At least I can blow my nose…

I could make some kind of trite, stupid, welcome-back kind of statement here like thousands of other faceless bloggers across the web offer after a vacation–  but I know my readers are better than that.  Read further:  I’m better than that.   Yes, September 1 came and passed, and as promised, I tossed up the raw video of the unveiling of Jill– and damn was she ugly.  Of course, after an hour of furious (albeit painful) scrubbing to remove the pervasive layer of death that clung to my first love, I realized I wasn’t even close to being out of the cliched woods.

Let’s start off with Jill herself.  Yep, the fingers still work (knew that awhile ago), but the wrist had only about a 35% range of motion.  I expected that Jill wouldn’t be back to her old spry self, not by a long shot, and I was doubly thankful that she didn’t leap up and try to choke the ever loving shit out of me in pseudo-zombie rage.  I don’t think she could have, honestly, because in addition to the wrist– my elbow didn’t want to move.  Apparently this is normal, but Holy Mother of all that’s Unholy–  the amount of pain involved during the first day or so was beyond even my masochistic tastes.  The best part was the doctor telling me that I no longer required any sort of support (ACE wrap, cast, brace, etc.) because I’d been immobilized for six weeks.  I nearly shat cinderblocks.

Of course, knowing I was going on vacation, I asked the doc what types of actions/activities were no-no’s.  His response was priceless, “Let pain be your guide.”

If only my conscience's direction was as unmistakably obvious as pain... Just saying...

Well, pain told me that the doc had his cranium firmly lodged in his colon– and letting Jill run around all willy-nilly was as stupid as trying to pogo-stick through a minefield, leading a troupe of hyperactive puppies.  Enter Norco, and my trusty old wrist brace (acquired when I first broke my hand in October 2010), to the rescue.  All is “well.”

Here I am, nearly a week later– and oddly enough, I still can’t fully straighten my right arm.  That’s not the weirdest part.  Apparently I shouldn’t have been worrying about turning into Patient Zero— I should have been worrying about becoming part Wookiee.  Yeah, apparently being in a cast for as long as I was means that hair follicles go apeshit while under cover.  Nobody warned me that I’d be sprouting hair in places that were as bare as (insert inappropriate simile here).  I would have filled in that parenthetical, but remember Mad Libs?  I think I’ve made my point about the fun of filling in the blank for yourself.

Which leaves me here, with partial use of an apparently mutated arm.  This partial usage is key, since I have caught a cold.  I would blame my loving girlfriend for this one, but we’ve both seemed to catch the wrath of the rhinovirus at about the same time, so any finger-pointing from this point forward is purely in jest.  I say this so she doesn’t kick my happy ass.  Needless to say, chicken soup in copious quantities isn’t part of the Kamikaze Diet (which is still to-be-posted), so I haven’t quite started it yet.

So, when it comes down to it…  I have a marginally useful arm, I’m still a lefty, still gimped–  but hey.  At least I can blow my freaking nose.  Now, if you’ll be so kind as to excuse me, I’ve gotta to hit the Sudafed again.

Unplug.

It’s snot funny…

So, me being MIA from the intarwebs (as invented by Al Gore) means one thing, I’ve taken time to emerge from the basement.  Yes, I have seen the sunlight of day, and remembered a time past where I toiled and played in the sun routinely.  I’m kind of surprised my busted ass didn’t turn to ash when the light hit me.  Little did I know that something less visible, something more insidious, was about to kick my ass.

I’m not sure whether or not it’s one of those cursed “summer cold” bugs, or if my allergies are popping about a month and a half early, but I’ve been rocking a headache and a runny nose for almost three days going.  All things considered, that’s not too bad, but I’ve stumbled across another thing that right-handed lefties like myself have a difficult time doing– blowing our freaking noses.

Oh sure, you use one hand to help a toddler blow their nose, but when it comes down to brass tacks, for some cosmically ambivalent reason, it’s much more awkward for self-service.  I woke up this morning, staggered off to release The Golgothan, thinking that today would be just another day in the life of the gimp.  Instead, I start sniffling whilst deucing.

Yeah, you already know where this is going.  I’ve gone so crazy, I’ve degraded from fap jokes to excretion jokes.  Anyway, back to nasally inhaling essence du Golgothan whilst on the throne.  Inevitably through my gurgling sniffles, I had to sneeze.  I thought only one thing, “Oh shit.”

Kid, you wear it so well.

Years of waiter training taught me how to properly stifle even my gargantuan sneezes.  There was one tiny problem, this tenacious bastard really wanted out.  A handful of nasty later, and I’m wiping my face to make sure I don’t end up like the cute li’l twerp up there.  So far so good, right?  Not quite, because my sinuses were still backed up.  So I figured, Hell, may as well try and fix this–  since I was having no luck trying to hork the offending mucous out through the back exit from the inflamed sinuses.

I really wish I hadn’t.  Thanks to the shape of the cast, Zombie Jill has no prayer of touching my face.  At all.  Rosie had this bad idea all to herself.  I ended up wiping goo outta my goatee for five minutes.  All before hopping up off das crappier.  How’d your day start?

Unplug.