and Bella walks again!

I can't sleep.

Dad goes in tomorrow for surgery...outpatient surgery, but an invasive and extremely painful procedure on top of the chronic pain he's been in for months and months and months. Chronic pain is so easy to type and say and think. But it's such a high-voltage and wordless thing-- he and I have barely even acknowledged what's been going on even though it's been such a heavy and constant weight, day after day.
If kidney stones aren't even the worst part of any given day of his... I can't imagine what those days must be like!

I'm extremely worried, which does no good. So I sit in my bed with my laptop on my stomach... its warmth feels good against the twisting knots in my belly.

Today: work was pretty tedious, but I got a decent amount done and contacted some top-notch researchers whose work excites me. It started to snow fairly hard as I drove off into the low gray cloud (thinking of Stephen King's "The Mist" and the family fight I had about it last year... does everything tie into a philosophical conversation with my dad?)

I did something for the first time today-- I got my hair done at a nice salon; not one of the tiny lean-to house salons where it's me and a bunch of blue-haired ladies getting a perm. Lately I've been craving something relaxing, and for some weird reason I just keep thinking about the days when I was a little kid and I had really long white-blond hair that my friends or my parents' friends were always braiding or flipping up into a ponytail. Nothing feels as amazing as someone playing with your long hair-- it's the single most relaxing feeling on the planet. So off I went to a nice salon because I'd read that a brand-new beauty school almost-graduate was giving cuts and color for half-off.
"Please don't cut my hair," I said to her. "I've been trying to grow it out forever. And I don't really want a different color... can we do highlights that are basically exactly the same shade?"
She looked at me in the mirror. I looked at her. She gave me a very knowing smile. The owner of the salon, standing over our shoulders, didn't flinch. I think she's seen many frazzled people sitting in that chair who don't want hair that's shorter or a different color... they just want to sit in the chair and pretend that they're five again with waist-long hair.

Two hours later, I was released into a heavy snow storm with wet curly hair that looks almost exactly like my normal wet curly hair, except it cost me a small fortune and probably added a year to my life.
Sometimes, being a little shallow is the antidote for being a little overwhelmed.
I would gladly give them money I barely have for the same thing I already had again. Seriously.

Yesterday: Spent almost 6 hours painting my bedroom. It's really hard to paint by yourself! I missed my painting buddy. The fumes start getting to you and then the panic sets in that you have to finish, perfectly, or you will never leave your fume-y apartment again. At 6pm I staggered out of my home for the first time all day-- exhausted but triumphant. Today, when I came home and flopped down on my bed in this room with no light switches or paintings on the walls, I looked up to admire my handiwork and discovered that the paint I used on the trim was exactly .000001 shade lighter than the paint that covers the rest of the walls.
The trim only took 5 of those 6 hours.

Game face on. I will triumph over $16 paint! I will learn to be a domestically capable person! Baer paint, $20 shampoo, tiny washing machine in my closet, schizophrenic stove range, Safeway strange & unusual-tasting vegetable bins... you can take my pride, but you cannot take my soul! I ate an artichoke for dinner, and by the end of this week, I will have beige walls and beige trim, or so help me, god!

(*apparently sleeping in potent chemical paint fumes and then getting potent chemical crap applied to your hair results in extremely long, pointless rants about domestic insecurities)

After painting, Tom, Thad, Sam & Kate joined me to celebrate Lance's belated birthday with a blue collar bowling extravaganza. Tom discovered an enormous purple ball with a thumb hole the size of Mount St. Helens that he coined "The Gaper". One round consisted of having to USE the Gaper to bowl, and it was the hardest I've laughed in a very, very, very long time. I had to use two hands and basically throw the ball in the general direction of the lane just to get it rolling.

Last week: a week of good things and very, very strange things. There was a scary car accident right outside my office window, where we've seen many accidents and even more near-misses over the past two years because of a particularly precarious two-way stop that SHOULD be a four-way stop with the national guard out there every evening to get people to stop going 60 in a 45 and blowing the only stop signs that are there. A lady blew the stop sign and got plowed into by a pickup truck... she ended up in the ditch, I ran out to call 911 and see if they were hurt. Both drivers were dazed, but within about 30 seconds she went from pale and incoherent to white and panicked. Screaming-- incoherent screaming is all I remember as she dove into the back seat and all I could think was, "child. Small child. Can't remember this address. Hurt child."
She reappeared holding a small black lab whose hind legs were dangling helplessly. The woman turned in a couple of hopeless circles and then sat next to the car, rocking the dog in her arms and sobbing.

It was awful. I felt sick-- first the sound of two cars crunching together in the street; then relief when the woman came out of the car in the ditch; then this. The woman wanted to take her dog away, but a man who had pulled over behind them helped me talk her out of it-- he'd called 911; her face and chin were scratched and bleeding; they both had to report the accident. Without so much as looking at each other, we both put her dog in the back seat of his very nice SUV and peeled out of the parking lot. I think we made it halfway to Longmont before I even asked what his name was, as he nervously looked in the rearview mirror at me with a large dog on my lap who was shaking so badly that I thought she might be having seizures.

To make a long and scary story short, after four stops at emergency vet clinics that were decoys, we finally got Bella into the vets, where she was whisked away and put straight into surgery. Hours later, she emerged from spinal damage surgery. I was relieved that they hadn't put her down, but very nervous about her outcome.
At this point, I was covered in dog hair, glass dust, some dog blood... I had so much adrenaline that the zippers on my boots were audibly clicking as my legs shook.
Over the weekend, the dog's owner called to say that Bella not only made it through surgery, but a few days later, she was eating, could control her bladder, and was even putting weight on her back legs-- something the vets said might not ever happen at ALL, but if it did, she wasn't expected to for several days later. Bella is expected to make a full recovery!

If there is anything as sweet as those words, I don't know what is. I'm so, so happy that she's ok... it sounds stupid, but I really bonded with her on our 30 minute panicked drive to the vet's (and more vets) offices. For all the pain she was in, she literally didn't whimper once-- she just shook in my arms and flailed around a little bit and rested her face on my chest and watched me.

It's difficult to worry about things that are out of your control. But every once in a while, a situation comes along where you barely have time to worry before you're able to leap into motion.
I much prefer motion. It feels so much better to be stroking her and saying what a good dog she is than standing back at your desk, wondering if she made it or not.

If only life gave us more options to leap...
leap, and the net will appear.

the continuing theme of my quarter-life crisis.