Sign here...

I officially signed the papers today -- I am gainfully employed for next year. Whee! I had hoped to meet with the principal as well, but he was in a meeting (oooh, big surprise -- probably the number-one reason I will NEVER get my administration certification). I shall try again tomorrow.

Miss Alice got her long, glossy tresses shorn today:



When she goes to camp in a few days, she will have to be able to comb her own hair and take a shower without help -- neither of which she could do with all that long hair. Tammy the hairdresser put a rubber band on it and cut it off in one big hunk so that we could donate it. I don't know if it's *quite* long enough to donate to Locks of Love, but we're going to look into the option.

We have certainly been experiencing odd, cool, wet weather this spring. The sky in Texas just doesn't usually look like this at the end of May:


There's a building in nearby Whitesboro that has a little faded "Autoplex" sign, and this one, lonely old car with a "For Sale" sign in the windshield:


Mom and I are busy getting everything ready for our Big Road Trip which begins this Saturday morning. Today we had my MomVan serviced, and tomorrow I'm going to go have it detailed on the inside.

Some pesky health issues won't go away for me, either -- leading me to pursue making an appointment with a bariatric surgeon to try to root out the cause of my abdominal discomfort. I underwent a form of bariatric surgery called an "SRVG" ten years ago this December, and now am having some pretty significant discomfort and swelling in my upper abdomen that I didn't have before.

I've had my guts cut into three separate times now: my SRVG in 1997, my C-section in 1999, and my panniculectomy in 2003. The C-section was the least troublesome and painful of all of them. After the panniculectomy & breast reduction in 2003, I was so uncomfortable and miserable that I swore I would NEVER let some yahoo slice me open again, EVER. It's just the worst. I fainted five times during the first two days of recovering from that. And I was left looking like Frankenstein's retarded half-sister.

When I was in labor with my son back in 1999, I went for 22 hours of hard contractions without dilating past 4cm, and his numbers were dipping. I opted for a C-section, but began to sob aloud as soon as I said it, because I had remembered how horrible the original SRVG surgery had been for me. I had literally wanted to DIE in my hospital room, I was so miserable and uncomfortable. Thankfully, the C-section didn't afford me ANY of that discomfort. Nonetheless, this is not something I take lightly.

Anyhow, the notion of yet another surgery looms as a possibility now. I'm sorely tempted to suggest that, when they go in there again, they upgrade the old SRVG procedure into a more contemporary bariatric procedure with more chance of helping me achieve a normal weight. I mean, heck -- if I'm going to have to suffer, might as well make it count. Fix whatever has gone wrong, then do some long-term improvements with a realistic chance of doing me some good.

Or just kill me now and get it overwith. There isn't much like the agony and utter irritability of surgery recovery. I'm not sure there's anything I despise more.

Well, okay, the multiple-times-daily vomiting is rapidly working its way up the list.

That was more than any of you wanted to know, wasn't it? Sorry.