October

Procrastination has finally metastasized into a malignant tumor of guilt, which must be surgically excised into a blog post. Unless someone knows of a homeopathic solution.

Apparently my most loyal readership is my friends' moms. In the last few months, several people I know have told me their parents wanted to know when I was going to post. It's good to know your audience I guess.

Justin once told me that his mom, a retired school teacher, appreciates my attention to proper grammar. I don't know why I'm good at it. I remember my dad being a bit of a stickler growing up, but nothing too excessive. I was never good at identifying parts of speech in school. I just know what sounds right, and I learned a few basic rules about where commas go, though I'm pretty sure I screw those up occasionally. Anyway, the compliment felt good, so this post is dedicated to Justin's mom. Hi Mrs. Klingman.

My last post was in June, and honestly, I didn't do a thing worth mentioning until October, but October was chock full of activity.

My mom came to help out for a week and make sure I was eating my vegetables. Later I went to the State Fair with the usual group, and we ate everything BUT vegetables. Finally, my friend Emily came for a visit where we tried to eat every delicious thing we could think of, regardless of its fiber content.

The first two activities weren't much different than when they happened in previous years. If you want a lot of details, go back and reread the posts from last year, but imagine that I'm 12 months older.

The purpose of Emily's visit was to see a Monty Python show on Thursday that we had been waiting 6 months for. That was a lot of fun. I always thought it would be fun to see John Cleese live, and now I can say that I did. He and Eric Idle showed some sketches, performed a few sketches, and told the story of how Monty Python got together.  Theyfdid a nice job of pretending they hadn't been telling the same exact story every night for months, and all in all, I'm glad I went. It was also nice to see how disabled access to the Durham Performing Arts Center works. There were really no complications, and everything about the show went smoothly.

They let me in early. Can you spot the cripple?

The next day at 5:15 PM, while we were trying to figure out what to do for dinner, I noticed an email from my friends that usually come down twice a year for the Martinsville race. It was sent around 11:00 AM and said, "We should be there around 5:30." I had known Martinsville was coming up, but thought it was the next week. "Emily? I think we may have a bunch of guests in a few minutes...." So our dinner plans had to change, but fortunately Emily already knows some of those guys, and everybody had a good time. I think their visit was more fun than usual because it was completely unexpected.

The Martinsville gang plus Emily

The Food Fairy continues to keep my fridge hilariously full.

There are a few containers hiding in the back that I didn't even know about when I took this.

With all the guests, I'd been eating out quite a bit and getting behind on my refrigerator contents. Some people helpfully suggest, "Why don't you just put some of that in your freezer?" I realized recently that I haven't eaten any food from my freezer in well over a year, so if I put more food in there, the freezer will just fill up, and then what do I do when that's full, Mister Smarty-pants? Hmm?

One of my biggest concerns lately is the size of my belly. It's starting to noticeably restrict my range of movement, and it's encroaching on my lap space. Both of those things are fairly damaging to my independence so I'm probably going to have to try to do something about it. I'm fairly certain the main culprit is all the midnight snacking I like to do (When else are you supposed to do it?), but man, giving that up really doesn't sound like fun.

I'm still dealing with the same back pain I've had, but if I don't move around too much, it's usually manageable.

All in all, I'm still the luckiest cripple you know, and nobody can tell me any different.

P.S. We've got the holidays coming up, so if I get enough interest from people's moms, maybe I'll write something about that.