All's Fair In Love And Chocolate

When Ben and I were in college, he kept getting involved in all the musical theater productions, and I felt compelled to attend every single show...because I was just THAT besotted with him. He always had these little bit parts, because he never actually auditioned. He just hung around with the theater folk and would somehow get roped into being "oddly dressed man #2" or some other such nonsense. Once he was the dude that opened and closed the curtain, and I was
STILL there for every show. Such devotion is rare, and I remind him of this every time he tries to get me to cut his toenails. Even the most devoted person has their limits.

Anyway. In one of the productions (I cannot for the life of me remember which one. They all blur together.) one of the main characters had to come out of their house and into a courtyard for the opening scene right after a fifteen minute intermission. In every other show it had gone like clockwork, but this time intermission ended and we all sat back down and stared at the stage...and nothing happened. I don't know how many minutes went by, but it was enough so that the audience was getting very uncomfortable, and I was busy being embarassed for my friend that should have been on stage. I couldn't imagine how he was going to pull off this scene now, when everyone would know that he had totally missed his cue. Suddenly, he RAN onto the stage and stopped dead still in the middle, completely out of breath. He looked right at the audience and, in a moment of sheer genius, asked, "What? It's a big house!" I think the audience laughed for five minutes. I left wishing he would do that every night.

Why am I telling you this? I honestly don't know, except that I left you way back in April about to have surgery, and some of you have apparently been waiting to hear from me. It is as if I disappeared into the vastness of the internet and forgot my cue to come out. But somehow, writing a blog post all out of breath, and asking "What? It's a big internet!" just isn't as funny. So really, that whole introduction was pointless, but hey...it was better than "So, um....I kind of forgot that I had a blog after my surgery and became slightly addicted to finding old high-school friends on facebook instead." Maybe you feel less abandoned with the first excuse? I don't know. Go examine your feelings and get back to me.

So. I am minus one kidney stone now, and the surgery was...oh dear. I do not feel that I can adequately do it justice with mere words. Let's just say that if I ever get another monster kidney stone? It had better just build itself a modest one-bedroom abode and prepare to hang out for all eternity.

The only amusement that I found in the whole experience was the one night in the hospital when, in an effort to get comfortable with that horrendous tube coming out of my back, I tried to sleep in the recliner by my bed. After a couple of hours of dosing, I tried to get up, and realized that somehow all of my tubes and IVs and such had gotten tangled together and I was not getting out of that chair without professional assistance. So I hit the nurse call button, and told her my situation in it's most basic terms. "Help! The reliner is trying to eat me!" I cannot be sure, but I think I heard snickering in the background, and then no less than three nurses were in my room in about 1.2 seconds (a fact that I later resented when my pleas of "Help! My remote has fallen behind my bed and I am being forced to endure "Miami Ink". Also, I have to pee." were largely ignored.)

So, to recap: Surgery, a success. Recliner, did not win against the efforts of the nursing staff. Blog, probably lost all of it's readers, but since it has a repentent writer now, has hopes of being read again someday. Maybe. If I offer bribes.

The End.