I graduated from Physical Therapy!! My shoulder is all better. It hurt a lot more during this last session, but he was kind of kicking my butt a bit, I think to make sure I was really healed. I can do pull-downs of 30+ pounds with no problem, in front of or behind my head. And I can do all kinds of other resist stuff. So it's all right.

He told me my shoulders are "hypermobile". It's unusual that I seem not to be double-jointed anywhere else, though my hips are actually unusually flexible as well, so there's that. A lot of people will have extra flexibility in all their joints-- I actually have a friend who's really messed-up because of this, with problems all over the place. But for me, no, it just means my shoulders slide out of their sockets pretty easily. It's fine as long as they slide out in a direction where my muscles can support them and pull them back in-- there's no pain, because the ligaments and soft tissues and complicated interrelated shit that makes up a shoulder (what a complicated joint, btw) are all perfectly happy to do this. However, if I have it at an angle where they can't, that's where I have the problem.
So I'm going to keep doing the exercises he gave me, to make the muscles and ligaments and what-have-you stronger and tighter, to reduce the angles my arm can be at while it's out of the socket. But anyway. There I am. I'm buff and tough and totally ready for action.

Which is good, because on Saturday I was doing things like this:




yeah, that's the bad shoulder. Didn't hurt! The only thing that hurt was intro high-fives. Which, the PT pointed out, is my angle of greatest risk. So... I guess that's a training goal, to keep doing those exercises until high-fives don't hurt.

It sounds like it could be a club name. Where fake-tanned pop-collar douchebags go to pick up skinny bottle-blond half-dressed whores on platform shoes.
But no. It's a crappy thing I keep doing to myself. Oh well, I had to go to PT anyway, so I might as well get my money's worth.
It hurt a lot more when it came out this time-- I saw stars and had to sit down (well, after finishing the jam) and sort myself out. Yes, yes, of course I was playing roller derby at the time. Phooey. I had a brace on, which was damned uncomfortable, but it was a variable-support brace, and I'd braced it to prevent my shoulder going backward, which was how it came out before, or so I'd thought-- last night it came out forward. Blegh.
I forgot to make my appointment for PT when at the doctor the other day, so I will have to do that. This will just remind me to do it.

The orthotics guy called and told me about the brace they could order for me. (I'm borrowing one right now from a friend who had shoulder surgery, and it's an adjustable one. It sucks to skate in. Not only was it ineffective, it also was made of neoprene and felt like I was like a baked potato in a microwave-- seriously, I walked up a flight of stairs with my skate bag and almost passed out.) Apparently I have a deductible *and* a co-pay, so basically I'd be paying the full $450 price tag on the item myself. Urgh. I'll see what the PT guy says first.

Queen City Roller Girls' travel team, the Lake Effect Furies, handily defeated the Gotham Girls' B-team, the Wall Street Traitors, in a 40-minute expo bout tonight. It was pretty awesome to watch (I watched it via live streaming video on derbynewsnetwork.com, but should you be interested, the footage is available there archived), especially because it was our intro to the Derby News Network crowd.

I am very, very sad we couldn't go, though. Z was going to go as the mascot, and he would've had a great time-- Gotham has Jeerleaders, and the headlining bout of the night was Charm City Roller Girls, out of Baltimore-- they wear yellow jerseys and have a mascot, a guy in a banana suit called Bane-Ana, who got up to some ridiculously amusing shenanigans with the Jeerleaders.
The Lake Effect Furry would've had a blast with them.

You might be a derby girl when: a medical professional says to you, "You might wanna lay off the roller derby until we see how the [course of treatment] goes," and you say, "Hm, well, what conditions do I have to meet in order to not have to make with the laying off?" and he looks at you like you have four heads. Straightjacket, here I come!!!

More seriously, I skated last night and it hurt (skating doesn't hurt, but we scrimmaged, and I gave an assist using my arm, which was OK, but then I had some chick fall sprawling in front of me and I had nowhere to go but to land on her head, which is great, except I hit my arm on the landing, and oh! my! not so great! wow!). So today I called the sports medicine group, and they said Come right in tonight we have a 6pm appointment. Oh! Uh, OK! I said, and did so.
I spent like 20 minutes filling out paperwork (I! have health insurance! that covers this! weeee! This is so great!); before I was even done some nice young lady came and took me to X-ray me from many angles, and then I went right in to see one Dr. Darling, who was indeed darling, and much younger than you'd think. He was charmingly friendly, and thumped on me in lots of ways. "Does that hurt?" "No." "How about this?" "Nn, well, ok." "How about th--" "AUGH."
After much prodding and testing and poking, he determined that I most likely had a shoulder subluxation last Saturday. What that means is that it's a partial dislocation; the head of the humerus doesn't slide all the way out of the socket of the shoulder, but it does partially.
He seemed relatively unfazed by my demonstration that that's part of my normal range of motion for my shoulder-- which is what perplexes me about the injury. I can "pop" my shoulder out easily, and often do-- when opening a door I sometimes let it slide out, because it kinda slingshots back in. It just, I dunno, goes that way, in order to complete the motion of the joint. I pop the joint out to get at my bra strap because I can't reach otherwise. The problem on Saturday was that it was "out", and i put pressure on the elbow at an angle, so it was pulled out of its normal range of motion. So it hurts now because I can't let it pop out to do what I normally do, because all the bits that hold it in are so sore from getting pushed on way too hard.

Anyway, Dr. Darling informed me that I did not in fact tear any rotator cuff anything, and indeed my rotator cuffs are rockin'. (I forget his actual word, but he seemed impressed at how well-developed the muscles were.) But he is worried that the shoulder could sublux again, and even fully dislocate, and that could result in a labral tear. So he's worried for my labrum. I had to Google that.
Ohhhhh.
Hey neat!
So I spent like two hours tonight reading about shoulder anatomy. (And I'm not a freak-- it's right in Grey's Anatomy that the shoulder capsule is loose enough to allow the bones to go up to 2.5cm out of contact-- so I'm perfectly normal in being able to pop my shoulders out.)

He said, however, I "might wanna lay off the roller derby" until we'd had a chance to try a course of physical therapy treatment. I looked at him, and he said, "No, huh?"
"It's the end of the season," I said. "Championships are coming up. I have a scrimmage on Sunday. There's... I really can't not skate. Is there anything I can do to minimize the damage I do to myself in the meantime?"
He didn't take a lot of persuading. He's treated half my team. He knows how this is.
"We could get you a brace to limit motion of the joint," he said.

While he was off talking to the orthotics guy I texted my teammate Hyper Bean. We call her Robo-Bean. She missed half the season, two seasons ago, to rotator cuff surgery, and now wears a motion-restrictive brace that makes her look a bit like the Terminator. She texted me back, and gave me the "good" brand name and the "bad" one, as well as fitting advice. And she offered to bring both to practice tonight so I could see them. I know my injury is different from hers, but my body is a similar size to hers.

So I am waiting for a call from the orthotic guy, but in the meantime i have a The Sully, which is a neoprene hook-and-loop octopus of a torture device. I have tried it on and understand how it works and now know what to ask for and what to ask NOT for. Also these are not designed for humans with breasts. Which is, oddly enough, just about half the adult population, but you know, nobody seems to notice that. W-evs!

Easter is nice, but mostly it's nice because it's spring. I've also had a third of a bottle of champagne, a third of a bottle of mead, and rather a bit of Jack and Coke. So here we go.

1) Happy birthday (e:Jim). I get really confused now that Z works outside the house because his coworkers have the same names as mine. My boss, who I love, is also Jim, and I have a Bill, and a Mark at the other store who calls all the time, and so when (e:Zobar) tells me how frustrated he is with Bill or whatever I think about our ebay guy and wonder how anyone could ever get mad at him, even though I know, of course, he's talking about other-Bill, who I've even met. It's quite funny.

2) I am so glad I have health insurance, and I'm glad I don't need a referral to go to the physical therapist, because my shoulder is definitely not right. But now I need there to be an extra weekday when I'm not working-- the day in between Sunday and Monday that I've proposed on other occasions, which is tentatively scheduled to be Super Extra Casual Day at work (when you can wear basketball shorts and not wash your hair) but also the day you can take off without losing your 40-hour status, so that you can get shit done like go to the doctor and grocery-shop and go to the bank and go places that are only open during working hours.

3) My little sister had chickens mailed to her. Apparently this is standard practice. 25 hatchlings, egg-layers; 24 female and 1 male. This is their starter flock for their organic farm which they're for-real starting up now in Shelbyville, IL. Except the chickens were supposed to be mailed tomorrow, to arrive Tuesday, but her husband got a call from Springfield from a confused postal worker saying "Um, there's a peeping box with your name on it, and if we leave this thing overnight on the loading dock until we're open, that box ain't gonna be peeping no more-- you wanna come get it while they're still peeping?" So her husband had to drive an hour and a half each way to pick up these chicks, instead of going to Easter dinner. Ann is righteously pissed, because sure the hatchery would give her $ back if the chicks all arrived dead Monday after sitting out an extra day, but who is gonna give those baby chickens a refund on their 25 tiny lives? Not cool! Who mails live animals on a Saturday! Bonus points to the postal worker who spotted the box and took time to call them.

4) Roller derby. I'm in this highlight reel. But what's awesome is of course the soundtrack. See, my team rickrolled the entire venue, instead of having a normal intro song. It was totally fucking awesome. So they put that in the highlight reel. Put it on mute for the first 20 seconds if you gotta, but totally watch this, because my team (in blue) is completely awesome.


4a) more roller derby: the Queen City Roller Girls (Buffalo league)'s Travel Team, the Lake Effect Furies, are coming to New York City April 10th, to play Gotham Girls' B-team (the Wall Street Traitors) as the opening bout for their season opener. It's almost sold out, the last 50 tickets will go onsale tonight at midnight. If you're down there, might be worth checking out. Wear blue and scream your head off for the Furies!! It's their debut bout under that name, I believe; last season they played as the QCRG Allstars.
Of course, everyone immediately began misspelling it as the "Furries", and so (e:zobar) wanted to be the mascot but that didn't go anywhere. Yet. We'll see.

OK that's it, I have to go drink more Jack.

Knockouts came from behind to tie last night's game in the final jam, forcing a sudden-death overtime last jam. Unfortunately for us, our jammer was sent to the penalty box, so the unopposed other jammer was free to score points: she was held to a single scoring pass, but that's all they needed, so we lost by four points or so. It was very exciting.

I am hurting in a lot of places, but mostly my shoulder, which I think I partially dislocated at one point. I pulled muscles in my right thigh and left hip/butt, but those are minor. Currently more distressing is that I had trouble sleeping, what with the shoulder injury keeping me from lying normally, and so am operating on about 3 hours' sleep and have practice in 3 hours. I am going to go back to bed and see what happens. Wish me luck. (Dosing up on ibuprofen now.)

I made a chicken pot pie.
So I have this recipe, which I've never made, for "No-Guilt Chicken Pot Pie", which I copied down off the back of a soup can or something, and it involves both Reduced-Sodium Bisquick and Campbell's Lo-Fat Cream of Chicken Soup. I don't know why you would ever eat something like that; there's no nutrients in it and it's all processed shit. But I copied it down because I like chicken pot pie and didn't have the recipe.
I make chicken pot pie all the time. It finally struck me that I should probably write down, on the page in my cookbook* where I copied over the bullshit recipe, what I actually do, because I just use the bullshit recipe to remind me, but if, say, Z ever wanted to make my actual recipe, he'd be totally confused.
So I did.
And then I did it differently anyway. So I'll write down both versions here, the one I wrote and the one I did.

I like my meals to have a bit of meat and a lot of vegetables. (And a little fat and a bit of starch. They're all good for you.) I am healthier (i.e. my guts don't hate me so much) when I get a reasonable quantity of vegetable matter into my system, so I try to eat a lot of them. However I am so disorganized I always wind up throwing out rotten fresh veggies. So I rely pretty heavily on frozen. Maybe not as nutritious, but at least I'm getting the fiber. So you can vary the veggies you use in here; I'm writing it because of what I generally have on hand.

I made this in a Dutch oven, because I have one. (It was my grandmother's. I got it for Christmas. My mom actually mailed it to me. A cast iron Dutch oven. Yeah it cost more to mail it than it would have to just buy me a new one. But that's OK, this one is HISTORICAL. That's how my family operates.) You could do it in a casserole and make the sauce separately in a saucepan. Um you probably want to read this through before you start making it because I have just had rather a bit of whiskey (OK, 2 oz) and I tend to tell stories instead of write recipes. Not in my book though!! Oh you wish you had my book (it's plaid, which makes it better). But anyway. Maybe I'll publish it someday. Meanwhile you just get my rambly stories about food. Read it through first and write down the highlights and you have a real recipe. I promise.

Heat your oven up to like 400 Fahrenheit. Err on the side of too hot, a little bit. Well, it doesn't matter, you can always turn it up at the end if your biscuits aren't getting golden. More on that later.

Cook 1 large chicken breast. You can microwave it and then cube it, or do what I did and chop it up and stir-fry it in bacon fat or peanut oil or butter or whatever, with half an onion. (A whole onion if you have it is also fine. If you are using already-cooked chicken omit any raw vegetables because they won't get cooked, and just use frozen. The onion's not important, it's a bonus flavor.) You could probably use chicken thighs for this and cut down on how much fat you add, but like nobody carries chicken thighs anymore, it's annoying!!!!! You have to special-request it at the butcher, or get them at Weg's with the bones in, annoying as hell!! So anyway, chicken breast. Or whatever. Ground beef would probably work too, just then it's not chicken pot pie anymore. Tofu might work. Go nuts. It's your pie. And you're probably a grown-up and can do whatever the fuck you want. Enjoy that.

I also added two sticks of celery, chopped fine, and a carrot, diced, and let it all cook until the chicken was done through and the onions were softened. If you have half a green pepper or red pepper that would also be fucking amazing and I wish I had. I didn't, though. No biggie, it was still good. And carrots are good for your eyes and celery is good for your butt. So go for it. I did. It was awesome.

Make sure you have at least 2 Tbsp of fat in there, however you get it. Or, do it the way I wrote down, and cook the chicken separately and make the sauce separately. You just need fat for it to work and I don't understand how these bullshit recipes work without fat. That's no good because you need fat for your neurons. Julia Child told me that.

The bullshit recipe calls for a can of low-fat cream of chicken soup. The written-down recipe calls for my mom's cream sauce:
2 Tbsp fat (butter, bacon grease)
2 Tbsp flour
Melt fat, stir in flour.
Add 1 cup milk. Heat, bring to a boil, stir until thickened. (Lift the stirring spoon; the sauce should coat the back. That's "thickened".)
[You can use this sauce for anything. Apparently it's some posh French "Mother Sauce" thing. I add macaroni noodles, and cheese, and it's mac and cheese, that's all I know.]

I did this over the cooked chicken and onion and carrot and celery, though, because I do my own dishes and don't want extra, thanks. Just stir all your business around in the hot fat, coat it in flour (white or whole wheat, because it's your damn pie, did I mention, and you do whatever the fuck you want), then add milk. Except I used 2 cups of water and 2 chicken buillion cubes, plus about 1/2-3/4 cups of milk, because I was low on milk and had used a bit more flour than I'd meant to so I had a lot of thickener to work with, kinda. (Save some milk for your biscuits! More on that later!) And I wanted a lot of pie!! You need to do what works for the size of your casserole container. Err on a little too little, because if it's overfull it gets everywhere. Life lesson, there.

Once it was thickened I dumped in about 1/2c. frozen corn, 1/2 c. frozen broccoli pieces, and like way too much frozen peas because they'd frozen into a chunk. It was probably like a cup and I didn't mean to use that much. I mean, if it was just me, I'd use like two cups because I love peas. But Z isn't quite such a weirdo so... anyway. But I'd added too much liquid to the sauce so there was a ton of it, so that worked out OK. Basically you want enough solid stuff in there so that it pokes out the top of the sauce and you have... not-soup. So make it full of stuff so you can rest your biscuits on top of the solid stuff. More on that later.

Stir it all around until the veggies are not frozen. Meanwhile! Oh yes, meanwhile. (If you haven't read ahead and are just getting to this and are like oh damn, don't bother letting the veggies defrost: turn off the burner under the cream sauce and the residual heat while you do this next bit will melt them for you. Don't worry.)

Well, this is your later: Biscuits! Or dumplings. I have recipes for both. There is no difference, except that biscuits have a firm dough and dumplings have a sloppy dough. Because biscuits are rolled so they'll be flaky, and then cut out, and dumplings are dropped off a spoon. It doesn't matter one tiny bit. Biscuits are page 8 and dumplings are page 23. OH you don't have my book. Wait, I'll tell you. I'll tell you about dumplings because they're easier to get onto this bitch. And by bitch I mean pie.
Dumplings:
3 Tbsp shortening (which means any fat that's solid at room temperature-- butter, lard, Crisco)
1 1/2 c flour
2 tsp baking powder
3/4 c milk
optional is a dash of salt
Combine flour and baking powder and maybe salt. Cut the shortening into the flour mixture-- with a pastry cutter or a fork or whatever-- until it's all in little chunks in there. ("Fine crumbs", says my mom's handwriting.) Stir in milk until all is wet. Drop by spoonfuls onto hot meat/vegetables in stew. (This recipe goes with my beef stew recipe which I'll probably share later.)

So anyway, do all that, and then put it onto your pie. Well, put it onto your casserole full of chicken and vegetables and stuff, and that MAKES it into a pie-- see how easy this is? No rolling out pie crust. That's why I went with this kind of pie. I love real pie but pot pie is waaaaay easier.
Spread it into a thin layer with whatever technique you innovate (I sort of stretch it out between a rubber spatula and a wooden spoon, then poke it with my fingers until it's even-ish. Don't worry, it gets baked, the germs get killed, lick your fingers if you want). It doesn't have to be even or perfect, it'll just cook faster if it's thin.

Then put it into your oven that's already hot, don't cover it, and wait about half an hour. Check and see if the biscuits are golden, and if they're not, your oven's not hot enough. So turn it up and do your dishes, and when you're done it'll be hot enough. (Well, I mean the dishes you dirtied making this thing; if you've got a mountain-ola of dishes from all month in there you'll burn the pie so don't.)

Pour yourself a beer, get yourself a big pasta bowl or something, and eat the hell out of that pie. Because it is tasty and it is made out of real food and that is good for you. (This is how I classify things as "health food"-- if I know what it's made out of, and preferably made it myself.)

________________ All good blog entries have a footnote or two.___

• My cookbook: it is a small blank book in which, in blue ballpoint pen, my mom wrote down a bunch of her favorite & most useful recipes when I was a sophomore in college. In the *mumbledecademumble* since then, I've written down recipes I really like in there. This fucking thing is priceless. But I have to remind myself to keep it updated.