Having a wonderful time in DC with plumtreeblossom — and bcat1 and spacechicken for much of the time! Yesterday we all went to the zoo, and then to Meskerem Ethiopian restaurant. Today we had brunch with bcat1 and spacechicken before they took off for Raleigh, and then plumtreeblossom and I wandered down the Mall and spent a couple nifty hours in the National Air and Space museum (which has the Apollo 11 CSM, the Friendship 7, and the Gemini capsule from the mission with the first US spacewalk, among lots of other impressive stuff). Then we headed for Dupont Circle, but decided to check out Chinatown on the way and ended up at a Burmese restaurant for dinner. (Neither of us had had Burmese food before. It’s yummy!) Then we went to Dupont Circle and had a lovely time wandering around. We ended up at Afterwords, a cafe connected to a bookstore, for very inexpensive and yummy dessert and coffee. The bookstore was neat, too.

Pictures will follow; we got some great ones at the zoo, and I think some of the ones from the Mall and the Air and Space museum came out well, although I haven’t had a chance to look at them. (I also owe y’all some pictures from Topsfield Fair.)

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!

The bad is that I am in serious pain and can barely walk.

Saturday during the day I noticed a mild twinge in my left hip joint, the kind of thing I notice from time to time which normally goes away on its own in an hour or so. Saturday night I sat down at the computer for a couple of hours. When I got up, I was quite sore and limping. I have no idea what if anything actually happened to cause this; to my knowledge I didn’t do anything unusual. I had a hard time finding a position that worked for me to sleep in, but I found one (on my back, knees together and slightly bent on top of a pillow). When I woke up I felt a lot better and thought “Great! Maybe I’ll be over it.” Then I tried to get out of bed, though.

I was seriously hobbling yesterday, but able to make my way around. I bought myself a cane at the drugstore, on the theory that recently I’ve had two twisted ankles and a bad hip, and plumtreeblossom has had occasional minor knee and ankle trouble, and her mother visited and could really have used a cane while she was here, and it seemed like an investment with excellent returns. And I drove to plumtreeblossom’s instead of taking the T, despite the fact that that means I have to pay $20 for parking at work tomorrow, because I didn’t think I could handle the walk to and from the T station.

It’s a good thing I have that cane; I don’t know what I’d do without it.

I was mostly OK for my date with Mare, limping with the cane and occasionally in pain but functional. When we went to bed (around midnight) I tried to duplicate the position that had worked for me the previous night. I woke up once probably around 1:30 and had to get some Aleve. At 3:00 I woke up moaning and couldn’t stay in bed because I couldn’t find a position that didn’t hurt. Even with the cane, I couldn’t pick up my left leg to take a step and I couldn’t put any weight on it, so I had this funny shuffle where I’d scoot my good foot forward on the floor, balancing with the cane, and then slide my left leg along the floor. Sitting hurts a lot less than lying down, so plumtreeblossom set me up in the living room with my laptop. (I don’t normally carry that with me; it’s fortuitous that I had it with me today.) I’ve been sitting for an hour, and I’m feeling a lot better. With the cane I can take steps; even a few small steps without it. (I tested this just now by going to the kitchen for a cupcake and some water.) An hour ago I was debating whether I needed to go to the emergency room right away, but now (if I don’t get worse) I think I probably won’t even have to tomorrow.

This is weird. Nothing happened to cause this. It definitely feels like a joint thing; it feels like it’s right in the ball-and-socket joint (although I don’t know if that’s the sort of thing I can tell). It’s definitely not muscular. And although even small movements hurt, it seems like it’s very seriously aggravated by long periods of immobility (like my couple hours sitting at the computer or my three hours in bed tonight), and it seems like using the joint (however gently and gingerly) helps.

*Sigh.* I hope this is just a weird thing that goes away and doesn’t come back, and not the first discovery that I’m developing arthritis or something. The last thing I need is another major medical adventure to embark upon.

Anyway, I think I’m going to try sleeping in this chair shortly. I’m feeling a lot more comfortable now.

Sorry for bending your collective ear!

PS — The other bad is that the wireless here seems to be really sporadic. :-)

First the good:

For the past few days I’ve been (I’d been? See next post) pretty productive around the house, cleaning and reorganizing.

My flowers are gorgeous.

I GOT MY BIRTHDAY KILT and it’s wonderful and perfect and exactly the length I wanted and it looks great on me! I’m so happy! Thanks so much to all of you who contributed, or wished you could. Pictures will eventually be forthcoming.

I had a lovely evening with plumtreeblossom; she made me yummy chicken pie (first time we’ve cooked in a while) and we ate it while watching Robots with vanguardcdk. And I got to briefly and unexpectedly see joyeous on my way over.

So before I met her, plumtreeblossom sang in a band. She recently lent me a videotape of a performance her band did at the Kendall in 2002. Wow, it’s neat to have a window into this part of her world! I hadn’t even heard her sing until the End of Summer party!

To re-use a venerable phrase: Hallelujah, I love her so!

Here she is, my rockstar girlfriend:

( Three more pictures. )
There are a few more in my ScrapBook gallery. Sorry for the low resolution; I didn’t realize until after I was done that I was capturing at 320x240.

Yesterday, nex0s posted An Incomplete List of Incidents of racism that have affected her and her family. Just big, serious, scary ones, not the everyday ones. It’s a long list. It’s depressing and infuriating, but I encourage you to go read it.

A year ago, plumtreeblossom and I had our first date, dinnertime dim-sum at Empire Garden in Chinatown. Tonight we’re going back to celebrate. What a wonderful year it’s been! Thank you, love!

So I had an awesome date with plumtreeblossom last night, with the help of nex0s, docorion, dan4th and dabunny, the awesome cast and crew of the theatreatfirst festival, gilana, surrealestate, Sears, and two lovely kitties!

First I met nex0s, docorion, and plumtreeblossom at Yoshi’s (a Japanese restaurant near plumtreeblossom’s house and theatreatfirst’s digs) for dinner and catching up while nex0s is in town. Then plumtreeblossom had to run off to get ready for her performance, and docorion suggested ice cream, so nex0s and I accompanied him to J.P. Licks in Davis Square. It was really great to get caught up with nex0s and hear some of her stories! Then nex0s and I went to the performance, where we had the unexpected delight of running into dan4th and dabunny.

The performance was a festival of short one-act plays by playwright Mark Harvey Levine, and it was fabulous! nex0s recently wrote a bit about the festival from an audience perspective, and plumtreeblossom’s post here talks about how well the festival went. It was really, really fun! I love the format — little ten-minute plays are sort of the short short stories of the stage, and I really enjoy them. Levine’s playlets are witty and entertaining and often very sweet and very funny, and the performances were all very well done.

After the plays I stayed to help a bit with strike (which mostly consisted of trying not to be in the way, since I didn’t know where anything went, but I did some vacuuming), and with such a large cast and crew (except for a little bit of doubling-up, the cast of each little play was different) the strike went pretty quickly. Then it was off to gilana’s house for a fabulous cast party. I was incapacitated by the heat for a little bit of it¹, but once I sat still for a while and cooled down I had a great time. plumtreeblossom and I spent quite a bit of the party hanging out with the lovely surrealestate (who lit up the stage as a firefly lightning bug in “In the Jar”, not to mention her development in “Cabfare for the Common Man”), and we ended up walking her home after the party. And of course, she invited us in, and, well, there was enticing green liquid. And we had some. And it was OH THE YUMMY! and we all sat out on her porch and had a lovely lovely time before plumtreeblossom and I called a cab to go to her place. (It would have been a perfectly delightful walk if it hadn’t been quite so late and we hadn’t been quite so engreenified.)

“They kiss. Lights out.”

This morning, having gotten to sleep at FOUR THIRTY IN THE MORNING, we slept until noon, with kitties keeping us company. Then we went to Sound Bites for excellent brunch, and went to Sears to get plumtreeblossom an air conditioner in advance of her mother’s visit next weekend. And then I drove back to Quincy, filled a prescription, checked on cathijosephine’s cat Chickenfinger, had dinner, and came home. I haven’t started catching up on LiveJournal.

Wow, that was a good, full, fun weekend!

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¹ It has been really hot and humid in the Boston area for a few days, and between thyroid hormone increasing my metabolism, longer hair after a many-year hiatus, and testosterone producing more muscle, my ability to handle the heat is diminished.

Massachusetts is not going to have a popular vote to deprive same-sex couples of equal rights under the law! I was first alerted to this news by qwrrty, who I gather was there. The line “The narrow 45-151 vote means Massachusetts remains the only state in the nation to allow same-sex couples to marry” in that article seems odd to me — yes, 45 votes is close to the 50-vote minority required for a petition-initiated constitutional amendment to be defeated in Massachusetts, but still, a 45-151 vote is not “narrow”. I guess you could say the measure was narrowly defeated, but calling it a “narrow vote” strikes me as odd.

In 25 years or so, people are going to look back on this vote with shock that almost a quarter of Massachusetts legislators thought it was a good idea to deprive same-sex couples of the right to marry, but from this vantage point, I am so proud that more than three quarters of my state legislators believe in equal rights for same-sex couples under the law.

I need a “proud of Massachusetts” userpic. [EDIT: Thanks to qwrrty, I have one.]

I had a very encouraging and hopeful meeting with my doctor today. (And an encouraging but possibly not quite on-target voicemail message from my hematologist this morning.) The short version is that I have a couple of endocrine problems, and it’s very likely that treating one or both of them will make a big difference. If I get a chance later tonight (I just got back to work after the appointment) I’ll probably post more details (probably in a locked post, which is a sneaky and underhanded way of encouraging my parents to get LJ accounts :-). [EDIT: It worked!]

(In other news, it is a marvellously sunny day here in Boston, so I was happy for the opportunity to go for a walk in the middle of the day — my PCP is walking distance from work.)