Signs of the times or is 2020 over yet?

I now have a sharps disposal container to hold my used needle from each day's injection.

We have a big assortment of masks.

I think Wally is over this year too. Or maybe I'm projecting. 

About my foot—an update

I broke the third metatarsal on May 16 (the break is in the foot, not the toe but it’s the third metatarsal). It broke clean through and as I wrote then, my orthopedist put me in a walking boot and continued following up with me.

I saw him June 23, when he said I could ditch the boot and use the carbon plate, and then again on August 4. At that point he said I could stop wearing the plate but I wasn’t cleared to run for another three months. I'm to see him then.

I’ll admit I tried a couple of trots (cannot call them runs) and my foot hurt, so I stopped. Things improved and I thought great, this may take a lot longer than I want but I’m on the mend.

Except in the last few weeks, I’ve had a shooting burning pain on the top of my toe on the same foot. Basically, it hurts when I point my toe. So if I were in child’s pose, my toe would hurt like the dickens. Since that wasn’t a broken bone issue, I got an appointment with the podiatrist I saw a couple of years ago.

Unfortunately about four days ago, the broken spot in my foot started hurting again. Ugh.

I saw the podiatrist today and told her about both things, and about the weird pain I’d had on the top of that same foot way back in March right as lockdown started. She got an x-ray of my foot and yep, she said, you can clearly see the break.

She thinks that painful spot on the top of my foot may have been referred pain from the third metatarsal as it was in the process of breaking.

The burning pain, she said, is almost certainly nerve pain. The medial dorsal cutaneous nerve runs from that bony spot on the top of the foot to the big toe and the next toe--it splits and each toe gets a nerve. She said that nerve has probably been aggravated by all of this and by the micro adjustments I make when I walk due to the broken foot. And it's true, I'm not walking normally, I can tell.

What’s less clear is whether it’s healing properly or not. She said there’s a chance I have a delayed union, or possibly a nonunion fracture. Because I was diagnosed over three months ago with this broken bone, she said she can prescribe a bone growth stimulator for my foot.

Well I’ve been there before with my pelvis so I know the drill.

She also wanted the records from my orthopedist so I jumped through those hoops to get those over to her. Once she’s got the original x-ray and dx from May 16, she can prescribe the bone growth stimulator. I’ll see her in another month when we’ll get another x-ray. She said we may need an MRI to see what’s going on, but we aren’t there yet.

In the meantime, I’m still not running but she did say it would be OK to use our indoor rowing machine. Rowing is boring but if that's my only option, then I guess I will be bored.

Shaking things up

Saturday I sat in my stylist's chair for six hours as she first did a treatment to remove color and any deposits from my shampoo, then washed my hair three times (yes three times), and then did two rounds of lightening (shampooing after each round) followed by toning (and yes, a final shampoo).

Here's my hair smooth dried on Saturday:

And here's my hair this morning, air dried:

Also a gratuitous photo:

It's much harder to blow dry my hair the way I've done for decades. That's because lightening the hair also really damages it so I've got texture I've never had. My hair is very soft, smooth and shiny when undamaged. But it's all good, I'm doing something different, trying something new and I like this a lot.

We'll end up going lighter over the next couple of months. But as my stylist told me, two rounds of lightening is all you can do in one sitting, it's just too hard on the hair. 

What I’ve learned in the last 8 weeks

Today starts the ninth week of eating vegan (no meat products of any kind, and no honey). To be honest, I expected my experiment to be pretty hard, that I would feel deprived, that I was having to make great sacrifices to eat this way. That hasn’t been the case.

To be fair, I was probably over 95% of the way to eating vegan already, with the exception of butter and eggs.

I’ve found that what I miss isn’t actually eggs but the super easy fast meal of eggs for dinner. I haven’t missed butter on my crusty rolls, and I already didn’t butter my corn on the cob because it’s so good nekkid. And instead of eggs for dinner, it’s been just as easy to make refried beans (italicized not because they’re vegan, although they are, but because I’ve always just made them by whirling them in my food processor with some hot sauce, then heated the mixture in the microwave).

I also mostly haven’t missed cheese, but again I wasn't eating a lot of it before. I did try some shredded vegan mozzarella and didn’t care for the texture (it stuck to my teeth) but found a different brand of a ball of vegan mozzarella that’s pretty good. I’ve also found a decent vegan cheddar style slice and an American style slice and use those on bean burgers.

People have asked if Kent is also vegan and the answer is no. However, he’s moved way down the food chain and the food processing chain and is onboard with making sure I can eat whatever he cooks when it’s his turn. I made a tofu BBQ recipe a couple of weeks ago, and suggested that he make a chicken version. He informed me that no thanks, he preferred the tofu. He does butter his corn on the cob, a lot—that’s where he’s a butter slicker.

What I’ve found surprising is people’s reactions to my diet choice. I get one of two reactions:

• Oh I’m practically a vegan – insert long involved description of why they eat the animal products they eat. OR
• I could never do that – insert long involved description of why they can’t do that

The thing is, I’m not looking to convert anyone to the way I eat. This is the right choice for me right now, and whatever you’re eating isn’t my business and frankly I don’t care. If you’re not vegan and we hang out together somehow in a post-pandemic world, just relax about my food options. I’m an adult and I can use my words to suggest places that will let both of us eat the foods we prefer.

A couple more changes

First, the new doorbell. It got here during the week last week, so yesterday Kent drove the kitties nuts as he installed it. They really don't like to hear the doorbell ring (stranger danger!) and of course he had to ring it to make sure it worked.

Next, we apparently also have a day lily in the very back of the yard. This has never bloomed in the seven years we've lived here, no doubt because the trees blocked all the light. But this year it's blooming.

Finally, I was bemoaning to some friends that I'd searched and searched online to find the matching small table to go with our front porch chairs. Maybe 10 minutes later, I got an email from one of them with a link to an online merchant who could get the table. So now the front porch is done!

An unexpected result of removing so many trees

 We found out that this tree is a fringe tree. We'd never seen it bloom in the seven years we'd been here because it never got enough light. It's still crooked from trying to get enough sunshine but I think that will change in the next year or two.

And we thought we had one surprise lilies. Surprise! We have a ton. The top left picture and the middle left picture are of the same cluster but from different spots. And yes, we put up a hummingbird feeder and I've seen two different hummingbirds eating there already! The little pond/puddle has a solar powered bubbler pump in it so the water doesn't get gross and the birds love it.