ow
Nothing stitches a brain back together like two cups of coffee.
May 11, 2008
March 20, 2008
milestones
And sometime late last night as we pulled out of the parking lot, my car finally rolled past a hundred thousand miles. It took far less than the two to three weeks that I had expected. Congratulations: we're alive, but it was still quite an experience.
What does the future hold?
Time will tell.
Time always does.
March 16, 2008
yes, I really am that bad
For what little it is worth, I am much better with a sword.
March 12, 2008
ow, ow, ow
You know what hurts more than you think it would?
Imagine plucking a rosebud, and driving one of those small and needle-sharp thorns that hides just beneath the sepals into the soft and fleshy pad of your thumb, and another just beneath your nail. There is no blood, and at first there is no pain. Now imagine that you have been rinsing these roses in alcohol (you know: to get the thrips off?), and savor the sting for a little while.
Almost better than coffee when it comes to the mid-afternoon wakeup call.
March 5, 2008
now gods, rise up for bastards
"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,
when we are sick in fortune, - often the surfeit
of our own behavior, - we make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as
if we were villains by necessity; fools by
heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,
liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of
planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,
by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion
of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish
disposition to the charge of a star!"
January 30, 2008
drug use
Oh, Benadryl, why must you be so perfect an antihistamine for my allergies, and yet so cruel in your side effects? Two small pills, and all my sneezing goes away - but I cannot walk, let alone operate heavy machinery in your presence. After dosing, I get from two to ten minutes of clarity and perfect breathing, and then unconsciousness sets in with the power and surprising subtlety of a blizzard in the night.
I took a pair last night at around seven, and I am still a little bit groggy and bleary-eyed.
November 30, 2007
an improvement?
Well, for whatever reason, last night I only woke up at six in the morning. I missed my three AM appointment with insomnia. Lucky me. Let us hope that tonight is better.
November 29, 2007
who needs sleep?
For the last four days, I have found myself rising spontaneously from sleep at approximately three and six in the morning. This is unsettling, and it is not dependent on the time at which I went to bed. Given its regularity, I suspect that there may be a mechanical inspiration; perhaps there is some machinery lurking within the bowels of the trailer that upsets my rest at regular and three hour intervals?
Whatever the source, it is driving me crazy.
October 11, 2007
ow
My knee still hurts.
Running in the dark just after it has rained in flip-flops is a bad idea, kids.
September 22, 2007
nature, red imported mandible and stinger
Ow.
The problem with stopping every now and again to appreciate nature and to smell the flowers is that sometimes you stop on top of a fire ant mound.
In flipflops.
Ow ow ow ow.
Cue profanity.
Ow.
September 5, 2007
seeing the world differently?
If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then a new pair of glasses must be a bit like remodeling the front of the house with nice new victorian picture-windows. I can see clearly again and live without glare while driving.
Rah!
January 13, 2007
you can't outrun your biology
For the last two days I have been laid up in bed by an old friend long thought forgotten. It appears that Gainesville does experience barometric shifts strong enough to adversely impact my sinuses... and once again, I find myself dizzily wandering into unconsciousness, hiding in oblivion until the pain stops. None of these bouts have been as bad as those from before the surgery. I haven't found myself incapable of standing or functioning as a rational human being, or choking down mysterious waves of nausea as the world swims before me... but it is a hell of a way to spend an otherwise sunny afternoon. It seems I have no choice: with the thunderheads on the horizon, I either wait until it rains and the waves of pressure pressure in my head are mercifully released - or I drink an inordinate amount of caffeine and stagger off the walls, full of a kinetic energy I can't quite seem to expend.
April 30, 2006
one final look at disaster
Yes, it does look like a ten-penny nail, and yes - not to sound too terribly blasphemous, but having one of those driven through your wrist can hurt a bit. Not quite sure about the downstream bruising, but it looks like the good news is that the Harry-Potter scar is there to stay. Yes, I already removed my own stitches, as they weren't really holding things together, and they itched besides. You will also be thrilled to know that spending nearly three months in a cast is enough to give the back of your hand a mild sunburn merely whilst one skates for two or three hours in the afternoon. No matter - I needed the sunlight and the fresh air, and now my 'cast-line' is slowly fading from that right arm - into a cherry-red glow. Whatever. Ten years have passed, and many things have changed, but some things stay the same. I look forward to the allegedly agonizing pain of physical therapy on Monday, as I suspect it really will help restore the full function of my wrist which can not quite bend all the way forwards or back on its own right now.
April 27, 2006
needles and pins
Today, I offer entertainment. They asked me if I wanted to keep my supportive little friend - and I did. This thin sliver of metal has been with me for three months - how can I let that kind of relationship go overnight? I guess we're going through a trial separation period. It lives in that little tube, and I live out here in an enormous cotton mitten that will come off sometime on either Thursday or Friday.
April 18, 2006
give the man a hand
The cast came off today, but the pin has not yet been removed from my hand. According to the doctor, it is possible that I may need to spend another month immobilized in a fixed cast before he is confident that there has been sufficient bone growth to merit moving me to a firm splint. We will confirm or deny this bone growth by sending me to get my hand CAT-scanned tomorrow during lunch. In the meantime, I wear the firm splint, as they would have just had to cut the cast off for the CAT scan anyhow. I also get a neat new jagged lightning-bolt of a scar (sigh... yes, I suppose it is like Harry Potter's scar, but not nearly as nice) to keep. If you look carefully at the first curve in the scarline, you can also see the protruding lump of the pin submerged just beneath the surface flesh...
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February 20, 2006
more cool gory pictures
Behold!
My hand, in before and after pictures. See if you can spot the "scaphoid non-union" in the first photo - it may take a bit of a look, as it appears to be two bones to the untrained eye. I mean, I certainly didn't see anything particularly unusual until the doc pointed it out to me. Note the small segment of my radius scraped out and inserted into the scaphoid in the second photo. Really cool that you can distinguish the individual pieces of the grafted contraption, and that the shaving was significant enough to stand out as a lighter patch on my arm. Do note that the doctor chose not to wire or screw the contraption together... and that pin is eventually going to have to come out. Last and not least, a shot of the stitch-work on my arm. I am almost disappointed - it was a neat job, and it will probably leave an insignificant and unnoticeable scar.
September 5, 2005
Price
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We followed the interstate down the path opened by the Wasatch fault, stopping briefly in Price, Utah to visit two locales of international renoun.
Our first visit was to the emergency room that once cared for myself and three other travelers, seven long years ago. It was during the return leg of our March 1998 Spring Break road trip to the Western Coast that a careless jackrabbit leapt out into our headlights, and into destiny. It left the four of us suspended upside-down in a ditch: Roy Huggins blind in one eye and bleeding, Elizabeth Tweig concussed with a series of scratches on her head that mysteriously parallel my front teeth, myself concussed with shattered sinuses, and Sarah Olivieri... with a broken fingernail. The Castleview Hospital's emergency room is still right where it used to be, and still ready to take in all visitors at all hours, no matter how far away, or how serious the car wreck.
The second locale was of no less significance, but of greater personal interest. Price, Utah also happens to be home to one of the best dinosaur collections in the world. The College of Eastern Utah maintains a Prehistoric Museum sampling the paleontology and archaeology of the area. This tiny museum in this tiny town is home to some of the richest fossil beds in the world, and as a result, the local natural history museum is better stocked than the collections of many larger cities.
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It is unusual returning to this place. The last time I was here, I was still somewhat concussed and using an old pair of glasses that my mother had thought to bring to replace the pair I had lost on the roadside. Between the persistent wooziness and a prescription nearly two years out of date, my memories of the time spent there are a little softer around the edges than usual.
The museum does not appear to have changed substantially in the seven years we have been apart, but many things which were once hidden are now visible. The Utahraptor, once trapped within the matrix of rock that held it, was now free to terrorize the coastal plains running along the Western Interior Sea of North America once more. 
When last I visited, the Utahraptor had just been revealed to the world in a rare example of science following art: until their discovery, the only members of the Dromeosauridae clan known to be that large hailed from the Steven Spielberg cinematic adaptation of the Michael Crichton novel, Jurassic Park.
In another odd twist of fate, and more proof that the world is a smaller place than one might initially suspect, it turns out that Reese Barrick, a paleontologist I had once hoped would be my advisor at NCSU, had also ended up at this spectacular museum as a curator. As we leave, it occurs to me that I too could settle here and be happy.