Yesterday in list form:
+: cathijosephine locked herself out of the house. This is a plus because she came over to get the spare key I have, woke me up early, and took me out to IHOP for breakfast to thank me, which means I got to see her unexpectedly, I got a free eggs-and-bacon-and-pancakes brunch, and I got to work on time.
+: Met devoken for dinner. Was great to catch up with her. I got to tell her all about plumtreeblossom’s and my New York trip.
+: In conjunction with the preceding, I discovered how easy it is to walk from work to Coolidge Corner. This will be useful.
±: Because I got in to work at an unexpectedly reasonable time, and devoken works till 9, I had a very long day at work. That would have made me happy if I’d been more focussed for it.
-: I have a cold. Over the course of yesterday it became clear that it's a real cold rather than just allergies or dry air. This morning it included a bad sore throat, but that got better when I was up and around. Oh, well. Maybe I caught it on the bus.

Friday night and yesterday morning, I did more disassembling in my old bedroom. Slowly, slowly making progress. (I’m moved upstairs, but lots of my stuff is still downstairs.)

Yesterday evening, I picked up plumtreeblossom from the T and we both went grocery shopping. She loves coming out to the huge suburban grocery stores. We each got a huge heaping cartful. (Oh, also yesterday morning I had cleared out the fridge so there’d be any place to put any of this.) Then, after dropping our shopping loads at my house, we went out to the Finnish steam baths a few blocks away and had a lovely blast of heat in the middle of the winter. After that, we went to the Firefly’s Barbeque (gratuitous Flash/audio warning!) in Quincy for dinner, which is becoming one of our favourite dinner venues.

(I tried one of their hot sauces. plumtreeblossom asked me how it was, and I said it was tasty, but pretty mild. She had a teensy taste to see, and disagreed amusingly. To me, it seemed milder than Tabasco, although more flavourful; to her, it seemed stronger than Tabasco.)

Then we came back here, and plumtreeblossom got to stay in my new bedroom for the first time.

This morning, we loaded up the car with plumtreeblossom’s groceries, and went out to the little hole-in-the-wall diner we like to go to for a yummy breakfast. plumtreeblossom needed leaf bags, and we went a bit out of our way to a Lowe’s. (I was debating going to the Home Depot nearby, but ① I don’t like their politics or their labour practices, and ② I had this notion that there might be some stuff at the Lowe’s I wanted, too.) This turned out to be an incredible impulse-purchase success; the Lowe’s had porch swings (with canopies) on sale. They had four different kinds out, one which unfolds into a bed, and a very small one. I bought the one that unfolds into a bed for my deck, so I’m going to have comfy seating (and, when the weather gets a lot warmer, maybe occasionally sleeping) out there! It’s getting delivered in a week. plumtreeblossom had somebody measure the little two-person one so she could check whether it would fit on her balcony. When I dropped her off this afternoon we measured the balcony, and it will, so she’s getting it, and she’ll have a nice covered place to sit out there and have her morning coffee and cigarette. What delightful discoveries!

Oh, and we did find leaf bags. :-)

On the way out of the Lowe’s, I had some weird visual stuff going on in one of my eyes that it later turns out was probably connected with my first ever migraine. It looked like a curved streak in the field of vision of my left eye had kaleidoscope-like flashing lights overlaid over it. The headache, which started to develop around the time the visual weirdness shut off (it started and stopped very very suddenly) was pretty mild and didn’t really bother me, although I did (about an hour later) end up taking some ibuprofen for it. If that’s what my migraines are going to be like; I won’t so much mind having them, but hopefully this was a one-off thing.

After I dropped plumtreeblossom off and came back home, I had the pleasant surprise of a phone call from cathijosephine’s father. He had called basically to say hi and see how I was doing and offer his sympathy over last month’s unpleasantness. That was nice!

So so far, it’s been a fabulous weekend. The rest of tonight is going to be about more house reorganizing (and maybe even cleaning and laundry).

My doctor told me I should drink more wine. I like my doctor.

EDIT: He also agreed with my suggestion to try decreasing my testosterone dose a little bit and seeing how that goes. Don’t worry, those of you who might care about that; we’re only talking about a small decrease.

(I mean to post this a long time ago!)

Sweet plumtreeblossom’s birthday is coming up, on December 27, and she’d like a sewing machine. I would love to get her one, but it seems to me that maybe some of you would like to help get her one, too, and then she can get a really kick-ass sewing machine, like one that turns into a spaceship in case of alien invasion. (I am still squeeing over the Utilikilt many of you got me in this fashion.) So, if you feel like contributing towards a sewing machine for my wonderful girlfriend, you can do so with this PayPal button:

(You don't need a PayPal account; you can use a credit or debit card. But if you want to contribute but don’t want to use PayPal, you’re welcome to get a contribution to me in another way.)

I strongly suspect that this will be my last posting shilling for a group gift for several months.

In other plumtreeblossom-related news, we had a lovely impromptu dinner near my work this evening. Yay!

And in other beowabbit-related news, I have a truly dreadful cough, and correspondingly raw throat and hoarse voice, but other than that I’m doing a lot better. And I think the cough is slowly receding.

Well, yesterday was increasingly awful throughout the day, but today (after sleeping 13 hours) I’m feeling a lot better. I think I’m over the worst of it.

The good: plumtreeblossom and I got to go see The Golden Compass last night. I found it really really compressed compared to the rather thoughtfully-paced book it’s based on, but I loved it. Lyra’s Oxford was much as I had imagined it, and Iorik and Lee were plucked right out of my head. The world was a bit more steampunky than in the book, but I didn’t mind that. The acting was good. I’m so glad I saw it. And I’m very glad that plumtreeblossom enjoyed it, too, not having read the book. (She’s excited to read the series now.) And, barring production problems, there are two more movies to look forward to!

We had an unplanned intermission when there was a fire alarm and the building was evacuated, but when we started to see people streaming back into the building as we were walking towards the T we decided to go back in and see what was up, and since it had only been 10min or so since the alarm, they resumed all the movies. We saw some smoke or steam coming from a nearby building; I presume that’s what the alarm was about, but I’m not sure. The Religious Right is up in arms about this movie — as well they should be; the books are delightfully subversive —, so plumtreeblossom’s first thought was a bomb threat.

More recent good stuff include dinner with plumtreeblossom at The Cheesecake Factory near my work on Wednesday, pasta and interesting liqueurs with cathijosephine on Thursday, and brunch at Johnny D’s this morning (with live jazz guitar).

The bad: I have a bad cold. I had hoped it would just be a mild day-or-so, but I feel really crummy today. I am probably going to go to bed soon. (I really hope plumtreeblossom doesn’t come down with this, but that seems pretty implausible.) On the other hand, I have the weekend to rest. On the other other hand, I had planned on doing a lot of work on the house this weekend, and instead I’m mostly going to be resting and trying to get better.

Net balance is quite good, though.

Just wanted to let folks know I’m doing much, much better today. I think the sciatica is gone and all the (considerable) aches I have left are muscular side-effects of that. I felt groggy and crummy all day yesterday and am pretty sure I had a fever and slept about 18 out of 24 hours, but that unpleasantness (except for the sleeping; sleeping was very pleasant!) seems to be behind me too. And plumtreeblossom’s coming over to remind me other humans exist tonight, and cathijosephine’s going to meet us for The Best Pastrami Sandwiches East of the International Date Line and West of Kiribati, and I'm alert and functional and awake enough to be working usefully from home today, so life is pretty good.

By the way, “You need to see a doctor immediately” is not a very helpful comment unless it’s accompanied by contact information for a doctor I can get to who is free or whom my insurance will reimburse me for even without them being my PCP or me having a referral, or instructions on how to get an immediate appointment from my highly overbooked doctor or nurse practitioner or the other doctors in his group without pointing a gun at the receptionists. I love my doctor and he’s responsible for my sleep apnea and hormonal problems being diagnosed and treated, but he’s very hard to schedule with and the place he works is kind of disorganized and claims not to have emergency appointments (I’ve tried in the past). And this was clearly (in retrospect) not an ER thing (although maybe if I’d gone to the ER they would have given me some nice muscle relaxants and analgesics that would have made Monday less unpleasant). I do appreciate everybody’s care and concern, though!

Actually, the subject is misleading: I am doing dramatically better today. It’s not just that I was still all night and am in less pain; I am actually improved. I can walk (slowly) without a cane! Don’t worry, I’m not going to, because I want to keep improving, but I noticed while getting myself oatmeal that I’d forgotten my cane and it was OK.

I’m doing much better this morning! It’s probably just because I found a good position last night and was still for a good long time¹, and I’m not going to be so stupid as to try to go to work, or really try to leave the house, but I’m sure in a lot less pain than I was yesterday.

(Current hip status: beowabbit is currently very hip.)

Going to work was a really stupid idea. My theory was that if I’m going to be in pain and discomfort anyway, there’s no real advantage to not being at work for it. What I didn’t count on was it taking almost two hours for me to walk from the parking garage to my office building. (Admittedly, I’m counting the three times I sat down on benches.) That normally takes 10min if I stop to buy an apple and a coffee on the way.

However, the campus police were very kind and sent over a Safety Patrol van to get me back to the parking garage from my office when I left (early), and the drive back to Quincy was uneventful and less painful than the drive from plumtreeblossom’s to work had been.

On the way home, I stopped by the drugstore and got crutches. I’m not sure they’re an improvement over the cane. They’re better for standing still for long periods of time, and they’re much quicker, and they’re more stable, so there are fewer of the nasty surprises, but they are much clumsier to handle, harder to keep from falling when I set them aside because I can’t hook them on things (and bending over to pick anything up is not so much happening at the moment), and while the cane basically left me fine most of the time with occasional moments of serious pain when I stepped wrong or had to rebalance, the crutches basically hurt just a bit on each “step”. I think the crutches are probably net worse on my hip. If I feel like I can go out tomorrow, I may buy a second cane, and try the two-cane approach. (Assuming, of course, I’m not magically all better tomorrow.)

I left a message for my doctor’s office as soon as I got in to work today, but haven’t heard back yet. At this point, I don’t think it justifies an ER visit, because my best guess is that medical science is going to tell me to suck it up and wait, and in the meantime keep my weight off it and take lots of painkillers, which I am already doing. (Well, modulo the stupidity of trying to go in to work today, but I’ve learned my lesson. Thanks, plumtreeblossom; you were right. On the other hand, I got lots of sympathy from my co-workers.)

In other news, my flowers are still beautiful, and my kilt still makes me very very happy.