Walgreens run!

ONE: The good news is our smoke detectors are capable of blasting sound to every corner of the house.

The other good news is it’s not a house fire that alerted us to this fact.

The bad news is (at least) one of the batteries died in (at least) one of the smoke detectors scattered around the house and its little chirpy alerts so effectively broadcast that news that we can’t pinpoint which one (or ones) is (or are) doing all that GODDAMN CHIRPING.

So ... it’s Everybody Gets A New Battery Day!

TWO:I just had the neurologist appointment that I scheduled three weeks ago at the height of my headache nightmare, and he officially undiagnosed my occipital neuralgia and told me I’d just experienced a plain old boring migraine. Which is so unglamorous that it robs me of the sense of exotic purpose to which I’m entitled. Anyway, he said that for now I should just keep plain old boring OTC migraine medicine on hand to stop the next one (because apparently there will be many more next ones) when it starts and to call him if things get worse.

THREE:No trip to Walgreens even counts if you don’t leave with a package of Chips Ahoy!

The good news: I just had what felt like a pretty solid workout—my second since The Marathon HeadacheTM started more than three weeks ago.

The other good news: It didn’t end with my head exploding in messy, screaming pain.

The bad news: Working out definitely made the pain worse.

The other bad news: Now my ears are screaming like a field of cicadas on a miserable summer night.

The worse news: WHAT THE HELL IS UP WITH MY HAIR?

The bad news is I woke up with my head throbbing. Throb. Ing.

The good news is once I hobbled and squinted to the kitchen and ate something, my head felt considerably better. Better than it’s felt all week, I dare say.

The bad news is it still really hurts.

The good news is it feels manageable enough that it’s emboldened me to not mask it with any pain meds so I can gauge how bad it is all day.

The bad news is I won’t really get a full all-day reading because I’m crawling back in bed.

Wait ... that’s actually good news.

FORTY WHOPPING FIVE DOLLARS

So way back in my old life in Chicago, I was working out with a top-tier (read: exponentially most expensive) trainer at a mega-trendy (read: exponentially most expensive) gym in the Loop (read: a few blocks from my office, which is why I was coughing up exponentially so much money). I met with my trainer at 6:30 am three days a week and worked out on my own at the same time two days a week, which meant I maintained a rigorous schedule of planning ahead, meal prep, gym-bag clothes packing and disciplined sleep every weekday. Plus I kept emergency backup food in my freezer and emergency backup clothes in my gym bag. Just in case.

But.

Despite all my extremely conscientious, extremely disciplined, extremely successful planning and packing over the course of four-plus years, there was one sweaty morning I unpacked my bag at the gym and discovered to my horror that I hadn’t packed any work clothes. Not. A. Stitch. And it was 7:30 am on a weekday in the Loop, which meant there were absolutely no places open to buy clothes anywhere for the next few hours.

But.

My mega-trendy gym DID have a mega-trendy (read: exponentially most expensive) little (read: tiny, shitty selection of merchandise) boutique in its lobby, which also wasn’t going to be open for the next few hours. But the woman at the nearby check-in desk heard my tale of woe and took pity on me and found a key to open up the mega-trendy (read: exponentially most expensive) boutique so I could find something reasonably priced (read: HAHAHA!) that I could buy and wear to work.

The bad news: There was nothing in the entire boutique that said “white-collar desk job.”

The good news: My white-collar desk job had a pretty flexible, non-collar-of-any-color-obligating dress code when we weren’t meeting with clients.

The bad news: There was nothing in the entire boutique that said “less than a mortgage payment.”

The good news: My gym shorts weren’t TOO sweaty and I did have emergency backup clean underwear and I figured could probably get away with spending one day at work dressed like I’d just run a marathon.

Long story short: This T-shirt cost me FORTY WHOPPING FIVE DOLLARS. And while it got me through a mega-casual workday, it actually fits like a cheap-ass five-dollar shirt to this day and I should just get rid of it but IT COST ME FORTY WHOPPING FIVE DOLLARS.

So I feel like I still have to keep it in my shirt rotation. Because FORTY WHOPPING FIVE DOLLARS.

My family told me on no uncertain terms to NOT post these pictures, so challenge accepted!

The good news is I got our back deck and the grill and all the patio furniture (now christened Porch Song Trilogy) all scrubbed and cleaned and dried and set up for summer.

The bad news is the umbrella for the table didn’t get set up. It’s on a high shelf in the garage, see, so I set up our tall step stool in a place near one end of the umbrella. That place also happened to be directly under the surprisingly sharp and surprisingly hard end of the track for the garage door. Not noticing this troublesome placement, I bounded up the step stool at full force ... and hit my head so hard on the sharp, hard end of the track that I saw stars and all but collapsed to the floor where blood ran down my arm and the pain intensified so quickly that I actually started gasping and sobbing.

My poor dad—who is legally blind—ran to get our poor neighbor—who had to look at my bloody, swollen head without barfing—and together they decided to take me to the ER:

The other good news is I don’t need stitches, but I have an impressive lump and a possible concussion and a badass punk-rocker streak of blood in my hair:

The other bad news, though, is the stupid, mean, dumbass doctor won’t let me go to the gym for arm day. So I apologize in advance if you see me today with my lumpy red head and my saggy, deflated arms.

The other freaking awesome news is our freaking awesome neighbor climbed (carefully) up the (newly placed) step stool to get our umbrella down, and it was waiting next to the driveway for us when we got home.

The bad news:

I've been lying to all our Full Monty audiences. I have not at any time during our rehearsals or run been fully naked; I've been wearing stitches in my head for the last 12 days. I've also had a band-aid on my ripped fingernail since Wednesday, but in comparison that barely qualifies as unsexy so stop whining and demanding refunds on your tickets.

The good news: I JUST GOT MY STITCHES OUT! (Also, the lab results showed the cysts were benign, but they're by nature benign and the lab work was just a precaution in case they were an abomination of nature like those damn gays.) Anyway, my stitches-less scalp and I are finally going MEGA FULL MONTY this weekend!

The bad news: The cute dude in the doctor's waiting room never once said hi or gave me butterfly kisses. Probably because I didn't put any product in my hair this morning because of my stitch-ectomy so my hair is doomed to be man-repellent-level floofy all day.

The good news: The temperatures here have yet to drop to sub-arctic levels, so nobody's cysts or stitches have frozen off for free yet--which would be totally unfair to me. But the snow has drifted a foot above the bottom of my office window (and I'm on the 94th floor, which makes it borderline alarming) and my skin is itchy to the bone, so once the temperatures drop I think it's safe to say that winter is finally here.