tobermory's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Weekend update OK then. Lot�s to catch up on due to my favorite of the seven deadly sins, sloth. The verdict on Thursday�s family dinner? Not quite as awful as I imagined it was going to be. We ate at Shaw�s Crab House and fine food was had by all. My nephews remained reasonably well behaved until Nephew #1 got a case of the crankies. I got a bit lubed with half a bottle of wine and a glass of port, but hey, who�s counting? I�m still cheesed at my brother for blowing off the dinner though. Friday was loads of fun. No, seriously. Megan and I hightailed it down to Pulaski Park fieldhouse to shoot for awhile and then we moseyed up the street to Tam�s check out Tam�s new apartment and new cat. Both were fab � apartment is smaller than the last, but still big for a one-bedroom, new cat, Foo, is beyond cute but very shy. From the apartment we went up the street to Pot Pan for some Thai before cabbing over to Schuba�s to see the Assassins who were very fine indeed. The opening band, TRS-80 pained me beyond belief. Two synth/keyboard players and a drummer who obviously met in the art department at Columbia in Chicago noodling away in front of clich�d hipster videos. Ooh yes! Anime is so cool! And please, show me some more strangely edited footage of 50�s consumer education movies! Plus the two keyboardists? Couldn�t have looked more bored if they tried. Maybe they were bored � their music certainly bored me so it�s reasonable to suspect that it made them a bit sleepy too. What really cracked me up was that they were recording the show so it could be purchased later. Yeah, like I want to hear that trainwreck again in its entirety. But the Assassins kicked some major booty and made up for the TRS-80 debacle. I didn�t get to bed until 2am which is very late for this little non-hipster. Saturday morning I had a rude awakening. I slept in to make up for the late bedtime and the phone rang at about 9 am. I let it ring because I figured that most people know that Steve and I are two people who really like our sleep and they don�t call us before 10 am. The phone did wake me up but I stayed in bed and my cat, Wendy, took her cue to come up in between Steve and I to get some quality attention time. Then the phone rang again at 9:30 and I figured this time I was going to get the irritating fucker. I went to roll over and my ass was apparently a little too close to the edge and it provided the necessary ballast to topple me off the bed and land me on said ass. This wouldn�t have been so bad as my ass has the requisite padding to keep me from getting too hurt, but the fact is that my ancient dresser is about 18� from the side of the bed and I whacked my knee on some part of it and I broke off the board at the bottom that�s been wobbly for some time now. I�m quite sure I swore a blue streak, but all Steve remembers hearing as he was so rudely awakened from his deep sleep was, �well, I finally broke that board off the bottom of the dresser.� I leapt up to get the phone and caught it just before it transferred to the answering machine. It was my mom telling me that my dad was in the hospital. I guess about four weeks ago he went to see a cardiologist to have a routine stress test and they put him on Coumadin, a blood thinner that helps to prevent strokes. The only problem is that the doctor didn�t mention that when you start Coumadin you have to get blood tests every four days to make sure that the dosage is correct. So for four weeks the dosage was totally off � way too high apparently � and it caused internal bleeding around his joints (his left arm is like one giant bruise) and was also the cause of the bloody urine and bleeding schwantz. So on Friday he went into his regular doctor got a blood test to try to figure out why he was becoming The Incredible Bruising Man. When the results came back at 4:20 am they called my parents house and had my dad rushed to the ER. I guess his blood count was totally off � a six when it should have been a 16. If he had fallen he would have bled to death either internally or from a cut. Luckily, that didn�t happen and he�s going to be OK. I went to visit on Saturday and he was the liveliest patient in intensive care � joking around and driving his nurse crazy. He got upgraded yesterday to a monitoring floor and he should be out on Wednesday. Pretty scary stuff though. Now he has to decide what to do about the fuck-up. My dad is totally anti-lawsuit, and his cardiologist is former hockey player that he coached, but it was a major, major fuck-up to put him on Coumadin and not tell him that he needed monitoring every few days. Everything is fine now, but this is going to cost the insurance company bazillions and my dad was pretty certain that he was going to die of some dread bladder cancer, and in reality he was in danger of death by internal bleeding. He has had two friends who are doctors tell him that this is easily a million dollar lawsuit. He doesn�t need the money, but I think he�s pretty peeved at the aggravation and mental anguish that he and my mom went through. After visiting my dad in the hospital on Saturday, Steve and I got shut out of two successive movies at two theaters � The Cooler in Highland Park and Hidalgo in Evanston � so don�t be believing any of this hand-wringing and concern about the fate of the movie industry because apparently they are doing just fine and packing the theatres to capacity. We scrapped the movie idea and walked over to the Stained Glass for a glass or two of wine and we (OK, I) wound up getting a little drinkie. I was powerless in the face of the tasty provocative wine flights. Plus we ate more than we planned, but I just had to have the empenada thingy that the people down the bar had � it looked soooooo good. And then once we�d had two appetizers dessert just seemed to be the obvious choice. Their cr�me brulee trio is so freaking good it was all I could do to stop myself from becoming a social pariah by licking out the little bowls to get the last morsels. Then something kind of odd happened. The couple sitting next to us started to talk to us. This may not seem odd to those of you with social graces, but to the completely anti-social among us � meaning myself � it felt like Steve and I were being cruised for some sort of spouse swapping party. As I mentioned before I was a little bit drinkie, so I went along with the whole exchanging e-mail addresses and pretending to be interested in their lives bit, but I tell you � it felt creepy. I much prefer to be anonymous so if you see me at a bar somewhere � don�t talk to me it�ll just squick me out. On a final note, my friend Walter sent me the information on how to put linkies in this hear diary so in the very near future you may just be able to kink to some of the fascinating things I write about. Three cheers for Walter! Hip Hip Hooray! 2:53 p.m. - 2004-03-22 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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