Oh, My Nerves!

I actually go to bed every night promising myself I'll post a blog update in the morning. It's been over three months! Well, let's see how long it will be before anyone notices this. :o)

Where to begin, oh where to begin?

Christmas was GREAT! December was GREAT, one of the best in memory. In fact, I think Facebook had a lot to do with that. What with everyone talking about how good their kitchens smelled and what they were up to, it was as close as possible to celebrating with everyone I know. The visit to Jenna and her family the week before the official holiday was wonderful, just wonderful! Of course, I wish we could have the whole family for the holidays, but I don't see that happening. Still, I wouldn't mind. :o) Adding to the enjoyment this year, I finally brought my little stereo from the back room where it's been collecting dust to the living room and brought down all the holiday cds from upstairs where they (and the other cds and some of the old records -- vinyl, you know) had been doing exactly nothing, because there is nothing up there to play them on. I don't know what I was thinking when I put all the recorded music up there, except that it seemed like they ought to hang around with the dvds. Well, and there isn't room for them down here, really. Most of the cds are still upstairs and most of the records are still in the back room, and the stereo is stuffed underneath the piano bench, discs in a small crate alongside. ANYWAY, we had a lot more music in the house during this past Christmas season than we've had before, and I actually baked a few cookies even though that was not a good idea. It smelled like one at the time.

I've spent the past couple of weeks mostly sitting with my left knee ace-bandaged and iced and elevated. I think I have a torn meniscus, having consulted with Google and Dr Rick (via email), and I know when it happened -- well, no, not when. I've forgotten how many weeks ago it was but I know what I was doing: I had taken a carton of chicken broth down from the shelf at Safeway and then was doing a little Y-turn around my shopping cart and my left knee sort of snapped. For a second or two I thought it was going to go out from under me, but it didn't, it just felt ... compromised. I leaned on the cart and finished the shopping and went home. Since then it's been varying degrees of *hurt.* Finally a couple of days ago I took Dr Rick's advice and called a knee specialist he knows ("Left knee or right knee?" the receptionist asked when I said I wanted to make an appointment), and I'm going in to see him next Tuesday morning. Of course, as soon as I made the call it started feeling better, but I think it's just being tricksy. You hear about people's trick knees all the time. :o)

And speaking of Dr Rick, who is wonderful, the best doctor EVER, the one who actually listens to me and who calls me on his own time to say my labs look great and I'm a rockstar -- he's closing his practice the end of this month. I actually cried. Bankruptcy for the practice and for him personally. He hasn't drawn salary in a year. Seventeen hundred patients, many of them, this being the neighborhood that it is, with AIDS, many of those advanced and unable to work. I strongly suspect that he was doing for many of his patients what he had said he would do for me if I were unable to get insurance after leaving Comcast: "Don't worry, we'll work something out." So one of the partners is moving to another location, another partnership, and I'll just follow him over there, although -- it isn't that I dislike him, I just don't LIKE him. He's a doctor, not a friend. Rick may or may not begin practice again once he's done dealing with all this. I'm sad.

But -- what with one thing and another, we do have my diabetes under control, as they say, on oral meds. No insulin. So that's good. And Scott, our friend the acupuncturist who will make house calls, has apparently fixed the back pain I've had almost constantly for YEARS. Took him three weeks.

David is at his Italian class, last one for this series. This is homemade-by-a-genuine-Italian Tiramisu day, and I am pea-green. The Safeway order just arrived -- we're doing the delivery thing again because of my walking problems. (Safe-way, my eye -- I also tore something in my shoulder while snagging a carton of whipping cream from a high rack back before New Year's and that STILL bothers me). I like the ease of Safeway Delivery but I'm not wild about the results. Today they decided that since they didn't have any green leaf lettuce, I would like red, and since they didn't have little packs of tomatoes I would be happy to have a little pack of mini-peppers. I ordered vanilla organic yogurt because the plain is too tangy to be fun on oatmeal, but they sent plain. However, they also included two quarts of strawberries that I did not order, which is fine with me (and karmically, I think I deserve them ;o) ) but won't be so good with the customer who *did.*

When David gets home, there will be a trip to Rainbow, the hippie-dippie grocery, for the stuff Safeway didn't include, and *hopefully* some raw milk products. Jenna persuaded me to try raw milk and I did some reading and searching and found that California is one of a tiny tiny handful of states where you can actually buy raw milk products. You know, in a store. Some stores.

My dairy of choice delivers to Rainbow on Thursday and I should have made just that one small trip that day, but ... I didn't. Last night I learned that Whole Foods (which also has been carrying raw milk) is having insurance problems with it and pulled all of it this morning at 8 am. There are three Whole Foods in SF, which means all the people who have been going there for their milk are going to find out about humble little Rainbow and converge on it, so I'm worried.

It's always something. I think Gilda Radner said that.