The Christmas Martyr has spoken.

Several months ago I signed up for a six-week quilting class. Because I wanted to learn how to quilt, sure, but also because I was looking to expand my social circle to include a bunch of women who share my combined loves of lozenges and sitting.

I took this six-week class, and then I took a two-day class, and then I took a three-hour class, and then I asked if I could retake session two of the six-week class. At which point the instructor handed me a class schedule to recommend another course I might find helpful, Give Up Already 101. Little did she know I'm already deep into the 300-level of the Quit It curriculum.

So after like forty-five hours of concentrated instruction, I decided I would make everyone a quilt for Christmas. It seemed like a fantastic idea in September, sort of, to me. And I announced it to everybody like a jackass and ran out and bought a metric shit ton of fabric so I could spend the next four months cordoned off in the back of the house trying to jam a queen-sized quilt underneath the arm of my basic $279 Husqvarna sewing machine. It's a lot like trying to feed a VCR into a paper shredder.

The indie quilt store where I took all the classes is less than a mile up the road; yesterday I busted in there with a rotary cutter in one hand, seventy-three too small quilt squares in the other hand, nine yards of purple flannel around my neck, and weeping. Like a sad, sad king whose scepter is just WAY too sharp.

As of today I have one quilt left. ONE QUILT LEFT. I'm actually really enjoying the process; I tend to learn better with endless hours of instruction coupled with an almost unbearable amount of immediate and tedious practice, so I feel I'm thriving. I would have been done by now but there was a Christmas onslaught of zombie orders that rightfully took priority; as it stands I expect to have this quilt completely finished around three in the morning on Christmas Day.

I've taken pictures of all the finished quilts but I don't want to post them yet-- I don't want anybody seeing the evidence and getting all disappointed this far before Christmas. Nothing like a baby blue and eggplant quilt that looks like it was hand-quilted by mice to make you wonder whatever happened to Nordstrom gift cards.

I'm the Foursquare Mayor of this Goddamn Safeway.

I've got a piece up at McSweeney's today that chronicles my manic highs and lows on Foursquare. I wrote it, surprisingly enough, after I discovered I'd just lost the title of mayor at my neighborhood Safeway. Once the wracked sobs and teeth gnashing subsided, it occurred to me that I might be overly invested in an application that awards points based solely on my ability to leave my house.****

Foursquare fun facts:

I once held the mayorships of two In-N-Burgers at one time. It was mid-August, I believe, though I'm not sure; around here we just refer to that period of time as "Camelot".

In the interest of quasi-privacy, I changed the number of the Safeway I temporarily owned and the name of the dude who apparently lives there now. The indignant power struggle, however, is all too real.

****I am the long-standing Foursquare mayor of my house. We've got a special going right now- if you steal the mayorship away from me, I'll smash your smartphone with a tack hammer in the garage.

I'm Foursquare friends with The Palazzo Resort in Las Vegas. The Palazzo Resort is currently checked in as "off the grid- checked in but hiding their whereabouts". I can only deduce by this that the 3,000-room Palazzo hotel is hanging out at The Palms casino.

I believe that Foursquare might be the most useless application currently available online, which explains why I love it so. "Erin," one might then ask, "What's the second most useless application?" Answer: The rest of the Internet ties for second place.

Architectural Road Trip

Randy came to me last week and told me he wants to take an Architectural Road Trip to cover a bunch of stuff at one time that he'd like to see but that doesn't necessarily warrant its own road trip.

This has nothing to do with China, by the way.

So here's what we're doing this weekend. We're driving up Route 66 through Winslow, Peach Springs, and Seligman and we're spending the night in Kingman.

Then tomorrow we're going to finally go walk out on that big glass bridge thing they built above the Grand Canyon a few years ago that we haven't seen yet because it costs like eighty dollars a person which is ridiculous. I was surprised to find out this was on the list since Randy generally takes his boycotts pretty seriously, but apparently the awesome factor broke him down. It is, after all, a giant glass bridge above the Grand Canyon and we are, after all, only human.

Provided neither one of us plummets to a steep, shardy death, we're then driving the rest of the way to Las Vegas. Primarily to see the new Hoover Dam Bypass, obviously, because whenever I think "Vegas" I always immediately then think "bridge".

Once in Vegas we're going to take a gander at the new and completed City Center they were working on last time we were there, and then we have reservations to go to the Minus 5 Ice Lounge, a bar made entirely out of ice. Ice tables, ice walls, ice chairs, even the drinking glasses are made of ice. We saw it on the Travel Channel last weekend. I can't even write any more about it because I'll start jumping up and down again.

I've packed a huge surprise picnic lunch complete with Brie and bread and prosciutto and tiny bottles of olive oil and aged balsamic, and I'm not at all embarrassed to tell you that I'll be busting out some of the good lingerie over the next couple of days because this is going to be the coolest, most weirdly romantic road trip ever.

Beijing, part three.

The Great Wall. I still can't quite believe I was actually there.

 

I carried that camera bag around like it was my job. And the camera was never in it so by the end of the trip it was just stuffed with random flyers and used napkins and stretched out hair ties, and there I am, curled around it on an airport bench like my left kidney's in there.

Randy and I knew we needed to bring raincoats with us so I, being hyper-cognizant of the 44-pound luggage weight limit, bought one of those "coats in a bag" from REI; an ultralight waterproof shell jammed inside a bag the size of a tennis ball. Randy went the other way, opting for this three-layer red jacket in the picture. He strolled around the store zipping up zippers and snapping snaps, looking for a coat with, quote, "enough systems". Randy really likes a coat that does the work for him; if he gets hot, he wants a ripcord he can pull that opens a hidden vent under his arm. If he gets cold, he wants to be able to reach back and unzip an entire other, heavier coat out of the hood. I felt smugly efficient tossing my coat/bag combo into the suitcase, but then in China I refused to take the coat out of the bag. It was sprinkling at the Great Wall but it wasn't enough to justify destroying the compact perfection of coat in a bag. Randy strutted around like a big red dry rooster, zipping shit, unzipping other shit, "Erin! Look at all my systems!" Meanwhile I'm hunkered down in a damp sweatshirt with the camera bag on my head, waiting for a typhoon so I could spring my coat from its skintight chrysalis. Whatever. When Randy manages to find the fifty yuan his systems ate I'll concede defeat.

 

We also went to The Summer Palace. Breathtaking.

 

And we drove downtown to walk around the Olympic venues, the National Stadium (the Bird's Nest) and the National Aquatics Center (the Water Cube).

Man, I love going back through these pictures. This was such an incredible trip. And now you're up to speed on the first two days!

Beijing, part two.

The timing worked out that we happened to be in Beijing for the Mid-Autumn Festival, or the Mooncake Festival. This is significant not only because we had the opportunity to witness and enjoy a significant cultural event, but also because it sounded a lot like there was gonna be cake.

Ming picked up that I was excited about this Mid-Autumn Festival, mostly because I kept slipping and calling it "Cake Day", and she pulled out her very best American analogies to talk me in off the cake ledge.

"In America, you have fruitcake? Yes?" Crap. Yeah. We have fruitcake. "The mooncake is like the fruitcake in China. You give it? And it's nice? But no one likes to eat it." She made a blick face there to punctuate. Mooncake is bad.

"Not all mooncake is bad," our regional guide piped up. "Some kinds aren't very bad."

"Ming, what's your favorite kind of mooncake?" I asked.

This required kind of a ridiculously long conversation with the regional guide in Chinese, I don't know what was going on there. Then she turned back to me, her hand on her chin. She squinted her eyes appraisingly.

"I try to figure out what kind of mooncake you will like best," she told me. I sat up straighter. I felt like I was about to get my cards read. She tapped her chin and thought.

"Okay, which do you like better: bean paste or soy curd?"

Oh. Wow. Okay. We're in a whoooooole other spectrum of "cake", now, aren't we.

"I like... strawberries?"

Ming nodded, satisfied. "I think you will like the bean paste."

Uh, and I think we need to work on our negotiating skills. The only thing bean paste and strawberries have in common is their inability to get along.

The hotel left complimentary mooncakes in our room that night; Ming told us to eat the mooncake while looking up at the moon and thinking about our families. I'd already eaten a mooncake when pressed at dinner so I was pretty sure that if I ate a mooncake and thought of my family, my family would be filled with an instant yet mysterious sense of annoyance. So I packed it instead and brought it home. One of these days I'm going to frost it and try and convince Randy it's a cupcake. And then I will pack my shit and go.

847 words.

If you think my NaBloPoMo stats are admirable, you should see where I am for NaNoWriMo.

Beijing, part one

The thing about our trip to China was that it was completely insane. We went so many different places and saw so many amazing things, I'm literally still completely overwhelmed. A couple of days ago, someone asked me what my favorite part of China was. I just sat there, glassy-eyed, slack jawed. I don't remember what I finally came up with. Pandas, maybe. People like pandas. Pandas are a safe answer. Pandas'll shut people up and let me eat my dinner, already.

Our trip was professionally engineered by an international tour company that specializes in making sure every second of every minute of your time in China is spent as efficiently as possible. This is an excerpt I just copied directly from the tour company's website:

"[Our] tours are not particularly designed for those who are looking for relaxing holidays in China. We strive to provide more of a cultural journey, an adventure, rather than a getaway; a learning experience rather than an escape.

In tune with this approach, we designed our China journey for those who would like to discover this great culture with flexibility and an open mind, and for those who would like to work together with us to achieve this goal."

Translated: We're going to run your ass off every second of every day making sure you leave here securely convinced that China is a paragon of modernity, tradition, progress, and morality, and if that means you get five hours of sleep a night, then that's what it fucking means. If you're not with us on this then you're against us, and this is China, right, so that strategy clearly isn't going to work. Now get back on that bus."

All of these tours are sanctioned by the Chinese government, meaning that in addition to the requisite government stores and factories that popped up on our tour itinerary, we never ever heard of or encountered any signs of poverty or national unrest. We had at least one guide with us the entire tour, and most of the time we had two. Our hotels, restaurants, tour stops, domestic flights, and other transportation were all arranged behind the scenes so there weren't any choices to be made on the fly. Add to that the fact that we literally-- LITERALLY-- had roughly thirty minutes of "free time" (meaning time to sit down in a chair somewhere and gasp for breath) from the time we left the hotel at 7:00am until we reached another hotel at 9:00 or 10:00 that night, and it's clear that no one was going to have an opportunity to accidentally stumble upon something culturally unflattering on one's own.

Our "national" guide, Ming, met us at the Beijing airport when we landed. As the national guide, she stayed with us the entire trip; the "regional" guides changed daily and were along to coordinate travel, food, and hotel details for a specific city. But Ming was our girl. Thirty-one years old, tall, very slim, cute, Chinese.

"My name is Ming," she told us once she'd corralled us through the arrival gate, "but you can call me Kate." Apparently the tour company had given all of their guides "Western" names to make it easier for their charges.

Which struck me as really funny; are there a lot of Americans who can't pronounce "Ming"?

"I'm sorry, Monp? Mirg? Say it one more time, slower. Okay... Mmmmelg? Fuck this, I'm calling you Kate."

The CIA should recruit me in 2024

I had a meeting this morning with my boss. Whom I've met four times. In two years. That's how it is when you're an international spy. Not a lot of face time.

I'm assuming. I'm only an international spy if someone somewhere has cake. If you have cake and you're reading this right now, don't look but I'm under your futon. Shhhhhh. Just go to sleep.

Two years ago I signed a contract with a local publishing company to write a book, and after a lot of organizing and research and chasing interviewees, it looks like that book is actually going to get written.

And that's all I can say because I've had this website for almost eight years and I think the "don't talk shit about work" lesson might have finally taken hold.

35% of it, anyway.

One!

So this is a pretty great way to cheat on the first day of NaBloPoMo... Go to trapeze class.

Somehow Randy ended up with the camera for this one and I just knew bad things were going to happen.

"You watch," I told the trapeze guy (handler?) up on the platform with me, "I love that guy to death but I'll give you a hundred bucks if he gets me in this video AT ALL."

 We both glance down at Randy. Who's already filming us. So I guess I owe that guy a hundred bones.

I wish there was video of the time I overflipped and caught my ponytail in the net. Or the one where I caught my foot in the net and half my big toenail disappeared. Where was Randy taking jerky close-ups of the ground THEN?

Here's a wider shot of virtually the same thing:

Stop pulling on my legs, I'll come out when I'm ready.

So here's what's going on. I got all gunned up to do NaBloPoMo this year thinking it would be a great way for me to tell the China trip story (albeit in stunted paragraph form) and then, on a tear, I decided to go ahead and give NaNoWriMo a whirl, too. Why not, right? So then OBVIOUSLY the writing project I was hired into TWO AND A HALF YEARS AGO smugly lurches to life and adds itself to my November to-do list, so yeah. I have no doubt whatsoever that I can post every day to my blog, pound out a 50,000 word novel AND satisfy the legal bindings of my contractural writing agreement. It's such a non-issue I don't even think we should talk about it anymore. Ever. Again. Seriously, don't bring it up.

I turned thirty-five in October and that went about the way you think it went. If you're under thirty-five you're no doubt imagining a huge drunken blowout, and if you're over thirty-five you're pursing your lips and shaking your head because you know full well I spent the entire day crying under the bed. Turns out you're both right because as it happens I can drink and cry and hide all at the same time. It's a life skill. If you're thirty-four you wouldn't understand.

You too, Atlanta.

Randy and I just returned from an epic trip to China. We hadn't planned on it but some friends put a trip and a group together and ultimately it was like twenty-three dollars to go on a world-class China extravaganza. Beijing, Xi'an, Chengdu, Lijiang, Dali, Kunming, Suzhou, Tongli, Shanghai.

Six domestic flights once in China. I ate a box and a half of Dramamine over sixteen days; my blood now runs orange but hey, no other passengers got puked on for once. And it's starting to look like my peripheral vision might come back so it was obviously the right call.

I tried to write about the trip during the nine free minutes I had there with an Internet connection, but China blocked access to Blogger before the 2008 Olympics and never opened it back up. I already called and bitched out the US embassy, don't you worry.

No I didn't. The US embassy stopped taking my calls like four years ago.

So I'm going to write about the trip as I go through all the receipts and brochures and everything I picked up along the way. I don't expect that to help, it's all in Chinese, but maybe there'll be some pictures or numbers or a Rorschach in there to jog my memory.

I can tell you this, though: the Beijing airport is absolutely unbelievable. We stepped off the plane and into the gate and Randy and I were both pretty positive we'd landed in Gattaca. What year is this, 2118? Is there some international airport contest going on that I haven't been privy to? Because if so, Beijing fucking won. You can stop pouring concrete, Dallas / Ft. Worth, it's over, we lost.

I have a restraining order but I have a feeling it won't stick.

I'm going to blame my Internet absence on the fact that I'm now missing a small piece of my right ear. I had no idea that all of a person's motivation could be localized to one very small and specific zone on the body, but there it is. Don't blame me, blame science. Or cancer. Yeah, back up, maybe blame cancer.

Having part of your ear cut off is not as fun as you think it's going to be, for the record. I made the same mistake this time as I made when I had a similar procedure performed on my back-- I disregarded everything the doctors said beforehand.

My dermatologist recommended the Mohs procedure for my melanoma removal; Mohs is a removal method that allows the doctor to take incredibly small sections of the area at a time and microscopically verify right then that the borders are clear. This in contrast with the removal procedure my previous dermatologist used on my back, a procedure called crazed serial hacking.

So I show up at the surgery center first thing in the morning with my Kindle and my baggie of almonds and my toe socks and an extra Diet Coke in my purse because after the doctor removes the first swath of skin it takes anywhere from three to six hours to find out if more skin has to be taken, and you have to remain in the office during that time. I'm not a hundred percent sure on why-- unless it has something to do with not wanting to loose a pack of barely cauterized facial surgery folk on the local restaurant community.

The doctor held up a mirror and explained exactly what was going to happen, information I would gladly share with you now except that my brain disregarded it immediately and replaced it with, "It's cool, don't even worry about it." I do remember he said something about trying to keep the curl at the top of my ear intact if it was possible; apparently trying to recreate that feature of the ear is, quote, "complicated".

Pssssshhhh. Doesn't look complicated. Pussy.

No, I'm joking, save the curl.

There were several extraordinarily painful shots to numb the area, and then the doctor began removing the melanoma on top of my ear. We chatted about the kinds of things you chat about when one of you is performing surgery on the other (the state of integrated air and missile defense, Foucault, etc.), the assistant cauterized the open wound, bandaged me up, and sent me back out to the waiting room for three to six hours.

The surgeon only sees one melanoma patient per day; it takes significantly longer to test the melanoma tissue than your other skin cancers and one is all they can do. I asked the nurse at the reception desk if they had a lanyard or a badge or something I could wear with MELANOMA on it, something to signify my obvious gangster status in this room full of wannabes. She did not. Rest assured I claimed my rightful position anyway by immediately laying claim to the comfy chair. Had there been a television I would have commandeered the remote. There was no television, however, so I had to settle for permanently naming all the fish in the fish tank.

Four hours later the doctor called me back. I pointedly left all my stuff in my chair, wishing too late that I'd thought to designate a Number Two to manage shit in my absence (the guy in the full neck bandage with his shoes off and all the good magazines on his lap, for example), ignored someone's grandchild calling Whiskerpants "Nemo", and went back.

"Good news," he said, "We got it all the first time. The borders are clear."

Excellent on all kinds of levels.

"So we'll see you first thing tomorrow morning."

That's how it works with Mohs. Because no one can predict how many times the doctor is going to have to remove tissue, it's impossible to plan to do the "closing" surgery that same day. Instead you're recauterized, bandaged up, sent home, and you come back the next day. Whereupon the doctor performs the skin graft / reconstruction surgery.

The nurse removes the temporary bandage and starts gathering the supplies she needs to really wrap up my head. In the midst of this she makes a fatal error.

"Do you want to see it?" she asks.

"Sure."

She holds up a hand mirror.

You know how sometimes you see an obviously photoshopped image where the intent is to make the observer believe that an inflight airplane only has one wing, or a new puppy has seven legs? That's exactly how I felt looking into that mirror. Like something was vitally wrong. It took me a split second to even identify what I was looking at; it was my ear, sure, but someone had photoshopped the top off.

I started laughing. And then I teared up just a little. The nurse then realized her mistake.

"It's going to be fine!" she said quickly. "Once he does the reconstruction, it'll be so much better, I promise. Seriously," she said. "Seriously."

Despite my repeated insistence that I was fine, she refused to take a picture of it with my cell phone.

As an added bonus, it hurt quite a bit once the shots wore off. I took a couple of the provided percocet, slept on my left side, and the next morning I was surprised at how much better it felt.

Piece of cake! Fuck you, cancer!

Right? Here's how the reconstruction went.

And I'm paraphrasing here because a) you can't quote an event, and b) I wasn't really listening.

The doctor pulled off the bandage. I'm guessing he didn't actually PULL it off, he most likely REMOVED it, but it sure as shit felt like he pulled that shit clean the shit off. Like pulling a wad of duct tape off the ends of your hair.

He administered more of those numbing shots. Straight into freshly cauterized tissue. Which really didn't seem that bad... once he started cutting that cauterized tissue completely off.

He took the skin graft from behind my ear. This was made pretty clear by all the eerily painless snipping and pulling going on back there. He sewed the skin graft onto the surgery site, stitched it up, stitched up the skin graft site, cauterized the absolute fuck out of everything, and left me in the capable hands of Nurse Regretful to wrap my head into a gauze vise.

Up until this point I was pretty proud of myself for the maintenance of my hair; I'd pinned it back out of the surgery site so it wouldn't get it the way, and it was still relatively blood and gore free. Nurse Regretful stopped that train in its tracks with a big handful of hair slime; she slicked it back all the way to the crown with a fistful of medical grade pork fat.

"There!" she smiled. "Now don't get that wet for a week."

So no washing my hair for a week. I pretended like this was going to be an inconvenience for me.

For the record, that big white bandage behind my ear came off inside of two hours. From then on it was just me and Big Tape. Big Tape and I ran an accelerated gamut of relationship stages, eventually ending in a standoff of mutual disgust. We passed through curiosity, bland acceptance, boundary testing, itchiness, irrational anger, complacency, stickiness, and smells weird.

Before I wrap this up I feel like I need to interrupt myself to mention how unbelievably painful this second procedure and its healing turned out to be. That first night before the skin graft was slightly unpleasant; the night after was fucking unbearable. I got home and felt good. I knew enough from the night before to expect the local to wear off in about four hours, I assumed I'd take a pain pill to sleep, and then based on experience I assumed I'd wake up the next morning at 90%.

That was safely not the case. I did everything but snort the pain medication and my whole head refused to not be on fire. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't turn my head, I couldn't convince Big Tape I just wanted to be friends, it was ridiculous.

When I went back a week later I was ready to cut Big Tape off with an ice pick. Big Tape did not feel the same, judging by the raw tenacity with which he decided to hold on.

This was a different nurse than my mirror-wielding surgery nurse. I couldn't see what she was doing, but I knew the end goal: get this fucking tape ball off my head. She's got scissors, she's got a scalpel, she's ripping it with her teeth... And every tug is just another tug on a twice-cauterized, freshly skin-grafted wound. Surprisingly enough I don't know all that much about skin grafts so I sort of picture them peeling off willy-nilly. Like Colorforms.

"I swear to god I'm gonna punch you in the face," I gritted at one point. She just furrowed her brow and nodded sympathetically.

"The ears are so sensitive," she empathized. "Bear with me."

It finally came off.

"Oh," she breathed, "It looks so good!"

She held up a mirror.

I laughed. "That does not look good."

It looked a lot better than it had when Nurse Regretful held a mirror up before the reconstruction, but it still looked pretty scalped.

New Nurse laughed with me. "It looks good to us," she explained, "The skin graft didn't die."

Oh. Well. Silver linings and all that. Way to not die, skin graft. Wooooooooo.

New Nurse gave me a new sheet of instructions to lose in my car. Big Tape wiggled his passive-aggressive goodbye from the biological waste can. I left and drove straight to my parents' house.

Who agreed that it was so much better than it could have been. And yet from a certain angle... yeah, not great.

But I said then and I maintain now that it's ONLY MY EAR. They literally could have removed it completely and I'd still be dancing in the streets if it meant not having cancer.

Plus, Nurse Regretful was absolutely right:

I truly cannot believe how well this guy has healed. I just can't believe it. And I took this picture about five weeks after the surgery, it looks even better now. You can see the tail of the skin graft site there behind my ear.

Having said that, I'm still amazed by how much it hurts. Not all the time, but I have to really prepare to sleep on it. And when I hug someone and I hug to the left, I invariably end up wincing when my friend's head presses against my ear. I would say something except that hugs are spontaneous things and I hate to bark out a series of rules outlining a three-second embrace.

It reminds me too much of Big Tape.

If you can read, go ahead and knock that down to 20%.

If you're a child-- and this pertains both to children who are and aren't related to me-- and you're between the ages of Walking and Barely Reading, you can safely expect a solid 85% of our conversations to revolve around whether or not you have to go to the bathroom.

We've decided to upholster the pie and eat the chair with vanilla ice cream.

I'm posting this via email and I'm going to try to attach photos but I'm not sure how that's going to work, if they'll stay where I put them or if they'll all end up at the bottom or what. I guess we'll see.

Kelly emailed me this morning to let me know that my bed and breakfast post showed up in her read feeder but not anywhere else, and I told her yeah, that's because about three hours after I wrote it the whole "Sam/Ron" name thing had been totally reasonably explained and that tomato coconut milk soup was pretty damn delicious, so given that and the generosity with which the local wine was being poured, I made the executive and chagrined decision to save that post to draft.

Then the pineapple mashed potatoes made a strangely yellow appearance and a whole bunch of gourmet, gargantuan pearl tapioca jiggled onto the scene so I republished.

We had a hilarious time, and I know I didn't make the point I wanted to make yesterday, that point being how surreal it was to drive three hours into the heart of nowhere only to be ushered into a stranger's kitchen and told hey! Imported tapioca and tropical mash, get your bib on! 

Anyway. 

The Chiricahua Mountains are gorgeous; these towering rock formations called "sky islands" formed by water and ice and time and gnomes and a wizard and sand. 

    

Randy was gung-ho for a fourteen or fifteen-hour hike and I was down to drive by some rocks with the windows down, so we compromised and hiked about four miles. 

 

This is me taking a picture of Randy taking a picture of me.

Much to Randy's dismay and alarm I chose to wear sneakers rather than regulation hiking boots.

"Don't come crying to me when your ankles are all wobbly," he told me over his shoulder. 

Periodically throughout the hike I'd yell, "Help! My ankles are collapsing! Splints! I need splints!"

At which point he'd put his fingers in his ears.

Randy taking a picture of me taking a picture of Randy.

Much to my dismay and alarm Randy chose to wear the longest socks he could find. I told him his socks were falling down about eleven thousand times.

"How are your knees?" I asked. "Are they cold? You should pull your socks up over your knees."

"I might, Erin. You don't know."

This was actually the day before, right after we checked into the B&B and drove up to the Chiricahuas so we could contemplate life and nature and which of our clothes we might possibly eat for dinner.

I don't actually remember what this specific signpost said, but more than one detailed a story about some covered wagon or another bound for settlement that made the awesome decision to break away from the wagon train to take a "shortcut" through this Apache territory.

Years later the army would invariably find one or two of the daughters enslaved in an Apache camp, and the girls would just sort of shrug, like, "yeah, I guess that shortcut was a pretty shitty idea."

Thanks for trying to shave a couple days off the trip, Dad.

 

It really was beautiful. And Randy even broke his diet protocol and had something other than an apple for breakfast; it saved the day, really, since I'm pretty sure otherwise I would have found him curled up on a rocky trail somewhere, shakily waiting for me to come along and feed him green onion pulp through an eye dropper and trying to yank his socks up over his head. 

Unfortunately it was a one time dietary breach so I was forced to eat this entire apple pie alone. In the garage. With a gardening trowel. 

 

That is a five-pound apple pie. And that's all apples in there, too, it's not like you cut it open and there's a big wad of paper towels in the middle or something. It's so enormous that other, smaller apple pies actually fall into its gravitational field; when we got home there were four normal-sized pies hovering outside the car. Which I ate. Immediately. For their own safety.

I took it to my parents' house because I needed witness to the majesty and we held a ruler up next to it for the sake of photographic perspective:

Totally unreadable. The pie renders conventional measurement moot. I mean, look, its bigger than the chair, for God's sake.  

 

 

I meant flask. Big enough to hide a flask in it.

It's the Fourth of July weekend, as you know, meaning among other things that Randy has like fifteen whole hours off in a row. Being a natural adventurer he suggested we get out of town for the weekend and head south to Bisbee and the Chiricahuas.

I know what Bisbee is, it's an adorable Old West mining town where you stay in a haunted hotel and drink beer in what used to be the Arizona stock exchange building and where the temperature is a chilly 90 degrees down from 112. But.

"What's a Chiricahua?"

Whereupon Randy explained that on the way home from the Chiricahuas we pass through Wilcox which is where the homemade five-pound apple pie store is. That was pretty much the only definition of "Chiricahua" I needed to hear so I packed a scarf and a bunch of forks and off we went.

Bisbee was great, obviously, since it's almost impossible to go wrong in a haunted hotel drinking beer in the old stock exchange, plus they really do it up Garrison Keillor style for the Fourth of July. This morning the main street in town was cordoned off with plastic netting for the annual downhill coaster car race.

"Oh, it's a great time," one helpful citizen told us. "They come racing down the hill, around the curves and everything, it's a blast."

Can anyone do it?

"Well, used to be anyone could, sure, but then a few years back one of the cars got out of control and flew into the crowd, killed a man and his child. Horrible. So now they just let the kids do it. So the cars are lighter.

Uh huh. And that seemed to do the trick, did it?

"Oh yeah. Last year a car flew into the crowd and broke somebody's ankle, but that's it."

Needless to say we didn't stick around for the drilling or mucking competitions.

Chiricahua time! NO idea what that is. We drove two hours out of Bisbee into what is seriously the flattest most abandoned Godforsaken country I have ever seen, ever. It wasn't farmland because there weren't any farms, and it wasn't cattle land because there weren't any cattle. At one point I pulled up Foursquare on my phone, an application that uses GPS tracking to find popular locations around you? And I shit you not, the only location that popped up was one another user had manually entered called "BFE". A relief, actually, since I half expected to see "kidney poaching warehouse" or "hard sell suicide cult way station" listed in the nearby results.

So we'd arranged to stay at this bed and breakfast, right, the idea (near as I can figure) being that the Chiricahuas (?) are in the mountains, and there are trees and shade and babbling brooks and hiking and dappled sunlight and frogs and birds and pie and shit. But something somewhere went terribly wrong; I don't know if these Chiricahua things MOVED or what, but we pull up in front of the bed and breakfast and there's not a tree or a frog or a dappled pie or ANYthing even remotely NEAR it.

The rest I'll just paraphrase because I'm running out of time. Within three minutes of walking into the house the proprietor (whose wife calls him Ron but who told Randy and me to call him Sam) asked me if I wouldn't mind taking a look at his computer, see if I could maybe get his Skype working for him. Which, you know. Wasn't on my activity roster.

"We've got a great menu tonight," Ron/Sam said, rubbing his hands together. "Tomato soup with coconut milk, and then we've got some potatoes with fresh pineapple, and for dessert I'm doing a gourmet... imported... tapioca!"

And I'm just sitting there at this guy's kitchen table watching his wife in her pajamas at the ironing board in the hallway and I'm trying to decide whether or not he's just fucking with me. I look to Randy like, "Oh, you better save me here, husband," and I clutched his knee under the table and I think I may have even barked out a laugh before I could help myself.

But Randy's absolutely NO help because he's on this insanely strict diet right now where he can only have 500 calories a day and 450 of those calories are from celery, right, so in the land of fight or flight he's cruising at about eight thousand feet, him and his Ziploc bag of goddamned radishes.

And I'm not kidding you here, we are seven thousand miles away from ANYTHING. There ARE NO OPTIONS.

After unloading the car we drove another twenty miles up to the Chiricahuas, which near as I can tell are big giant rocks. I don't know, I didn't read any of the signs or anything; I was too busy worried about how much imported tapioca I'm going to have to suck back later.

We walked around a bit, not saying anything for a while- I was mentally lost in a "potatoes/pineapple" loop and Randy's only eaten two hundred calories so far today, he didn't really have the energy for speech. But at some point out of nowhere he goes, "We could just leave our shit, start driving now and be in Wilcox by eight."

As if I hadn't already done that math.

"That iPad was expensive."

"Oh. Right."

So now we're back in our room, dinner's in forty-five minutes, and I've been warned that the other guests tonight are a hundred and fifteen years old and they talk about nothing but politics.

I have to go shower and do my hair big enough to hide some bread in it.

Hypothetical

If you're at the mall and you happen to see one child take a piece of gum out of his mouth and hand it to another child who then puts said gum in HIS mouth, you are in fact supposed to sprint over and slap the second child on the back of the skull, right? Because security doesn't seem to hear where I'm coming from on this.

Oh, come on, you know it was a Moleskine notebook.

On March 12th I went to the dermatologist for a full-body mole check.  I like my dermatologist. I think I like him primarily because he's so good I've never actually met him; I've only met his minions. The minions wear extremely starchy coats and seem to do a lot of frightened scattering, two other factors I find medically credible.

Years ago I went to another dermatologist. She wore a turtleneck and a stethoscope, both of which bothered me. A stethoscope? Seriously? Exactly how many people have you needed to revive today in the course of doling out Micro Retin-A samples? And why can't I see your neck? What's under there? You're worrying me. This in addition to the fact that I actually met with her in person a number of times, always a bad sign when on the lookout for quality medical care.

During one of our appointments she checked up on the four thousand moles on my back.

"Hmmm," she said, "this one sounds strange."

We then decided the best course of action would be for her to dive into the center of my back with a hacksaw, remove the mole along with an acre and a half of surrounding tissue, and then sew me back up with some nylon rope she found in a lobster trap. With her eyes closed.

That mole was referred to as both "precancerous" and "abnormal" and, four years later after I'd regained most of the feeling between my shoulder blades, it was largely forgotten.

In the meantime I changed doctors. Please see above.

Last month I stripped down during my appointment and led my jittery minion on an exciting and awkward tour of my bone white epidermis. I asked about specific moles, at times referencing written notations I'd made in a small notebook. I referred to each mole as "him", as in, "what about this guy, does he look weird to you?" Or "how about him, he's kinda puffy."

Everything checked out. All my guys were in line, so to speak. I wasn't terribly surprised, I tend to take a prison lockdown approach to my skin; if all my guys behave themselves and stay where they're supposed to be, they get one hour of outside time a month. The rest of the time I wear a chainmail shark suit underneath a ski bib.

A couple of weeks after my appointment I was standing in the bathroom washing my face when Randy came up behind me.

"Why is your ear black?" he asked. He asked it in the only way you can ask another person why their ear is black-- rudely.

I got defensive, obviously, I mean it was probably just dirt or a leech or something like usual, no need to freak out at me with the judgment.

I flipped my right ear around to get a look at the back and HOLY SHIT WHY IS MY EAR BLACK?

"Ohhhhh, what the fuck is that."

Randy: "Is it moving?"

No.

Randy: "Call the doctor."

I did, I called the doctor. And I got a regional switchboard, thank God, because what I really needed right then was a sign of medical competency and nothing screams competence louder than a scheduling office three hundred miles away. I was in good hands.

After another, more thorough investigation, I deduced that a tiny mole on the top of my ear- a very tiny mole, maybe 5mm-- had gone rogue and was now off the goddamn grid. The entire top of my ear was now covered in black filmy-looking skin. It didn't have a texture but it looked scaly and weird and like every poster you've ever seen in a doctor's office about skin cancer.

That was a Thursday. My appointment, my new appointment, was scheduled for the following Monday. April 12th. Here's a synopsis of everything Randy and I talked about on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday:

How to make a prosthetic ear out of plumber's caulk.
How to make a prosthetic ear out of Scotch tape.
How to make a prosthetic ear out of paper mâché.
How to make a prosthetic ear out of a banana.

I can't make dinner tonight, I have cancer ear.

ME: Kiss my cancer ear.
RANDY: No.
ME: DO IT.
RANDY: Ew.
ME: Do it or I'll command it to spread to your ear while you're sleeping.
RANDY: You're annoying when you have cancer.

I sold zombies at an art show Saturday afternoon and my friend Stacey came down to say hey.

"So I have this thing on my ear," I started, flipping my ear around so she could see.

Her eyes got huge.

"Erin. That's totally cancer."

"I know."

"No seriously. That's cancer."

"I KNOW."

"Do you want a hat?"

Monday morning my starchy minion was confused.

"I just saw you!" she said.

I didn't even say anything, I just flipped my ear around. My new calling card.

She rustled over to look.

"Wow," she breathed, "that was not here before."

It wasn't. It was absolutely not there exactly one month beforehand. I know this because we'd actually had a conversation about, quote, "this little one on your ear".  I also know it because I do actually look behind my ears periodically and not just when I think there might be a grasshopper back there.

She removed it immediately, obviously, and sent it to the lab. The results were back last week and, just as she and I and Randy and Stacey and every single other person who wrinkled their nose at it thought, it was cancer. Superficial spreading melanoma, the most common type of melanoma. But mine had moved faaaaaast. Frighteningly fast.

Right after she instructed me in no uncertain terms not to Google "melanoma" if I wanted to sleep in anything other than a fetal position, she informed me that the lesion she removed was .3mm deep. Lesions that grow to one millimeter deep or greater are at risk of spreading into the lymph nodes and throughout the body. So I'm good there. I'm seeing a specialist soon to remove the remnants of the melanoma since the borders weren't clean, and I'm looking forward to that because having a whole bunch of skin cut off the top and back of your ear is awesome. I can confirm that now, having just had a small taste of ear skin removal myself. At first you might be all silver linings and bright sides and shit, like, "hey! At least it's on the back of my ear where no one can see it and it won't bother me at all." And then some minion cuts a big swath of skin off your ear bone and suddenly you remember you wear glasses and have hair and pretty much everything you do all day long involves your stupid ear, plus you look like half an elf.

But hey, I'll take it. I feel like I just won the lottery, frankly, because the odds of having found this and handled it so quickly before it could do any real damage are not in my favor. I had just gotten a clean bill of health from the dermatologist so I wasn't exactly suspicious about anything, and I was lying before when I said I check behind my ears periodically; I have checked behind my ears exactly three times in my life: once when I got my ears pierced, again to free a moth, and then a third time last week when my husband probably saved my life by being snarky in the bathroom.

The only downside here really is that now I'm required to see the actual doctor every three months for the next five years. And then every six months for three years after that. I'm not a hundred percent sure I'm on board with this kind of common, lackadaisical doctoring. Maybe he wheels around a defibrillator all day or something, that might put me at ease.

Blogspot Plus represent!

Last week I received an email from Haloscan, my comment provider.

"The hardware and software are physically failing," it read. "We have no choice but to discontinue the service."

The phrasing really bothers me, like Grampa Haloscan just made the jump to hospice care. "We're sorry," his doctors tell us in low voices, "there's nothing else we can do. He's physically failing, we have no choice but to discontinue his use."

While in the background Grampa Haloscan plucks weakly at the sheets and thinks loving thoughts about cream of celery soup.

It's possible I'm making this harder than it needs to be.

Bottom line is that Haloscan is done. The email provided a link whereby I could "upgrade" my service to another host to preserve seven years of comment archives and continue the service, but apparently my bullshit handhacked old Blogger code from 2003 didn't make the cut because I wasn't allowed an audience with this touted "upgrade" page.

And that was kind of the last straw. I've been trying to upgrade this stupid website for six months, but everyone I've attempted to hire to redesign and/or move it has ignored me. Which is telling.  Mia emailed me earlier today to tell me about the Haloscan thing in case I hadn't heard, and she offered to help me upgrade to the new and improved 2007 version of Blogger. You know, on the off chance I felt like launching myself into a brand new echelon of outdated source code. I wrote her back like, "meh, I've been thinking about maybe moving to wordpress and I don't know how to move my archives and it looks really hard and I don't really understand wordpress so what do you think?"

Turns out she thought I should maybe just take the ELEVEN SECONDS it would require to update to the latest version of Blogger and stop making shit harder. And since I'd pretty much spent the majority of my day avoiding the floor guy by eating Triscuits in bed, I went ahead and threw eleven seconds up against updating my blog. It boiled down to pushing three buttons. I felt like Blogger was rolling its eyes at me the whole time.

So here. I had to get rid of that MSPaint banner because I'm not seven. And I lost my "About" page that I didn't really care about at all and never updated, and no doubt some other Blogspot Plus bonus features from 2004 vanished as well but hey, I've still got the Blogger hoodie they sent me when they opted to make Blogspot Pro a free service six years ago so at the end of the day I'm still a big winner.

Okay, I've got to shake the bedsheets out now, it's like a shredded wheat bomb exploded in here.

Here, catch.

I just like ten minutes ago got back from Oxnard, California where I was helping Little Chel get moved into her and her husband's new apartment; he's in the military and she's been working hard to ensure he has a nice home to come back to after his most recent deployment. Chel and her mom really did all the heavy lifting; I drove out there yesterday morning with a Tahoe full of carefully labeled plastic totes and I drove back today with a bag of brand new, pride-filled NAVY tee-shirts and some "onion blossom" flavored Pringles.

(A word about said Pringles: they were $1.41 on base so I threw them in the shopping cart on the basis of scientific discovery. We couldn't reach a taste consensus, but if you took a big wad of horseradish and rolled it in orange table salt? There. Eat that.

I just looked at the Pringles website and they don't even list "onion blossom" as a flavor option anymore. I am either in possession of a very valuable can of rare Pringles or a very salty can of slow acting poison.)

The News Upon Returning Home: Tomorrow the floor guy starts lining out the travertine floor, the door guy comes to replace the wrong French doors with the right French doors, and the electrician comes to finish up the light trim and switches.

The floor is going to take three days-- three full days of no walking on it, meaning we'll have no access to the family room for those three days. The family room is only accessible via the kitchen death zone, and frankly we're all a little concerned about Randy tiptoeing across a still wet and slowly shifting floor on Day Two in a desperate attempt to reach His Chair. All of Randy's "best stuff" is in the family room, and since we can't move his entire impromptu kitchen table desk into the bedroom, Randy has calmed himself by deducing that we'll simply crawl in and out of the family room window for the next three days.

"It'll be fine," he assured me tonight, catching my sweaty backpack when I flung it at him. "We'll just take the screen off one side of the window."

"What about the dog?" I asked, flinging my shoes into the closet. I'd just been behind the wheel for eight and a half hours; "fling" was seriously my only available mode of handoff.

"I'll boost him."

I was just about to deal with my dirty clothes but I stopped mid-fling.

"You'll boost him," I said. "You'll boost The Jake. Through the window."

"Boost!" He made what I can only assume to be a gesture representative of a man shoving a ninety pound dog through a window.

I pulled my socks off and put them in the closet, fling style. There was an inch of drywall dust on the dresser. The bedroom door still needed to be painted. Randy's Tahoe now smelled like tacos and feet.

"Sure," I conceded, "boost. Boost him." Problem solved. "You have to do it, though, I can't lift him to boost him." I looked at The Jake, then, wiggling his fat ass around the closet. I bet I could fling him, I thought.

"Oh, I''ll do it! I'll do the boosting!" He almost sang it, like a huge weight had just been lifted from his shoulders-- and put squarely and furrily in his hands. He looked so happy, I didn't have the heart to tell him about his footy taco truck.

"Yes. Awesome, do it. Boost the dog," I relented. I moved into my optimum flinging stance. "Okay, now back up a little. Tell me what you think about these chips."

Kitchen Remodel '010

I've been taking and posting pictures of the kitchen remodel to flickr when I a) have time, b) have internet access, and c) can actually get in the kitchen.

I probably won't document the entire process here since it's already on flickr, but I'll do a better job of tying the two together.