We did labs again today (my new favorite Tuesday activity) and fortunately my bilirubin is still dropping. As slow as molasses… but at least it’s going down. On the other hand, my ALT went up again and my AST stayed elevated. I feel leaps and bounds better than I did a month ago, but honest to god I am so ready for this to be over.

The insider wants to go home. I miss my home. I miss my job (actually I’m still doing my job, but I miss the office). I know, I know, it’s sick, but you don’t understand. I. am. so. bored.

I work, I read books (although now I am out of Terry Pratchett—the Man again with the good taste—and my dad is pressing me to read Bible prophesy books, sigh) and I watch movies with my mom. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy I’m no longer sick and I have fun with my mom, but enough’s enough.

So how is the wide world of blogging doing? It’s now March (or will be in six minutes)… do tell how 2006 is treating you. I have decided that 2006 is going to be, shall we say, a bust year. The year I hope to forget. Now I think I have Grampa on this train too, so what about the rest of you? Good year so far, or bad?

Remember, today was Fat Tuesday. If you didn’t party, that’s not a good sign. 🙂

We cut my hair yesterday. I know that may not seem like a big deal, but it was to me. I had long hair… not super long, but about the middle of my back—maybe a little less—and I really liked my hair. Considering the circumstances I’m in right now (being yellow, itchy and drugged) I probably shouldn’t be vain and care about my hair. But I am and I do.

It’s not super short, but he took off eleven inches (my mom’s hairdresser came to the house) and now it hangs just below my chin. It doesn’t look terrible—everyone says I look like a pixie… but I don’t want to look like a damn pixie. Ever since I got sick I’ve been having trouble with it… it iched on my back and neck, and I was only washing it every three days or so and it was breaking where I kept pulling it up—another sign of the lack of protein. But still.

Oh and I also ate bacon yesterday… first time in years. The Man is happy. My dad’s forcing all kinds of things down me… I have to eat something every four hours, I have to eat a little bit of pure fat every hour or so, etc., etc. He wants my gallbladder to release CCK, which will help clear my colon and move the bile out of my body. It’s working. I feel better than I did yesterday, and light years better than I did three days ago, so that’s good. We find out Tuesday the bilirubin number. My dad thinks that if he is correct in how he is treating me (the food, flaxseed oil, SAMe and other vitamins), I should be at about a 26… and we might be able to get it down to a 12 by next week. It would be a miracle.

My mom caught me up on all the gossip from church today—the one I haven’t been to in years—and it was highly entertaining. Except that I found out my ex got married… and I saw a picture and she’s cute. I’m not still in love with him, and I’m not jealous or really that upset… but I’m a little cranky that he got married before me, even though I’m not ready to get married just yet. It’s the principle of the damn matter. 🙂 You understand.

Oh and we let the cats out today to get acquainted and when they got back in here, Ellie pooped on the linoleum. Typical.

Santa breakfast = adults in costume performing plays (Frosty, Rudolph, Santa, cowgirls and a cowboy) and little children going apeshit over all of the above. I can’t wait to get the pictures from my cousin, lol.

After that we had lunch with a very old friend—mmm, sushi—shopped and came home, where we proceeded to make cornbread stuffing, pecan pie and cranberry salad. (Presents were wrapped, too.)

I was going to sleep in, but the Man woke me at 10:30… to tell me that it’ll be less than a week. 🙂 🙂 So now I’m up, drinking coffee, and trying to figure out how to handle an impossible (because it’s Christmas Eve, shit) task.

For several years (at least 10), my dad has made ornaments for my sister, mom and I. He always waits until Christmas Eve (no other time), and they’re always imaginative and silly and they landmark a specific thing that happened to us that year. For instance, when I was 12 I got my braces off and he went to the doctor (his buddy), got my old braces and made an ornament. (Yes, they were clean. Shut it.)

There are also many, many Jeeps on the tree… for the years my sister hit a schoolbus, a guardrail, another car.. and the time I hit my mom’s car. Anyway… for the past three or so years, my mom and I have been trying to make my dad one as well.

This year I was going to get a diecast model of his Jeep, attach the year, bill of sale (miniaturized—love computers!), etc., and hang that on the tree. (Christmas morning we all have to hunt amongst the branches to find what we believe is our particular ornament.)

But then I remembered that his mom passed away earlier this year (a year is a long time, give me a break), so now I’m flummoxed. I can’t get anything engraved (we did that the year my Nana died), and I don’t know what I would get to symbolize her anyway.

I’m heading to the hobby shop, hoping something will jump at me.

Have a lovely Christmas Eve everyone. 🙂

In a Past Life…

You Were: A Famous Spice Trader.
Where You Lived: New Guinea.
How You Died: Consumption.
Who Were You In a Past Life?

I have to pack and clean today.
Can you tell I’m procrastinating?

The most annoying part about driving around New York City is driving around New York City… with the taxis… who use their horns incessantly.

Generally I’m not a horn blower. I don’t like excess noise and I honestly feel that laying on the horn can cause more problems than it can solve.

That being said, I was only in NYC for five hours before I was honking the horn. Not continually, like most of the cabbies, but a fair amount—to show that a) I am here and b) I see you being a jackass and trying to cut me off… back up bitch!

It was slightly exhilarating—in a nail-biting kind of way, lol.

The ticket, however… grrrrrrrr. The $65 ticket for parking somewhere that had no signs. It was a side street and when I asked someone who was going into the building, she told me it was fine. Apparently, someone else in the building called the ticket police and there’s a “complainant’s” name on the ticket. Again, grrrr.

Fortunately, I can oppose the ticket via the Internet—very cool—and I shall prepare a statement to rival all statements. It will be eloquent, it will be precise and it will take off at least $20 from the fee—so help me god.

The coworker and I were less-than-impressed with the ticket, to say the least. Especially after we had spent the better part of the afternoon in back alleys and side streets, going behind fake walls and popping secret trap doors to get to the good fake designer stuff on Canal Street—going “outside of the law” had a certain brass balls effect on both of us. We have Prada, we have Tiffany, we have Yves St. Laurent, we have Chanel and we have Kate Spade—and yes, some of what we bought was presents, so shush it.

Then there was pizza in Little Italy and thai food at Topaz (on 56th, between 6th and 7th), Bloomingdales, FAO Schwartz and Niketown, followed by a three and a half hour drive home…

During which the coworker fell asleep and I, driving in torrential rain, envisioned a road where there was a ceiling and no rain marred my line of sight. My vision fell apart during the whole logic faze, but it did make me wonder about the Chunnel. How did they build the Chunnel? Is it in the water on the sea floor, or under the sea floor? How long did it take to make?

And so, for educational purposes, the answers:

The Chunnel opened in 1994.
Three attempts were made to build the tunnel. The first two failed because of politics and cash.
When the process was finally started, it took seven years to finish.
Construction workers had to move more than 17 million tons of earth to complete the project.
It cost more than $21 billion dollars.
There are three tunnels. Two of the tunnels carry trains and one is used for repair work and emergencies, such as fire. Each tunnel is 32 miles long.
The Chunnel goes from Calais, France to Folkestone, England.
They were built about 45 meters below the seabed under the English Channel.
Many of the tunnel boring machines used on the Chunnel were as long as two football fields and capable of boring 250 feet a day.
When construction began in 1988, British and French tunnel workers raced to reach the middle of the tunnel first. The British won.

Read more…

Just got home. Very, very tired. The coworker has crashed in my spare room and neither of us want to go to work tomorrow.

Tomorrow I shall post about a) the honking, b) the scary back rooms, c) the parking ticket (!@#$%) and d), the Chunnel.

Don’t ask.

If you are boiling eggs, and you get busy doing something else ::coughfixingwendysblogcough::, the water will boil away and bad things happen to the a) pot, b) eggs and c) smell in your apartment (yech).

For your perusal…

Edible or not? Will they kill me?

I think this is one of my grandmother’s pots… and that means my mom is going to kick my ass.

Lovely.

And really, the Internet should be scratch-and-sniff—or click-and-sniff—because my apartment smells terrible right now. So terrible, in fact, that I had to open a window—and it’s 18 degrees outside.

I am now chattering as I type. Must. go. shut. window.

I have this scrape on my right index finger. It’s a small, oval shaped owie that looks as if the top layer of my skin has just been shaved off—with a cheese grater.

The thing is, I don’t remember scraping my finger. Granted, it’s the finger I slammed in my car door earlier this year—when I was ::sheepish shrug:: a little drunk—and the nerves are still a little off. It aches when the weather changes and it stays colder than the rest of my hand, no matter what… so it’s possible I scraped it and just didn’t feel it.

Then I went to make myself a cup of tea (it’s very cold—17 degrees, sigh). I pulled the lid off the pot and… well, well, well, ouch. It seems that the lid comes off with a pop and between the handle and the pulling of the lid… yeah.

My teapot is trying to injure me. Fantastic.

I’m freezing. FREEZING, I tell you. My fingers are partially numb, lord knows I haven’t felt my toes since I left my house and now my arms and legs are cold, too.

(The coworker is cold as well, so I know it’s not just me.)

Technically, it’s not that cold outside—39 degrees—and we have the thermostat set to 78 degrees, but I swear it feels like it’s at 50.

::brief pause to answer phone, during which time I look behind the couch::

And see that, shit, we had shoved the couch all the way against the heater… no wonder we’re cold.

The couch, btw, is made of leather. Leather that, right now, smells awfully crispy. Oy.

Maybe we’ll be heating up soon…

The coworker called, cranky that I haven’t posted all weekend… lol.

Sorry. There’s just not much going on.

Let’s see… I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind… I love this movie. It’s a brilliantly acted, highly evocative film.

Oh, and now I’ve just finished reading The White Plague by Frank Herbert—another book from the Man. It’s ridiculously disturbing—and makes me think that in the event of some sort of worldwide plague, we’d be blessed to die, and not live through the horror that the world becomes.

Then this morning I had to go to Wal-Mart to buy cat food and cat litter—that was a lovely hour-long nightmare… where 45 minutes was spent in line.

And that, my fellow blog people, was when I remembered why I despise this time of year—there are way too many cranky, irritable people shopping.

They shove, they yell, they threaten their kids with no Santa… ::shudder:: Today, I believe, is the day I shall swear off Wal-Mart forever—even though Target only sells the small bags of cat food that I use.