Tag: biceps surgery

I’m So Excited

I got my teeth yesterday!

It’s very odd to have teeth again now. I also realized that the lower denture plate feels even stranger not just because I had my bottom teeth all removed after Labor Day (yes, it has been that long), but because even before that, it had been years since I had a full set of bottom teeth. I don’t even remember how long it’s been since I lost my first lower tooth, but I know it was a front one, followed by abscessed molars, which was a horrible experience…that I’ll never have to go through again. I am finished with tooth pain, now and forever. Huzzah in-fucking-deed, y’all.

So, now all that is left to be finished with is the biceps repair and recovery. Huzzah!

It was a cold, gray, drizzly day in New Orleans yesterday; it actually has been all week. This has, of course, helped me to sleep better (as well as not wanting to get up in the morning, because the bed is warm and comfortable–Tug has finally adjusted to the time change too; he now vaults over Paul and lands on me just before the six o’clock alarm rings). It’s a bit chilly, but I’m not complaining, not after that horrendous summer we just suffered through. No, I’ll just grit my teeth and happily put on another layer, thank you very much. I actually kind of like it, because it makes being inside feel more snug and cozy. I do like that feeling, I suppose, despite my aversion to the cold weather.

I stopped and made groceries in Mid-city yesterday, primarily so I could also stop at Five Guys for dinner. I’ve generally not eaten in the evenings after work since the dental procedure–and really hadn’t even before. But oh my God, I was starving all the way home smelling that food in the bag, and yes, it was marvelous, absolutely marvelous. There’s some adjustments to be made and I need to get used to them–they feel a little alien now, as does chewing. I also realized that I’ve not chewed properly in decades, because I’ve been missing teeth for quite some time (which always made me feel like a hillbilly from the holler) so I am glad I no longer have that anxiety and stress about people judging me as “poor white trash” because of my teeth. As I was sitting in my easy chair eating my bacon cheeseburger, I realized I had the sound turned down on the television (hearing aids); could see it clearly (new glasses); and could eat and chew easily (new teeth).

Finally.

Today is my last day in the office until I return from my surgery. Monday is my pre-surgery get everything ready for a major disruption day; Tuesday is the surgery; and then comes the recovery. I was thinking I could go ahead and get a turkey breast so I could make pulled turkey for the holidays…and then realized that you can’t really pull turkey apart one-handed. Sigh. I guess it’ll be okay; we don’t really care that much about traditional meals and so forth for holidays. Usually I am not here for Thanksgiving, as I have tended to always drive north for Welcome Colonizers Day, so there’s that, too. Paul had wanted to go visit his mom between the holidays–I still think he should; losing my mom made me realize how critically important it is for him to spend as much time with his as he can before he finds himself motherless as well. He’s also an only child, which makes it even worse. My sister and her kids made my absence from important family days–birthdays, holidays, anniversaries–easier on my parents; he doesn’t have a sibling making up for his absence on those kinds of days for his mother.

Heavy heaving sigh.

I slept super well last night so I feel very rested this morning, which is always a good thing. It’s nice to feel rested by the end of the work week, even if a bit groggy; it’ll feel great to sleep later tomorrow. We have to take Tug back to the vet for a shot tomorrow morning, but that’ll be fine. It’s weird to think I won’t be in the office again for three weeks after today. It’s weird to think I’ll be drugged out and out of it for almost a week. I think there was also some underlying anxiety about getting the teeth before the surgery, too; which has now been alleviated. I’m not sure what today’s weather is going to be like–I’ll check once I finish writing this and have a second cup of coffee for the morning–but I doubt that it’s going to be warm and sunny today. Well, I could wait so I looked and yes, the high today is 69 (which made me giggle a bit because I am always a twelve year old boy at heart) and there’s more chance of rain today. We need the rain–I don’t know if the swamp fire is still burning in the east, but it sure smelled like burning rubber yesterday around the office–because it’s been horrifically dry and drought-ish this year.

I also need to finish off the blatant self-promotion by doing some more of it. It’s not easy, you know, coming up with ideas to promote myself and my books; I find myself fascinating, but I am sure that others aren’t quite as enthusiastic about me as I am about me. I do feel weird having two books as new releases at basically the same time; while I have always been relatively prolific throughout most of my writing career, I’ve never managed to have two novels released so closely to each other. It worries me a bit, as obviously I want people to buy, read, and enjoy both–but getting people to buy read and enjoy one is hard enough without having to compete with myself for the attention and wallet of readers.

So today is the first day in a very long time where I won’t have ice cream as part of my diet–I’m still going to be eating soft food for a while, since I am not just going to throw what’s left away, but I am not going to be buying ice cream for quite some time now–if ever again. I do love it, but having a pint every day for over two months sounds much better than it actually is, in all honesty. I’ve also gotten so out of the habit of grocery shopping for real that I couldn’t quite figure out last night what all was needed when I went to the Carrollton Rouse’s. Tomorrow I can take a better inventory, can clean out some cabinets, and so forth. Tug has also made a mess of my piles of stuff that need to be filed–he keeps zooming around like a pinball and as his paws scrabble over the piles as he careems around, the piles fall to the floor–which means no more piles and I need to be better about filing things right away rather than leaving them out for “when I have more time later.” That’s, as my grandmother used to say, “the devil on my shoulder whispering in my ear.”

I also need to pay the bills since Pay Day is the day after the surgery and I seriously doubt that I’ll be in any condition to do that the morning after, so I need to get it taken care of while I am lucid before hand. Sigh.

And on that note, I am going to get cleaned up and head into the spice mines. May you have a fabulous Thursday, Constant Reader–and I’ll probably be back to annoy you later on.

10 Out of 10

Paul went out Sunday evening to have dinner with a friend Sunday night, leaving me home to my own devices, and after he departed I pulled up Youtube and did a search I’ve not done in a very long time: for Friday the 13th, the television series. Imagine my delight when I found a playlist of almost every episode from it’s three year run in the late 1980’s in syndication! (It had been briefly up on Amazon Prime a few years ago, so I tagged it for Watch Later…so of course it was “unavailable in your area” when I went back to watch it.) I watched the pilot episode, “The Inheritance,” Sunday night. The video quality wasn’t great; it looked like someone had recorded it with a VCR off the broadcast and then digitized it for upload years later, and of course, the entire show had been done on a shoestring budget for syndication in the first place, so it didn’t hold up as well as I would have liked, but the show was terrific at the time. The premise of the show is that Lewis Vendredi had made a deal with the devil: immortality in exchange for selling cursed objects out of his antique shop. Lewis goes back on the deal and so the devil summons him to hell, and his niece Micky and nephew Ryan inherit the shop. Not knowing things are cursed, they have a big sale to clean out most of the inventory before Jack Marshack shows up, fills them in on the curse, and now they have to get all the cursed objects back before people start dying.

Great concept, isn’t it? In the first episode the object is a doll that can come to life and speak to its owner, and will kill people that harm the child. The little girl’s mother had died and her father has married a horrible second wife (the proverbial evil stepmother), and of course the doll ends up dispatching the evil stepmother before Ryan and Micky can get it back from her. The next three seasons explore the attempts to get the objects back. I know of two enormously successful writers who also loved the show, so there are some of us fans still out there–and this is a show I would love to reboot and modernize; same concept, but with different stories. I also have a book about the show somewhere I always meant to read; perhaps I should dig it out and read it for my Halloween Horror Month celebration–and I should watch the show whenever I am home alone again if I am too tired to read or write anything. Now that sounds like a good plan.

Everything is proceeding apace for my arm surgery. It is scheduled now for the week of Thanksgiving; my MRI is scheduled; and I am going through all of the pre-surgery hoops that need to be cleared. I am getting fitted for the new dentures this Friday, and I have my new glasses and my hearing aids. Not bad for someone who hates dealing with this sort of thing, wouldn’t you say?

We had a heavy rain last night–apparently in the early afternoon through the early evening–so of course, Cox Internet (piece of shit that it is) was spotty for the rest of the evening. Shocking, I know. Cox? Failing to live up to their end of the pay-for-service bargain? Who would have ever thought such a thing possible? It really galls me how bad their service had gotten over the last year. They were completely reliable for years. I never had a single complaint about Cox; when I returned to the apartment after Hurricane Katrina the cable was still working. Now? After a strong storm, it’s garbage. Garbage.

I went back to work on the sequel to Death Drop yesterday, but didn’t get much done on it, alas. Perhaps the jolt of diving back into writing so hard on Sunday strained the muscles, depleting the creative reserves or something because they were out of shape from not being used in so long. So, the evening wasn’t productive–primarily because of the spotty in-and-out internet frustration. I mostly watched another episode of Friday the 13th-the Series (“Hellowe’en”, if you want to know specifics) which kept freezing as the Internet went in and out, and then started watching a documentary I thought I’d seen before, Keep Sweet, that documentary about fundamentalist Mormons (it really is staggering how misogynist even the more modern versions of that religion are); I had seen it before, but when I pulled up Netflix…the Internet was spotty and Netflix recommended it to me like I hadn’t seen it before.

But I was sleepy-tired, and went to bed just around nine as i was nodding off again. I slept well last night–feel rested and good this morning–but am finding it more than a little hard to believe that September is about to be over and it will be October this weekend. So, I need to get Shawn’s book finished before this weekend, and I think I will put off my Halloween Horror Month reading until after finishing Lou Berney’s new one, which actually looks shortish, and Lou’s books always read fast. I should have read last night when the Internet started getting spotty, but my brain was already tired by then. I swung by the post office to get the mail yesterday–my shoes and zipper LSU hoody arrived, as well as a copy of The Adventures of Ellery Queen. I don’t think I’ve read any of the Queen short stories, but have read most of the novels, but can now correct that oversight. I think maybe if it isn’t raining when I get home from work tonight I may take a walk around the neighborhood; the exercise certainly can’t hurt me none, and I want to start looking for Halloween decorations. I also need to swing uptown and check out the skeleton house’s decorations this year. Halloween is such a marvelous season in New Orleans, and I love how we were ll talking about how much cooler it’s been–high eighties–after the brutality of this summer.

Ugh, so stupid, I should have started rereading Jackson Square Jazz last night. Lesson learned; before I leave the house this morning I’m putting a copy in my easy chair so I’ll remember tonight.

Another one of those tiresome women-penned essays about “gay” romance surfaced yesterday, but I’m not going to talk about that now; but it was the usual bullshit about straight women inventing gay romance and how gay men can’t/don’t write it–in general (per the essay), straight women don’t like gay fiction written by gay men because it usually will tackle social issues and/or how difficult it is to be gay in modern America but straight women don’t want to read about that. The essay itself mentions this…but the writer doesn’t see it as a problem? It’s more of the same bullshit it always is; gay men can’t write romance the way the straight ladies like it because it’s too real when they write it (this despite the fact that they also don’t want realistic gay sex scenes, either). There will definitely be more on this later.

And on that note, I am staggering back to the spice mines. Y’all have a great day, okay?