Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

markgritter and I are about to decamp for five days in sunny Southern California, which, if you know how much I adore Minnesota in October and how little I think of sunny Southern California, will strike you as something which must come with a pretty powerful motivating force. And it does: my godfather Dave (the younger of my two godfathers and the one I talk about more) is getting married. Were it not early in the morning and were I not Scandosotan, this would come with a quantity of exclamation marks: he and Hsin-Yi have been together some time, she seems really good for him, and I am so glad to have her in the family. So consider the exclamation marks implied.

(markgritter is still not entirely well--that's since Labor Day, for those of you keeping score, and he developed a secondary respiratory infection that finally seems to have cleared up leaving only the first problem--and then there are my own health concerns--so this travel is not entirely un-fraught. Wish us luck.)

In other news, I seem to have sold "Entanglement" to Nature, so yay for quantum mechanical short-shorts. Again: exclamation marks promised for later in the day.

Upon reading the manual to our new car, markgritter was startled to discover that it can be taught to open garage doors. (timprov and I were startled, too, but did not read the manual. Suffice it to say that this is not a feature we would have been willing to pay for separately, but it's kind of cool to have it around.)

markgritter: Okay, I've programmed it now so that 1 is the left door and 2 is the right door. We can make 3 your folks' if you want.
me: Awesome.
timprov: Can we make 3 something else?
me: Like MIA so we can program the car to run off with all their Chinese treasures?
markgritter: Well, it has to be 1-3 inches from the current garage door opener when it's activated.
timprov: I was thinking more like Narnia.
markgritter: If you can find a garage that already opens onto Narnia and get 1-3 inches from the opener when they use it, then yes, we can teach our car to open the door to Narnia.
timprov and me: Awesome.

Hurrah for a decent night of sleep! Finally. First one since we left for California. Still more wobbly than my current norm during the days, still finding PT exercises more difficult than usual, but sleep! Sleep is something. Something good, even. Highly recommended, sleep. All the best people do it from time to time.

And it was just in time for markgritter's birthday, too. Good timing, sleep! I tried telling some of our friends that we were not having a birthday party for markgritter this year, and one of our friends (who shall remain dlandon) thought I meant we were not having a birthday party, we were just having this totally casual thing with cake where people brought presents and stuff. And everybody else present thought this was not just a totally reasonable interpretation but the totally reasonable interpretation. I love how we've gotten these people to the point where "we're not having a party" doesn't really compute, and they get ready to come to our not-a-party. Which will have lots of fruit and cheese and cake. That's training one's friends well, that is.

(Seriously, though. No party. Maybe a random we-like-Mark party later, when we're feeling a bit steadier on our feet.)

(Do not pity him. He gets tapas.)

One of the odd things about being mired in vertigo and PT for this long is that my sense of time is off. Another is that I am distrusting my control of tone in a lot of interpersonal interactions. I verbally rolled my eyes at an old friend today online, and I felt sure that my friend would cope and verbally roll their eyes back, because we've gone round and round on this general issue before, and nobody has taken their marbles and gone home yet. (That would require either of us to find our marbles, possibly. But I digress.) But when something hurts my feelings or upsets me in the last few months, I've been really unsure that I will be able to bring it up in a fair and reasonable way (as opposed to, "You hurt my feelings and I have verrrrrrrtigooooooo, waaaaaaaaah"), so I've been keeping my mouth shut instead of being quiet and polite and firm about stuff like that. This is perhaps suboptimal on all counts, as I'm pretty sure my near and dear (and even my distant but cordial) are not keen on increased likelihood of touching unknown sore spots in the same spot multiple times. I'm also aware that by bringing it up as a general problem in an lj entry -- even though it is a general problem and not specifically that greykev has been going around telling people that my feet smell like elephant farts and I'm trying to weasel out of facing him about it -- I may be making people nervous about talking to me at all, which is the last thing I want. Uff da. Sometimes a sense of social/conversational fair play is a bit oppressive.

markgritter got home last night, yay! Frontier lied to me about his plane, though, so I had an hour in the airport waiting. I was finishing the book I'd brought when he walked up. Timing, as they say.

And once again this year, Mark's timing was impeccable: he was gone the week the tomatoes started to go nuts. We only have three tomato plants, but they're producing like crazy. If anybody knows of a south Mpls or suburban shelter that takes fresh garden produce for the homeless and hungry, we may get to that point this year. Or we may just make a lot of soup and salsa and give tomatoes to everyone we see. Beware, bewaaaare!

I was wiggling my fingers in kind of a scary way there. Sorry you couldn't see it.

Anyway, clever, tasty tomato recipes are welcome here.

Quite awhile ago, when I had one of my posts where the book had eaten my head for a bit, rose_and_ivy said, "I've been there, but not with a story. How did you train your brain that way?" And I've been thinking about it, trying to get at the real answer, especially as I suspect that I am not very far from another, longer brain-eaten period, so I may not have my head up to think about this sort of thing for awhile now if I don't do it right away.

( brain training )

It was extremely foggy this morning taking markgritter to the airport. The Minnesota River in particular was fogged over, reminding us of when we lived upstream in St. Peter and would look down over the fogged river valley on our way to classes in the morning. Came home to put in a load of laundry and deal with the first person giving us an estimate on having the driveway and front step redone. The later flight is less disorienting than the earlier one, but I'm always aware of his absence even in the parts of the day when he'd usually be sleeping, and Ista is unsettled. But there's enough light and warmth that she and I can have long late afternoon/early evening walks, with no need to stop and calculate what the warmest part of the day will be and what route will offer the most shelter from wind. I love winter, but I suppose there's and advantage or two to spring.

Ista is mostly fine now, although she's still favoring her right hind leg.

markgritter, on the other hand, seems to have done something awful to his back.

We are the merriest Christmas lot in the world, let me tell you. This is where the phrase "relentless good cheer" comes into play.

missista is not my lj. missista is an lj to which all three typing members of my household have posting privileges. If you are reading missista for a line on my thoughts and only my thoughts from the perspective of the dog, you will be misattributing your quotes at least a third of the time and possibly more. It is entirely possible that you will be attributing things to me that I have not even had a chance to read, given that -- contrary to occasional appearances -- I do actually do things away from my lj.

I should have known better than to think we could go a week without someone in this house seeing a member of the medical profession. (Professionally. We're going to see one socially on Sunday.)

I took markgritter into the clinic unexpectedly this morning. We have a diagnosis (non-contagious, short-term, should not interfere with his ability to Do Stuff), a prescription, and an admonition to take him to the ER if the diagnosis was wrong and things get suddenly worse.

I hope timprov's birthday gets better from here.

Me: We've been married too long.
Mark: No we haven't.
Me: Our smartassery is starting to coincide.
Mark: Isn't that why we got married in the first place?
Me: Oh yeah....