What happens in the alley, stays in the alley Like the desert in a Discovery Channel program, the alley behind our house looks bleak and uninviting, but is actually teeming with life. When it snows you can see the tracks of 4 or 5 different creatures. Rats predominate but there are also rabbits, squirrels, pigeons, cats and raccoons. This year there's been a bumper crop of bunnies, which the Trib explained is due to West Nile Virus.

We also have a regular troop of dumpster divers, who range from enterprising to visibly mentally ill. And then there are the graffiti artists. We learned that the city has a crew of "Graffiti Blasters" when some graffiti showed up on the garage door one morning and by afternoon it had been covered up by some hastily swiped, mismatched paint.

Apparently the city won't take care of privately owned dumpsters, though. This one has been around for a few weeks at least:





And I don't know how to explain this fist-sized ball of crud on the garage door:

 

¶ 2:44 PM

  Joint Custody A few weeks ago, in a burst of houseguest-inspired energy, my mother-in-law and I planted some flowers out front. Pansies are really the best (maybe the only) bet for April, so that's what we planted in the flower boxes.

We also bought a pot of pansies and planted them in this green pot that had been sitting with some dead weeds in front of the porch for at least a year.

Our neighbors all expressed overwhelming gratitude that someone finally planted something, especially since 3 (half!!) of them are trying to sell their condos.

Then, when the weather got warmer, I went out and bought some lantanas:

While I was repotting them, one of my neighbors from the front building approached me. She said, "Did you know that this pot [pointing to the pansies] is actually ours? It's part of our patio set." All the evidence had been that it was no-man's-pot so I just apologized and said, "These pansies'll die by June anyway." She smiled but said nothing.

A few days later the pansies moved 5 feet away, to rejoin the patio set (as pictured). The next morning they were back to our porch. Then back to the neighbor's and back to our place. Finally they settled into a pattern: On weekends they stay with the neighbors and during the week they come back.

Last Monday they came back and I started bitching, "Look at this, all these dead blossoms and I don't even think they've been watered." That was when I realized I was the divorced mother of pansies.

I think a second neighbor might have been involved in the initial tussle. He and Patio Set argue about everything at our association meetings and I don't think he was pleased about the move. 

¶ 1:03 PM

  The weekend before I went to Argentina, I threw a party for Darling Angel and her friend K. The DA had just finished her last CPA exam and K took the GMAT, so a party was in order for all. And to make it sweeter, I provided personalized snacks.  

¶ 10:13 PM

  Warning: More gross medical stuff On Thursday I had a fibroadenoma removed. It was no big deal, just local anaesthetic, but still it was the whole surgical routine: a sterile OR where I couldn't even wear a ring, painfully bright lights, and a sizable audience. (There was a brief period in my late 20s when it weirded me out that the students, residents and fellows were all my age, but it passed.)

They covered me up from head to toe in those green paper sheets so I couldn't see a thing. After a few minutes the student and the surgeon stopped talking and it was quiet. But not completely quiet. I could hear something very quiet and very cheesy. I asked, "What is that?" The surgeon first told me it was the cautery. I said, "I guess that explains the burning smell, but I meant the music." He said, "Oh, it's '25 or 6 to 4.'" Mistaking my curiosity for enthusiasm, someone turned the radio way up, and I was just stuck, because how can you not laugh at that song? And how can you laugh when you're having thoracic surgery?

The Straight Dope says the lyrics are about being unable to write a song:
Staring blindly into space
Getting up to splash my face
Wanting just to stay awake
Wondering how much I can take
Should I try to do some more
[Refrain]

Chicago was followed by the almost-as-funny "Jesus is Just Alright with Me" and Steely Dan's "Black Cow." Until this minute I thought the lyrics said:

Take your big black cow
And get outta here

So that was no good either.

By the time they'd moved on to appliance and lottery commercials and into a Pink Floyd block, the tumor was out. The nurse asked, "Do you want to see it?" I was kind of afraid I'd freak out, but I also really needed something to distract me from the radio, not to mention the stitches. She used forceps to nudge a little jar under my sheet, just a couple inches from my eye for me to look at. She held it there for a while, then said, "You know, you really can't see it very well in the jar." Next thing I knew, this tumor was out of the jar and 2 inches from my eye, and if I were going to freak out that would be it. But I didn't. With the same surfeit of helpfulness that probably inspired the loud music, she told me I could take it home if I was willing to pick it up from the lab this week. I passed on that one.

Every surgery should be painless and this amusing. 

¶ 10:14 PM

  More benefits of education From the Boston Globe Magazine, 2/18:

According to sociologist Virginia Rutter of Framingham State College, surveys show that educated couples engage in more variety in their sex lives. They are, for example, more likely to participate in oral sex, and educated women are more likely to receive oral sex as well as perform it. 

¶ 10:57 PM

  Overheard at the dentist's office "Her father's a physicist and her mother's from Missouri." 

¶ 2:50 PM

  It's the New Leprosy I do a lot of work with psoriasis and one of the challenges is getting people to understand that it can be a really serious problem. People joke about the heartbreak of psoriasis, but when it's all over your body and you can't even get a haircut, or go to a picnic, or leave your house, it's a life-altering problem.

My clients keep telling us we're not making it sound dramatic enough. So they put their heads together and came up with a more compelling phrase: "a modern-day leprosy." We thought that was . . . a little over the top. We said no dermatologist would go along with that. But they persisted.

Fortunately, I was scheduled to meet with a top researcher. So I gave it a test run with him.

Me: You know, we've really been trying to tell the story of how serious this disease can be.
Dr. M: Yes, that's so important. The comorbidities, obesity, cardiovascular disease . . .
Me: Yes, well, I've even heard it referred to as, oh, something like "a modern-day leprosy."
[His eyes light up.] Dr. M: Are you familiar with the John Updike? The American writer?
Me [Not sure where this is going]: Yes . . .
Dr. M.: He had psoriasis. He wrote an autobiographical story about it. It was called, "Journal of a Leper."

Score one for the client. I told everyone about it and said I'd see if we could find the story.

Today I checked the book out of the library. (My favorite library ever, the Sulzer Library up in Lincoln Square, which is so great it's even open on Sundays.) It's so old the hardcover price was $10.00. As in, it was published before prices ended in 99. Its 15 pages include breasts and erections and the Hancock tower and Art and false, codependent love, in addition to psoriasis. I was going to copy the story and pass it around my office and the client, but now I'm not so sure. 

¶ 9:13 PM

  Snow day! I've long hated February 13. When I was 8, it fell on a Monday -- which, as everyone knows, is far scarier than Friday the 13th -- and my guinea pig Izod died. The day before Valentine's Day. Ever after, I've viewed this date as nothing good.

Today started out much like that. I woke up bright and early, ready to go run some fun-filled errands before work, but it turned out that there was no hot water. I woke up my ever-handy husband and we studied the manual, but to no avail. So I called the furnace company and prepared for a day of pure suckitude.

From a financial standpoint, nothing good happened today. But overall, I can't complain. Nothing much was going on at work, for once. The furnace guys showed up well before they said they would. They fixed the problem, at least for the moment. (It involved a cookie sheet and a lot of carbon monoxide.) And by the time they left, it was almost noon and it was snowing so hard I blissfully sent out an email -- "Whereabouts: Working from home today."

My office closed at 3:30 because of the weather. This has never happened before, and really it didn't quite happen today, seeing as how all of my coworkers were still there 2 hours later. But I quit work at 6 and read a book until 7:15, when I walked out into the "blizzard" to see my friend Gordon play.

(As I told him, "Cue: 'When I lived in New England . . . '" Because the "blizzard" is only 6, maybe 8 inches tops. I don't think Chicago gets a lot of snow, but the furnace guys begged to disagree. It used to get a lot of snow here, they said ominously. All I know is, it was maybe 15 degrees and the snow was so fine and so fast that the back of my throat was scraped raw and my cheeks were red for an hour. And that's pretty cold, fossil fuels or no.)

But I stayed home from work, and it was half-price wine night, and my sis and her friend and Queen of the Maye came out, and who's to argue with that?

So for once, a 2/13 turned out OK.

We'll see how 2/14 turns out, post-half-price wine night. 

¶ 11:24 PM