Writing

one year ago today

One year ago today we had a small group of close family and friends over to watch us get married and help us celebrate.  I don’t think that it is a stretch to say that it was one of the best days of my life.  Looking back on that day… it was perfect.  There is not a single thing that I would change or do any differently.

One year ago tomorrow we got on a plane and flew to Maui, and the night we landed we drove up to the top of Haleakala to watch the sun rise.

on top of the world

This is our favorite picture of us together.  Some random stranger took it for us shortly after the sun rose over the cloud cover.  (Thank you random stranger, you did a great job!)  We’ll be back there someday.

Happy anniversary, John.  This has been an awesome year.

I love you!

Something I am thinking a lot about as the long Memorial Day holiday weekend approaches is meat, especially grilling and barbecuing.

One of the things about my new restricted diet and my persistently tender mouth is that I have been fantasizing (a lot) about about foods that I either cannot eat or would have great difficulty eating right now.  Hamburgers with bacon and cheese and dripping with ketchup.  Barbecued ribs.  Sausages in toasted buns topped with sauteed sweet onions and peppers.  Now, in theory, I could still enjoy these things, but I would have to cut them up into little pieces first (because of the whole issue with biting into things when I still have what amounts to a less-then-half healed wound in the front of my mouth) which is less then optimal.  The experience of lifting the loaded burger up to your mouth and trying to fit in as big a bite as you can is a huge part of the enjoyment.  Cutting that same loaded burger up into neat little pieces (leaving aside the whole issue of how exactly to neatly cut up a loaded burger) and then carefully forking them is kind of a disappointment.

As a sort of “last supper” before the surgery, John and I went out to dinner at The Pine Club.  He had known about the place for a while, and been interested in trying it out for a while, and we decided that this was as good a time as any.

The Pine Club is a steakhouse.  An excellent, excellent, classic steakhouse.  Sitting in it, I felt like I was in either Chicago or New York in the 1950s.

A couple of quirks to keep in mind about The Pine Club. First, they don’t take reservations.  You show up, and you take your chances.  We went early, at about 6:00pm, and it was already fairly busy.  It was completely full when we left.  And this was on a Monday of no particular importance, just a normal day.   So I guess that I wouldn’t recommend trying to go there for a meal on a holiday (assuming that they are even open on a holiday).  Second, they don’t accept credit cards.  Cash money and personal checks only.  Since neither John nor I have had a checkbook in several years, we crossed our fingers, stopped by an ATM, got a sum of money rather larger then either of us normally carry on us, and hoped it would be enough.  (It was.  But it still felt very odd to pull out actual paper money when the bill came rather then a credit card.)

The meal… was amazing.  Meat done skillfully and without  any unnecessary flourishes.   John had the bone-in rib eye and I had the broiled veal chop.  Each came topped with crispy fried onions and were accompanied by a salad, potato, and vegetable.  The meat just melted in your mouth.

When my implant is finally in and everything is all healed and settled, the first place that we are going to go out to eat is The Pine Club.  We think that it will make a nice, neat bracket to the whole situation.

forget-me-nots

Forget-me-nots are my favorite flower.

When I was working out what I wanted to do for my wedding bouquet and boutonnieres last year, I didn’t much care what other flowers were in it as long as I had forget-me-nots and the other flowers I picked looked good with them.  I didn’t think that it would be easy finding forget-me-nots at a florist (afterall, they are hardly a common bouquet flower) so I made sure that I had some in my garden that I could pick and use.

Since the weather abruptly changed from chilly and rainy to hot, sunny, and humid, John and I took a walk in the cox Arboretum to see what we could see.

Cabbage Rose

This is one of my favorite shots of the day.  I think that it is some kind of cabbage rose, but I admit that I am not 100% sure.

After the arboretum, we had daiquiris and played backgammon on the deck.  It was that kind of a day.

Why do we have to go to work tomorrow?

I had yet another round of oral surgery last Wednesday.  (Which of course I am thrilled about.  Not.)

The original surgical site was persistently (despite two rounds of antibiotics) red and swollen and inflamed and painful.  And the Dr did not like the look of it.  So I had an appointment on last Wednesday to “check it out”.  Which quickly turned to (once I was there) “let’s open this up and take a look”, and then (once I was in the chair and sedated out of my mind) turned to “this looks really bad, so let’s take the post out and put in some more bone graft”.

Yeah.  Fun.

Basically, the implant (the titanium post) failed.  Initially, the Dr had done a bone graft and put in the post all at once.  And in most cases, that would have been just fine.  But because I am special, either the graft or the post reacted badly, and caused a persistent infection below the gumline.  So the post had to come out, and more bone graft had to be put in.

I am trying really hard to not see this “failure” as a personal failure.  In theory, I know that there is nothing that I could have done to change the outcome.  But I still feel (silly as it may be) that this is a personal failing on my part, and that I should have been able to do something.  That’s the Type A personality in me.

Now the timeline for the process is thus:

• Bone graft (3-6 months to heal)
• Surgery to (re-)place the titanium post (3-6 months to heal)
• Surgery to place the final replacement tooth

Two additional surgeries.  And odds are that this process will not be finished until sometime next year.   Next year!

Originally I had hoped to have the whole process done by Ted and Sabrina’s wedding in September, so that I could actually enjoy their wedding dinner.  Shit, I had hoped to have the whole process done by Pennsic!

No chance of that now.

Fuck.

If you are thinking of giving me some kind of sanctimonious “other people have it so much worse” pep-talk, please spare me.  I am just not in the mood to hear it right now.

FUCK!

Since Saturday was actually a nice, sunny day (a nice break from the unrelentingly overcast weather that we have had for the past week) we went to the range so that I could break in my new 22.

I have shot before.  Usually I shoot John’s 22, which he has pimped out with a tripod and a scope.  My 22 has niether, so I had to figure out the iron sights, and how to hold it so that I could sight properly using the iron sights.

For the iron sights on my 22, I needed figure out how to hold it so that the brass bead on the front right rested just over the diamond shape in the notch in the rear sight.  John said that sometimes you have to adjust the sights, but it turned out that the sights on my 22 were pretty accurate, so no further adjustment was needed.

I started out doing just “okay” with targeting, but was happy that I improved noticeably from when we started shooting to when we decided to wrap it up for the day.

Note: if you (like me) wear glasses, consider getting safety glasses that are made to fit over regular glasses.  Because layering normal safety glasses over regular glasses is not terribly comfortable and also looks (according to John) pretty silly.

I really love the treasure trove of mobile devices that my group at work has access to.  This time I was able to snag an iPad for a test run.

I am already not happy with the iPad experience.

First of all, you can’t just turn it on and get started.  No.  First you have to synch it up with your iTunes.  This is mandatory.  No getting around it. Argh!  And if you don’t have iTunes (which I do) or if you don’t have the latest version of iTunes (which I don’t, because of my 3 year old iPod which chokes and dies and refuses to synch on modern versions of iTunes) then you have to either install or upgrade.  Double argh!

I only hope that I can roll back my iTunes version with a minimum of fuss when this is all over.

Once that is over, then you have to manually enable the 3G.  And then the Wi-fi.

I thought that Apple was supposed to be all about out-of-the-box functionality?  Apple does have very nice hardware design, no getting around that, but the software… eh, it has been a while since I was impressed by their software.

The iPad, for all its small size, was heavier then I expected.

I was annoyed to see just how many of the websites that I visit on a regular basis use flash, which iPad won’t support.

Bottom line, it is a big iPhone (or Nexus One, or whatever flavor of app enabled smartphone that you have) that can’t make phone calls.  Web browsing is about the only thing that I found that the iPad can do better then a more conventional smartphone.

Today is my birthday.

Today is also Mother’s Day.  34 years ago, I was born on Mother’s Day.  To this day, my Mom claims that I was the best (and the first) Mother’s Day present that she ever got.  You can imagine, that it is pretty hard to top that, when I am thinking about what I can get/do for her to mark the occasion.

I like to be pretty low-key about my birthday on normal years – I have never really been a “its my special day so lets have a party” sort of person – and since I am still recovering from the oral surgery, this year will be even more low-key then usual.  John and I are getting take-out and spending the rest of the day lounging around at home.

Later tonight we may float a tea light on a martini and call it a birthday cake.

Birthday presents?  John got me a gun for my birthday.  A Ruger 10-22 rifle with a special-order  PINK laminate stock.  It is flamingo pink.  It is awesome.  It is gorgeous.  I can’t wait to take it out to the range to shoot it. Everyone else at the range will have their big, serious, macho, guns, and I will have my pretty pink .22 rifle.

I have officially joined the (small, select) ranks of gun-owning liberal Democrats.

John does such an excellent job of finding the perfect presents.

We spent most of the morning and early afternoon planting the garden, now that we are safely past the frost point.

Since the garden last year did so well, we slightly more then doubled its size for this year.

So, what did we plant?

• Raspberries – 3 bushes
• Blackberries – 2 bushes
• Eggplants – 4 plants
• Green peppers – 4 plants
• Banana peppers – 2 plants
• Jalapeno peppers – 2 plants
• Zucchini – 2 plants
• Tomatoes – we got all heirloom varieties this year
  • “Mr. Stripey” (orange and yellow striped) – 2 plants
  • “Black Prince” (black/purple) – 2 plants
  • “Lemon Boy” (bright yellow) – 2 plants
  • “Pink Brandywine” (fuchsia?) – 2 plants
  • “Early Girl” (early to ripen) – 1 plant
  • “Homestead” (pretty stock, red tomatoes) – 7 plants
• Rosemary – 4 plants
• Basil – 4 plants
• Sage – 4 plants
• Catnip – 1 plant

Yes, that is 16 tomato plants.  We love tomatoes, we love salsa and marinara sauce, and we plan on trying our hand(s) at canning come late summer.

The berry bushes are all along the back of the house.  The tomatoes are in two rows along the long end of the garden.  The herbs are all in the quadrant closest to the patio door.  The zucchini are off in one corner, since I know from my parents’ gardens when I was growing up that they can grow pretty wild and crazy, and I want to be able to easily segregate them from the other plants.

The catnip is for Merlin and Percival.  And I might try brewing some tea out of it at some point as well.

I can’t wait for everything to start growing and blooming and ripening.

I am looking forward to my favorite summer lunch… just-picked tomatoes, sliced thick, with some fresh basil, some fresh mozzarella, a sprinkle of salt, a dash of black pepper, and a drizzle of olive oil.  Perfection.

Also, a day spent grubbing around in the sun and dirt, and having a vegetable and herb garden to show for all of that work at the end of it = a very good day indeed.

I still have a bruise and faint needle mark in the bend of my left elbow from the IV.  I didn’t expect to have such a long-lasting bruise there, as I have never bruised from blood draws.  But this wasn’t exactly a blood draw, and I do have a tendency to bruise easily, so I guess that I shouldn’t have been too surprised.  At least the drugs I got were good ones.  I was a bit anxious about that (and I opted for general anesthesia rather then local and a sedative) and I wanted to be 100% out for the procedures.  The technicians promised that I wouldn’t remember a single thing, and they were right.  I actually don’t remember a lot from the first day, which is probably a good thing.  I slept most of the day, and took a lot of pain medication.

The next couple of days I also slept a lot.  I read when I could concentrate.  I napped and numbed my brain with daytime TV and movies when I couldn’t.  I am glad that I was able to take off the week as sick leave.  I wouldn’t have been good for anything at all in the office, and couldn’t concentrate enough to get any work done at home.

My face it still numb and a bit swollen on the right side.

I am still taking antibiotics (and will be for several days more) but I am down to 1 or 2 vicoden a day (morning and night).

When I peel up my lip and look at the purple, bruised, and swollen ruin at the surgical site, it depresses me, so mostly I don’t look.

I have a mouthpiece to wear… or I would have a mouthpiece to wear if it fit right and I could wear it without pain.  Hopefully my doctor will be able to make some adjustments to it tomorrow morning.  Otherwise… otherwise, I don’t really know what my options are.  No good options, anyway.

Moderate to hard exercise is out right now.  Nothing that would would me up enough to where I would need to pant through my mouth… nothing that would dry out and irritate the surgical site.  Yoga, weights, and walks in the neighborhood only, for now.  No biking or running on the elliptical.  And no fencing.  When I mentioned the fencing to the oral surgeon (and to my dentist) the reaction was surprise and mild horror.  Participating in an activity where the likelihood that I will be hit in the face is quite high, never mind that I wear a mask?  No.  Not that I really feel like fencing right now anyway.

At the moment I am just feeling depressed about the whole thing.

Silver lining?  Well, considering how restricted my diet is right now, I bet that I lose weight.