This past weekend was eerily reminiscent of normality.
Friday night, Carole and I tried out the new Montanas restaurant in Coquitlam - I had a chicken wrap, salad, and a pint of Canadian, and I was fine! Then we went to a friend's birthday party, where I refrained from the chips and dip, but DID still have a couple beers (this was my first alcohol in a week) and I was fine!
Saturday was a gorgeous day - over 17 degrees on February 27th (which, is actually alarmingly unnatural) so Carole and I walked all the way down the hill to the Marketplace where we had lunch (I had a proscuito and bocaccini panini, and I was fine!) and did a little shopping before the hike back home. It was a hot sweaty day, but we've officially started working on our tans... in February!!! Did I mention it was February?
Saturday night we went to see Wayne's other band "The Rainspider" downtown at a nifty bar I've never been to before, called Smiley O'Niels. (Yes, it's an Irish Pub) - it's a really nice place, and the band was great - it was a lot of fun,and I even had three beers... and I was fine!
Sunday I got up early to do some home-brew bottling, and also watched Alien Vs. Pretator. It was actually a lot better than I thought it would be. We then watched Calendar Girls, then I went outside to do some weeding and gardening for an hour or so - but it was just as hot as the day before, and I had to get inside after a while for fear of sunburn. By the way, I mentioned that it's February, right? As Carole and I lay in the sun for a little while, tanning, I remarked "This is definately wrong... it's snowing in Madrid, there are rainstorms in California, and we're tanning in Canada? This is nice, but it feels wrong... like the world is topsy-turvy...."
So, Sunday night I made breaded chicken breasts and potatoe trouffade, we watched the Oscars, and I had a few beers (okay, five I think... they had been burning a hold in the fridge for two weeks anyway!) - and I was fine!
Of course, I'm not going to let it go to my head - it's back to sanity now. I've got 15 days until my surgery, and I've got to book my pre-operative appointment tomorrow - so, back to reality and the meagre fat-free diet. Oh, and it's raining now too. See, everything's back to normal - of course, this being the last day of February is also the FIRST day of rain all month. We've had the hottest, driest, sunniest February on record. Hooray! I think... I love the sun, but I sure hope this isn't the beginning of a freaky global warming fiasco...
What a sad, sad state of affairs it is, when "same-old, same-old" includes a night in the Emergency room hooked up to tubes and dopey on demerol. Heck, it's barely even worth mentioning... so, Saturday night/Sunday morning aside, here's how I spent my weekend:
Friday night, my band played it's first "all ages" show to about 60 Surrey youth, at the Stardust roller rink. I'd had a gallbladder attack in the wee hours of Friday morning, and so I wasn't sure how the gig would turn out, what with my lack of sleep and percacet still in my system... but all in all, it was a lot of fun. We played pretty well, the sound was great (I got to use my new GK amp) and the kids really seemed to like us. After the gig, I made the mistake of buying a tiny 93 cent bag of plain popcorn, so a couple hours after getting home I had another gb attack. And, silly me, I made the mistake of taking my painkiller with water, which, natually, gave me another attack four hours later....
Fortunately, mornings are generally good for me, and the egg, english muffin, and cranberry juice I had for breakfast Saturday morning caused me no grief whatsoever. I spent most of the day practicing poker online, as Saturday night Carole and I had another tournament to attend! It started at 7:30, and we actually made it there a few minutes early, despite the place being deep in the heart of Surrey.
We were greeted at the door by our host and his 6 year old daughter, who was offering all the guests cinnamon heart candies. Not being able to say no to a child, I gracefully took a single cinnamon heart, popped it into my mouth and said thank you. Geez, you'd think I'd know better by now, eh? I actually got myself sat down at the table before the attack started, but BARELY got myself up again... This was a BAD one.
I clumsily excused myself between gasps for air, and asked Carole to drive me directly to Emergency. Poor thing, she had just opened a bottle of wine, and hadn't even taken a sip. I hope the rest of the guests liked the appies we brought, we didn't get to try them either...
So anyway, you know how the rest of my Saturday night went (I am curious who won the tounament though!) and I was out of the hospital by about 1:30 AM. I'm not sure if it was a new attack, or if the demerol had just worn off, but I had another attack at 3:30AM. Dang, I really gotta stop taking a coulple sips of water before going to bed... that'll get ya every time.
Only one attack Sunday night, but I nonetheless decided to take Monday off to catch up on my sleep and reocouperate. I worked on my home computer, I worked on some of the tracks that my band has been recording, and heck, I even played a couple videogames before making a nice, all natural, health, fat free borsht for dinner. I figured, if I can't eat have a bowl of fresh vegetable soup, then there's GOT to be a problem. Sure, the water I can understand - but soup's pretty safe, right? Nope. Another super-killer-major attack, another percacet, and another restless, breathless, sweaty, pain filled hour waiting for it to kick in. Fortunately those things work a lot better than morphine does, and I was actually able to lie back in bed and watch the 1960 classic Tora! Tora! Tora! before falling asleep.
So anyway, I went to work today. I even had a sandwich for lunch. I was pretty woosy and figured I could play it safe and have a yogurt, and then passout from malnutrition, or I could gamble of a healthy dill shrimp on rye sandwich and hopeto have enough energy to type a blog entry. So far, I'm okay.
I called the surgeon and asked if I could move my surgery day closer. He was free a full two weeks earlier, so now I'm booked for March 15th. That means we won't be doing the Oregon coast tour we had planned for Easter, but seriously... like I'd really want to be in the US and have another serious attack...
Better safe than sorry, and better sooner than later. Surgery is now in three weeks. Any bets on whether I last that long?
I heard about this on the new the other day, then just came across this article today - I figured it was funny enough to reprint here:
The Guardian
They are called Charley, Left-Arrow, Diagonal-Line and Six-Point. The four female penguins at Bremerhaven Zoo in Germany are at the centre of debate after being brought in to tempt "gay" male penguins.
The zoo imported the penguins from Sweden last month after finding through DNA tests that three of their five existing pairs were all male.
The zoo had been mystified why its endangered Humboldt penguins had failed to breed, until they realised the males had paired off, the zoo's director Heike Kück said.
Last year, two of the male pairs spent months sitting on a stone instead of an egg.
But the zoo's decision to introduce females has sparked a furious response from gay and lesbian groups in Germany.
"All sorts of gay and lesbian associations have been emailing and calling in to protest," a spokesman for Bremerhaven's Zoo on the Sea in north-western Germany said.
Ms Kück defended her decision to bring in the females, which, she said, had had little success in "turning" the males.
"The central question is, are our penguins really gay or is it simply a lack of opportunity?" she told Der Spiegel. "So far the males have scarcely thrown the females a single glance. The men have had the opportunity but haven't done it.
"If the penguins really are gay then obviously they can stay gay."
The experiment goes to the heart of a debate among biologists as to whether homosexuality exists in the animal world.
Scientists have found numerous examples of same-sex behaviour in emus, dolphins and pigs, while same-sex couples in other penguin species are also well documented. They include Eric and Dora, two King penguins who live together in Edinburgh Zoo.
Yesterday Heiner Klös, a biologist at Berlin's Zoo, said: "The pairs show signs of courtship but they don't actually get round to mating. So I don't think we can say that they are actually gay."
In case the existing males show no interest in reproduction, the zoo has also flown in two new male penguins, "so the ladies don't miss out altogether", Ms Kück said.
I wait for this day for six months, and now that it's finally here, I'm SO excited! Today is the day that marks all the good stuff to come over the next six months. True, it doesn't always fall on February 10th, in fact, it came a week earlier this year!
So what am I so happy about? Well, today was the first day that, at 6:34AM as I left for work, I could see the crimson glow of sunrise peeking out from behind the eastern mountain range, with clear blue skies above. Stary blackness still loomed to the west, but in the east came the first glimpse of that six month old promise of longer days, warmer weather, shorts, beaches, sunglasses, BBQs, gardens and cervesas! (okay, okay, the cervesa is a year-round thing...)
It was truely a great way to start the day. Especially since two hours after seeing that sunrise, I'd be in a surgeon's office, waiting to hear when is the soonest I can have my gallbladder removed. As it turns out, after this seven month long wait to see the surgeon, he's totally free in March, and I had my choice of dates. I figured I'd wait until after my birthday and the Easter holiday, so I'm now finally booked for March 31! What a relief. So, barring any unforseen bumpings, it looks like that date's solid. I'll start April as a new and improved Calvin.
Well, another busy-busy week has passed, and a new one has started.
I bottled beer a week ago, and have two bottles left, without so much as a hangover to show for it - next time I'll brew stronger beer. Nobody should consume 23 litres of beer in 8 days without getting one good drunk out of it... must've been defective.
Oh yeah, I can drink again, by the way... it turns out, consuming alcohol doesn't seem to cause my gallbladder any grief. Cool!
I've also been eating really well the past couple of weeks. This last week alone, I made Tandoori Chicken on Basmati rice, Cochinita Pibil (slow roasted pork) on long grain rice, Broiled Halibut and olives a la Calvin, and last night, I made an amazing Ceasar Tomatto Basil roasted Chicken on Fusilli that totally rocked. Yeah, I'm still eating healthy (no fast food or pop, or deap fried or fatty foods), but I've certainly added a lot more veriety to the diet. I'm up to 200lbs again too...
My brother and Dad have been over for a week too, renovating my basement and adding lots of nifty new features to my workshop and studio. Job well done, guys! Thinks are looking so cool down there. When we first moved in, the first thing I said I'd do was finish the basement, and I made a lot of progress in the first 3 months, building two rooms - but then there it sat for three years, incomplete... Thanks again guys for all the help. Amazing work! When I get the wet-bar and pool table in there, everyone's invited over for a big party ;-)
The band had also been plugging along at recording, though no real progress was made last week. We've hit a few snags, and progress has been slow, but it's nothing we can't overcome, and hopefully tonight we'll make some headway.
I also have rented (and returned and re-rented) a couple of bass rigs over the past week, with the expectation of purchasing a new amp setup soon. I had my heart set on a SWR 750x rig, as that's what Godsmack and Static-X use, but no dealer in Canada could get one in in less than 8 weeks - plus,nobody would bring one in unless I put a deposit down... I want to TRY one before I buy one, but they say they won't bring one in unless I promise to buy it. Lame... So I decided to rent an SWR 350x to see if the technology sounded good, even though I'd be ordering the more powerful version. The only one available was at the Surrey Long & McQuade, so I had to trek into no man's land. I got the amp back to the studio, tried it out, and IT SUCKED! It buzzed like a mo-fo, had absolutely NO guts, made terrible discharge squeals when it was powered off, and didn't even have good tone dispite all the flaws, so I trekked back into no man's land the next day to return it and try something else. What I finally walked out of there with was a Gallien-Krueger 700RB. And Whoah, I love it. It's half the price of the SWR, but had about triple the power (it's rating is similar, but has WAY more balls) plus it's got so many extra features that I think I've found a winner. I've only played it for about 1/2 an hour, but I'm sure I want to buy it. Now I've gotta try-and-buy speakers... that's gonna be fun...
Anyway, like I said, it was a busy week... the weather has been nice, even though we woke up to a surprise snowfall yesterday morning, it's back to blue skies and green grass today. The days are getting noticeably longer already, and I'm starting to yearn for the beach. Ski season didn't even begin this year, and though I kinda regret not even getting up the slopes once, it's not too bad - I want spring to come now anyway.
Gotta run, more work to do...