These are days you remember

I left the house under my own power, quite alone; I felt liberated and free! I made it all the way to Eastern Market and managed to stand in line for blueberry buckwheat pancakes, coffee and orange juice. $5.92 including tax.

Any day that starts with blue bucks can't be all bad. I even like the coffee at Market Lunch. It's nothing special, only slightly better than diner coffee, but in the lunch counter setting it works. The OJ is Tropicana Pure Premium with No Pulp. I prefer Some Pulp, but TPP is my favorite juice from a carton.

Actually, that's a lie. I really prefer the Tropicana Ruby Red Orange mix, but I'm to avoid grapefruit products from here on in because of one of the anti-rejection meds. This, this is the one tragedy of my life right now. In other words, I should shut up.

After breakfast, I felt well enough to go to CVS to purchase AA and AAA batteries to power my blood pressure cuff and my Handspring Visor, respectively. So far, I'm the only Visor owner who isn't crazy about the machine. It's not the Visor per se, it's me. I'm just not cut out to use a PDA. I don't hot sync very often, which means I tend to lose data with alarming frequency; and even though I've had mine since February, I have yet to load a single application.

I keep resolving to do better, but I keep not doing better. Today I couldn't find the thing to put in the new batteries. I'm sure I'll find it one of these days, and maybe when I do I'll make it work. But there's also a chance that I won't. Wouldn't be the first time that a marginally spendy toy gathered significant dust in my life.

Dad came over and brought me a box of really terrible chocolates with some ghastly strawberry flavored filling. They were small, so I ate one and disposed of the rest in a trash bag after he had gone. He meant well, and I thanked him with a smile, but I'm not about to eat that stuff. If I'm going to eat chocolate, by golly it's going to be high quality.

Word that I'm home from the hospital has started to spread, and today brought phone calls from Auntie Pat in Dallas, who doesn't sound well at all; Aunt Martha in New York City, who sounds great; and my cousin, Emie, who rocks in every way possible.

You know what Em does for a living? She makes furniture. I think that's so cool. She's a decent painter--and by that I mean that I'd like her work even if she weren't a relative--but her job is building and finishing custom furniture. It's so rare that you meet people who make a living working with their hands; because I don't, because my own hands are next to useless, I'm in awe of people who do.

In any case, I'll probably join Em and her husband at Aunt Martha's for Thanksgiving, which answers the "What on Earth am I going to do for Thanksgiving?" question. The day's other event is that I clipped Lola's nails and put some stuff on mine so they will stop splitting. I think it's very unfair that I should take all these meds that have unpleasant complications such as lymphoma, hypertension and excess hair growth in places you don't really want it, but that there should be no compensations such as stronger fingernails... that seems somehow unfair.

Oh well. Nutri-nail worked for me once before; I guess it's possible that it might work again.

before - after