A carnival of technology

I don’t actually know what my fever was. I didn’t own any kind of thermometer until this evening, at which point my temperature appears to be mostly normal. NOAA tells me the temperature outside, my fancy programmable thermostat that still can’t get this dump below 80 tells me the temperature inside, and body temperatures are for sick people. I don’t get sick.

I got sick. I firmly believe that this is a result of the accident. My immune system is normally strong, like bull, which I attribute to high doses of vitamin C, exercise and a good night’s sleep. I haven’t been buying as much orange juice as normal because it often doesn’t fit in the bag next to all of those stupid TV dinners, I certainly haven’t been exercising, and my stupid broken foot has me sleeping on the couch more often than not. I have a cold. There’s no point in going to a doctor—there’s no cure for the common cold after all—but the difference in available medication for the symptoms has been striking. The last time I had a cold I took some Nyquil and slept it out, but after the Control Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005, Nyquil replaced the pseudoephedrine with something useless—phenylalanine or something stupid like that—and it doesn’t work anymore. I have some Sudafed leftover from before it required an anal probe to buy, but it’s expired and I’m not sure it’s working at 100% efficiency. Oddly enough, Vicodin is probably the best thing to take. It’s a pain reliever, fever reducer and cough suppressant, which about covers everything. I guess it’s a good thing that I saved some.

I started getting a headache after Kat and Jon left on Saturday, so, according to WebMD, I still have two or three days of sniffling and sneezing before everything clears my system. This sucks. I took enough cough drops to equate to a couple packs of Newports in menthol, but now the cough has stopped and my nose is running. How did the cold even come to be? What possible advantage is there for a species, if a virus can even be called a living thing, to give someone the sniffles for a week? This sucks.

For those of you just tuning in or who don’t care enough to remember all of this mess (I know I’d rather not), let’s start with a quick recap. I broke my heel when, while on my bicycle, I lost a fight with a car. I’m out of the cast and in a heavy, goofy-looking removable boot, and I will continue to wear this until everything’s signed off by the bone doctor. I see Dr. Newfield again sometime in October, the twenty-somethingith. October twenty-somethingith doesn’t have any memorable tragedies associated with it like my last appointment, so I’ll probably call midway through next month if I don’t find that little appointment reminder card by then. I can put some weight on my foot now as I walk, and I’ve been seeing a physical therapist twice a week. There are no lawyers involved yet, and I’m not eager to hire any based on the free advice of some guy I met in the police station and readiness so far of State Farm to pay any claims I throw at them. I had been popping Vicodin like candy for a while, but once I stopped out of fear that I’d be buying painkillers in the Love Shack parking lot for the rest of my life my foot didn’t really ache much more, so I don’t guess I’ll be going back to them. I have some leftover if anyone wants to make an offer.

And now, the rest of the story.

I got my bike back today. Kat was in town for the day for some anime convention, so I enlisted her help in picking the bike up. The final total ended up being over $600, so I’ll have more fun with copying machines and faxes submitting the rest of this claim. I’m not even quite done with it yet. I realized after I got home that I didn’t get the fancy extended warranty on this new set of wheels, so I have to talk with Raul on Monday to sort that out.

The new crank is a Shimano Ultegra, which I’m told is way better than the worthless pieces of junk Schwinn installs at the factory. Both the crank and the bottom bracket are chrome colored, whereas the old ones were both black. It still fits with the three-color scheme of the bike, so whatever. The new bottom bracket says “DO NOT DISASSEMBLE,” written in the same ominous font and tone as “REFILL ONLY WITH KIKKOMAN,” so I guess that means the new one is a sealed assembly and the old one probably wasn’t. So that’s a nice improvement. The wheels have some different markings on them, but they’re the same model, so I guess it’s just a new model year. The new rear rack is the exact same one I bought at REI a few months ago.

As far as the healing process goes, my therapist says I’ve been making a lot of progress, and she keeps finding new ways to torture me in our semiweekly sessions. Though the ankle is still a concern, things have been moving on to getting the rest of my leg working again, and that hasn’t been really very pleasant. Apparently my bone should be pretty well healed by now, but it still hurts a little bit to put a lot of weight on it. While at the bike shop today, I decided on a whim to hop on and coast the fifteen yards or so from the door from the car, and, while beginning to instinctively dismount on the right side, I got a feeling in my heel that, though I didn’t hurt myself, I was about to do something really stupid. I quickly corrected with no damage done, but I still found that concerning. If the bone is healed, why does weight make the heel hurt? The heel’s not a muscle, so it’s not like it’s been wasting away or anything. My foot is also still all swollen and gross, though, so maybe that has something to do with it. I hope that goes away soon.

I love to cook supper for myself. It’s probably healthier than eating out all the time, and I enjoy working in the kitchen, even if my apartment kitchen is only barely bigger than a breadbox. I like to cook, but I’ve never been able to get into the habit of packing a lunch. I don’t have particularly regular habits at any restaurant, but there are a handful of places in Roswell that I rotate through frequently enough for the people there to know at least my face, and maybe even my name and a usual order. There’s the burrito place down the street, the pizza joint run by the Moroccan guy with an Italian grandmother, the Greek place, and the old people restaurant.

The old folk’s restaurant is a little place off of Holcomb Bridge run by a lady from Dutchland (it took me a while to figure out why everything is served with carrot slices as a garnish) that serves soups and sandwiches and stuff like that. They have a menu, but I honestly don’t know what’s on it. They always have a lunch special of a cup of some kind of soup, a choice of some sort of entree, and a dessert. It’s a neat little place. For whatever reason, the usual crowd it attracts are old enough to be my grandparents, but no one’s ever complained about the young punk coming in and eating their quiche, and there a lot of interesting people there. The restaurant also has cooking classes about once a month or so, and I signed up for one of those.

I’ve since found out that the soup class is famous, but the one I joined was a new idea and a lot less specific; it was about cooking with herbs. The class crowd was about the same as the lunch crowd as far as age, but I did end up sitting at a table with someone who graduated from Tech the same year I did that I sort of knew through Strick. Apparently his wife works at the restaurant. Crazy, man. Anyway, it was an educational experience. The class was basically a series of lectures followed by eating the item discussed, and most of the dishes were just regular things jazzed up with some extra plants. There were a couple kinds of pesto, an herb butter, a vinaigrette and some lemon sherbet with rosemary and lime peel and juice for dessert. I could have done without the chewy rosemary bits, but it tasted mighty nice. I learned a lot, and I got to thinking that maybe I should use that balcony space to try to grow some things. I guess I probably shouldn’t put that off until my foot heals like everything else that I’m procrastinating.

At one point, while making one of the pestoes, Ms. Annelies asked whether everyone had a food processor. I was the only one who didn’t, which I guess isn’t a horrible shortcoming, but can make things difficult. The guy from Tech confessed that he only had one because he took the soup class a few months before. I don’t really know what to think about it. Electricity is great and all, but I usually like the visceral experience of doing everything by hand, kind of like that crazy carpenter on PBS. I guess convenience is nice too, though. I have been known to use a microwave on occasion.

So, for anyone reading this looking for Christmas present ideas (I’m looking at you, mom), I could probably use a Cuisinart.

I went to the bone doctor today, where I learned two things: my shit health insurance (I swear the only thing they cover halfway decently is drugs) isn’t covering the bone doctor visits, so I have to front the cash until this goes to State Farm, and my heel is about halfway there. The bone doc’s team decided to remove my cast regardless of how my foot looked due the level of leg shrinkage (sigh), and once they got a nice picture of the new layer of bone growing into place on my heel, I got a walking boot. This thing kind of blows. Remember those high top shoes we wore back in the 80’s? It reminds me of those, except that this thing weighs about five pounds.

I can walk now using both feet and the crutches; the doctor said to start out putting about 10% of my weight on it and go from there, working with the physical therapist people to build that up and try to get my foot moving again. He forgot to mention that this is impossible. I walk at an old-man pace now, careful with each step not to put too much weight on the foot since I don’t care to break it all over again. If I just lift up that foot and use the crutches alone I can book it pretty well, but I’m supposed to be building things back up or something.

This boot looks ridiculous. It looks sort of like the bottom half of a ski boot, but much thicker on the bottom and wider in the back. It’s slightly more comfortable than a cast, but this is offset by its weight, and my foot hurts a lot more now that I’ve been moving it around a little. The boot is larger than even the baggiest of my pant legs, but at least I can take it off and wash up every now and then. The cast removal didn’t expose a stench for legends like I had expected it would, but there was a lot of dead skin down in there. And lint, somehow.

Boris, a Campbell (Russian) dwarf hamster with a name that did match her gender, passed away this morning. She was best known for her loves of corn flakes and biting fingers. Boris loved to explore—the world outside was a fascinating landscape of exciting smells and exotic objects—but, unlike other hamsters, she was no escapist. The cage provided either too much comfort of too great an obstacle, and no attempts were ever made. Her aquarium did not even need a lid.

Boris was approximately two and half years old.

I’m going to need a new set of drinking glasses before this is all over.

I hate talking about my foot. My foot is a pretty obvious injury, though, so I get a lot of questions, and I hate how every conversation turns into a game of twenty questions about a broken foot. It’s really not very interesting, and I don’t want your looks of pity and sympathy. Sometimes I’m able to bite my tongue and answer the questions, and sometimes I can’t. Mostly it depends on how high I am at the time. I don’t know what my deal with hyrdocodone is. I probably already told the cough syrup story, but these pills are killer when they kick in. I have a new appreciation for that House doctor show. Anyhow, I don’t want to talk about my foot. I want to talk about the weather and what everyone did over the weekend and the strengths and weaknesses of the Copenhagen interpretation over the many worlds quantum model and all that stupid normal stuff. So I’ll gripe about my foot here and get it all out of the way at once.

For the basic stuff, my bone fragments have apparently found purchase, and my heel aches pretty much constantly. I’ve gone back to sleeping on the couch so that I don’t need to move the pillows back and forth, and as a result of that and the fact that the cast restricts movement, I haven’t been sleeping well. I’m taking the painkillers again, though only occasionally, having decided that the benefits outweigh the side effects. Maybe I’m addicted. Who knows? I guess I’ll find out in two or three weeks when I run out.

I carry a bookbag around with me so that I can carry things while my hands are occupied with the crutches. I’ve been using this to go shopping, and I’ve found very little trouble with it. I imagine that some dude carrying around a bag probably makes stores a little nervous, but I also figure they realize that some dude with a bum foot isn’t going to be able to run very fast. With the exception of a door here and there, most people realize that I don’t want any help and leave me be and everyone’s happy. The occasional attacks on my self-sufficiency are annoying at best (thanks for helping out, by the way, mom and dad. I finally did take my shirts out of the dryer), even if they are understandable. People are basically nice, at least some of the time, and they just want to help. Pride may be a sin, but it’s such a satisfying one, so I just want to do things myself. So far I’ve only been challenged on account of the bag once. I normally shop for my yuppie beer and occasional liquor at the package store next to the Publix run by the Indian dude, since it’s super convenient and they have a pretty good selection of weird beers. Once in a while, though, I go looking for something really off the wall, and one of these inclinations took me to Green’s this past weekend. I ended up getting a new Dogfish Head beer, one that they claim is based on a 9,000 year old brew dug up somewhere in China (it was pretty tasty, strong grape flavor), and they complained about the bag. The Indian (I guess he might be Paki. I’ve never asked.) dude next to the Publix has never cared.

I’m not terribly graceful to begin with, and these crutches have made me a bit of a klutz. After breaking a couple of glasses I learned not to leave things on the parts of the kitchen counter I grab for balance, but I’ve still managed to break one of my drinking beakers, several glasses, a plate and that crappy citrus juicer that I had. That thing was a real pain to clean. Where should I go to buy a new juicer?

I’ve been driving into work again, and, though I started out by hitting the gas with my toes (the doc said I could put weight on my foot if not for the fact that it’s stuck at an obtuse angle), I’ve now switched to a total left-foot style. I’m not sure if this is safe or not. There are some ideas about brain being able to apply concepts learned with one half of the body to the other half, such as with the Half Keyboard, but I don’t know how that works here. Only one foot is involved, so I don’t know if the reflexes are remembered as left/right or inner/outer. Probably the latter. It’s been working pretty ok so far, though I can’t drive for long before my right leg starts to hurt from holding it out of the way. I tried leaning it over into the passenger seat, but I found that I tended to knock the gear shift into neutral. Automatic transmission is both my salvation and my bane.

I have no idea what to expect as far as walking again. I had assumed that I’d put one some pudge now that I’m more sedentary than usual, but I’ve actually lost a few pounds since the wreck, even though, after a brief flirtation with delivery pizza and Chinese, I’m eating the same quantity and quality of food as usual. My next appointment with the bone doctor is on September 11th, and the receptionist apologized for the date. Yeah, we should remember the events of that day. It was a tragic, horrible thing. I watched it happen on TV like everyone else, my roommate at the time was from New York and was worried about his family and friends, and I was part of the same confusion and uncertainty that everyone felt. But jeez, can we move on already? Maybe 8% or so of the country has a reason for feeling a real, direct emotional reaction to that day, but for the rest of us it was the death of some hideous architecture, some people you never knew and a symbol both of the strength of our economic system and the horrors of our economic classes. Yeah, that September 11th was a real bad day, but the rest of them are just days.

So, anyone seen any good movies lately? I thought the Simpsons movie was kind of disappointing, though it had several good moments. I did get around to watching that copy of Rashomon that I forked over a big pile of cash for (freaking Criterion Collection), and I’m not real sure what to think of it. It’s set in medieval Japan, but it’s more of a suspense movie than the usual Western-styled samurai movie I’m familiar with from Kurosawa. I thought it was pretty good, but I think I like Hitchcock more for that sort of feeling, and I like Kurosawa more when he’s paying homage to John Ford.