A Long Day, Good News

It was kind of a busy day today.

I had an early-ish therapy appointment. When I was leaving the casita, I found that Kelly had left a book for me on the hood of the car, a copy of an anatomy and physiology (the class I'm taking next semester) reference book that she snagged off the free table. Yay for free books!

So I popped the book in the car and headed off to therapy. It was kind of an emotional session and I came home dazed. At home, I had enough time to eat a snack and fix my face, then I had to head out to my doctor's appointment.

The soonest appointment I could get was at a hospital 40 minutes away, so I had kept the new car (which has A/C) and sent Dave to work with the old car (which has no A/C). I was glad I did because it was a hot day today.

The doctor's appointment was a breeze. I was called in early and seen by the doctor early. Turns out that I don't have a perforated eardrum--yay!--my primary care doc had seen a strange bit of ear wax and thought it looked like a tear in my eardrum. (I'm getting less and less sure that my primary care doc is really a doctor. I think he might be more like Dr. Pepper.) Anyway, the ENT said that it's not uncommon for there to be post-ear infection residual pain that can last up to three months and that's probably what I'm experiencing now. She recommended an over-the-counter nose spray and ibuprofen to help with the pain and congestion.

The other thing she said--and this is specialist advice--is that a few drops of olive oil in your ear can help with ear wax, should you choose to do anything about ear wax. So there you go.

After my appointment, I walked down to the hospital cafeteria and had a chicken quesadilla and a diet Sprite for lunch. It was pretty good and only $5.

Then I made the 40 minute trek home.

On the way home, I tried to take a picture of a storm that was going on over the mountains, complete with rain and lightning. Instead, I got a not very interesting picture of an intersection in a completely unnecessary part of town.

Actually, on the way home I stopped by the co-op first to pick up a few things for dinner. I ran into the cashier who told me on my last visit that I look like an actress/songwriter named Kirsten Lopez, who wrote the songs for the movie Frozen. I looked her up and, no, I don't look anything like her. I told him that I used to be compared to Kathy Bates back in her Misery days (I've never seen the movie, a guy I used to work with a long, long time ago made the comparison)--and once, in Japan, when I was in-shape and prone to wearing tight-skirted business suits, someone compared me to Jennifer Lopez. That was flattering. But Kirsten Lopez? Eh.

Anyway, I picked up some tomatoes, cat food, toilet paper, and a bar of milk chocolate as a post-therapy, post-doctor reward.

At home, I put everything away and decided I needed to lie down awhile before starting dinner. I had an hour-long nap that left me more tired than rested and when my alarm when off I had to talk myself out of going back to sleep and skipping a homemade dinner in favor of eating out somewhere. But no. We had dinner out last night, so I dutifully got up and cooked. I made tempeh tacos. I mixed up some salsa with jalapenos from the garden and I shredded some red cabbage and cheddar cheese and I heated up a can of pinto beans. Then I cleared and set the table.

Dave texted to say that he was on the way home. We sat down to dinner as soon as he walked in.

After dinner, we went off to meet my brother at Costco. It's been awhile since we shopped there, so we had quite a few things in our basket by the time we made it out the door. We split several things with my brother, including some frozen organic broccoli, lemons, avocados, a big box of Sweet'n'Low, and some multi-grain English muffins. For ourselves, we bought strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, cucumbers, baby carrots, baby squash, red peppers, watermelon, snap peas, tomatoes, cleaning sponges, yogurt, cheddar and Parmesan cheeses, plastic wrap, and on and on.

After that little stocking-up run, we headed up to Judi's so that we could clean up a bit and check the sculpture I added arms and hands to last night. It was still ok, so I wrapped it up again, and unwrapped the piece I started painting.

You can see that I'll have to put several coats of the white underglaze on to get any kind of adequate coverage. This is just the beginning of that process. I like the creepy, ghost-like appearance of this piece at this stage, though.

We came home, put away all our Costco goodies, and then I got into my pajamas. Dave went off to practice his clarinet, and I put my headphones on and watched some youtube cooking videos.