Ab-Ripper Ouch

Be warned, this is a medical post.  Feel free to go look at funny pictures of cats on the internet until tomorrow's post.  Note though, I will do my best to spare you the details, but as I am overcome with ouch, owwie and uncomfortableness I'm going to have to hammer it out in words here. 

Let's start at the beginning.  Rewind to Thanksgiving day with family, friends, a lovely dinner and a warm toasty fire burning.  Burning because I flipped the switch that turns it on, despite the fact that it was pleasant weather outside.  Thanksgiving day was just asking for a fire and I didn't want to let it down. 

At the culmination of the evening, my husband challenged my niece, Olivia, and me to fifteen minutes of Ab-Ripper X.  As you may remember from a prior post, we were successful in completing the workout but it was tough.

Fast forward to the next day and I have a problem.  I have hurt my behind.  I have hurt it right in the middle, just below where the coccyx bone is.  I have sat up, crunched and exercised myself into a nice patch of raw skin.  It is not comfortable.  I apply liberally and regularly, Neosporin ointment.  I keep the area clean.  I anxiously await the area to heal.

A week later and the area has healed, but, and this is strange, it appears that some acne has appeared in the same area.  Acne that got dramatically worse very quickly.  Oh no, could this be a boil?  I've heard of them and they sound awful.  I futilely hope it's just clogged pores from all the antibiotic ointment I've been applying.

So hoping didn't help.  It really didn't help because things got much much worse.  Two nights ago I could barely lie on my back due to pain.  Last night, no way.  Not a chance.  Sitting was achievable by having great posture and leaning slightly forward.  Something had to be done.  Something other than read all about it on the internet.

The internet had some good advice, some home treatments (such as hot compresses) but oral antibiotics or having a professional open up the area could be needed.  Check with your friendly doctor if things get bad, the web sites say.  And since the situation had been rapidly progressing in a downhill direction quickly, I went to Urgent Care at opening today.

The doctor saw me and said, "Yep, you need to go to the emergency room.  They will either lance it or have to surgically open it up depending on the severity."  Wait, what?  Are you sure?  It was fine two days ago, well, not as bad.  Seriously?  Yes, seriously, sigh.  And yet from a pain perspective I wanted to say, "Bring on the knife, get me some relief."  Back in the car to the hospital.

And this is where things take a surprising turn, in time.  I was checked in and in a bed in the emergency room in less than ten minutes.  Ten minutes?!  That just doesn't happen.  They did an initial assessment and sent me to the "procedure" area.  Elapsed time, twenty minutes.  The doctor said he would try and drain it, but the type it was was going to possibly have to have follow-up surgery by a general surgeon.  Ugh, but okay, can you fix me today?   He said he'd be right back.

In another thirty minutes I was bandaged up, holding paperwork and prescriptions for antibiotics and pain medication and walking out of the hospital.  Total elapsed time was about an hour-and-a-half.  In the EMERGENCY room!  How crazy cakes is that?  I am not complaining.  I am thrilled—well, aside from the large bandage, incision and packing in my backside. 

This morning started with me telling my husband I might go to the doctor to being and then wham, I'm at the emergency room for a possible procedure.  My husband called his mother and she very kindly drove up to help because emergency room visits usually mean hours and hours of wait time until anything happens.  Here's the amazing thing.  I was home before she got here.  Urgent care, Emergency room, minor surgical procedure, trip to the pharmacy for prescriptions and I was back in three hours. 

I can only hope my backside heals at an equally rapid pace.

The Big Boy Update:  "Three, four, five, eight, number two."  It appears he can count.  He counted off his numbers to us more than once today.  Eight follows five and "number two" comes next.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Stairs up and stairs down.  She's been able to go up for a while, and she could go down steps when she wanted to.  She seemed interested in going up four steps and then down four steps.  Two days ago she went up a flight, stood up at the top, walked around and then got down on her hands and knees and backed up to the top step.  She then, carefully, went down the entire flight.  Since then, she's done it twice more. 

Fitness Update:  None for a while, for obvious reasons.

Someone Once Said:  We humans have to make considerable progress before we can accept a free gift, and value it. Accepting is much harder than giving.

The Height of Socks

Fashions come and go.  One of the best measurements historically was the height of skirts.  Up and down they'd go through the decades, usually matching other social changes of the times.  I've never cared much about skirts, although I seem to be wearing more this year than ever before.  What has seemed to have an affect on me though has been the height of socks.

Looking back when I was in elementary school I have no idea what I wore sock-wise.  I'm guessing I wore socks because I have distinct memories of sneakers.  I also remember my mother putting on my socks and my toes wiggling around to get them on just right before the addition of the shoe, because a bunched up sock is never comfortable when the shoe goes on top.  I hadn't remembered this until today when I saw my son wiggling his toes to get his socks straightened out.  It's always amazing to me when a very old memory can push itself to the forefront of your mind after laying dormant for so long.

The first time I really remember a personal preference with socks was sixth grade.  I have a birthmark on my right knee and I always disliked it.  As an adult, I don't even remember it's there for the most part, but this was sixth grade and my focus was different back then.  I asked for the longest, highest knee-socks my mom could find so I could try and cover up that blasted birthmark.  Those socks barely covered it, and only did so if I continually pulled them back up as I ran around the playground.  In an effort to not call attention to a defect by bringing excessive focus to the area, I'm sure I succeeded masterfully.

In junior high school and high school sock fashions were mid-calf.  But not pulled up straight.  You had to bunch them down.  The bunching length and amount was key.  Sometimes I had to work at it to get them just right.  During this time one thing that was definitely out of fashion was ankle socks.  Talk about uncouth and uncool.  Who would wear those wardrobe atrocities, I thought?

My boyfriend, that's who.  And he loved them.  I was unable to convince him otherwise because he played golf and he didn't want a mid-calf suntan line.  He won, continued to wear his ankle socks and I averted my eyes.

About those ankle socks though.  Today I'm a huge fan.  Love them.  I wouldn't dare go running without them.  The thought of wearing shorts and sneakers with socks partially up my legs makes what little fashion sense I have cringe.

Fashions and fads change though.  It appears this winter it is quite fashionable to wear boots and have socks that not only come up to your knees, but go over them and completely cover them.  And the elastic component in these very high socks makes them stay up easily without being binding.  They're great for keeping your knees warm when you're wearing a skirt in cold weather too.   Talk about fun to wear.

As I was putting on my knee socks the other day, I thought back to the sixth-grade version of me and wished I could have mailed some knee socks back in time to help with my birthmark hiding endeavors.


The Big Boy Update:  Blaming his sister.  He can explain that his sister "do it" when he realizes he's about to get in trouble.  He will also ask her to "do it" if he wants her to try out whatever fun or challenging thing he's currently in the middle of.  And then yesterday on the way to school there was a persistent sunbeam in his face.  It happens often and he dislikes it.  It's the time of morning when the sun is just blaring in your eyes.  If he can move his head out of the way, he won't be too bothered.  Yesterday he couldn't get away from the sun.  I realized he was upset when he started complaining loudly in the back seat, "no no no!" while covering up his face.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Speaking of "no," she's learned how to say no.  She is very clear in the "do not want" and "no" category when it comes to pushing something away.  There is no question what she's thinking.  But she hasn't said "no" yet.  This afternoon after her bath on the changing table, she suddenly figured out how to say "no."  It's a very long word for her and it goes up at the end, but it was clear what she was saying as she kept repeating herself.

Someone Once Said:   Maybe Jesus was right when he said the meek shall inherit the earth – but they inherit very small plots, about six feet by three.

Mt Strip Mall, My Grocery Store, My Gas Station

I live quite close to where I grew up.  How close you ask?  Only one zip code away.  If the traffic lights were with me I could probably make it from my house now to my house then in five minutes.  The whole area feels like home as it's the only place I've ever known.  But there are subtle differences in what I consider "home" even within such a narrow area.

For instance, I went shopping with my mother last week.  We needed to get some groceries.  We went to the grocery store closer to her house which is the one she normally shops at.  I looked around and didn't know where things were.  The store itself just felt like "other people's store" instead of my store.  And yet this is the grocery store I went to for my whole adolescent life.

When I think back to my childhood and remember my mother telling me I could do any gymnastics I wanted to in the grocery store, as long as I didn't put my hands down, I'm thinking about events that happened in that store.  When I remember coming to the store to visit my boyfriend, Bill, who was a register clerk there during high school, it was at that store, but it seems far away and elsewhere-ish in my mind.

What does seem like "my store" is the one just a few miles away that's closer to my house.  But I can remember a time when I first moved closer to this second store and how foreign it seemed to be shopping there instead of the store I'd shopped in for so many years.

It's the same with your main gas station or your main strip mall or main coffee shop.  Whichever one you frequent the most becomes your mental "home" and everything else seems unfamiliar and for other people.

The Big Boy Update: "I see Minnie Maus.  It's a Minnie Maus."   During lunch the other day I heard him saying this.  I didn't know what he meant until I realized I'd served him his food in a new bowl that had Mickey Mouse at the bottom.  He had moved the mashed potatoes around and was looking at the image at the bottom.  He can say "Mickey" but when it comes to the whole name, he thinks Mickey is "Minnie Maus."  He also said "Bear, bear, bear!" yesterday and I realized, again, that he was looking at the bottom of the bowl we had been given by friends recently.  He was looking at Winnie the Pooh.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles: Ack Ack Ack Ack.  She has a very strange laugh she does sometimes.  It sounds like she's trying to clear her throat by doing a hacking sound.  But no, she's laughing.  And she's usually laughing at you. 

Someone Once Said:  Scientific detachment: It’s the ignition system of the world; without it we’re sunk.

The Safety Swear

I can swear.  I do swear.  I shouldn't swear.  I swear way too much.  I really need to break my swearing habits.

 It's almost impossible to not make exclamations in some way.  You're surprised, you stub your toe,  You want to emphasize something.  Dang, drat, darn, crap, ow, arrrugh work.  Those exclamations do a good job, but sometimes I need something with a few more syllables to get my true meaning of surprise, indignation or pain expressed.

But there are children with mimicking ears.  Children who silently listen to you say something over and over again.  Something you don't really realize you're saying until one day when they've processed it and, bam, they have a new vocabulary word and there's no way you can take it back. 

So I've been working on my safety swears.  Some of them I've had for years, such as "God bless America."  I have one, "I swannie" that always reminds me of my Aunt Pat, because I can just hear her in my mind every time I say it.  Then there are funny ones, such as, "mama pajama" from the movie Mystery Men.  I even manage to get in a, "son of a gun" from time to time. 

I hope I'm doing an okay job of curtailing my language.  I fear however, that in just a short while my son is going to blurt out a terrible, dirty word and look at me with the biggest smile because he's just managed to use his new word correctly in context.

The Big Boy Update:  Tummy trouble.  Last night at the conclusion of dinner he started telling us his tummy was bothering him.  He communicates with us fairly regularly about his skin being itchy by showing us where it's bothering him and asking for lotion or medicine or powder, but this marks the first time he's really communicated an unexpected ill.  We can see him scratching and watch his face get red.  We wouldn't have known his stomach was bothering him.  I was hoping he hadn't contracted the stomach virus that was going around school.  I was doubly hoping he wasn't going to throw up his dinner in the back seat of the car.  I loosened his diaper and told him we would have a bath when we got home.  He held on to his stomach and repeated bath and, "tummy hurt" several times.   When we got home the issue had apparently been resolved...in his diaper.  A right mess it was too.  But he felt better.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Here's your baby, ma'am. At pickup at school today the other teachers were telling me to look at my daughter.  She was coming from the classroom, in the teacher's arms, completely limp and laid out.  She was completely asleep.  It was a tiring morning.

Someone Once Said:  People who pass up temptations have only themselves to blame.

The Pleasure of Paper

I don't think I started out loving paper.  I think the love of origami came first.  Paper was just paper and didn't have any special capabilities until I learned you could manipulate it into shapes—shapes that could do something like fly or flap or spin or hold water.  It was when I could turn a single piece of paper into an airplane, a flapping bird, a whirligig or a cup that paper became so much more than just a boring medium on which I could write.

From that point forward, I was on a mission for the best paper.  Some paper was thin and crispy and was great for certain models.  Other paper was bright and colorful and looked beautiful when folded into a box or ornament.  Other paper was metallic—which was expensive and uncommon and unlikely to be used because it was so much nicer to look at and anyway, nothing ever seemed worthy enough for the ten inch gold square at any rate.

There was Japanese Washi paper and mulberry fiber paper and make your own paper that I destroyed a perfectly good blender making.  There was thick paper and even wallpaper because some models are stunning when made with wallpaper believe it or not.

Paper collecting aside, the bottom line is you need the proper paper for the model you want to fold.  The most beautiful model in the world will look like a fancy wad of trash if you don't pair the design with paper appropriate for the model's complexity and folding techniques.  And this is something that takes lots of trial and error and then some more error until you start to get the hang of it.

But like so many things in my life, that's another story.  This is about collecting paper.  It's a funny thing, collecting a consumable.  You collect it so that you might have options when you need it.  But the more "valuable" or "rare" or even "special" a piece of paper is, the more likely you are to never use it.  I have some papers in my collection that have been there for over twenty years.  Wait, is that right?  I just did a year calculation from some of the oldest papers I have.  I remembered when and where I got them and yes, 1991 Germany trip was indeed over twenty years ago.  That thing about time flying...so true.

Today I was cutting wrapping paper into squares for some upcoming holiday origami projects and I looked at, for what would appear to be at least the twentieth time now, some very old rolls of wrapping paper.  These rolls still exist because the quality of the paper is so excellent it's been hard to use them up.  It's that "I don't want to use it because then there won't be any more" logic which means it never gets used. 

Today I had a different mental angle on the old paper.  I thought if I cut it into small 4" squares to be folded with, I'd get a lot more enjoyment out of it than I would with it sitting in the the wrapping paper bin.  Also, if I didn't get to using it soon, some nice family member might inadvertently use it up on presents and then it would just be torn off and thrown away.  The inner-cringe I felt when that thought came on was just too much.  "Save the paper by using the paper!" I thought.

As I cut up some of this ancient paper I thought back to the very strange store from which it came.  It was in the mountains where we vacationed during the holidays with my parent's best friends.  But the strange thing about the store was that it was a roadside store, selling yard things like those gnarled rocking chairs and bird baths and other things wholly unrelated to wrapping paper.  And yet they had a lot of paper.

Someone must have hijacked a truck from a distributor because they had the same stock of paper for several years.  After the first year when I realized how amazing it was for folding origami, I went back and bought more at the following year's trip.  I think I bought even more the third year.  At some point the roadside store closed.  A new store opened though and I remember going in, futilely, to see if they somehow had a magic stash of wrapping paper still in the corner.

The Big Boy Update:  Chopsticks.  Last night at dinner the waitress gave my son a set of chopsticks rubber-banded together so he might have a chance at using them successfully.  Unexpectedly, he was able to pick up food with them.  Not every time, but enough times to know it wasn't a lucky grab.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Formula out, milk in.  We're done with formula.  I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but she hasn't had any formula for probably two weeks now.  We weaned her to whole milk.  She's also good at using a sippy cup with a straw all by herself at the table.  Next step is to get her to a sippy cup at night for her bedtime milk.

Fitness Update:  5.75 miles.  Wait, was that this morning?  I tell you, by the time the children are in bed the morning runs seems more than a full day away.  I've been trying out the Nike Fitness Kinect game (read workout) too and it's been interesting.  It's a less-strenuous thirty minute workout that includes fun and challenging exercises.

Someone Once Said:  Sometimes the best one can do about a weak point is not to call attention to it.

This Picture is Really Old...

You're out somewhere and you meet someone new.  Perhaps you're in a waiting room, say for the chiropractor because your back is all manner of ow, and you strike up a conversation with someone.  They ask about children, you tell them more than they really wanted to hear.  You return the favor and ask them about their family, upon which they pull out their wallet and proudly show you some pictures.  But, and you know it's coming, they say, "These pictures are old."   "How old," you ask?  They explain that they're at least three years out of date.  Additional conversation ensues as they explain, "how much they've changed" since those old pictures were taken.

Interactions like the one above used to be so common.  You'd encounter someone who is very enthusiastic and wants to show you and tell you all about their family or pets or favorite bonsai trees.  They would whip out their wallet and start going through the little picture insert that was available on every wallet for sale for so long.  But that's all changed now.

Do wallets even come with the photo inserts any more?  Because who goes with inserts when there's a cell phone or iPad or even laptop available in close proximity that has not three or four pictures, but scads of them.  More pictures than you could possibly even begin to go through, even if you were staying for the duration of the holiday season.

And out of date, old photos?  These days, you're more likely to run into the, "This was my grandson who lives out of the country and here he is enjoying his breakfast from two hours ago."

The Big Boy Update:  Sandy.  How is it he manages to get so much sand into his shoes at school?  They're not open toed.  He has on thick, wintery socks.  And yet every day he manages to bring home at least three-eights of the playground sand in his shoes.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Muddy.  How is it on the same playground my son is trouncing around in the sand, my daughter seems to find dirty muddy mess?  She can get her fluffy pink and white jacket's sleeves so dirty in a single short playground session that I'm not sure if the fluffy, pink and white jacket I sent her to school in was really pink and white to start.

Fitness Update:  Five miles.  Always nice to run before Monday's weigh-in.  It's a bit of a way to cheat on the weekly pound verification because an hour of running will drop off some handy weight in sweat.

Someone Once Said:   Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash.

The Saint Michaels Origami Book

I've been doing origami since I was eight-years-old.  How I got started doing origami is another story altogether, but ever since I started doing origami I've enjoyed buying origami books.  Over time I've collected a lot of books (perhaps too many books some might say.)  And just like a good book can bring back memories of a time in your life when you read it, my origami books can bring back a situation, a feeling, a location, when I bring them out and fold their models.

A long, long time ago, when I was fairly new to origami and there was no internet, no online shopping and the only origami books you'd find were the few they had in the big bookstore, I found a book that I cherished.  It was hard to find new books back then and I spent hours scouring used book stores or anywhere that might have anything origami related. 

This particular time, we were in St. Michaels, Maryland over Christmas (or was it Thanksgiving) and we went into the little town to do some holiday shopping.  I suppose it wasn't Christmas if we were still shopping, it must have been Thanksgiving.  I went in a small bookstore on the off chance they'd have anything new or old or unknown in the realm of origami books and paper.

This one store had a brand new, shiny, hardcover origami book I'd never seen before.  I was sold.  I wasn't letting that book out of my hands until it was mine.  After I bought it, I sat in the car and fairly drooled over the beautiful photography and enticing designs.  I couldn't wait to get back to the house so I could get to my paper and start making the models.

It was, and still is, a beautiful book.  Every time I see it on the shelf a little memory of cold weather, warm fires and happy family over the holidays on the Chesapeake Bay comes back to me.  Later on, not only did I meet the author of this book at an origami convention, I got to know her and she even published one of my own origami creations in one of her books. 

The Big Boy Update:  Lights On. Today he went three rooms over, got a stool and dragged it across the house to get to a set of light switches.  He climbed up, said, "lights on" and proceeded to turn each of the four switches on and off, stopping to look around and determine which lights were associated with which switch.  Last night in the tub with lots of floating toys around him, daddy asked him, "do you see the duck?"  He's starting to speak in sentences so he responded, "I see the duck."  Then, he must have realized he needed to actually find the duck so he started to look around for it.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Back in the box.  She loves being in a box.  Especially if there are things in the box.  She was in the most uncomfortable looking box of Legos earlier.  She was happy, even if her bottom must have been all kinds of discomfort.

Someone Once Said:  Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done.