Day Four Grade - Morale quandry

Such a mixed day. Got a whole four hours of sleep the night before. Was so tired that at one point in midafternoon while writing a time entry, pen in hand, I fell asleep. Head bob startled me back awake. I've dozed off reading or in a class, but never n the middle of actually writing something. Tears came in the afternoon when I was defeatedb my inability to simply clip amessage to the side of an inbox - it's on top of a tall credenza and opening the clip required a pincer grip, but there was no way I could reach up that high and out far enough with my left to deposit this simple piece of paper.

I headed out to the doctor's office trul dejected.

But there, I was pronounced as doing very well, and moved into a softer, less restrictive sling, and given the go ahead to start therapy. Oh, and drugs, so I can sleep (yay!). The therapy is not going to be fun - much pulling and tugging and weights nad generally promises to leave me sore - but it means I will be recovering mobility. According to the doctor I am quite lucky because I broke a nice, big chunk of bone off the top, meaning that it is well-anchored.

New sling gives much more mobility, meaning more pain, and hangs directly from my neck, meaning pain until I get used to it, but no compression strap, sono more sense of entrapped limbs. Tradeoffs, but worth it.

Overall, a better day, even though I was very tired.

And now, off to luxuriate in a bath, an indulgence denied to me throughout this injury. I have a lovely scar, no more bandages, and I'm on the mend.

Stolen from Lyssa...

...who stole it from Dil3mma, who stole it from Sirinek......who stole it from n3m3sis42 who stole it from sylkweb who stole it from ${GOD} knows where...

And now this week's Friday Five: Goals and Childhood.

1. As a child, who was your favorite superhero/heroine? Why?
Does Peter Pan count? Talk about your sexual ambiguity--I grew up on the Mary Martin version wherein I knew that Peter Pan was supposed to be a boy but was really a girl. That made me ambitious.

2. What was one thing you always wanted as a child but never got?
To travel. My dad had two opportunities to go to exotic places - Venezuela and Brazil - but passed them up. I begged and begged. No dice. I didn't get out of Oregon/Washington until I was a senior in highschool and went to California.


3. What's the furthest from home you've been?
St. John, the U.S. Virgin Islands. Particularly so since "home" at that time was Alaska. I loved it there, but couldn't live on an island longterm.


4. What's one thing you've always wanted to learn but haven't yet?
A musical instrument. I was a much-deprived child, never forced to sit through a single piano lesson. I was working at the violin for a while, but my instructor stopped teaching adults and I never found another; now I don't have time.

5. What are your plans for the weekend?
Study tonight (just taking a break), going to an arboretum early tomorrow (to remind myself that spring will come), Imolc celebration and dinner with friends tomorrow evening; study, gaming, and a law school meeting on Sunday. Other than that, resting [snort].

Dredged up by Lyssa

I was a dolly-lover as a small child. Baby dolls, playing mommy, were my favorite things. I went through a period when I was about 3 and 4 of obsessively putting my babies into pajamas every night and putting them to bed, then getting them up and dressing them in the morning. Since there were 23 of them, counting all the little dollies who of course deserved beddies too, this was quite the daily process.

When I was 3, though, Santa Claus brought me a formidable companion, a walking doll who was as tall as I, named "Tootles" on the package. She was the rage in 1961. If you stood behind her and lifted up her hand, her leg moved forward, simulating an 11-month-old learning to walk. The problem was, she was only an inch or so shorter than me, which meant my arms were not long enough to reach around her and perform the "simulate walking" function that was her selling point. But she was one of my family now, and I loved her. I called her "Turtle," because my little mouth couldn't get around Tootles.

Sometime in March her head fell off.

The creepy part about Turtle was she had eyes to seemed to look at you no matter where you were in the room. So she'd been staring at me from the toybox, accusation in her glassine glare, for months now. Because I didn't play with her much. It was hard for me to lug her from place to place, none of the babydolls clothes fit her, and she was hard plastic, not the least bit cuddly. The best thing to was to send her off to school in the morning and indulge the babies.

A crisis was called for. In the form of a beheading.

It's not the head coming off that I remember. The guilty tears as I carried it to my parents are dim. I recall my father wielding a screwdriver, my mother backseat driving about the proper alignment, and both of them smiling as they pronounced Turtle "as good as new." I tucked in the babies, and my parents tucked me in.

Alas, "Good as new" was not what Turtle desired. I was at the soft edge of sleep when her head sprang off, bounced across the floor, and landed beside my bed, glaring accusation in the soft glow of the nightlight. My screams brought parents, who spirited Turtle away with promises to fix her better.

She would not spend another night in my room. I dreamed that night of Turtle, her head in the red toybox, scolding me for my negligence while her body ran about the room. More screaming, more parents running in.

I did not see Turtle again. Whether her head was successfully replaced and she found a home with an older, taller mommy, or whether she landed in the trashcan, I do not know. Still, there is never a doll-based horror movie that I don't remember her.