I'm smiling, goddammit.

I got a great shareware photo program called Gimp a while back. It lets me take a second look sometimes. In this case, I was poking through photos prior to deletion. We'd been looking at the brace shots in terms of the brace.

That's how I found the picture Robyn took that turned out to be a very lonely silhouette.

This might be an interesting one to turn black and white.





There. What do you think? I had to sharpen it up a little.

I have increasing amounts of energy and decreasing amounts of pain. I've not messed with the original pain dose for discharge. This was a step down from the hospital dose. I think another step down will be in order tomorrow. I'm hungry. As we all know, Tuesday is the day I get to eat again. I hope someone is telling my stomach. I'm trying to keep him busy.

There is still drainage in the bandage, although far less than in the last one. [Nancy, there is still yellow in the mix. Lots of clear and red tinged as well. ] Minerva constantly rides my back, reminding me that I must comply with the expectations of my healers. If this is really the range of motion I was supposed to have (last time), then I was really out of line. Yo. Because Minerva rides my back, I feel freer to move parts of me she does not control. The safe feeling of the law abiding citizen of an authoritarian regime.

Did I mention the wiring in my jaw comes out Tuesday morning? Dang! No worries after that. I'll eat myself back to good health.

We had a campus clean up day with the Braille School staff in Vinton a few weeks ago. We have a huge campus that we all enjoy and there are not enough hands for a good spring clean up without us. We trimmed 100 yards of hedge and in the process revealed a goldfinch nest with two live birdlets and an egg. The goldfinch is a lovely bird, our State Bird, and so the loss of this nest is, of course, a loss to the entire combined communities, Avian and Human. But I digress.

We lowered the nest into the bush farther, but some wily predators had been watching our work. Note to self: you are not as sneaky as a goldfinch. The nest was scattered. There was no sign of the finchlets. The egg sat here in the bush. I think it was already broken when the nest went down. The predators didn't bother with it. After you've had fresh finchlet, day-old eggs just don't cut it.

A number of people ask me whether I will continue to ride a bicycle. I was not really a bike fanatic. What I was doing was training for the BRMA ride. In my mind it was about not letting my physical conditioning exclude me from having fun with my friends. Riding that road trip was a personal fitness goal. If I could ride up long hills and travel 50 miles per day with my some of my best friends, it would be a pretty good start to the summer. I was looking at biking as another way to get the "run" in that I seem to need three times per week in order to stay reasonably trim and somewhat less crabby. Here's one reason I'd really like to get back on the bicycle:

I only could ever ride half way up the long hills before stopping. There the wind sings and the view is spectacular. It is a view of which one feels a peculiar ownership. Perhaps that's from grinding up this far.

I never thought much about the down hill portion, other than associating it with fun, gliding pleasure. I have a pretty nice old racing bike and high pressure tires and I'm a big guy. Downhill and momentum have been my friends.

I think it was the day before I wrecked that I clipped Chris's rear tire with my front one, in town, and ended up on my back with my bike beside me, on concrete.

Oh, I just can't imagine even being in that position now. Oh. I have to go the bathroom.