Thursday, June 30, 2011

I Will Make Every Conversation About Sex Eventually. Every One.

The cake master's g-mail chat status read "ANTM is still on?" I had no idea what that meant so I googled it. Mistake.

me: Ok, I had to actually go look up what ANTM is, and now I'm upset that I did that
The cake master: hahaha
it's SO BAD

me: it's to the point where I don't even want to watch tv anymore because even if i'm watching something good there's going to be a commercial for something that flat out sucks

The cake master: haha
very true

me: also the history channel should not be allowed to be called the history channel any more

The cake master: why not?
because of the serious lack of history being broadcast on it?

me: who the hell's idea was it to make a reality show about logging? for reals. wtf?

The cake master: oh i know, it's ridiculous

me: also, discovery channel ghost hunters needs to be called "old houses make noises, get over it"

The cake master: omfg
HAHAHA
indeed
and BBC America needs to be called, "Hey, we have a few British shows"

me: OMG RIGHT? I love TNG n' everything but THAT WAS AN AMERICAN SHOW OH MY GOD STOP

The cake master: I actually emailed them about that once
like, BBC has so many good shows, can't we get a few more instead of TNG?
and they responded it's a popular show and they get good ratings on it

me: "it stars a british guy, what the eff do you want from us?"

The cake master: hahaha
right, now they have Battlestar Galactica
which I love, but COME ON
of course, it stars a british guy too, so I guess I shouldn't complain
a British guy with an American accent

me: There's already a Sci Fi channel. It's called SyFy

The cake master: and it used to show Battlestar Galactica!!

me: i really need to bang patrick stewart. fyi

The cake master: haha nice

me: like, a lot

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

My Opinion, And I Do Have One

The Post Office is fucking with me, and I'm starting to feel a little bit stabby about it.

This started way the hell back in May, while the bartender was in the hospital. I didn't even really notice it at first - truth is I don't get all that much mail, what with our modern, instant methods of communication, and it's not unusual to go a few days without seeing anything in the mailbox. But I had ordered a couple of t-shirts and realized that it had been over a week and they hadn't shown up, and that it also seemed to be taking an extraordinarily long time for my Gilmore Girls Season 2 DVDs that I purchased from Amazon to arrive (fuck you, that show is awesome). And just as it was dawning on me that maybe there was a problem, I got phone calls from the place where I rent a storage locker to house all nine of my Christmas trees when it's not the season of Christmas trees and from my insurance company, both of whom snippily informed me that they'd sent me mail that had been returned with no forwarding address and, you know, I really should have informed them of the fact that I was moving ahead of time. Except, um, I haven't moved. In, like, four years. The phone calls came when I was in England, so there wasn't a whole lot I could do at the time.

The nearest I can figure out, the screw up has something to do with my neighbor moving out. This would make some sense - my now former neighbor, while nice enough, is a colossal fucking idiot. Shortly after he first moved in I got notices from both the gas and the electric companies of the cancellation of my accounts and the final bills. As I had not cancelled any accounts I called them up and was told my accounts had been cancelled because I had moved and someone else was living there. I explained that I had NOT moved, someone else most certainly the fuck was not living there and fix it now. Turns out the guy who had moved in across the hall didn't actually know his address and was giving all the utility companies mine. Everything got straightened out, he was all "dude, my bad" and life went on as normal. Except, it seems, that he never did actually learn his address, and when he moved out and changed his address with USPS he again gave them mine. And in the infinite wisdom of the Post Office, they assumed that meant that I had moved, so despite the fact that I had filled out no change of address card they were sending all my mail back from whence it came, with a note saying I had left no forwarding address, which indeed I hadn't, BECAUSE I HAD NOT FUCKING MOVED.

Upon my return, I got in touch with them, explained that I had gotten no mail for an entire month and asked that they please stop doing whatever it was they were doing and go ahead and actually deliver my mail. In the meantime, I got in touch with every single vendor I had purchase something from that had not arrived, and begged them to resend the packages to my office where I seem to have more success with actually receiving mail.

I got a phone call from the post office apologizing and saying the problem had been fixed and for a while it seemed that it had. I got a trickle of things in, occasionally, covered in weird rerouting stickers, and I assumed all was back to normal. Which turned out to be a poor assumption. Again, I started getting a mess of phone calls and e-mails from friends who'd tried sending me things, my employer who'd tried to mail my pay stub, the insurance company who'd sent my cards again only to have them returned a second time - was I sure I hadn't moved? Did I actually know my own address? I fired off a message to them on their website, with the former case number, the name of the person who said it had been fixed, a description of how I knew it had not AT ALL been fixed, and a plea to please ACTUALLY FIX IT. At the bottom where it says "How should we contact you?" I checked off "e-mail" and sent the thing off with the understanding that I would be e-mailed an update within three business days.

I received no such e-mail. Instead I received a voicemail from a man at the post office asking me to call back to "discuss" the issue with a number. Which I called. FOUR TIMES. Four times I called the number he left, and four times it rang and rang and rang for 10 minutes and was followed by a shrill beepy sound and a click. Two days later, the same man called me AGAIN, left the SAME number, which I called again TWO MORE TIMES to the same effect, i.e. NONE. I gave up and resigned myself with having to accept that I might never have home mail service again.

And then, yesterday, I finally get an e-mail from USPS. Does it tell me they've looked into and resolved my issue? Do they ask me for more information on the problem, like dates and such forth? Does it include a working phone number that either gets answered or goes to voicemail? No. It reads thusly:

"The United States Postal Service® (USPS®) would like to thank you for your recent E-mail. Your opinions are very important to the USPS® as we continually monitor and improve customer service.

You can provide feedback on your E-mail experience by completing a brief 5 minute survey. To participate in the survey, click on the Web address below. For your convenience, the survey is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week through July 7, 2011, from any computer with Internet access."

Oh really, post office, you want my opinion do you? WELL HERE IT IS. My opinion is that your entire organization should get stabbed in the eye. Right in the eye, with a blunt pencil. My opinion is that this is a vast conspiracy to try and trick me into paying for a PO Box by pretending to be incompetent at delivering mail to my home. My opinion is that you should actually take some sort of action to resolve the problem before you ask me my opinion about it. My opinion is that I hate you.

Don't Ask Me Questions If You're Not Prepared For The Answer

In the elevator this morning

The CEO: Hey! What are you listening to?

Me: (putting my iPod away) It's on shuffle.

The CEO: So you don't know what you're listening to?

Me: (skipping ahead) Well that was a Snoop Dogg song, the next one would have been Blink-182, then The Creepshow, NOFX, Cake, oooh The Penguins! (holding it up to show The Penquins' "Earth Angel (Will You Be Mine?)" and grinning in victory)

The CEO: (rolling his eyes) I shouldn't have asked.

Me: How to go from Snoop Dogg to The Penguins in six tracks!


My iPod is a dangerous realm for the uninitiated, people. Don't try this at home.

Sunday, June 19, 2011

TBS: Very Funny (Just Not On TV)

The TBS Just For Laughs comedy festival sponsored by Twix (clearly the most hilarious of all candy bars) was this past week and I was lucky enough to be a part of the very first event AND the very last event, while seeing my future husband and getting a bunch of free candy in between. Every bit of it was fantastic and way the hell funnier than the TBS prime time line up of shows, most of which can be described in almost any way you want except "very funny". But allow me to start at the beginning.

The festival kicked off in the most awesome way possible: by confusing the shit out of tourists. The MP3 Experiment is a flash mob* created by the group Improv Everywhere in which participants download an MP3 to their iPod (or similar), synchronize their watches with the atomic clock on the website, show up in an appointed place wearing an appointed color shirt and at an appointed time everyone presses "play" and follows the instructions. I'd been to one before about three years ago, and while it was fun, it was cold and raining and not a lot of people showed up. Not so this time. I got on the train to go downtown and immediately noticed a group of about five people in solid colored t-shirts of red, green and yellow attempting to covertly drink a batch of vodka and lemonade from a tube they'd rigged to a container in one guy's backpack who were clearly up to the same antics I was. In fact, about 1,000 other people turned out to be up to the same antics I was. I installed myself near the bean and played a quick game of "Who else do I think is playing?" while I waited for it to be 1:30. At 1:30, chaos organization erupted. Here is a short video of it. A few awesome people with no idea what was going on decided it was best to just go with it, and started following us around doing whatever they saw us doing. The highlight for me was during our attempt to make ourselves into a giant target. While crushed in with all the other people wearing green shirts, I found myself looking at two guys standing near me who were looking right back and grinning. "Dude, you're the girl from the train!" one of them said. "I KNEW it! I knew you were playing!" High fives were exchanged, vodka lemonade was shared, memories were made. It was an amazing day**.

 The following Thursday, I forewent my usual drinking night at Tai's and instead met up with Mr and MrsTrivia, Mr. and Mrs. Paulblo and Mr. and Mrs. Eldest of the Brothers Whose Last Name Rhymes With Schmongola for dinner at Elephant and Castle before making our collective way over to the Chicago Theater to see Demetri Martin and Some of His Friends Who Are Also Comedians. Demetri Martin, by the way, is going to marry me someday when he finally meets me and falls hopelessly in love with me and my hilarious t-shirts. I wore one to the show which I thought he would like, but as I was sitting in the balcony he didn't see it and instead pulled some other guy up on stage to look at his t-shirt (said guy had asked Demetri what was with his very plain shirt because it wasn't funny and Demetri brought him up for a comparison. Guy's t-shirt was a drawing of Jesus shooting Charles Darwin in the head and read "Evolve this". "So my shirt just has a line on it and isn't funny, and your shirt is what's wrong with America," Demetri observed. Point Demetri). The show and everyone on was hilarious (though I think Kristen Schaal was holding back her best stuff for her own show which makes total sense), in particular Hannibal Buress, who we are seeing again in July. I was sitting in a different place from the others who were downstairs and MrTrivia had graciously offered me a ride home, so we had agreed to meet out front at the end of the show. On the way out I received several complimentary Twix bars which amazingly happened to be the exact size of fun:
 

This is precisely how big fun is.
 Outside , I walked over close to the street and began scanning the crowd for MrTrivia and/or the rest of our party. Seeing none of them, I texted him and said "I'm already outside! What do I win?"

"I am too right in front. Where r u?" he responded.

I looked around for him some more but didn't see him. "Right in the middle near the street" I replied and continued looking. As I did so, I noticed a tallish man standing right in front of me turn around slowly. Upon sighting me he said "Seriously?" We'd been standing right next to each other for five minutes without noticing.

The festival closed last Sunday with a show titled Steve Martin and Martin Short in a Very Stupid Conversation. When I saw that Steve Martin was coming to town I freaked a little. I've been wanting to see him live since I was about 7 years old, right around the first time I saw the King Tut clip from SNL in re-run. A good chunk of my childhood was spent next door with my best friend Mary watching Dirty Rotten Scoundrels nearly every other day (also we were watching a lot of Jean-Claude Van Damme movies for which I have no explanation save that we were very young). Martin Short is no slouch either, and the show opened with various clips of their work, including their appearance together in The Three Amigos, a little Ed Grimly and the absolutely legendary Great Flydini. They then had a piss funny conversation in which they interviewed one another, Short interviewing Steve martin about himself, Martin interviewing Martin Short about what he thought of Steve Martin. Martin Short sang a song, Steve Martin played the banjo (brilliantly - there's a reason the man's won 4 Grammys) and then Short returned to the stage and interviewed Steve Martin again as Jiminy Glick. Meanwhile, I was pissing myself, had tears streaming down my face and laughed so hard and so long my abs still hurt four days later. It was funny on an absolutely insane level that should not be achievable without performance enhancing drugs and well worth the quarter century wait.

Demetri: Call me.

*Note to the City of Chicago, CPD and Chicago area news outlets: the crime spree you've been witnessing this summer involving roving bands of teenagers ganging up on individuals in the downtown area to beat up and rob them which you all have been calling a flash mob? Stop doing that. Try group thugging, gang activity, or some other wording of your choice. That is not what flash mob means.

**It started out that way anyway. In case anyone is wondering what happened to the other two posts I was planning about my trip to England, due to an e-mail (!) I received when I got home from flash mobbing, I just don't feel like writing them anymore. Sorry.

Friday, June 10, 2011

Spell Check Break

Blogger spell check doesn't like real Welsh words any better than the ones I made up. VOWELS, DAMN IT, USE VOWELS.

Britannia 2011 - Parte The Seconde

Chester

Chester is an old Roman city near the border with Wales, and one of the best preserved walled cities anywhere in Britain. It is well defended to this day - the comic and I drove past our hotel and all the way back around the ring road no less than four times because all roads either lead away from it, are one way streets in the wrong direction, or are under construction with traffic diverted in the opposite direction from where we needed to go. Eventually we admitted defeat and parked in the car park meant for the nearby shopping center. These frustrations were immediately forgotten upon looking out our bedroom window and seeing this directly across the street:


Roman amphitheater, which thankfully was not showing "The Hangover 2".
This was obviously a cause for celebration and we immediately went out and found an Italian restaurant where we ate and drank like motherfuckers, then drunk dialed H-town in Baltimore, yelled something at her about art lovers and equilibrium and stumbled back to the hotel to sleep it off.

The next day we walked around the city, and by walked around the city I actually mean "around" - with almost all of the walls still intact, you can basically walk all the way around on the top of them. There are also spectacular little plaques along the way, inscribed with facts about the their construction, the history of the area, and random factoids (also a recipe), the best of which was this one:


This is awesome and henceforth is the standard by which I will judge the information on all other plaques.
Wales

We left Chester with considerably more ease than we'd had getting there and drove to Wales. Wales is a country of immense beauty, but also a completely insane, largely unpronounceable and completely unspellable language. They have a thing for doubling letters unnecessarily causing their words to be ridiculously long and while the Welsh language does have vowels, they are loathe to use them unless they've completely run out of doubled consonants.


A river running through Llangollen, where we stayed, which in English is the River Dee, but in Welsh is probably spelled more like Gogllywnnscestt or Wydnollffydd or something like that.
Here's the thing about Wales, ok? Because I'm from Chicago by way of Cleveland, right? So I know what cold feels like. When you walk out your door here and it's 2 degrees Fahrenheit with a windchill making it feel more like 12 below, that is a cold that will slap you right in the face, rip off your nipples, then shrivel your lungs into raisins. Whoever came up with the adage "Don't make a fact like that, it might freeze that way forever" was almost certainly standing outside in Chicago in January when he said it. What I'm trying to say is, I've been cold before.

But not like this.

The cold in Wales is a cold like no other cold I've ever experienced. It's a damp, heavy cold that gets in you and stays there, obliterating all hope that you might ever feel warm again. In Chicago, when it's cold, you just go inside, wait two minutes and then Presto! - you are warm. I spent less than 24 hours in Wales, but even after I went inside, even after I'd left, I stayed cold for six days. It was like someone had filled my soul with equal parts sorrow, hopelessness and dead puppies. I'm still recovering.

Other than that, though, Wales is beautiful, the audience at the comic's gig was brilliantly weird and whatever I had for dinner was delicious (I don't remember what it was because alcohol happened. Oh wait! Prawns? I think it had something to do with prawns). And then I went to bed to get some rest for the next day's planned activities, which didn't happened due to there being a drunk comedian in the room who was snoring like it's his job. It didn't matter - we ended up doing none of the things we'd originally planned to do anyway, but with good reason: the comic realized suddenly that Penrith is sort of on the way to Newcastle.



For an account of my time in Chester and Wales in which I do not actually appear other than a veiled reference to the terrible weather being my fault, check out the comic's blog.

Tuesday, June 07, 2011

Britannia 2011 - Parte The Firste

Arrival and Punky!

I'm not gonna lie, the TSA scares the shit out of me. Something about the combination of their absolute authority in deciding whether or not I pose a threat to my fellow travelers combined with my paralysing fear of public embarrassment makes the "please take off your shoes" portion of my trip the most harrowing part of the whole experience. Why, then, I decided to wear a fencenet body stocking under my t-shirt and jeans instead of underwear and a bra like a normal person is quite beyond my ability to comprehend. It seemed like a good idea when I left the house. It seemed like an incredibly bad idea when I got in the security line and realized there were only two lines open: one regular line and one irradiating porn producing body scanner line. So I was already on edge when the boarding pass checker with the rapist mustache who I was still thirty people away from caught my eye from across the room and yelled "Honey, you've been distracting me for the last 15 minutes!" All heads swiveled in my direction and I laughed nervously and suggested it was due to my pink hair, which coincidentally was now also the precise color of my face. "That and your amazing smile," he said, and I cringed because it was obvious I was going to get flagged for one of those "enhanced pat downs" of which he was sure to surreptitiously photograph me getting felt up with no undergarments to protect me. That didn't happen, of course - I'm just paranoid. Either that or I've repressed the memory, it's hard to say. At any rate, I got to Heathrow as planned, traded my clothes for a raincoat as planned, met the comic sort of as planned, and went to Luton which was not at all planned, but was necessary if I wanted to see my friend Steve, who chose to time his trip to Spain for exactly the same time as my trip to England. I spent an hour chatting with the group in Steve's pub while drinking out of the comic's Stanley Cup shot glass (it is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up)  and trying to deflect questions about why I refused to remove my coat.

On Tuesdays, the comic and his partner Manly Tony record Punky! Radio over Skype. On my first Tuesday in town, they recorded the 300th episode of Punky! in front of a live "studio" (the comic's lounge) audience. Said audience included myself, my darling Sulu and her husband G, Felix a.k.a Hamboy (formerly of the recorder band The Blow Jobs - Felix claims they broke up due to musical similarities) and a guy called Phil who inexplicably carries around a bazouki in the back of his car.
A bazouki player (not Phil)
This came in very handy as Felix had brought three recorders and a tambourine with him and we performed an impromptu mashup of White Riot and Blitzkrieg Bop. I also got to tell the story of the guy who got his face kicked in at Riotfest and introduce the song I had picked out for the show, "She's Only Fucking 12" by 3CR.

We'd had a lot to drink by the end of the show and so the obvious thing to do was go out for Italian food and drink two more bottles of wine at dinner, then head over to the Arena Tavern for some further beers. While the rest of us were comparing our various mobile devices and the games contained therein, the comic wandered off and found a man he'd met recently but whose name he couldn't recall and brought him over to our table in the hopes that he'd introduce himself to the rest of us so the comic could pretend like he'd known his name all along. This plan went awry (as his plans often do) when, upon encountering Sulu and I sitting in close proximity, the stranger abandoned all social niceties and ignoring everyone else greeted us with the question "Are you two lesbians?" I told him we were, but only on Tuesdays.

Having said our goodbyes to the others, the comic, Tony and I went back to the flat, at which time a sane group of people would have gone to bed. Instead, Tony decided to edit Punky! so we could upload it that very night and we all consumed the last of the wine, the port, and half of another bottle of port, then drunk dialed Kelly in Los Angeles for reasons I can no longer remember. Eventually Tony went to bed, while the comic and I stayed up listening to Demented Are Go long past the time my desire to go to bed had kicked in because the comic wanted to hear "PVC Chair" and kept insisting it was the next track, though it never was. We finally got in bed some time after dawn, drunk as fuck and in no shape to get up, pack, and drive to Chester the next day.

The next day we got up, packed and drove to Chester.

Britannia 2011 - An Introduction

I started to write a post about my trip to England last month only to realize that there was no way for me to make it one post. In the interest of seeing everything his land has to offer, the comic took me on a whirlwind tour that seemed designed to cram everything it was possible to see into one go, from which I am only now starting to recover. The immediate trip to Cleveland upon my return has not helped my situation, nor has dealing with the post office, who allowed my address to be fraudulently changed just before I left, thus ensuring that the half a dozen things I had ordered off of Amazon would be returned to the sender and my insurance company would threaten to drop me for not telling them I had moved. I will attempt to reconstruct the last two weeks over the rest of this one, so please be patient with me - I am still fragile and covered in bruises (not those kind. Ok, those too, but mostly the ones caused by my being particularly accident prone on this trip. That's my story and I'm sticking to it, unless you know where to go to find the truth, in which case the truth will be out there soon, I promise).

Friday, June 03, 2011

Blogging Is Not A Matter Of Life And Death...Unlike Pneumonia

Relax, I'll tell you where I've been, just calm down. I've just returned from spending 11 days on a 10 day trip to England the U.K., which followed directly on the heels of spending the bulk of two weeks visiting Hell Illinois Masonic Hospital, where they were holding my beloved roommate the bartender in a thankfully successful attempt at making him not die, which nearly killed him in and of itself.

I'll explain that shortly, but let's back up a minute.

What now seems like many Thursdays ago, I was in my usual watering hole doing my usual have dinner with my roommate and then drink a beer while antisocially playing games on my iPad thing, when a pretty looking boy began admiring my very pink hair and asking my advice on how he could do something similar to his very brown hair. I have had this conversation many times, and now that I have an iPad, I can augment it with Facebook photos of my coiffure's previous incarnations. He was impressed, deemed me artistic and started showing me some of his design portfolio, including some work he'd done for a motorcycle club. In turn I showed him the results of the Super Secret Project. It was the most stunning transformation I've ever seen: he was having a normal, relaxed, easy conversation with me and then as if I'd flipped a switch he suddenly became so nervous that he literally could not complete a sentence. He eventually took several deep breaths and managed to choke out enough words for me to understand he was asking me out. It's not like I could say no - he was adorable and there was a strong chance his head might implode from a rejection, so I gave him my e-mail and made vague plans to "eat something and watch the hockey game" on Saturday. In retrospect, it seems hilarious to me that I thought there was any chance I might wind up in some sort of normal situation.

The bartender had not been feeling well, so when he came home from working Friday night at 4:30 a.m. sweating and out of breath I was concerned. He asked me if we had an accurate thermometer (we didn't) and then said the bone chilling words that would kick off a terrifying saga: "I think you need to get dressed. I need you to take me to the hospital." The bartender doesn't really "do" hospitals. Despite that fact, he'd just been to the ER two weeks prior to that due to excruciating back and chest pain that was diagnosed as walking pneumonia. He was given antibiotics and sent on his way. He felt better after a few days, went back for a follow up a week later, was pronounced healthy and sent on his way. Two days later he had a fever of 102.2, couldn't breathe and wanted me to take him back to the hospital. Not good.

We got there and did the whole ER routine: triage, get in a room, vitals, talk to a nurse, talk to another nurse, wait for a doctor, explain everything again, wait some more, repeat everything again for a medical student, then a third nurse, get some blood drawn and then finally they took him away for a chest x-ray, which is when I checked my voicemail and realized I'd missed a call from the comic the night before explaining that he'd been randomly punched in the face. None of my boys were doing well, it seemed. I texted the only one who was (the boy from Thursday night) to inform him that I would not be making our date that afternoon and rescheduling it for Sunday. A doctor came in with the bad news: the bartender's pneumonia had not gone away at all, but rather seemed to have gotten worse. They decided to admit him for a couple days. I texted the newbie and rescheduled our date for early the following week, then went home and fed the cat.

When I got back to the hospital the situation had gone from bad to worse. A CT scan revealed that in addition to the pneumonia worsening, his lung was also being collapsed from the outside due to empyema. He would need surgery, but they didn't want to perform it until they got the infection that caused the pneumonia in the first place under control. They started throwing every antibiotic they had in their arsenal at him hoping something would work. None of them seemed to help, and after two days of this with his condition continuing to worsen it was becoming clear he had some sort of antibiotic resistant super bug and that they couldn't wait any longer to do the surgery. He went under the knife that Tuesday, while I paced the family lounge, tweeting what little information I had and postponing my date until the bartender made it home.

I was wholly unprepared for the scene that greeted me when they allowed me to see him in the ICU after surgery. IVs in both arms, a breathing tube down his throat, oxygen, catheter, epidural, three chest tubes snaking out of his back and his arms strapped down as a precaution because people coming out of anesthesia have a penchant for trying to rip their breathing tube out when they come to. He looked terrible. "You look good," I told him, which he obviously didn't reply to because you can't talk with a breathing tube stuffed down your throat. The anethesiologist came in to check up on things. His name was Dr. Dieter, but he looked less like Dieter from Sprockets and more like The Dude from Big Lebowski. He was also hilarious. "I was only in there for the important part," he said. "Basically, we cut you open, drianed the pus out and then took a garden hose to your chest for about 20 minutes."

Having cultured the fluid to get a better idea of just what the hell had made him so sick in the first place, they put him on an appropriate antibiotic that we hoped would clear up the infection once and for all. In the meantime, breathing tube removed, the bartender was free to insult his oh-so-witty surgeon when he came in each day to pull out the chest tubes one at a time. "I promise you, I won't feel a thing," the surgeon said as he de-Borged my roommate, which earned him "Dick" in response. On the day the final chest tube came out, the plan was that he would get out of ICU, go upstairs for observation for a day and then finally go home. Obviously this scenario was not in the stars because when everything else has gone horribly wrong, why not just pile it on?

As it turned out, after a day and a half on the "right" antibiotic to treat the infection, it was discovered it was the wrong antibiotic for the bartenders kidneys, as they had begun to shut down. So began several stress filled days of constant monitoring in an effort to keep the treatment that was saving his life from killing him.

Finally, FINALLY, he was well enough to leave the hospital and I took him home on Tuesday afternoon, 11 days after I'd driven him there in the middle of the night. I spent the next three days hovering over him and carrying things around because he wasn't allowed to lift anything at all (and couldn't have even if he'd tried). Then on Saturday, at the bartender's insistance, I finally left for my long planned trip to England which I had resigned myself already that I was going to miss, sending a text message to newbie postponing our date until June in the cab on the way to O'Hare.

So yeah. Sorry about the long break from blogging. I WAS BUSY.