well as some other irritated and swollen things. And there were some early signs of osteoarthritis also. Yay me.
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Not all of the report was horrible. There was no atrophy of something and something is intact. But those were two short sentences in a very long paragraph. Anyway, so I've been having a little pity party for myself for the last couple of hours. Having thoughts like, I won't even be able to tie my shoes! Now I'm going to make a list of things to ask and tell the doctor because nothing is more irritating than remembering something you forgot to ask. Well, maybe not being able to tie your shoes.

The MRI and Christmas

I pretty much went through the list in the previous post without a hitch, except the neighbor visiting was moved from Thursday to Saturday and the Friday kitchen part took about 10 hours. I was starting to feel like some sort of kitchen prisoner in hell.
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Of course that was the point: to have everything done the day before. On Christmas eve, it all went pretty easily: basically displaying things on platters and trays. We had ten guests, which may not seem like that many to some of you, but to me it felt like a million people were here.
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There was a lot of fruit left over, and that surprised me because that's what I eat at parties. I had blackberries, strawberries, raspberries, grapes and blueberry craisins. In fact I am finishing off the strawberries right now.
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Christmas day was supposed to be a rest day but I seemed to be busy until about 7:00 pm, so I will use today as my rest day.
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Thursday's MRI was very interesting. My main concern was that I would fall asleep. To try to keep myself awake, I made up things that the noises sounded like. Some of them were amusing. But I caught myself almost dozing off FIVE times! And in case I didn't mention it before, I didn't want to fall asleep because people move and jerk when they fall asleep and you are supposed to stay perfectly still in the MRI chamber. It went by pretty quickly actually, and she showed me the video. It just looked like some 1974 hippy acid video except it was in black and white.
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My doctor's nurse called on Friday and said that I did in fact have a tear in my rotator cuff. (I knew that.) She gave me two referrals for orthopedic surgeons and one of them was my hand doctor, so I picked him. I called his office pretty late on Friday and left a message. I have no idea when I will hear back. It was odd that it was my hand doctor, because for some reason I thought my hand doctor was just that: A hand doctor. I don't know why I thought that. Anyway, he struck me as a competent fellow when I used him before, so I'm good.
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Now I am looking forward to January 5th. My Sweetie and I are going to New Orleans. Also I booked the beach cottage for May. We've upgraded to a five bedroom so everyone can be there at the same time. Yay! Wow it's almost 2012. It seems like I waited forever fo my 50th birthday and now that was 8 months ago. Time flies.

Wednesday ~ House cleaning, neatening up

Thursday ~ Visit neighbor, go for MRI and drinks with daughter, grocery store

Friday ~ cooking, prepping food

Saturday ~ celebrate Christmas Eve with family, go out to play

Sunday ~ Rest

I think I have this down.

The Best Laid Plans....

I kind of wanted to talk about this sweet little thing I bought:
And how I plan to use it for my finely grated provolone and horseradish spread that I plan to make for the roast beef sliders that will be part of my Christmas eve finger food and how I have a strange fascination for spreaders:

(The steak knife on the right was for size reference). But I guess I should (ha! "should" almost spells "shoulder!") get to the nitty gritty about what's going on.

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I have two little pills left of the Prednisone and there has been no change in my shoulder. Whenever I've taken this before, I got instant relief. Everything I've read online about torn rotator cuffs describes my symptons exactly. The good news is the Prednisone has been great for my poor thumb. My right hand is doing a lot more work because my left side is so pathetic, but I have had no thumb pain at all. And because I had to eat low fat, low protein in order to avoid a gall bladder attack, I actually lost a few pounds. Which was weird because I always thought this was all beer fat, and believe me, I have been drinking a lot of beer.

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So when I wake up today, I will call my doctor and I guess he will either hook me up with a specialist or send me somewhere for an MRI. I really don't want to get surgery before my January 5th New Orleans vacation, but I'm also not sure if I can take this for 21 or so more days. I'm sure I'll have a better idea of everything in the next few days.

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So that's where my shoulder stands. I do have a great menu for our Christmas eve and I'm also happy we are having it in the afternoon, so our night and our Christmas will be free. Oh, and I am SO SO VERY happy that my gall bladder held up, but I sure am craving some cheese.

~~~UPDATE: MRI is scheduled for Thursday at 3:30 CST.~~~

Not Shouldering Through The Pain

I haven't mentioned it before but my left shoulder is all out of wank and quite painful. It's been like this for about three weeks. When it comes to physical irritations, because I have a pretty high tolerance for pain, I try to ignore them, thinking they will go away. They usually do. But not only is my shoulder not getting better, it began to interrupt my sleep. That doesn't fly with me.
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I am a great sleeper. Granted, I get to wait until I am sleepy to go to bed and then sleep until I am ready to get up. Yes, I do appreciate that. I remember those horrible "Insomnia Sundays" from back in my working days. They sucked big time. So at this stage of my life I have really good sleeps and I enjoy them.
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Well this wanky shoulder and sleeping do not have a good working relationship. It wakes me up. A Lot. So today I did what any normal person would have done two weeks ago. I actually went to the doctor. Okay, I have to confess here that besides not being a doctor goer type person, I was afraid he would say: It's osteoarthritis and you will just have to live with it for the rest of your life. Because that is what the hand doctor told me about my thumb. And I'm no longer a big fan of my thumb, but we tolerate each other. A shoulder however is a bigger deal.
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And by a bigger deal, I don't just mean size. You may not realize it, but unless you are a knitter, or maybe a hitchhiker, or someone who is paid to "autograph" things for a famous person, you use your shoulder way more than you use your thumb. And when it comes to sleeping, you hardly use your thumb at all. And if you do, please tell me how.
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We looked at the x-ray together and I was happy to see my bones were all smooth and rounded and nicely spaced. He thinks I have a small tear in my rotator cuff. So he gave me that steroid dosepak thing. Yeah, the thing that gives me gall bladder attacks. I refused them the last time I was supposed to take them for something, so that should tell you how bad my shoulder hurts. I did however ask him how to avoid the gall bladder attack. He said to avoid proteins and fats. If I had known all of this, I would have had a ribeye yesterday.
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But my shoulder hurts, and gall bladder attacks are hideous, so I went to the grocery store and bought very healthy things to have for the next few days. And the doctor said if I am not good after the medicine is finished (which will be Monday) then I will have to have an MRI and possibly rotator cuff surgery.
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The timing seems kind of poor considering it is Christmas and we are going to New Orleans on January 5th. But I think I'll always remember this Christmas season as the one with the bad timing. I forgot to tell you that we had to buy a new hot water heater ($$$$!) on Tuesday. Gotta have hot water. A good working shoulder would be nice too. I hope the medicine works.

Shower Chemistry

As I was taking a shower today I was trying to decide which conditioners to mix. Then I wondered if anyone else does this. That's my shower and my husband has his own shower. I counted and I have eight shampoos and six conditioners. I don't know why.
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The odd thing is, I'm a real stickler about certain things. For instance, I've used the same soap for at least 20 years (Pears) and I've used the same toothpaste for longer than that (Colgate). But when it comes to shampoo and conditioner, I love variety. I'm always looking for something different. And then I like to mix them together. Not mix shampoos with conditoners of course, but shampoos with shampoos and conditioners with conditioners. (And I think "shampoo" is a really funny word if you think about it. It's like a combination of "Shamu" and "tattoo" which are two things that really do not belong together. You shouldn't get a tattoo of Shamu and you shouldn't tattoo Shamu.)
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Anyway, does anyone else do hair chemistry in the shower? And to be quite honest I really just want everyone to listen to this song: http://soundcloud.com/filed-under-anonymous/a-million-chimneys

Good Art

I first posted that picture over four years ago. It is Caravaggios' The Cardsharps. It's my second favorite painting and it makes its home right here in Fort Worth at the Kimbell Art Museum. On Saturday we went to The Kimbell to see the exhibit "Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome." I was excited to see more Caravaggio work. It was also fascinating to see the paintings of his students, followers and admirers.
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There are many reasons I love this type of art. Most people who have an interest in art have all sorts of different tastes. Impressionism is very popular as well as modern art. I really love the very old, very realistic paintings. I was thinking about this today and I think I figured it out. Most of the paintings in the exhibit were painted between 1590 and 1620. There are no photographs from that time so these realistic paintings give us a snapshot, if you will, into the past. Because such objects as an apple or a stein look almost photographic, I think it is safe to assume that the other objects (not the angels, of course) are also very realistic. And a lot of these old paintings feature books.
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Books were not commonly owned objects in that time and so I imagine that it was because they were special that they were included in so many paintings. They did not look like modern books. They were always curvy, wavy and somewhat crinkled. I paid particular notice to the books in the paintings. There were also some things in the paintings that were unidentifiable by me. I wish I could have asked someone what they were.
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I also got a big kick out of seeing from where the paintings had been loaned. There were paintings from all over Rome, some from Spain, at least one from The Louvre and even one from the museum in my home state of North Carolina. I've always thought it was fascinating how these great old paintings travel around the world. On the one hand, I am thrilled about it and on the other, it makes me nervous to think these fine old irreplaceable, delicate masterpieces could be damaged or lost forever.
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I guess I should just appreciate being able to see great artwork. I'm sure there are millions of people on the planet who have never seen great art. I'm lucky because I have seen my two favorite paintings. And of all of Caravaggio's work that I saw today, I still say The Cardsharps is his best.

Watching Time Flip By

My best friend gave me a silver photo album as a wedding gift. It's very pretty and is a single picture page book with a photo slot in the silver cover and stands upright like a picture frame. As we did did not have a huge amount of pictures - it was a small family event at my in-laws' house - there were many pages left empty.
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I remember getting all the pictures back. Yeah, back in the day when we had to get pictures developed. I had fun arranging them in the book and then I was out of pictures. As I looked with dismay at all the blank slots, I decided that every year, we would have our picture taken on our anniversary and put them in the book. This is this year's pic:

It's very strange to flip through the book and watch yourself change. It's like Boom! Turn the pages and watch yourself age from 40 to 50. Or from 34 to 44 if you are the groom. It might be funny to do a 10 year slideshow.
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And speaking of time passing, my dashboard says this is my 1000th post, but I know that's only partly true. They count half finished posts that you deleted or any post that you deleted. My guess is that my blog probably contains about 985 posts. But I'm not going to count them. It was bad enough counting from 40 to 50. Turn the page.

Organizational Madness

I checked back over my blog to see when I first mentioned the Tupperware and it was two weeks ago. Since then I have continued with this finding of places for things. That old expression: A place for everything and everything in its place, or something to that effect, has apparently taken over my mind. I can't seem to stop. I found a good place for all of My Sweetie's school books (schoolbooks? I don't feel like looking that up). They were in a stack in the bedroom and that's fine when you're twenty, but at our age it seemed silly. I found a shelf for them in here. I also found another shelf for all of his big hardback video game guide books. And those actually seem like something you would own when you are twenty.
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Saturday, I decided to rearrange some stuff in the library. To move bookcases in the library requires removing all the books. It was daunting but I HAD to do it. And I did. One bookcase only had to be slid four inches to the right, but take out all the books, I did. And it is all better. And I enjoyed seeing all the books. I found all kinds of things I had never noticed. I have decided to read Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. Especially since I have never read a Jane Austen novel and her fans all hate it. I digress.
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On Friday, one of my MOW ladies asked if I could come over some day and help her organize her clothes. I was all WHAT ARE YOU KIDDING YES!! I did that this afternoon (yesterday - Monday- chronologically. I haven't gone to bed yet.) She could not have picked a better time to ask me. I was The Wizard of Clothes. I was more than just the mover of things from place to place: I gently chastised her for having clothes with tags on them. I also told her how I keep my clothes to a workable minimum. She liked the idea. But considering that she had eight or nine nearly indentical red shirts, I doubt she will heed my advice. I made a point to hang all of the red shirts together so she will see that she has an unnecessary redundancy in her closet.
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This afternoon I am going to tackle a built-in storage area in the house that I don't think I've opened in six months. I can't wait. But I'll have to. I have to go to sleep now.

Pictures in Pictures

One of my FB friends wanted to see my polymer cover on my porch light and so I took a picture.
After I took the picture I saw so many things in the reflection as well as the picture. It's almost like a picture puzzle.
For instance, you can see my beer in a red huggy and that's inside the house although it looks like it's sitting on bricks. The bricks are on the front porch.. You can see through my house to the backyard. You can see my neighbor's house across the street from the front of my house.
You can see the back of my mailbox out on the street.
You can see me taking the picture.
And Snoopy.
And Charlie Brown.
I was tickled that I was just taking a picture of the porch light and all these other things happened. Have fun. Let me know if you see anything else.

Silly Adult Phone Conversation

Me: Hello?
My Sweetie: Where are you?
Me: Nevada
My Sweetie: So you hopped a plane?
Me: Yeah
My Sweetie: Are you having fun?
Me: Yeah, except I just lost $140.
My Sweetie: But you got groceries for that.
Me: Yeah
My Sweetie: See you in a few minutes.
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And just for funsies (and to possibly make you roll your eyes), I covered a cardboard box for Barney to sleep in and I really think he likes it:

Organizing the Tupperware

This is the before picture of the three main shelves of my pantry:
I had kept my plasticware in that blue dish drainer for quite a while. It seemed like a good idea at the time. And don't let the picture fool you. First of all I was holding the camera up. That middle shelf is my eye level shelf. I had to use this to sort through the plasticware:

And you had to do it that way, because if you tried to just slide that drainer thing out, all the small lids would slide right through it. And the bottom shelf? Well because it was below eye level, I pretty much used only the front 8 inches. I didn't even know what was behind the stuff in front. So I cleared out that bottom shelf.:

I am ashamed to say, there were cans of stuff in there that dated all the way back to 2005. There was a can of peaches that looked like it was moments away from exploding. It was not good. Out of Sight, Out of Mind truly applied.

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Anyway I got this pull out drawer plastic bin thing and transferred all the plasticware from the blue drainer basket to the drawer:

Then I put the good stuff from the first 8 inches of the bottom shelf onto the top shelf and I slid the drawer bin onto the bottom shelf with my plasticware tucked neatly inside:

And now it all makes more sense:

Whenever I do stuff like this I always wonder why I hadn't thought of it before. I've had the pull out drawer bin since 2008. It was one of the things I brought home when I cleared out Mom's house that year. I had been using it to store my rock polishing stuff - which I haven't used in a long time. And why hadn't I noticed that I hadn't looked into the back of that bottom shelf in years? There are actually two shelves below that one and I go through those quite often. Anyway, I got it done and it has worked out great so far. So yay! And thank God that can of peaches never blew up.

Christmas Fever (in my feet?)

I spent most of Friday, Saturday and Sunday decorating for Christmas. I do it for me because I love love love Christmas stuff. See that stuff at the bottom of the pic? That's a clear polymer with little gift boxes printed on it. I cut out little panels of that to put on the panes of my front porch light. I love it! I didn't take a picture because although the project itself is very cute, the metal around the panes is old and crappy.
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We went our for a little while to shop for some fun stuff on Saturday and then stopped at a bar for beers and then went out to eat. That was fun. We went to three different places to shop and I got piles of stuff but we only spent about $40 at each store. I love good deals. And now my feet are killing me!
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Seriously, the last time my feet hurt this bad was when I wore my "ruby" slippers to walk all over Bourbon Street. What happened was, I spent quite a lot of time over these last three days, balancing on my toes on the top step of a step ladder. Standing on your toes on a step ladder uses about a thousand more foot muscles than just standing on your toes on the floor. I guess there's that whole balancing thing. I mean if you're on the floor on your toes and reaching up and you get off balance, you just take a step back. On top of a step ladder? Taking a step back is not a good idea. It requires falling. I do not care for falling. So I used all thousand muscles of my feet over and over and now I am paying the price.
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I think Monday will be used to rest my feet and enjoy my Christmas decorations. Sounds like a very good use of a Monday to me.

Friday Goofy

I took this picture Thursday night in Downtown Fort Worth
of My Sweetie in front of a painting
of what we can only figure to be Pirate Claus.

Not A Topical Climate

This is going to be one of those posts where I ramble and do not adhere to any particular topic because I feel like chatting about some things.
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Saturday night, we went out on a date night because we found out about a bar/arcade that features the old 80's arcade games as well as pinball. We played Galaga, Asteroids, Ms. PacMan, Donkey Komg and Frogger as well as a few other games as well as pinball and skeeball. The weather was perfect and they had the place sort of open air with two large garage type doors open to the patio. After we played some games we headed downtown to eat and play.
I love the crazy Texas topiary they have downtown. We went to the old City Streets which is called something else now and had some beers and played pool and wandered about. It was a fun date night.
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I have been unhappy with my current tupperware situation. And I don't mean Tupperware©. I use "tupperware" like I use "kleenex." Kleenex means "soft paper you blow your nose on" to me. But back to the tupperware. My plastic food storage containers, (see! tupperware is easier to say and type!) are ridiculously unorganized. Where they are currently stored requires me to stand on a step stool and have a hunting expedition. EVERY. TIME. So I have been mulling over this for a while and as usual, I got an idea. I will take before and after pictures when I do this - about 13 hours from now.
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Although I hate Thanksgiving, I somehow ended up volunteering to provide food for my in-laws. I have kept it super simple and it's only going to be four people so it's not so bad. The hardest part will be taking everything over to their house. And if you have just wondered, the answer is "No. It would not be easier to have them over here." Well, easier for me, but not for them.
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45 minutes ago I put an ad on Craigslist for something free. I want to get rid of a computer speaker set. And I am not kidding but I have already had EIGHT responses. One of them said "I can pick them up right now." Really? At 1:00 A freaking M? I've done this before and I met the guy in the afternoon in a CVS parking lot on the corner of a busy street. And I watched him drive away before I left. And then I didn't go straight home. I'm no dummy. That was for a box of pool and spa chemicals that we had after we had that spa taken out. And for these speakers I'm doing the same thing but also My Sweetie will be with me because I'm going for Saturday afternoon. While I have been typing this, I have already arranged for the Saturday thing and had two more e-mails. I guess some people really want some free stuff.
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Also I finally am getting near the end of this chair covering stuff. The third chair I covered was awful. As in "How not to recover a chair" awful. So that is now the chair in my smoking room. So after the third chair, I guess I was gun shy. I kept saying, "I need to be in the zone." Well apparently today (Tuesday) I was in the zone because I did my best chair yet. I wanted to go ahead and do the 5th chair after that because it was ready, but I had an accidental nap. And the 6th and last chair has not been stripped down yet. I will get there eventually. And I've taken lots of pictures.
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And now I am all topiced out. Topicked? Topicced? Topict? hmmmm

Time. How It Boggles.*

Today is Mom's birthday. My Sweetie and I went out for a date night, Saturday night, and as we were cruising down the highway, I was thinking: So 73 years ago, my grandmother was a 26 year old woman with two little kids and at full burst pregnancy with mom. (I really can't picture grandma as a 26 year old person.)

By the way, I finally figured out why I never liked my grandmother. I can usually come up with things, but they never really explain how I feel. I realized after all this time that in my entire lifetime, I never heard my grandmother laugh. And she never smiled. Oh yeah there are a few photographs, but that's just for the photographer. Who doesn't laugh or smile? Ick. But enough of that.

Today is Mom's birthday. Mom was no June Cleaver. If Mom had to be described in comparison to TV people, she would have been a combination of Laura Petrie, Mary Richards, Edith Bunker and Della Street. Yeah, an unusual combination, but that's how real people are.

I really love Mom and I'm so happy she's still here. I can't believe Mom is 73. Time is a weird thing.

Mom laughs and smiles. I love that in a person. And I love my Mom.

(*I stole the word "boggles" from Jazz.)

My Weird Dreams

I always have the strangest, most vivid dreams. This morning when I woke up, I was straight out of a long dream where I was a student at some sort of audio/visual school. There were all these banks of VCRs and monitors and we were all comparing our work and, of course, it all seemed perfectly normal. When I woke up I was all, "What the heck was that? An audio/visual school from 1993?" I thought it was weird that my dream self did not realize that all the equipment was so outdated.

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I wonder why I have no sense of the date in my dreams. Sometimes my daughter (who is 27) will be 5 years old in a dream and my dream self doesn't even notice. Or Dad, who died in 1998, is in the dream and my dream self doesn't freak out - it all seems perfectly normal. Dreams are so odd. At least I don't get the tidal waves anymore.

I Am Not Kidding

My Sweetie opened that bottle for me and pulled out that cotton. We did not fluff it up or anything. That's just how it came out of the bottle. It was crazy. Like a clown car. If the car was a vitamin C bottle and the clowns were cotton. And there are actual vitamin C tablets in that bottle. Lots of them. It was very strange.

Guess What I Did Friday

Good Blood

So I got the letter from my doctor regarding my latest blood work and I was very very happy to read that my liver is fine. I do so love my beer but I like my liver also. Also my kidneys are fine, which are things I rarely think about but my doctor had said that he was concerned because of one of my medicines. So that was good. The only negative thing in the letter was my bad cholesterol, the LDL was a little high. It was followed by these lines: Avoid the fried foods and foods with lots of butter or cream. Watch out for high fat dairy products as well.
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Really? I could go months without fried foods but I love butter, cream sauces, cheese sauces. Havarti cheese? yum yum yum. I suppose this would be good reason number 18 to start walking on my treadmill regularly. My excuse that it was too hot all summer was sound, but has now expired. Trying to reduce my LDL seems like a more interesting challenge than trying to lose 20 pounds, so I think I just may have the incentive I've always needed.
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The most interesting thing about the letter was that my doctor had actually hand written my address on the envelope. I bet it had to be hand canceled. I can't imagine the electronic reader at the post office could read it. Heck, they probably had to take it to a pharmacist.