I spent nearly a freakin’ hour on the freakin’ phone with freakin’ Alltel last night trying to set up our freakin’ voicemail for our semi-new cellphones, bought a couple months ago. I knew the voicemail wasn’t setup and couldn’t be set up by us for some reason, but just never got around to it until last night. I figured it would be a few minutes long phone call, but it just grew and grew until nearly an hour had passed by the time I had my voicemail set up. So long that I never got around to writing my Re:Collection piece like I wanted to. So freakin’ annoying.

Well, I managed to distract myself from posting these things for a month. Fairly amazing, really. In that time I’ve . . .

. . . finished two books (Love Is A Mix Tape and Perfect From Now On) and started a third (Isaac Asimov’s Prelude to Foundation.) I won’t bother with details here - I already did that over there.

. . . saw Transformers. Quick review: awesome. Stupid, but awesome anyway.

. . . begun a brand new series that everyone should read. I’m jumping in the way-back machine and exploring my complicated relationship with music in a new series of posts I’m calling Re:Collection. I just started last week, but I hope to have something new every week. It’s not just about music, for those of you who opt not to read the Lookout - it’s about my life. Music is as important a part of my life as nearly anything else, and it deserved to have some special attention paid to as to why.

. . . bought a pool! After seven long years without water to swim in, we finally gave in and bought a relatively cheap, above-ground vinyl pool from everyone’s most-hated store, Walmart, who had it much, much cheaper than anyone else. Twelve feet in diameter, three feet in depth, nearly 2000 gallons of water - it’s not Olympic by any means, but it gets us wet and cool, and Amanda loves it. Now if only these monsoon storms would go away so we could actually swim in it after work. (Alissa just alerted to me via email that her mom, who is watching her this week, reports that Amanda said, while having her swimmies put on in preparation for going in their pool, said, “Water safety.” Bill Cosby was right - kids do say the darnedest things.)

. . . planned a vacation! A real vacation, not a “fakation” like I took back in late May. No, this time we’re actually leaving Phoenix and heading to the summer home of Phoenicians, San Diego. We spent a good deal of time on the decision of whether to fly or drive, but in the end it just made a lot more sense to drive over - we could get a much nicer hotel, could take practically whatever we wanted with us, and we wouldn’t have to deal with the dilemma of getting Amanda’s stroller, car seat, and Pack-n-play onto a plane (because there’s no way we’re dealing with whatever the hotels have to offer - who knows what other people’s kids have done in those things, and you know they don’t clean them like they should.) So this time in August, we’ll be packing up to leave for a 5 day stay in Sandy Eggo. Plans are to hit Seaworld, the San Diego Zoo, and see the aircraft carrier USS Midway, which has been turned into a giant walkthrough museum. Oh, and rest.

After just over a year on “Dopamax” (I use its nickname here to try to avoid the spam-bots from tagging me like they love to do when you mention a drug by name - Google it and you’ll see what it is) and successfully avoiding migraines for quite a long time, my neurologist and I have decided to try and get me off of this crap. I’ve been doing so for the past month and a half, slowly moving down in dosage one pill at a time to see if lower doses allow the migraines to creep back in. So far, so good. I think most of my migraines were food-related, a realization that is both comforting and sad at the same time. Comforting because it’s therefore easy to avoid migraines - avoid the food that seemed to cause them (chocolate and cheddar cheese - believe it or not, I ate way more of both of these than I realized on a regular basis.) Sad because, well, it’s pretty obvious why - I love chocolate and cheddar cheese. But if that’s what keeps migraines and daily headaches away, fine, I’ll do without.

I must also throw in here the issue of allergies. My neurologist suggested from the start that out-of-control allergies could set off migraines, so getting started on a serious treatment program is sure to have had a big effect on my headache issues. I’m two months into a several-year long treatment by way of injections. At the end of that time, I’ll be far more resistant to the annoying things that set off sinus headaches and possibly what caused a lot of migraine problems. I’m absolutely stunned at how happily I will offer up my arms twice a week for a shot in each one.

However, as I’m coming off of Dopamax, I’m now starting on something some call “Morontin” (again, Google it.) I’ve had a nagging issue with my right arm for a couple of years now, something that has finally gotten to the point that I had to ask about it. Simply put, my pinky and ring finger, along with the portion of my palm attached to them, go numb during the night. This is not normal under any circumstances. It’s a condition called ulnar nerve neuropathy. Nearly every night, I will awake with either those to fingers completely, totally numb, or tingling as if I’d just had them in freezing cold water. Neither is a particularly pleasant sensation, and it wakes me up at least once a night, sometimes several times a night, and very rare is the morning that I wake up without those finger being numb and slowly over the next hour regaining their normal sensations.

My neurologist sent me for nerve conduction testing a couple of weeks ago. This was fun. Oh, it was fine at first - just some electrodes taped onto various spots on my hand and arm - but when no results came up, it was time for needles. Needles in muscles. Most were bearable, a couple were almost completely unnoticeable, but two were absolutely awful: the one going into the side of my palm and the one going into that big fleshy part on the palm by the thumb. The latter, actually, was excruciating. I have distinct, sharp memories of feeling the needle poke through my skin and then resist going further at the muscle until the technician gave the needle several short, sharp shoves. And then it just hurt constantly while she made me move my thumb against her hand for resistance. All that for absolutely no results - and that’s what my doctor expected would be the result! (To explain, he said that it’s possible that at this point only a small number of nerve fibers have been affected, and they may be in a position that the tests can’t reveal anything yet. I didn’t think to ask if this meant that someday I could look forward to more nerve testing.)

So, in lieu of surgery, because whatever is going on is just not bad enough right now, I’m on a drug that should hopefully eliminate some of the nighttime numbness and waking episodes. So far, three days into it, absolutely nothing has happened. I still wake up numb, but now I wake up numb and groggy. Fun. And, as luck would have it, in trying to get away from some of the side effects of Dopamax, like making me forgetful, I’m now on a drug that is also blessed with the same damned side effect, only it seems to make me aggressively dumb. Before I could kind of predict what I would forget, but with Morontin, it’s completely random. Example: I went out yesterday to hit a pool store for supplies (oh, yeah - we bought a “cheap” above-ground pool - more on that later!) and Zia for musical supplies. By the time I got half way down the road, I knew I was going to a pool store, but not why or, more accurately, what for. After I got there, it started to clear up, but I couldn’t help but walk around and wonder if I was forgetting something vital. When I left, I had no idea if I had something else to do besides Zia - but at least I had my priorities straight, right? So part of me is hoping that this drug just isn’t going to work and I can get off of it soon and just be drug-free (besides my allergy stuff, can’t live without that.) I don’t know what the solution is, or even what the situation itself is, but some good has to come from all of this, right?

Amanda has taken to drawing a lot lately. Her favorite game with Crayons continues to be doing anything but actually drawing with them (lately it’s been lining them up as candles and proclaiming “birt-day cake!”) but she’s drawing more now than ever before, and even attempts to draw her own interpretations of things. Tonight I requested a couple of drawings from her and here are the results:

Nevermind the blue sun and the yellow circle, which I’m guessing is another sun (these are mommy’s works of art) - I just kept them in there because I liked the composition. Don’t you see what she drew? Isn’t it obvious? Oh, fine, maybe for the untrained eye it might not be quite so apparent what Amanda’s subjects worse, but I assure you my years of art training have not gone to waste:

And, yes, I actually requested a shuttle and a firetruck, and that’s what she gave me. Maybe she’s an Abstract Expressionist.