Gland On The Run

I haven't posted in a long time because a large part of what I've been doing and thinking about for the last few months has been my health.  Which has been sketchy.  Well, not sketchy, maybe--but not good.  I've had these sort of mental...lacunae, maybe, for lack of a better term.  (Okay, there's almost certainly a better term.)  They're a little the feeling you have when your blood sugar level suddenly spikes--like how it feels when you drink way too much coffee and suddenly feel like you're going to pass out.  Dizzy, and disoriented, and sort of... dazed.  Anyway, that kind of feeling has been coming on over me, at seemingly randomly intervals for the last several months.

There have been other things too... listlessness, an inability to concentrate, steady weight gain (despite not really ever being hungry)...all sorts of little problems with my otherwise Greek God-like body.  None is debilitating; by themselves, most are things to just shrug off.   But, coming all together for as long as they have, it seems more probably they're all part of some general... condition.  (Lycanthrophy, perhaps?)

Because I'm an idiot, I put off seeing a doctor until last week.  (In my defense, the episodes have been, at times, sporadic enough to at least make it seem reasonable that I was on the mend.)  Now, the results are in.  What my blood work seems to suggest is that my thyroid is the problem.  (It's weak, my thyroid.  Or at least lazy.)  If this is, in fact, the case, (we won't know for sure until I start medication) it's actually good news.  Hypothyroidism is said to be easily treated.  Of all the things I might have had, of all the things I've been worried that I had, this actually is one of the least worrisome.

Hopefully I'll be on medication within the next few weeks and the bright chipper smiling ANCIANT that you all know and tolerate will be back on point, posting not-all-that frequently about a narrow range of esoteric personal topics which maybe fifteen people in the whole world actually want to read about.

Until then, good luck, and good night.

London Calling

In a few hours, I leave for London with my wife.  There, we'll dine at two, three-star Michelin restaurants.  We'll see some plays (Deathtrap and An Ideal Husband).  We'll go to museums, stroll along the Thames, and generally recharge.  It should be wonderful.

And yet my heart is dark and full.  Leaving here means leaving behind the small white dog.  He will be surrounded by other dogs--mean dogs for all I know!--for ten days.  He won't have his own bed, or his own window, or his own mailman.  Worst, he won't know if we're coming back.  (But we are, Binks!  We are!)

Right now he's asleep, blissfully unaware of the fate that lies in store.  All the sorrow and worrying is left to us, his soon-to-desolate parents....

Halloween costume

After a walk in the dirt

Calm and wooly

Happy and shorn

Obi-Wan KeBink