...
When I was 57, my darling friend, Trisha, would NOT keep this picture of us until I could learn to remove enough wrinkles from her face to make it bearable... and turned out that by "enough" she'd meant ALL. Heh. So I practiced. Still, it did not work as well on me as it did on her. Now that we're both septuagenarians, I wonder if she'd accept wrinkles on pictures better....
Sorry to have abandoned ship yesterday, but it had gotten to the point where I felt I could not take any "refreshing" little breaks from my other work to recognize the rest of the world. I shut out everything else, except trips to the bathroom and to get more coffee, powered through for 36 hours, even in time to get to the dermatologist for my quarterly striptease act.
I amused the living daylights out of him and his assistants, stopped at the hippie store for a pint of their chicken salad to eat before I dropped, amusing the living daylights out of them, too, in the process, and got all the way back home, not having killed anyone with my rickety old zapping nerves. My hands and feet were asleep, from the elbows and knees, and my balance was on vacation in South America, but everyone had lived, and I had finished my monumental task at last, despite all the ludicrous wildfire and power outage impediments and my silly old age.
I'd even bragged about finally having joined the Third Millennium, mastering the miraculous capabilities of the electronic alternative to the drudgery of meatspace... well... then I looked at my computer. Something seemed dreadfully off.
It was.
I should NEVER have bragged. Who am I trying to kid? Trisha? Pfeh. So. As to my sleep circus, I showed it! Few people realize the human brain starts jumping around worse than a nursery school playground when stress levels are too far beyond the pale, never realizing one can drop out of automatic and into manual transmission mode to keep it on task.
When you are 70, it's almost all shifting and double-clutching and very little task, but, dammit, it still works. As your brain starts rolling back in your head, YOU can right it for precious seconds of needed work, before you have to do it again.
I then could not sleep without the aid of a chill pill. I then slept for 14 hours.
Here I am. Alive. And blurry.
This might be information useful only to nutty old ladies of a certain bent, or it may save your life.
Pick.
And now, I must pay for that brag with more attention to the awful and another trip down to Crescent City, before — I hope — returning to our regular programming.
pipe up any time....
