Yep, well, I'm an idiot.

Words immortalized in a Simpsons episode: "What better way to celebrate your country's independence than by blowing up a part of it?"

Fireworks sure are neat.

I went on this great kayaking trip yesterday. A couple hours into it, I realized I'd locked the keys to my car, parked at Morgan's where we haul the boats back out after driving them upriver and kayaking down, in the truck at the place where we put in the river. Fat lot of good they'd do us there when we arrived back at Morgan's with our boats and no keys to go drive upriver and get the truck. My brother who didn't marry a psycho volunteered to run up the bike trail that goes along the river and retrieve the keys. I tried to convince them I'd go but they pretty much laughed at me. I'm not known for my running abilities, or for my breathing ones. Too bad I didn't pack my skates in the kayak; I could've gotten up that trail in about two minutes. C'est, la vie. We pulled our boats over to the side and wedged them up onto the muddy bank and the brother took off up the bike trail. About two seconds later I realized we'd wedged the boats up into...dum dum dum...poison ivy. Oh yeah. You know what I've got now. This marks...let's see, about the...84th or so day straight I've had poison ivy in at least one place on my body. This summer's definately been my record for days of itch.

I seem to be having trouble with the photo uploader. I've tried several times today to upload images to a post, and it goes through the whole process with the popup window and all, and then it says "Done" but my pics are nowhere to be found. Annoying. I only got this fireworks shot on here by uploading from Flickr, which is cool, except that you can only upload one image per post and I had about four or five I wanted to blather on about, including shots of the river, the festival, and a half-drowned mouse I rescued from a Big Gulp 32-ounce cup some bastard littered on the riverbank. Who wants to drown in flat soda? Poor thing. It was shivering and covered with fleas when we took it out of the cup. We left it sitting in a patch of sunlight to recover.

Anyway, if you feel like going to the bother, you can look at a few pics of my kayaking extravaganza by clicking here. There are also a few fireworks shots. It's amazing what you can do with a cheap, busted-ass camera held together by medical tape.

Speaking of medical tape, Mercy Fairfield has the ugliest hospital gowns of any hospital I've been in. I mean, shit. They're pale green and have varying horrible patterns on them. I had to wear one today when for some reason I showed up for my CT scan and they insisted I needed chest x-rays as well. WTF? I've been doing this crap for almost two years now, I've never needed an x-ray too. I'm wondering if they're going to use it for comparison purposes--tennis-freak pulmonary specialist guy says if this CT scan shows stability, I can switch to yearly chest x-rays instead of CT scan every six months--which is good; it'll save me some dollars and make me less radioactive. Maybe they want the x-ray today so they can compare it to the one I'll have in a year. They can look at it and say, yep, still there...the technician who did my CT today was a girl I hadn't seen before (after a while, you get to know the people who do this stuff). She asked me if I'd ever had CT scan before and I laughed and told her this is my seventh one in two years. She was like, holy shit, are you serious? What do you have? I told her and she looked at me like I was contagious. It's such fun having a medical condition so obscure that most nurses and doctors haven't even heard of it. Then she proceeded to stick me expertly with the IV needle (thank heaven for nurses who can HIT A VEIN THE VERY FIRST TIME, they're a gift from God), inject me, scan me, and remove any hair on my arm when she took the IV-needle tape off. You don't realize how sensitve the crook of your elbow is there until someone rips all the hair off it. It's not like a lot grows there or anything, but shit, that hurts worse than the needle.

Came home and fell asleep for two hours. Genius move. Now it's 12:22 and I'm still awake and my alarm's set to go off at 6:42 tomorrow morning for another long fun day of proofing crud. It'll be nice when this busy spell slows down. Last week was a son of a bitch. At least my boss is back from vacation now and can help. Hopefully I won't have to stay late any this week. I have about seven or eight good solid hours of proofing in me per day; you ask me to proof stuff after that and I start letting reflexive pronoun usage and dangling participles slide all over the joint, and we can't be having that. Oh no.

All right. Guess I better think about getting back in bed.