(no subject)

[which_chick]

So I went to the one-week post op doc visit today.



There are still not pictures, damn it all, but he allowed as how, if I'd email him, he'd email me the pictures when he got them from the nice people at Medical Imaging or whatever. I remain hopeful and I have emailed him requesting same.

The doc visit was all about the "How are things working out for you?" line of inquiry. He wanted to know how things were going, physically and emotionally and shit. Emotionally I'm good -- fertility was never an issue for me. Physically I'm in pretty decent shape. I have good daily mobility and all the adjacent parts work as they should, so no worries there. All the swelling has gone down some, the incision looks nicer than I thought it would, and nothing hurts very much. If the largest complaints I can muster are about the insufficiently entertaining nature of percocet and the annoying persistance of the tape strips, it should be fairly obvious that things are going well.

I think we'd do ever so much better if I didn't immediately go into some kind of psychotic alpha mode around doctors. *sigh* Who's controlling this conversation? I am! I am! It's honestly not his fault. (The Doogie factor doesn't help matters on this front.)

While I was out, I also mailed off a book for not_your_real, bought a latte at the Sign of the Mermaid, and grocery shopped a little. I dropped off some moravian spice cookies at work and at grandma's. Also at the office, I got my yarn from the online yarn store that I had ordered from the other day. They're quite speedy, which is one of the reasons I shop with them. New yarn! YAY! Let the swatching commence!

Tonight: Mix up dough for sand tarts. Fix lemon butter spinach (with boiled potato for underneath) supper using leftover denuded lemon from sand tart recipe. Roll, cut, and bake remaining half batch of moravian spice cookies. Finish watching Rome episodes.

Comments

[cousin-sue.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you're feeling okay.

And the foodage is always nice to hear about.

Spouse is making his good as sex butternut squash soup for an office party tomorrow. I am looking forward to this!

I cannot find decent green yarn for the younger child, who has determined she wants to knit a green scarf for daddy for Christmas. it's a little late to start now...

Sigh

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

Spouse still hasn't shared that recipe. Go beat him with rolling pin until he hands it over. :) I'm stuck at home all day here, could use something to do.

The food I've been making is mostly seasonal cookies. I've been getting some email on that front because I was in the top ten for a google on "sand tarts" when I checked today. Some of the email spends a great deal of time telling me that I'm horribly cynical and that it's *wrong* to make sand tarts so very plain-looking so that they do not appeal to tots who indiscriminately scarf everything what has got colored sugar on it. It's not like I'm PREVENTING the tots from eating 'em, just that the tots have to make the effort, themselves, to see what might be worth eating on the holiday cookie tray. If they think that the pretty, brightly-colored cookies are the only ones worth eating, well, hell. More for me.

[wootsauce.livejournal.com]

People are e-mailing you....to tell you that you're wrong...about not decorating your cookies?

I am so confused as to why this is... well, an intervention worthy offense.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

I didn't really get it either. Apparently I'm foisting my dogma on the innocent and unsuspecting people who, of their own free will, read my page (http://www.bedford.net/teep/sandtart.htm) on sand tarts.

Here's an excerpt illustrating the general tenor of the complaint: "Then for the fancy ones we had the more Christmas-y stuff like reindeer and trees and angels, etc. I didn't consider these either boring, easy, or insipid. Where, O where, did you come by such a caustic view of this? Did too many people look askance at your simple sand tarts that you feel you must insult their more flamboyant possibilities? And to order anyone reading your recipe that decorating them demeans them in some way by making them appealing to kids--that compounds the issue. It's one thing to have your own opinion, but to foist it on everyone else as dogma, robbing them of the possible pleasure of sharing this xperience (of creatively decorating them) with their family/friends? Maybe experience with your own kids lead you to this."

Whatever. The author goes on in that same vein for a while but I think you have enough there to see where she's going with it.

[wootsauce.livejournal.com]

I'm glad that civilization has come so far that we have the free time and energy to expend on other people's dogmatic recipe-writing!

Having just written a bunch of essays on rape, feminism, and racial prejudice earlier today, I can't even imagine where someone would get this worked up about a recipe for holiday cookies on the internets.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

Truly, we are living in the future!

Actually, it makes sense in a weird kind of way. Normal people frequently feel powerless about the big issues like rape, feminism, and racial prejudice... I mean, except for a select few sickos, yeah, they're generally agin rape and prejudice and in favor of feminism at least as far as letting women vote, drive, and own property (and if you don't think those are important rights for women, take a gander at our good friends the Saudis). However, they don't think they can DO anything about those issues... but they figure they can damn well make sure that I don't ruin Christmas for other people by maligning tickytacky cookie decorating. Unfortunately for the fine folks emailing me, I am rather less malleable and far less open to persuasion than the white male hegemony.

[feenicks.livejournal.com]

Mmmmm.... cookies........ appearance not important. Some of the best treats look, um, less than attractive (rumballs, say.)

As for alpha mode around doctors - YOU EMPLOY THEM TO CARE FOR YOUR MOST IMPORTANT POSSESSION - YOUR BODY

Sorry to shout, please don't go alpha all over me. Too many people let docs run all over them, though.

Starlet

[not-your-real.livejournal.com]

I have decided that socks are the project for After Christmas. My only task now is reining myself in so I don't go buying the materials prematurely.

To make it more fun, and also for the all-important "two-socks-at-once" requirement so that the second sock doesn't never get knit, I want to do them via the knit-a-tube-flat method (quick overview: on flat needles, knit 1, yarn to front, slip 1 purlwise, repeat; half the stitches knitted (front half of sock). Do it all over again, knitting the slipped stitches and slipping the knitted stitches: other half of tube knitted), with two balls of yarn and two socks hanging off one needle (just like how I make sweaters only insanier).

I promise to bring this silliness to New Year's, or at least to demonstrate what I'm talking about.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

Good point -- the doc is my employee, subject to some ethical concerns and good medical practice and legality and so forth. However, I kind of think that hiring a doc and then NOT DOING WHAT THE DOC SAYS is a waste of money.

Anytime I go to a doctor, I am paying for an expert-level opinion and skills that I do not, myself, possess... so I should be prepared to follow the advice I get. That's a large part of what I'm paying for. (It is also incumbant upon me, time permitting, to assemble the medical facts at hand and weigh the doc's advice against what appears to be good medical practice. I can do this via reading on the internets, by hiring a second opinion, by tracking down my cousin Betsy and asking her for advice, or by any other means I deem sufficient... but that's my own responsibility and not really the doc's job.)

On the caregiving level, I trust the doc I chose, follow his instructions, and listen to what he tells me. I just give him a fair amount of grief in the conversational flow because doctors are, in their own way, alpha mode critters and when you stick two unrepentantly alpha critters in a room, there's a pissing contest waiting to happen. *sigh* I kind of feel bad about it, but it's a visceral sort of thing and I don't seem to be able to avoid it. I've tried.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

I think anything that would result in having two socks at the same time might help me out with the sock thing. Knitting them at the same time would certainly remove the 'not the same size' problem that I run into because I am unable to count rows.

[wootsauce.livejournal.com]

Ah, that makes sense. That is definitely a much more positive view of the situation than mine.

[feenicks.livejournal.com]

That's a sharp explanation of the dynamics of patient participation in health care! It should be on a poster at every doc's office. At some point I finally got the obvious-to-everyone-but-me idea that I wasted my money when I stubbornly refused my doctors' instructions instead of discussing my concerns until I was comfortable with their orders then getting off my butt and following them. Better late than never?

I still say that being the "pain-in-the-butt assertive patient" is nothing to feel bad about, as you are probably the reason those alpha doctors aren't sliding over the line and becoming arrogant asses. Though I gotta say, you seemed to have missed a few. ~_^

[not-your-real.livejournal.com]

Ahem. I have lost the "not buying prematurely" battle.

I decided I wanted this Regia self-striping stuff, and I wanted it just like a purple-blue-and-checkered-black-and-white sock on somebody's things-she-knit page, and I found the store with the most Regia (royalyarns.com), and... no purple stripes.

Then I found another page with only a handful of Regias (theknittinggarden.com), and they had one that the other page didn't. "Provence", with purple, blue and checkered-black-and-white stripes.

Then I noticed that the ID number for this colorway was smack between two of the ones listed on royalyarns as "discontinued". Panic! Must have purple stripes! 2 balls yarn ordered.

Ah, well. (Why couldn't I have waited till Tuesday, driven down to The Tangled Web, and fondled all the sock yarns?)

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

I am Jack's complete lack of surprise. :)

Sock yarn is the sexy. That's why people want to make socks. Don't feel bad that you lost the battle. Darwinistically speaking, sock yarn propagates and diversifies via being able to persuade people to buy it. It has evolved in an environment where the successful organisms are eminently take-home-able, kind of like kittens.

The purpose of consumer goods: be a meme

[ardvaark99999.livejournal.com]

Sock yarn is the sexy. That's why people want to make socks. Don't feel bad that you lost the battle. Darwinistically speaking, sock yarn propagates and diversifies via being able to persuade people to buy it. It has evolved in an environment where the successful organisms are eminently take-home-able, kind of like kittens.

This is a spectacularly interesting thought. Think of successful products: iPod, Mazda Miata, the Jenna Jameson masturbator pussy (http://www.passiononline.co.uk/shop/product_info.php?products_id=2889) [1], etc.

What does each have in common? It is cute, and you want to take it home with you. Designs and modes of design that are successful inspire imitators (propagate), and are tweaked/mutate to hit new niches (iPod Nano, iPod Shuffle, frinstance). If they do not mutate or are evolutionary dead ends, they die out (rotary dial telephones).

I wonder if someone has done a paper on this somewhere...


[1] Ok, that was completely gratuitous.