Technical Difficulties

My afternoon got derailed by an unexpected trip to the vet, as the Elder Saucepan vomited up some blood. The answer is most likely the pain medication he's on, so we're switching for a couple of weeks, plus giving him Pepcid. (Yes, the OTC stuff, only he gets a quarter of the 10 mg pill.)

Because we were at the vet, I couldn't make my dressage lesson today, which makes me almost ridiculously glum. Hopefully, my instructor can fit me in this weekend. And I am quite certain I made the right decision.

When I got home, I checked the mail and found a packet from the sleep clinic waiting, with a twelve (count 'em, 12) page questionnaire. I filled it out while the cats ate, and stuck it in my purse, so that I cannot forget it when I have my appointment on February 10. It may be a little battered by then, but at least it won't be sitting innocently and uselessly on the dining room table.

From filling out the questionnaire, I can report, with the kind of relief you get when it's not a surprise but you're relieved all the same, that I have no symptoms of narcolepsy. Those questions were scary. But the RLS was a definite "yes."

Speaking of same, heresluck pointed me at this article on RLS; I'm pleased that everyone agrees it's real, but can we talk about how comforting it ISN'T to be in a 3% minority?

I am very much hoping the sleep clinic can help me.

>OPEN CUPBOARD
You open the cupboard. A thin plastic bag containing approximately two cups of flour falls out. The bag impales itself on one of a pair of chopsticks that are standing, points up, in the silverware compartment of the dish drainer in the sink.

Flour begins to leak slowly out of the thin plastic bag.

>SWEAR
That's not a very constructive response, now is it?

Flour continues to leak slowly out of the thin plastic bag.

>TAKE BAG
If you do that, you run the risk of dislodging the chopstick. Proceed? YES|NO

>NO
Flour continues to leak slowly out of the thin plastic bag.

>TAKE BAG AND CHOPSTICK
Carefully, you pick up the bag and chopstick. Flour continues to leak out of the thin plastic bag, but neither faster nor in greater quantity than before.

You are getting flour on your hands.

>S
You walk south into the pantry. It's small and dark in here, and there are a lot of bags of catfood. There are three drawers to your left.

Flour continues to leak slowly out of the thin plastic bag.

>OPEN MIDDLE DRAWER
You open the middle drawer. Inside, there is a box of ziploc bags.

Flour continues to leak slowly out of the thin plastic bag.

>TAKE ZIPLOC BAG
It's a challenge getting a ziploc bag out of its box with one hand, but you manage. Perhaps that swearing was helpful after all.

Flour continues to leak slowly out of the thin plastic bag.

>OPEN ZIPLOC BAG
You open the ziploc bag.

Flour continues to leak slowly out of the thin plastic bag.

>PUT BAG IN BAG
I'm sorry, I don't know how to do that.

Flour continues to leak slowly out of the thin plastic bag.

>PUT THIN PLASTIC BAG IN ZIPLOC BAG
You're really challenging your dexterity tonight, aren't you? You put the thin plastic bag in the ziploc bag. It lands mostly upside down.

Flour continues to leak slowly out of the thin plastic bag, but with the ziploc bag in place it doesn't matter anymore.

>TAKE CHOPSTICK
You take the flour-covered chopstick.

>SEAL ZIPLOC BAG
You seal the ziploc bag. Take that, flour!

>N
You go north into the kitchen. One cupboard is open. There is spilled flour on the counter and one chopstick in the dish drainer.

>LAUGH
Well, really, what else can you do?

You laugh. In a minute, your husband will be laughing, too.

Today I have succeeded in giving blood. That makes the fourth time this year, which, allowing for broken ankles¹, inevitable human frailty², and uncooperative hemoglobin³, feels like a very satisfying achievement.

I may not achieve anything else today, but by gum, I donated blood.

---
¹Say it with me, ankle you are very stupid.
²Remembering the appointment, but forgetting what day it was.
³Last month, I went, but could not get a hemoglobin count above 12. Today, the first stick got a 12.4, and when we tried again, it came up an entire point. Baffled, but not arguing.

Today I ventured out on an expedition with only the soft lace-up ankle brace. I did not fall down or hurt myself or anything else bad.

WIKTORY!

After stopping by the wake for a friend's father, we went over to Willy Street, where we met an Unexpected! Bonus! Friend!, which was excellent. And then I walked--yes, walked, without lurching like a drunk or falling down or going so slowly that passing tortoises were laughing--to Steve's Tattoo to get my captive bead earrings put back in.

I had to take them out for the surgery on my ankle, and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get captive beads back in myself, so what with the mobility issues and the not-being-able-to-drive-myself issues--N.b., if you're going to break your ankle, for the love of little red fruitbats, don't break your driving ankle--this was the first chance I'd had. And since for some reason, regular earrings in those holes had been painful to lie on (v. bad when you're spending all day in bed), I'd left the earrings out.

And two of four, both on the left, had closed themselves back up.

Of course, I'd been leaving the earrings out of the other six holes, too, and none of them misbehaved in such a fashion, but go figure.

So I ended up sitting in Steve's for longer than I had anticipated (many thanks to mirrorthaw for, once again, being patient), watching the tattooists go about their business and admiring the art and the bumper stickers on the walls. (My favorite is still MORE FUN THAN A HOT POKER UP THE ASS, because it's an Edward II reference for me, even if it isn't for them, and I have good memories of me and matociquala cracking the piercer up with our geektastic delight.) While sitting there, I figured out my next tattoo: once the swelling finally goes down, I want a dragon on my right ankle. Very possibly Smaug. Or Smaug, because say what you like about the Rankin-Bass Hobbit and I'll agree with you, I had that iron-on decal as a kid, and I wore the shirt until I literally could not cram my rack into it any longer. (I wore out Gollum and Gandalf, too, I think, but iirc did not care for the Rankin-Bass Bilbo.) And it is still a kick-ass dragon.

But that's a matter for when my ankle is functional again, and I have some money in the exchequer for frivolities. Which the way things are going, looks like sometime after they open an ice-rink in Hell.

Also, I don't know the band or the song they were playing, but the refrain, "Dr. Laura, who made you God?" cracked my shit up.

It turned out that I had remembered correctly: that top piercing in my cartilege hurts like a mad bastard. (The piercer was delighted with this phrase and vowed to use it.) And now my left ear is feeling very put upon and sorry for itself, to which I say, too damn bad.

But I do have my earrings back in, which is good because I was going to feel horribly naked at WFC without them.

---

ETA: Further WIKTORY: I have finished a draft of "Hollywood and Vine" and have printed it out and handed it to my husband. So there, neurotic pink circus poodle!

Dear Diary,

Today I got to go outside! I hobbled all the way to the corner and all the way back, and mirrorthaw didn't have to carry me up the stairs or anything!

Best Day Ever!

Love and kisses,
Mole

---

So Wednesday I got my new (black) cast. Friday I went and talked to my GP about the restless legs syndrome that has gone, what with the enforced immobility, from minor nuisance to excruciating torture. (Ironically, it's only started plaguing me as the actual broken ankle mends and I cut back on the oxycodone, since one of the things that can help with RLS is, wait for it, narcotics.) He's started me on clonazepam, with the intention to upgrade to Requip when I'm mobile again. More reasons that, when I can start doing PT, I will be doing PT with all my heart.

For those of you playing along at home, I'm in the cast, and forbidden to put any weight on my right foot, for a month. September 15, they take the cast off, do X-rays, and if everything looks okay, I graduate to a walking cast. Between the boredom and the chronic health problems--on the one hand there's the RLS and on the other hand, there's my digestive system, which is full of hate and nausea--it's going to be a very long month.

I am deeply, deeply grateful for all the sympathy and offers of help. On the practical side of things, we're doing okay (my husband continues to be a Hero of the Revolution); the worst problem I'm facing is that I'm bored and restless and frustrated. I am hoping that as I go off the oxycodone and (please, merciful powers) get the RLS under control so that I can SLEEP, I will get my concentration back and be able to work. But in the meantime, pointing me to funny/cute/entertaining things around the internet will be considered a great kindness.

Don't break your ankle, people. It's even less fun than you'd think.

So, on the way home from picking up the Saab at the shop (it is no longer the Roaring Car! rejoice!), the radio played Kid Rock's "All Summer Long," to which I say WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT OVER. Why is Warren Zevon trapped in this Kid Rock song about listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd?

It does, however, make me want the mash-up, "Werewolves of Alabama," like whoa.

1. The new bread pans work very nicely. They're a little shorter (length-wise rather than depth-wise) than my old ones, so I get these very tall majestic loaves. They do, however, definitely need greasing, at least around the top.

2. Also, the new bread pans are deep red. My bread mixing bowl is golden-yellow. Our counters are bright blue (so not our choice). As I said to matociquala yesterday, I feel like I've wandered into some trendy yupster magazine article on baking your own bread.

3. Stuff I'm working on right now, at least hypothetically: (1) A Reckoning of Men: matociquala lobbed the ball back and it's awesomely cool, but I have to figure out how to play it. (2) Shadow Unit: "Hope Is Stronger Than Love," which gave me something this morning which should be OMG TEH CREEPY if I can make it work. (3) "Doc Holliday Makes A Deal": I hope this will consent to be a short story, but otherwise it's the first chapter of Doc Holliday, Demon Hunter.

4. Saturday night of Penguicon, mirrorthaw and I were flipping channels (we don't have cable, so this is a sort of weird special occasion thing when we stay in hotels) and we found a college women's fast-pitch softball game, Tennessee vs. Alabama, and Tennessee was getting shellacked. mirrorthaw can confirm that I turned into the most geeked out, fangirliest fangirl EVAR, because OMG there are women playing sports on my TV. I'm totally the same way about women's basketball, even though basketball is not a sport that does much for me, so IMAGINE MY GEEKITUDE. And not only was it women playing baseball (under the generous definition of baseball, yes), but, unlike with women's basketball, these were not women built like supermodels. This is totally not a slam against the women who play basketball, but their sport selects for women who are tall and willowy and thus fit right in with the cultural image of what sort of women you see on your TV. Fast-pitch softball does not select for tall and willowy; from the evidence of the Tennessee and Alabama teams, it selects for women who are short and stocky and strong. Women who are built like me. I can't even explain how awesome it was. I also loved the breakdown of the dichotomized performance of female gender roles: these are athletes, visibly powerful women (Alabama hit several home runs while we were watching), wearing softball uniforms (and Tennessee with that terrible orange, too), and they've got the black bars under their eyes to cut the glare, and yet the Tennessee pitchers have all done their hair the same way, with the French braid along one side and the pale blue bow at the back, and I love the way that they're doing both, that they can be serious athletes and yet still make choices about their gender performance--they can code themselves along a spectrum of femininities*--and they can by god play their sport and mean it.

5. I want to say thank you publicly to Penguicon's concom and staff, who did a wonderful job this weekend--especially but not at all exclusively Yanni Kuznia, who was running the literature track. Thank you all very much!

---
*pitselly objected to my using the butch/femme dichotomy/continuum to talk about this, but the suggested replacement of masculine/feminine is wrong, because it implies that there's only one way to perform femininity, and that is NOT AT ALL what I mean. It also implies that the women who didn't go for the braids and pale blue bows were being, or trying to be, like male athletes, and that is equally not what I mean. They're all women athletes, and what I love is the fact that they have a variety of gender performances without being stigmatized as quote-unquote masculine (those girls are just trying to pretend they're men) or stigmatized the opposite way as quote-unquote feminine (those girls, they can't cope with a real man's game). And there isn't a lot of vocabulary to talk about that.

1. I started wishing for pictures in Son of the Morning Star with Captain Frederick Benteen: "In not a single photograph does he look formidable, not even very military. He appears placid, gentle, benevolent, with feminine lips and prematurely white hair. Only after contemplating that orotund face for a while does one begin to perceive something rather less accommodating. Embedded in that fleshy face are the expressionless agate eyes of a killer. One might compare them to the eyes of John Wesley Hardin or Billy the Kid. Now, this sinister absence of expression could be nothing more than a result of myopia, a condition afflicting him after the Oklahoma winter campaign of 1868-9 when he lent his protective goggles to a regimental surgeon. Still, in Civil War photographs, he has almost that same look" (Connell 30).

2. Custer with scouts in 1874. Bloody Knife, the man kneeling to Custer's right (viewer's left), also died at the Little Bighorn, and Connell spends a couple of pages discussing the fate of two of Custer's staghounds (who may or may not be the dogs in this picture).

3. Via buymeaclue, this lovely moment between horse and humans.

4. Thank you, dd_b, for pointing me to this article about the discovery of some OK Corral documents in a Cochise County courthouse. ETA: and thank you, swan_tower, for the pointer to the NPR article, which provides a few other bits of information.

5. I made bread this afternoon, which means the house smells yummy.

So the delivery ninja brought my new toner cartridge today. (Huzzah! Megan Arkenberg, this means you will be getting your Booth stories soon!) But he or she felt it necessary to . . .

I need to back up a second. Instead of a regular doormat, we have a metal grating. It's intended for the purpose--my sister found it in one of those catalogues of Victorian home decor reproductions--and I actually really like it, because you wipe your feet on it and it doesn't get dragged around.

So, grating. And toner cartridge in a fairly sizable box. And the delivery ninja, having put the box beside the front door, felt it necessary to lean the grating up against the box. To keep it from blowing away? To make sure I didn't miss it? To camouflage it from the roving bands of toner pirates?

Really, I got nothin'. But I'm glad the toner cartridge came.

So I'm trying thecoughlin's advice for whiny princess feet (thank you, btw!), which means there is a towel draped across my footstool (stubby little legs to go with the whiny princess feet), and, periodically when I feel warm enough to take my slippers and socks off, my bare feet kneading it.

This would be the unparalleled glamor with which the life of a writer is filled.

It took Catzilla a couple days to notice (Catzilla, while nowhere near as dumb as my beloved first cat Richie, is nevertheless not the brightest porchlight on the block), but then this evening, he was all, "Dude, what are you doing?"

"It's not for cats," sez I, by rote.

"Dude," says Catzilla, unimpressed as ever by this line of reasoning. "It's totally for cats. Here, lemme see."

We then had to have a discussion about whether or not this was a game (the cat voted yes, the biped voted no) and whether or not the biped's bare toes were cat toys (the cat voted yes--"Dude! They're moving!"--the biped voted no), and then, philosophical in his defeat, he curled up on the spare stretch of towel, just close enough that I can feel his body heat on my right foot, and sacked the hell out. ("Dude, I told you. Totally for cats.")

Catzilla is the epitome of the annoying younger brother, for both the bipeds and the other cats, but he is, when all is said and done, a very sweet kitty.

I will try to remember his sweetness when we have to have this same discussion all over again tomorrow.

ETA 9:57 P.M.: My toes just got licked.

ETA 10:08 P.M.: The biped was just completely discombobulated (i.e., I broke all records for the sitting high jump) by the cat's cunning introduction of a milk jug ring into the field of play--I mean, the towel. Notice the way in which this achieves the feline goal ("totally for cats") while staying technically within the previously promulgated rules (which may be boiled down to, "No attacking my toes, fluffybutt.")

And in conclusion, totally for cats.