A Break Before Completion

I'm sitting beneath a painting by Van Gogh of an outdoor café bathed in yellow light. It's a comfort zone in eastern Jackson Heights.  It's been some time since I've made the time to have someone fix me a casual breakfast.

I had a scare this morning as my feet were swollen when I awoke.  Usually my ankles go down as I sleep and my feet are seldom edemic in the first place.  Things are getting worse as my lymphatic system starts a slow shutdown.  My grandmother and great-grandmother both died drowning in their own fluids, and I'm destined for the same fate.  Mom got lucky and inherited her father's metabolism and will outlive me if she doesn't meet with a serious injury at the nursing home.  She ensured my legacy of allergies intolerances and weak immune system by smoking during her pregnancy.

This place apparently became a Natives some months ago, a chain of Colombian restaurants; there's a larger one closer to where I live which serves as a dinner theatre.

Appropriately enough Nelly Furtado was on the radio when I came in.

With a heel which may either have tendonitis or a mild fracture, I was terrified into taking a walk out to the next community.  The round trip walk will rack me up 3 miles.  It won't do me much good if I don't do it again tomorrow.

I ordered a Colombian style breakfast, except it also will have a chorizo.  Aren't they Mexican?  Maybe not.  Anyway I'll be sparing with that or the additives will compensate for the walking and flare my entire body for 3 days.

They predict heavy rains today but there's no precipitation anywhere near the region on maps.

While most of the graphics are by me for Burn2,  there's an animation of an EMH's thought processes which I'm using from a graphics repository for RP and Trek fan sites.  You see Virginia, back in the days before social networking when everybody made websites, there were these people who offered superior graphical elements for non-commercial webpages in exchange for a link to them.  Linkware they were called.  The Brit LCARS site has linkware, fair use on the Playa with appropriate credit.  I'll have to use my profile and this blog to credit the creator.  I'd never take credit for something I didn't create.  Ever.

Breakfast is big.  Eating the carne asada and rice n beans mixed with egg; the arepa con queso and chorizo are coming home.

I'm back and my foot is now normal. I think after I finish the parcel I'll take another walk. Then work on my skin, then work on the freebie pack of skins, then work on the free Tee Shirts I'll offer on my parcel.

Yes I missed press day, won't be immortalized on a hand drawn map of the playa, or appear on Designing Worlds, but I believe you'll find my place worthwhile if you take the time to walk through it.

Don't Drink & Drive

Don't drink and drive.

Ever.

This means vehicles, heavy machinery, your fists, or an Internet-enabled device.

You will always hurt someone.

Always.

You can devastate them with bullshit just by saying words. 

Saying "sorry" and other expressions of apology are so rare these days.  It seems to be reserved for the brave or twelve-stepper while the rest gouge deeper out of a false sense of pride, say they were joking, or - the worst offense of them all - turn it around and make the victim appear as and feel like a hated, despised criminal.

No, the western world of the 21st century is no more civilized than the rest of the planet.

Sometimes sorry isn't enough.  Being online under the influence will hurt people online to such a degree like rearending a compact full of little kids at a red light.

The question is, if you're sorry and truly regret that alien sentiments left your mouth or keyboard, and sorry isn't enough, what more can you do to make up for it?  Start thinking up a year of special service you could offer for them to show the sincerity of having admitted error once you've made it clear to everyone else that you were referring to yourself when you said what you said.

Being under the influence is no excuse.  If you're drunk or high then either lock yourself into a room away from everyone and breakables and sleep it off or watch TV, or go to rehab. 

Or I start to blog about you.  The only thing worse than degrading my downtime is hurting others within my sights, especially my friends.

Doctor's Appointment or "The Big Eep"

Nervous.

Dreading. 

Dreading nothing will get done today.

Dreading I'll undergo a procedure.  Not good with lying on my back - well the last time he inclined me - and whine about the tourniquet.

It was six years ago when I came for a ganglion cyst resting on the tendon on my other thumb.

"I can give you cortisone."

"That didn't work last time."

"Then it should be excised."

"Let's do it."

Flashback eleven years before...

... In an HMO on the Long Island Jewish Hospital campus, I was referred to a hand specialist for a ganglion cyst on my left middle finger.  The cortisone shot felt cold, but other than some unpleasant side effects nothing happened.  We had to schedule an outpatient procedure in the HMO's surgical room.  The resulting experience was immortalized in an APAzine.  
In 2005 I gave him a copy of the mini-comic.  He got a kick out of it.

I don't know anyone else who walks around recording their diagnoses. He always did, except now people transcribe them for him.

Anyway he has his own place, his own building and not some shared clinic.  His own surgical equipment in the exam rooms?  He has full surgical facilities.  The one I was in six years ago was where the impromptu procedure took place.  He doesn't know yet that in the six weeks waiting for this day that I'd seen the proverbial unknown devil and had X-rays and a diagnosis, except I can no longer straighten my left thumb out as much as the other.

In the exam room.  This is an exam exam room. A laptop. Pretty screensaver I remember from back then is also on a wall mounted monitor.  He ski's I see...

Been moved to another room - definitely equipped for surgery.  I remember this room. I wonder if my description on the phone in August gave them a little heads up of what I had?

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Back at work a day later. 

He heard the 2 month history, gave me the hurts-like-hell shot, and took all of 8ish minutes for the procedure. Was rather relaxing. Then Dad and I went to a really good Kosher Deli nearby.  All this prospect about sedation for a little snip was such BS. 

I knew it would be sore today etc, but it means I get full use of my hand back, and that means everything to me.  From the first moment after the procedure I could bend my thumb again. Maybe by the end of the week I can "flick" things, hold up a cooking pot with two hands, zip up a jacket as we see 50sF for the first time since April, make a sincere fist...

Well okay, everything in its time.