Yuck

Routine day surgery turned into a 2 night stay at the hospital for me. I had a lot of complications during recovery that were not expected. I got worried when I say my dr. in recovery rubbing his head and on the phone and shaking his head. He had EXACTLY what I had 2 months ago and guarantees me it will be 2 weeks before I feel better. My pain finally dropped from a 6/7 to a 3 this afternoon with a different med. I’ve lost 10 lbs. so far ( yaaaa!!!! ) and I’ll probably drop another 10 just because swallowing is kind of tough.

Thursday I get the silicone ring out of my nose from the turbinoplasty. I still can’t tell if they took my uvula out, but I can guarantee you my adenoids and tonsils are gone.

And, no, ice cream does not sound good to me.

But I will share my secret jello recipe with you. Jello requires 2 cups of water to one package of mix. For the 1 cup of cold liquid use Sprite or 7-Up for lime or lemon based jellos and use Cream Soda for dark berry flavored jellos like cherry or mountain berry.

And my wife has been absolutely wonderful during all of this. She has been in some severe pain of her own the last could of days sleeping on a hospital couch and not showering at her own regular intervals. There is absolutely NO doubt in my mind she is a wonderful woman.

Tomorrow It’s Time

Ok, so allergy shots didn’t work. And the sleep study let me know I snored. Now it’s time to take out my tonsils, adenoids and trim my nose innerds so that I don’t snore and I don’t have as many sinus infections. So if you aren’t too squeemish, you can see what a tonsillectomy looks like. ( more below the video )

But here’s the surgery TFM had on Thursday morning. Dude … I’ll take tonsils any day … ( more below )

Before my wife and I exercised our “marital prerogative” last night she got all bunched up about what her ex gave H for Christmas. H loves basketball and his new Wii. We got him Mavericks paraphernalia and Wii games. So what did “the one of whom we do not speak” give him? A shotgun. He had told H they were getting him a glass basketball goal. Instead he got an adult BB Gun, 12 gauge I think.

As a word to the wise, don’t talk about your former spouse with your current spouse before you have sweet lovin’.

Weekly Word Challenge 12-26-2007

I have two entries this week for “pink”.

This is wrong

I wanted to write about my grandmother soon. Not now, but seeing as how you people eat up sob stories and stuff like that, I’ll oblige again, but not now.

What I wanted to talk about today – because it’s my arena – is a group lunch I missed by going to a group lunch. You see, I get together a few times a year with former co-workers from the big insurance company. Well, this year I was all set to go see them when my boss comes in on Wednesday and says, “Hey, we’re doing [our usual boring group lunch at the boring usual restaurant where I’ll set the tone by ordering the cheapest item on the menu so you guys have to pick from the sandwich menu for our once a year group lunch] will you be going?”

Like I’m going to say, “No!” or I have a choice. So, begrudgingly, I coalesced and went to the boring lunch.

Man , I missed out. I called AI to tell him that I would not be there and asked he let everyone know. G was supposed to tell me how to crack Hickory nuts – I told AI if he says,”You drive a car over them, you kick his a$$!” G has some great stories from Iowa … rendering trucks, NASCAR racing, Iowa people are well, as The Music Man says,

But what the heck, you’re welcome,
Join us at the picnic.
You can eat your fill
Of all the food you bring yourself.

So I call AI after work and ask him what I missed. Well, a lot it seem. There is an elevator that I believe is now cursed. About a month after I started working there a guy dropped dead in the elevator. They named the top floor after him. Well, it seems another guy gets in the elevator and puts his finger on the biometric thumb print thingy and DROPS DEAD. He’s in his 30’s. No one found him for an hour. How sad.

Then AI says, “But I’ve got another story to top that.”

No way …

Way

A guy we used to work with announced that he will be … ughhh … [clears throat] … mmmm … getting “re-assigned due to gender dysphoria”.

In ebonics … dude wants to be a woman.

Yep, and his whole group now has to go to diversity and sensitivity training. He’s going to stay married to his wife – and ladies she acquiesced – and starting in February he has to dress in DRAG for one year until the surgery to make sure that’s what he wants.

Someone said this, “He’s a lesbian trapped in a man’s body.”

Dude, so am I and I’m A-O-K with it. Loves me some women!!!! Every nook cranny and curve of your lovely bodies.

AI and I talked about it today, because I could. I’m wondering how a man, former marine, connects the dots from point A to point B and says, “Yep! That’s the solution, whack it off and give me some pumps and a va-jay-jay.” How do you get to that decision in your life?

But ya know, my $8.00 burger and 1/2 cup of baked beans was good too …

A Non-Christmas Post

I graduated from high school in 1988 with fresh memories of John Hughes movies and synth-pop driven music. My diploma was the key to the door that would open the rest of my life.

Shortly after graduation, my friend Keith invited 3 of us to go to Lake LBJ in Austin to stay at his parent’s lake house. Keith’s dad was an attorney. I remember driving down and listening to Concrete Blonde’s “Joey” for the first time. It started my fascination with smoky lunged torch singing women. The five of us, Keith, Sam, K, me and Keith’s mom made the long trip to the hill country in a red suburban.

It was summer camp without counselors or … maybe it wasn’t camp. It was on the lake and a lot of fun. We water skied and fished a little and I watched the girl I had crush on since 2nd grade across the lake at her parent’s lake house. One evening their boat wouldn’t start so I swam over and helped them start it or something. Dude, I swam across a lake for a girl.

Sam is a big hunter, the walls of his office are now lined with his trophies of dead animal head and probably a caramelized fish or two. He’s a dentist. But before he was a dentist, Sam was 18 and fishing with a bow and arrow.

I’ll never forget Sam shooting a carp right between the eyes with an arrow. He did that all afternoon. The carp piled up on the shore. So many he had to bury them by the neighbor’s boat house. He got in trouble for that. He had dropped horse feed in the lake to get the carp to come to his hunting ground.

Illegal? No, at the time in Texas you could kill as many carp as you wanted without a license.

A day or so later, our boat got stuck on a sand barge. I think I pulled that boat in waist deep water for a few hundred yards. It was all fun.

That night my mom called and sounded funny. She told me she loved me and was excited about me coming home. I played Risk for the first and last time that night. I learned you really don’t fight a land war in Asia.

Somehow I was stuck on a Southwest Airlines flight back to Midland. My dad picked me up from the airport in my truck. I thought it was odd. A few miles from home he said, “I don’t want this to sound like a soap opera because it isn’t, but I’ve left your mom. There’s no other woman.”

I didn’t say a word the rest of the trip home. Somehow, they either escaped me or there was nothing to say or I was just angry.

A few weeks later I saw my dad in a movie with his girlfriend.

Keith went off to the Navy, actually the Naval Academy. I’m sure he’s un-sticking naval vessels from sand bars or something. Maybe he destroys Al Quida navy or something.

Sam, like I said, is a dentist … with dead animals on his wall. I keep telling my family to go see him when they need dental work. They don’t listen.

K, … happy and healthy doing IT stuff amazing me with the stuff he knows. K always thought Keith’s sister was hot. Maybe she was, either way she was too tall for me.

The girl across the water ended up marrying and having kids. Her twin sister had triplets about 10 years ago. The moral is never take fertility drugs if twins run in your family.

I wouldn’t mind a trip back to that lake 20 years later. I’d take a shovel to see if the fish bones are still buried by that doc. Maybe swim across the lake to see the twins parents, or sit under the big Texas summer sun at night and listen to frogs and boats and feel the breeze off the lake as it waves the mimosa trees.

Me? I’m still learning not to fight land wars in Asia.

Weekly Word Challenge 12/18/2007

Since I purport to being a photographer, or at least aspire to be one, I really should participate in some photography challenges. Tink at Pickled Beef has The Weekly Word Challenge. You get to take a picture of one of two words or both. In essence it’s like HNT in that you post a picture then go to Tink’s site and leave a comment saying you have a WWC up. As such, I am leaving my entry in the post AND on the side bar so you can see it. Here’s this week’s entry.

This week’s words: White and Life

What’s On Jef’s Camera/Cell Phone and His Mind

Well, we’ve reached another end of the week here on the edge of the the swamp in the DFW area, my town. We should feel lucky because some people didn’t make it to the end of the week.

I felt like this post needed some explanation. Yes, M’s boyfriend did send said photo of himself in his birthday suit to M. Yes, said photo was found by my wife. And yes, said photo was found by M’s dad, the one of whom we do not speak. He reads her email. So now he’s stirred up the hornets nest even though he has not tried to call her or get in tough with her since March. Gotta feel the love. When she asked how hard it was to change her last name I showed no sign of enthusiasm simply answered her questions. I feel like she will pursue that at some point, but first she must understand that bad choices have bad consequences and there is no time frame on the consequences.

Also, the previous post talked about the Christmas Tree that made some of you cry or something like that. Here’s the picture of the tree and little a.

Of course, the biggest news is that I scooped two local papers and the college paper with photos of a campus icon going up. It seems there’s a fountain here that has been dismantled for a couple of years and cleaned. Day before yesterday, they put the fountain back together. I have vowed that when my beloved Red Raiders come back to this fair burgh to play I will place a very large white inflatable golf ball on top of the fountain and fill it with red food coloring.

More From The Denton Years

I moved to Denton, Texas to be with a girl during the 1994-1995 school year. It was, perhaps, one of the biggest mistakes of my life. Being with the girl not Denton. Denton was a really cool town. Just far enough away from “the city” but not too close. Two major colleges and a population of about 100,000 people. The urban sprawl of Dallas and Fort Worth hadn’t caught up to the tip of the Golden Triangle.

I did have a very cold Christmas there. And as such, I shall re-tell that story.

Like all good stories this one starts with, “There was this girl.” I met her when she was 19. I was 23 or so. She was hot to me. Very experienced and at 23 I was not. Anyway, this was my first really serious relationship and before long we were having lots of good young sex interrupted by periods of, “Wait, we shouldn’t be doing this!”

We got engaged and she decided to transfer to UNT in Denton. So we both moved up to Denton, but not to the same apartment. Anyway, a few months into the engagement she tells me the night before we got engaged she had slept with an old boyfriend. It really explained the look on her face that night after I had proposed. Moe than likely she had slept with a lot of other guys while we were engaged. It didn’t do a lot for my self-esteem.

Somewhere around Christmas it wasn’t working out. I guess she wanted to be 19 or 20 and not have a finace. So we split and I was heartbroken. I was alone in a weird town and I knew no one. I had a great studio apartment across from TWU in Denton. A university filled with women. But most of them played for the other team. So they looked at me like I was competition.

Most nights I would drive home from work, a good hour commute from Irving to Denton, and have nothing to do. I had basic cable supplied by the complex, but nothing else. And basic cable is like a peanut butter sandwich without jelly. You can only take so much of the information channel and Creflo Dollar and T.D. Jakes. There was no where to go and I had no desire at the time to do anything.

I remember pulling out this little Christmas tree. It made me sad, because the previous Christmas the girl and I were in another apartment exchanging gifts in front of the fire and kissing and having mad passionate sex. In some order related to that; sometimes different.

I had this set of purple ornaments that I put on the tree and white lights. I remember laying on the floor of my apartment with that “six inch empty” in my chest. The kind that hurts when someone doesn’t love you. Just an empty feeling. It was dark. I had turned all the lights off.

And there was this little pitiful fake tree just shining and looking all happy despite who it was or where it came from or where it was going. The tree and I kept each other company. It game me hope and I turned it’s lights on now and then.

I set that tree up in my daughter’s room now. As a matter of fact I got it out of the attic last night and placed it beside her bed at her request. I printed a coloring book Santa. Little a colored it and cut it out and I craftily fashioned a band around the back to make a tree topper.

That reminds me of where I’ve been and how bad it was. Then I look across the room at the sweetest most beautiful child in my eyes and she’s peaceful and sleeping. The room just explodes with the light from both her and the tree.

In my mind I know that nothing is really all that bad and that sometimes a lot of pain brings a lot of joy. So I keep my tree; I drag it out of the attic every year and put it in my daughter’s room . The ornaments are LONG gone. But the lights are still on it. It’s tiny compared to my step kid’s trees, but they think they have the better trees.

I know better.

What’s young and hot in Florida and it’s not orange spice tea?

I don’t know how I found Tink of Pickled Beef. I really don’t. But she’s a very cool blogger. Tink granted me a few questions. If you want to read the whole interview, you’re in for .

There’s A Reason Why I Like Capitol Punishment

If you haven’t figured it out, I have some views on crime. Recently, the AP wire released this story on states rethinking trying juveniles as adults entitled “States Rethinking Charging Kids As Adults”.

Obviously, if I’m pro-capitol punishment, then I want to weigh in on this. First, I don’t believe we can reform people who are hardened. Second, they don’t want to be reformed or have a desire to change their life. Third, we mix petty criminals in with hardened violent criminals and juvenal offenders and we get even worse kids.

Prison has not turned into a deterrent, but rather a breeding ground for organized crime. We pay for a room and food and college degrees. Even cable and workout rooms. Hmmm, most honest citizens below the poverty line would live better if they were sent to prison. No kidding. Why is prison made to make inmates comfortable? No it’s not a good place, but the amenities are definitely appealing.

I believe we need to go back to enforcing an incredibly strict sense of punishment for violent crimes. If you kill someone intentionally, you should be punished.

My wacko opinion on this is that we didn’t used to have these issues until we started to cut people slack and wanted to “reform” them. Over the last 100 years we have deteriorated tremendously. When you thin the gene pool you also thin the behavior pool. Call it barbaric, but don’t even the Darwinist believe in thinning the species of the weak and sick? Aren’t I using their own theories to better society? Selectively eliminate the problems to strengthen the species?

People who are removed from the possibility of affecting society by means of death, don’t affect society negatively by means of procreation and environmental passing of bad habits.