Trans/plant/portation

Last February Susanne and I hosted a baby shower for our good friends who, obviously, were having a baby. There are a lot of parties in and around DC, I suppose, on a daily basis, and not just because two and a half million people live there. I think parties of all sorts — showers, cocktail parties, work happy hours, holiday get-togethers, poker nights — are part and parcel of the culture there. It’s something that after living there for more than a decade, I now take for granted. I presume that everyone knows all of the etiquette around hosting, attending, and being made the spotlight of social occasions. And that’s not to say that I think every party is like the parties of DC. I certainly don’t think it’s standard for to see people from the Department of State and Department of Commerce to get into an argument about which of their jobs is more important. Although on the other hand, I suppose that fight happens in some form at many parties no matter where they’re held.

But DCists do have a protocol for these things. If it’s informal, an evite goes out to a few or everyone the host has ever met, so you look down these long, multi-page lists of names and email abbreviations trying to figure out who’s been invited, and it soon starts to look like the streaming green nonsense characters in the Matrix movies. If it’s formal, you’ll get an invitation in the mail — in which case you have no idea who else may be coming, but depending on the event, you can guess. 

The emphasis on knowing who else will be there isn’t to determine whether you yourself should show up, it’s to ascertain the annoyance and idiosyncrasy factor of the event. Will there be a lot of really cool “kids” (and by kids, I mean mid-to-late 30-somethings who still shop at Abercrombie & Fitch) there? If so, bring your Foucault references and general disdain for establishment.* Expect a crowd mainly of the host’s coworkers? Get ready for a support group masquerading as soiree. A bunch of folks from Baltimore? Don’t be surprised if you see people putting ice cubes in their pinot grigio glasses, hon. I don’t know why, it’s just a thing I’ve noticed.

All of these differences, of course, are important because they help you meet the expectations for the event and have fun.

In Walla Walla, it is different. Forget evites — I’ve sent out two so far and only about 25% of the people who come to the event have RSVP’d on the Web. Forget even having a distinct idea of who to invite or who may wind up arriving on one’s doorstep. Instead of the East Coast “it’s my birthday and here’s who I want to see” mentality, it’s more of a “oh, don’t do anything for little ole me” sense. But friends, being who they are by definition, affectionate for their pals, say, “oh no no no, we need to do something, so let’s have a party.” And then each friend runs off to his or her own corner to plan a fete of the grandest proportions. Thus, the more friends one has, the more parties that may be taking place, on the same night, with the same people, same themes, and potentially, same bag of chips.

Again, DC has its own issues. Our baby shower last year, for example, was marked by an older couple — longtime family friends of one of the new parent’s parents — who were spirited, to say the least. The gentleman walked in, asked if we had free long-distance, and when we said we did, asked to use the phone. In fact, he asked Susanne to dial it for him, and then proceeded, during the entire shower, to talk on the phone in an attempt to get Dubai Airlines to hook him up with a cheaper flight to Uzbekistan. His wife, meanwhile, refused to eat anything we’d prepared because apparently she only eats once a day, and only at salad bars, so Ruby Tuesday is kind of a way of life for her. Everyone else, for their parts, seemed to enjoy themselves, despite the occasional holler from the husband, who had made his way upstairs to our bedroom, where he’d sat on the bed to argue with the airline.

In this context, we are again going to a baby shower this weekend. Actually, we’re the site of a baby shower and we’re attending another. For the same person, and for the reasons I listed before — that friends have gone off and made plans without conferring with each other. I’m not sure if we’ll have the kind of personalities one finds out in the east, but we may have a Baby Shower Meets Groundhog Day. Only time will tell.

*Now that Barack Obama has been elected President, these folks have a lot more conversation time on their hands, since there is no evil Bush/Cheney administration to bash. It seems to have been upsetting for them.

motorized scooter

If the local trip to the grocery store was a frustrating success, then our next venture out, this time to Costco, an hour’s drive away, was a comical catastrophe in slow motion. Susanne dropped me off at the front door and I crutched in, showed my ID, and hopped onto the scooter. This one seemed a bit more worn out even at first glance, its grip bars rubbed thin of vinyl, the green-red light that indicates battery power totally absent–as if to suggest to patrons that AT ANY MINUTE you could be stranded at the back of the store, in the produce room, where you could quickly freeze to death as you weakly called out for help from the indifferent staff.

Judging this book by its cover, I was proved correct. The hum from the battery was low and strained, and I trudged off at about 1 mile an hour. I didn’t wait for Susanne, figuring that she would quickly catch up with me by the time we rounded the electronics and jewelry counter at the front of every Costco store. Sure enough, she looked at me, leaning forward and looking for a riding crop, and giggled. I needed the store to be downhill, somehow.

You know you look ridiculous when little old ladies see you and laugh, pointing in your direction. I attempted to look serious while perusing through the fiction titles, but I don’t think I pulled it off. Adding to the silliness of it all was a 2-foot long chain of lint and dust that trailed behind the scooter like a dirty “Just Married” string of cans. I had, I guess, my own rattail for the device.

We made our way through the store, the battery hum slowly decreasing in pitch, attempting to forewarn me since the battery light was no longer with us. Susanne would collect anything I had put in the crooked metal basket and put it in her shopping cart because she didn’t want me to be weighed down by anything else. I trudged oh so slowly to the front of the store after we’d made our purchases and plugged the yellow beast into the wall. Suck the life into yourself, I told the machine. Good breath in, bad breath out.

I stood there waiting for Susanne to pull the car up, then decided what the heck, I could crutch out there just fine. A little boy saw me and asked his dad if he could get some black sticks, too. Apparently they’re the new Razor, and WAY cooler than battery-powered scooters. But this kid probably never saw the scooters at the Oddfellows House in Walla Walla. Those people’s scooters are pimped out!

Sitting around one’s home when one is working 40 or more hours a week feels like a luxury. Sitting around one’s home as if that is a 40-a-week job, well, not so much on the luxury side of life is that. As Yoda would say, if Yoda were unemployed and hanging out after knee surgery. Wait a minute, I may be mixing metaphors here.
The point is, getting out of the house (nay, the living room, for that matter) becomes a bit of a thrill, no matter the reason for the departure. Thus it was that going to the local grocery store in search of tomato paste in a tube was akin to something like seeing the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade for the first time, or getting on that jet to Disney World.
I hobbled out to the car on crutches — the kind that you slip your forearms into and we motored to Albertson’s, which is the grocery that carries a strange mix of food staples and unexpected gourmet items, such as the tube of tomato paste, and imported items like PG Tips tea bags. Albertson’s has one of those battery-powered carts, so I put my crutches in the basket and began following Susanne around the store like a robot dog or Roomba. It even beeped in reverse, which for some reason Susanne did not find amusing in the slightest. I even got an “okay, now, stop that,” from her.
It was a strange contraption indeed. You had to aim perfectly for the produce bags, and then figure out, using trigonometry, how to then get to the specific produce item desired. So if the broccoli crowns were, for example, 16 inches behind you, you could:
1. back up and beep after checking your blind spots
2. attempt a tight K-turn
3. make a yaw maneuever before reentering the Earth’s atmosphere
I also discovered that the scooter had the smallest turning ratio I could have imagined, being nearly able to circle around a quarter on the floor. Not that I could reach the quarter. But I could drive around it in a strange technology-based attempt to be all territorial about it.
We weaved our way through the store, me trying not to knock things over with my crutches in the basket, Susanne gathering up the items on our list. They were out of the tomato paste, much to our frustration. Also frustrating was the realization that people weren’t seeing me, a 300-pound guy in a bright yellow scooter, and I had to stop suddenly more than a few times, lest I run over some toddler or ram into a special display of Multigrain Cheerios. It was a convenience, the scooter, but it also was like entering a new world, and as a tall person, I wasn’t used to seeing my world from this vantage point next to the quarters and the floor, and yet, there I was.
We were in the checkout line, finally, and I realized I didn’t really know when one got out of these things. Before checking out? Just after? Was there a protocol? I got up and crutched out to the parking lot, and heard, distantly, a small child call out to his mother: “hey, I found a quarter! Cool!”

birthday cake from the past

1. Open first cookbook, entitled, “Baking,” and search for chocolate cake recipe.

2. Realize that there is not, in fact, any specific recipe for chocolate cake — there are, however, 15 recipes related to chocolate cake as a topographal category: flourless chocolate cake, chocolate mousse cake, sour cherry chocolate cake, hazelnut chocolate torte, chocolate and ice box cake . . . . Quit reading and try to remember what the original idea was again.

3. Read through four more cookbooks, not finding a cake recipe worth making. 

4. Pull out the Fine Cooking Chocolate magazine special and identify the recipe to attempt today. Sigh with relief until discovering there are 14,836 steps to creating said cake. Go for it anyway, since it’s the best bet.

5. Push self on office chair over to pantry and reach up to acquire 16-pound container of flour. Sift 3 cups into bowl and add other dry ingredients. 

6. Make wet chocolate mixture, spilling some on container of homemade pasta, and realizing that it is out of reach, choose to leave it there, because at least it smells nice.

7. Whip butter and sugar together in mixer, becoming quickly aware that there is something already in the bowl. Turn off mixer, look in bowl and see small pieces of homemade pasta. Curse out loud that now you need more room temperature butter.

8. Spill some of butter-sugar mixture on on boxer shorts, which are the fashion around the house these days. Admire how the boxer short ribbing nicely holds things like flour, sugar, and butter.

9. Re-mix, in clean bowl, more butter and sugar, and add flour and wet mixture to bowl. Slop wet mixture up onto the kitchen ceiling, 8 feet above and understand that from a seated position, getting it off the ceiling is next to impossible. Continue with cake baking.

10. Curse again as it is evidenced that there is no parchment or wax paper. Grease and flour all three cake pans, crossing fingers that the cakes will come out of them after baking.

11. Get cakes in oven and then crutch over to couch to rest while they fuse to the cake pans.

12. Hear alarm go off much earlier than reconstructed knee would like, and take cakes out to cool.

13. Carefully take out one cake, grumbling at the one spot that has glued itself to the pan. 

14. Repeat Step 13 twice more.

15. Grind up 6 ounces of chocolate in food processor and become dimly aware that it is not actually plugged into the wall. Take stock that said wall is at least one foot beyond reach from seated position in office chair. 

16. Melt 6 ounces of unground chocolate on stove top in double boiler, being able to see only 2 square inches of the pan surface. Stir constantly, assuming the rest of the pan surface looks like the part that is viewable, making assumptions based on sampling size and overall population.

17. Watch as stirring arm falls off body. Consider cost to benefit ratio of having surgery again, this time to replace arm.

18. Mix melted chocolate into other ingredients for frosting and whip with mixer.

19. Layer crumbly cake layers with frosting, teetering one-of-a-kind and irreplaceable cake stand on thigh. Watch as cake slides off cake stand onto floor.

20. Kidding. Finish crumb layer and put cake into fridge for quick cool down before the cake target comes home from work.

21. Remove cake from fridge and finish frosting. Crutch back to couch and thank reconstructed knee for cooperating.

22. Nap.

I was looking at the throngs of people who mashed into DC’s 69 square miles for the inauguration yesterday, getting wistful for a time, and then it hit me that they were in, in fact, the District of Columbia. Those long lines of portable restrooms were there because there aren’t a lot of places to use the bathroom; you wind up buying some diet peach Snapple product that expired in 2003 just so you can be called a “customer” and get a grimy key to a suspicious-looking toilet. I thought about the clusters of RVs that sell fake FBI shirts and crappy plaster Capitol buildings on far more average tourist days than this. They must have done some big time product procurement in advance of the millions of folks visiting. 

In reality, there is no such thing as clean coal banner

DC in general, though, tends toward the dodgy business practices. Consider the following:

1. A woman walking home from work one day is approached by two rough-looking men who have a deal for her: a brand-new Culligan water machine, complete with 6 or 7 10-gallon water jugs. One had been leaning up against a white, unmarked truck, while the other, just to add a little something special to the business exchange, looked nervously around the intersection, presumably to identify any other potential customers. The entire kit and kaboodle was rather undervalued at something like $40. The woman’s inquiry about how to continue water service was met with an “uh, you can just call the company, or something.” Or something indeed.

2. A friend of ours was offered free cable from some random cable guy if only she’d perform her own service on him. “Cable guy” in DC, just to clarify, amounts to a guy in a beat-up Toyota pickup truck with a “No Fear” sticker on the crooked back bumper. This particular cable guy did his very best to live up to the standard, even though the standard is about 2 inches off the ground.

3. Leaving a parking garage one evening, the cashier told us she didn’t have any change. This could have meant that A) she didn’t have any change, B) she didn’t care to give us the change she did have, C) she was saving up for a new iPod. Of course it wasn’t even in the realm of possibility that she round down our ticket cost until she could give us the next bill she did have. We just had to overpay. Okay, that’s not really an example of “discounted” services, but it does show that sometimes in the nation’s capitol, the lines get a little blurred.

4. A popular coffee shop, Murky Coffee, just off the Eastern Market Metro stop, was shut down by the city for not paying its sales tax. By the time officials shuttered the doors, the owner owed more than $400,000. For coffee sales. Didn’t exactly take overnight to rack up that much back tax debt. As one friend put it, “all those times I paid an extra $2 because I had to go to the ATM since they would only take cash? That really pisses me off.” So much for cheap coffee.

5. In response to the revelation, previously covered up by the city, that DC water was laden with lead, city officials started giving out free Brita filters to households. That they didn’t plan much in the way of redoing the plumbing infrastructure — well, let’s not pay attention to that. People got something for nothing. Lead poisoning! Fast forward about 8 years or so and the city stopped short of replacing all of the bad pipe — if you guessed that African-American dense area of Anacostia, you win a prize. The prize is a cheap Culligan water system.

I sure hope the tourists enjoyed DC!

wasserman political cartoon

Intrepid readers of this blog will recall that before Election Day I made some crack about CNN showing some crude holograms as part of it’s “Watch Us!” election coverage. I said it in jest and with a jaundiced eye, and then lo and behold, there is Wolf Blitzer having a rather inane conversation with a “virtual” reporter — about the technology and not the election. Whether said “holograms” were real or not, I was prescient. So with such completely uninspiring obviousness, here are a few other “predictions:”

1. Obamania will be fading fast by the end of the first 100 days. The message about hope is great, the enthusiasm is fantastic, and you can’t live in DC for more than a decade and not feel like the obvious differences between Obama and the outgoing administration hit you like a truck pileup on the Beltway. But to enact his ideas he simply has to govern from the center, which is going to strike some — vehicle carnage aside — as inauthentic at some point. It isn’t necessarily the case, but there will be some folks who see this as a selling out — and it’s just a matter of time when people feel like Obama’s pulled a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” or a welfare reform bill that we weren’t expecting.

2. The Daily Show will be no more — Jon Stewart for one isn’t going to want to continue walking the tightrope of making fun of the people in power in a politically “incorrect” way without getting TOO incorrect about it, for one. But without the 8-foot wide pipe of shit that was the Bush White House giving Comedy Central such excellent material, we’re going to need a new kind of political humor. Jon is going to jump ship to more mainstream broadcast comedy — probably after Jay Leno’s next gig fails right out of the gate. Long live Conan.

3. Reversals to the tightening of reproductive rights laws is either going to happen quietly and successfully, or is going to be the once and future “gay marriage” of the religious right. I’ve seen it only on the margins of reporting so far that Obama will reverse the global gag rule — that to get federal funding for family planning practitioners have to first and foremost talk about abstinence-only practices — and given that this is something they’re planning in the first week in office, signals that there is some Hillary agenda being taken up within the administration. So if they’re serious about rescinding that executive order, will they go the next step and try to get some more permanent legislation passed? If that’s the case, how will they work that on the Hill? With fanfare or under cover of night?

4. Michelle Obama is only going to First Lady us for so long before the Real Michelle stands up — and by that I mean that you cannot possibly contain this smart lady within the narrow confines of the duties and office of First Lady for long. While I think the President (I’m only jumping the title gun by a couple of hours here) is anxious not to repeat any Clintonian mistakes, like putting her in charge of health care, I do think she’ll get some kind of policy duty. She’s not going to be content with picking out furniture, talking about the girls’ school choice, and continuing Laura’s quite boring legacy of the National Book Expo on the Mall.

5. The $850B stimulus bill is not going to pass in the way we think it will today. Already there are rumblings about how it’s not going to help anyone in the near future. If that logic catches wind in the Capitol, who’s going to vote for it? Obama will likely get a lot more traction on job creation than in having to constantly spin the stimulus as something other than a “typical” Democrat tax and spend program. But again, I’m as jaded as a cheap Obama statue currently being sold in a small mobile vehicle parked 100 years from the Washington Monument….

Well, the surgery went well, and by “well” I mean that it took an expected two hours or so and ended with a repaired knee joint. The outpatient center was in its own way, beyond imagination — with comfy chairs and a fancy mocha bar (lest we forget we are in the Pacific Northwest). Susanne wondered if she shouldn’t just show up there from time to time to get some work done. 

After getting prepped via a series of 12,783 questions, 73 percent of which were “which knee is it,” I drew my initials on the left leg and added a smile. The surgeon was grateful I hadn’t sketched a frown, but honestly, how could I have gone into the experience with such negativity? After knowing this doctor for five months, he said he was a Christian and asked if we would mind if he said a prayer before the surgery. This inspired the following thoughts, in no particular order, but which occurred to me in something like 2.3 seconds:

1. All his training, residency, education, and experience, and he doesn’t find that sufficient? Is the prayer for the last nth percent chance that something will go wrong?

2. If a surgeon wants to have a prayer before going into the operating theater, for Pete’s sake, LET HIM DO IT. 

3. The Catholics pray so differently — so often for penance and nearly always from a standard script. Perhaps the Hail Holy Queen would suffice?

4. Was there a measurable quantity of irony I could point to here that this doctor was praying for my knee? Or just conceptual irony?

We told him to go ahead and pray, and he asked for good healing on my joint so I could go and serve others. That was a little presumptive of him, but I don’t technically have anything against that, per se, anyway.

I watched the ceiling go by as I was wheeled into operating suite 3. Now then, I understand that good doctors like to have their tools of the trade laid out neatly and orderly, but there is something about seeing the odd single-piece, stainless steel hammer on the table to give one pause. Great pause. I have had a lumbar puncture before, which means I have had a 10-inch needle inserted into my spine. Scratch that — I’ve had FIVE spinal taps in this life. I’ve had seven strabismus surgeries on my lazy eyes, one of which was, believe it or not, intentionally interrupted so that I could sit up and have the surgeon pull on plastic sutures she’d attached to my eye muscles so that she could “fine tune” her work. Having the sensation of one’s eye being tugged against the eye socket while having no actual feeling of pain has definitely been one of the odder moments in my 38.5 years on the planet.

But these surreal experiences pale in comparison to the hammer. Surgery was hammer time? Why was such an instrument necessary, exactly?* Gratefully, I was soon woozy with the poison — erm, anesthesia. The anesthesiologist seemed to get a kick out of not even asking me to count back from 10. I was there one second and gone the next.

Waking up some hours later I had the now-familiar queasiness from having whatever hellacious concoction poured into me. It took me three hours to get it together enough to get out of bed and get into the house, where I have now planted my derriere for the next three weeks or so. First the Blizzard of 2008, now the Knee Mending of 2009 begins. I’m sure it’s because I made no specific resolutions for the year other than to be open to new experiences. I should know to be extremely specific and not allow any definitional latitude. But nooooo, I had to say, “be open to new experiences,” blah blah blah, so that shiny hammers and titanium screws could wander their way into my life and my body and here I have to count them as wins in my exploration of new freaking experiences.

Be that as it may, I am on the mend. I have discovered, vicariously through Susanne, that Tallman’s Pharmacy on Main Street is chock full of friendly employees, that Oxycontin does not work with the needs of my stomach, that purple Gatorade Fierce turns green after only 20 minutes in one’s stomach, and that I was wrong when I thought that Washington State allowed marijuana for medical use.

So many lovely new experiences, it’s a joy to have arrived in this new year. Seriously, however, I am looking forward to four months from now, when my knee is expected to make a full recovery. Full recovery I can get behind quite easily.

*Those reading this who may know the answer to this question, please be alerted that I am asking it rhetorically only. I do not need any comments with technical answers.

We were talking the other night about hospital mishaps — which some of you political junkies will recall the NLM 1999 study showed happen at the rate of 90,000 a year — and we started conjecturing what could go wrong with my knee surgery, because all medical science has been working toward this moment of my ACL reconstruction. Hey, it’s not my ego, people, it’s just the way the world is.

Anyway, so many people who have had issues on one side of their body have had the wrong side addressed that now even the doctors tell you to write on your body and identify which limb or side needs repair, and which should be left alone. This sounds simple at first, but consider:

Writing “NO” could just as easily look like “ON.” On this side? Come ON over here, baby? Baby you can drive my car?

Writing “Not this one” could, if masked by a patterned hospital gown, look like the abbreviated and wholly misleading “this one.”

Writing “GO AWAY” just seems rude.

We also considered drawing a big “X” on the right (healthy) knee, and worried it would look like the final destination on a pirate map. Yes, pirating figures into my medical situation. Pirates are relevant, damn it, and not just the 21st century pirates of Somalia.

We’ve opted for the “THIS ONE” on the left left and “NO” with an underline on the right leg. The underline will help the health providers see which way is up on the wording, since bodies lying on a table don’t really imply north-south very well. We’re also crossing our fingers that our nursing staff are avid billiards players, and so will know how to interpret the underlining correctly, as they have seen their share of 6 and 9 balls. This is why it’s important to teach children the basics of pool, so that they can provide the highest level of care to their craziest customers at some point in the unforeseeable future. Trust me, if there’d been a way to bring bowling into this discussion I would have, but I got nothing.

Anyway, I’ll be back as soon as I can because as we all know from last December, I need to vent my prolific insights when I’m cooped up. Have a great weekend, folks.

Gearing up for surgery tomorrow, I’ve just been trying to keep things tidy around the house and make sure we’re stocked with foodstuffs and the other necessities one wants when one is recuperating from such an event. It’s kind of like getting ready for a storm, I suppose, because you know you won’t be going out for a while, but it’s unlike that — simply put, when you’re the only person at Safeway buying ginger ale, potato chips, and batteries, people look at you strangely. When everyone is buying up for a storm, it’s no big deal. It wasn’t even that crazy, in the days after 9/11 to purchase yards of cellophane and duct tape, with which we could all slowly suffocate ourselves in our own homes. But ginger ale and batteries? He must be insane, the cashier thinks.

So we came back to Walla Walla a bit over a week ago, to snowy highways and a persistent fog that obscured, once again, anything on the sides of the highways so that it looked like the beginning of Heaven Can Wait  where the squirrely guys come out and try to escort you to your Next Phase of Death. Only then you find yourself in a recently murdered body and can’t understand why Dyan Cannon keeps screaming her head off every time you walk in the room. Okay, it wasn’t quite like that, it was more like this:

The long long road to Walla Walla

The fog lifted after about an hour of driving, and to give ourselves a last moment of civilization, we stopped off at Costco, about 50 miles outside of W2. First though, we went to P.F. Chang’s for lunch where we had a rather uninspired meal that culminated in me receiving just about the most annoying fortune cookie ever, or at least for these last five months.

Fortune cookie from the land of the obvious and ironic

That was good for a laugh, at least. I’ll be sure to let the management of P.F. Chang’s know when I’ve encountered the exotic, because you know, I’m sure they’re on pins and needles waiting for such an epistle.

In the meantime, I wait for the surgery. And then I’ll do my best to follow instructions and wait through the recovery. And then, happily, I shall bowl.

Back in July, I got married to a wonderful woman who makes me smile just by thinking about her. We made a ceremony together, finding readings, music, writing up our own words and also vows, and we included time for our community to speak if they wanted to. The flowers were colorful and vibrant, the participants excited, the guests supportive, and the church light-filled, if not a bit warmer than we’d have liked. It was July in DC, after all. But everything went well, on time, and we enjoyed our 15 minutes of photo opp after the event, casually walking down to the reception a block away in the heart of the embassy district in the city.

We walked into the reception venue and were cheered by our loved ones, and I thought my heart was bursting a little, so stunned was I by their affection. We made our way around the room like celebrities, which made it difficult to remember to actually take care of ourselves. But the evening was fun, until…

Dance, dance, pop

It’s all Michael Jackson’s fault. No sooner than the intro of Billie Jean came on was I doing a dance move I’d executed successfully since 1989. No sooner was I doing my little leg twist than I heard a short “pop” and the physical sensation of my left leg buckling under me. I was hopping on my right foot, trying to figure out why the left one had just given me its pink slip. My brand spanking new wife looked at me and saw the panic in my eyes. Our guests, some of whom were well lubricated at this point in the evening, did not notice the calamity at first. And then they saw me hopping like an overweight kangaroo and everyone stopped moving. Somehow, in the recesses of my brain, I stopped having my moment of shock and ow enough to wave at them, smile, and tell them to “keep dancing! I’m fine! Ha ha!”

Holy crap, I needed a chair, I told Susanne. One was quickly provided and I spent the next 90 minutes icing the knee, compressing the knee with an ace bandage someone had brought to me, and nursing a glass of ice water (with a twist, of course). Four ibuprofen later I looked at the clock and realized we had to get people home — the venue needed to close soon. But with all my will I still couldn’t stand. A friend who works for the National Security Agency had found me some crutches. I joked that there’s probably a van that drives around DC in case any NSA calls them, and he replied that he could neither confirm nor deny that. Dry wit, those NSA employees.

We rolled into the ER in our formal wear, still smiling and a bit incredulous that such a lovely day was closing this way. The X-rays showed that all of my bones were in place, but yup, I sure couldn’t stand on the leg. It was 5 days later when I could put any weight on it at all. The ER doctor who clearly hated that this was where his career had ended up, guessed that I’d dislocated the knee cap.

By our drive cross-country I was walking again, albeit slowly and not for very long. It wasn’t until late September that I’d found an orthopaedic doctor who ran an MRI, and we found out I’d torn my ACL and meniscus. And here we are in January, me still somewhat hobbled and homesick for some quality time in a 10-pin bowling alley.

Finally, I have a surgery date — next Friday. I’ve been waiting for donor material to be available, which is awful to think about but necessary to get me back and working. I promised the nursing staff I’d bring them caramel brownies, because you know, it’s a good thing to have the people cutting you open really like you as a person. Can’t hurt, right?

So, I’ll cross my fingers, draw a big arrow on my left leg and a red “NOT THIS ONE” on my right, and get ready for a lot of TV. Which will make it pretty much just like life as usual.