Yes.
This.
This is the stupidest sticker ever.
I know you can't read it. That's why it's so fucking stupid.

I killed my iPhone. I don't know how. It's less than a year old. I saw the stupidest sticker ever on a car, and took its picture, risking life and limb I know, but I had to document it. I got to work, and emailed the picture here to moblog it.
Walked away leaving my phone on the counter to finish sending the email. Came back and looked on my computer to see whether the photo had uploaded. It hadn't. Picked up my phone to see if there was a reason why not.
Couldn't wake the phone.
Tried restarting it. Nothing. Tried hooking it up to the computer. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. It's totally dead. If I plug it into the computer, after about 3 minutes iTunes pops up a message saying that it could not communicate with the iPhoneTM because of an error reading the device.
Fuckers!

Anyway. So i'm non-moblogging, sans picture, the stupidest sticker I've ever seen.
You know those really stupid oval stickers, that have acronyms in them? They come from the EU, right, and you put your country code in them, right, only Americans for some reason think they're so cool that they need to have one for every possible thing. And they don't make any sense-- what the fuck does OBX stand for? What about SJCI? (I see stickers for both of those every day.) So since the codes don't mean anything, they have to defeat their whole purpose by writing, in tiny lettering, at the lower border of the sticker, what the cryptic acronym stands for.
Again, missing the point of the whole exercise.
(It was cool, for like, a second, in 1997, to have the country code sticker of a country you admired. I thought that was kind of neat. Between 8:15:36 and 8:15:37 am on November 13th, 1997. Really. Then I was like, "Actually that's kind of pretentious and stupid. Without even being at least arguably intelligence-requiring like some pretentious things are. So it's the worst of both worlds. Never mind, those things suck and they irritate me." And my opinion hasn't changed in over a decade. Even after having been to the European Union, where they make sense and are functional.)

So this was one of those stickers.
Know what it said?
"S". That's all it said. That was the acronym. One letter.
I was like, "What the fuck does S stand for?" Because it's not a country code. And guess what. This is English. A shit-ton of words start with S. It's one of the more common letters, in fact.
So I drove up a little closer.
Underneath, it said, and I'm not making this up,
"See Europe In A Volvo." Only in block caps, and tiny.

For fucking serious.
That is the dumbest thing I've ever seen in my whole life, I think. And I just had to share it with all of you.
I used to sort of think maybe Volvos were cool. Like, they're functional luxury cars. I can kind of dig that.
But now I've lost patience with them.

Also I think it's about time I stopped working in Williamsville, because people like that are my customers and really????? Ugh.

Interesting to think about. I'm sort of unhappy with my diet right now-- not the foods in it, per se, but my eating situation as a whole, really. I have coworkers who really like to eat together, and I like eating with them, but that often means waiting until well after I want to eat (I get very stupid when not fed-- I don't deal well with missing a meal, which has always made me feel like a wuss and like I deserve to be fat, but I'm working on not letting my body's mechanisms be such an issue, you know? I gotta eat, so what?) and it also means eating what they get, which is Mighty Taco or pizza or something, usually. I actually started Cold Cut Fridays, where I go to Tops and buy a loaf of bread and sandwich fixins for everyone, because it's cheaper and less gross than tacos again, or burgers again, or pizza the third time this week, or takeout Chinese. I like junk food, it's just my whole life it's been a special once-in-a-great-while treat. And it's still like that to (e:zobar), so he gets all excited and says "Ooooh we could get Chinese we haven't had that in like six months!" and I hate to ruin it by saying "Uh I had it today already." Oh.
The other complicating factor is roller derby practice. I've learned the hard way (throwing up in the rink bathroom sucks) that I can't eat much right before. I try not to eat after 5pm on practice nights. Which is three nights a week. That's kind of a lot of my life. But that means I either eat gross junk food at 4:45 and it's my first meal of the day, or I eat leftovers of whatever Z made at 11:30pm and then can't fall asleep.
Anyway, my food consumption is just all fucked-up and I'm not particularly happy but not really sure how to fix it. It's OK, mostly, but my digestion has been unhappy for like a month and I know it's that I'm not getting enough vegetables.

Dairy:

1. How many gallons of milk do you drink per week? What kind?

Ummm... We always buy a gallon, and in weeks where we eat at home normally we go through it in two weeks or so, but, lately, well... The last two cups or so go bad, because we shop so infrequently and eat home so infrequently.
But I was raised on drinking lots and lots and lots of milk-- osteoporosis runs in the family on both sides and my mother has always been afraid of it, so we drank tons of milk. And I love the taste of it. i'll come home and just drink a whole big glass of it instead of eating a snack if I'm hungry.
And oh, whole. Always whole. My whole life whole. Even on a diet, whole. Because if I'm going to drink milk I'm going to drink fucking actual milk, not gross watery shit. I drink plenty of water and that's fine in its place. I have a general horror of low-fat anything-- if you can't have that much fat in your diet (and low-fat diets, like diets as we know them of almost any kind, are pretty much bullshit anyway) then don't fucking eat/drink it, don't have a shitty alternative to it and have twice as much of it and oh you just had the same amount of fat as if you'd just eaten the fucking thing you really wanted in the first place! I am sorry, this makes me say the F-word a lot.

2. How frequently do you eat any kind of cheese in a week?
A damn lot. Probably five to twelve times a week. The thing is, cheese is a relatively inexpensive way to achieve caloric density, so a lot of my inherited recipes call for it. Also it is really tasty. You can't fuck with that.
Mostly cheddar, lots of feta if I can afford it, fancy cheeses to just eat straight up if I am very rich. I love cheese and it loves me. I know it gives some people gas, but not me.

3. How much half/half or creamer do you drink in a week?

A half of a half of a pint? Not sure. We used to go through a quart of it every two weeks or so, in coffee and recipes, but not anymore, so i'm not sure.

Staples:

4. How much rice do you consume in a week?
Uh.... probably a cup, cup and a half, depending.

5. How many loaves of bread do you eat in a week?
Half of one? If I bring lunch a lot. Z mostly eats up all the bread because he loves sandwiches more than I do. back when I worked part-time I made bread all the time and ate a lot of it, but I don't have time for yeast bread anymore-- you need a day off for that, and I don't have days off.

6. How many times do you eat any pasta in a week?
A million. OK, really probably four or five. It's our go-to staple. If a meal requires additional bulk it will come in the form of pasta, if it is not rice or potatoes.

Um, potatoes are not on this survey. Lose!!! They are the default staple in parts of the world. Such as poor rural upstate New York. My mother was a fantastic meal planner, and we were quite poor; she bought everything in bulk, and every dinner consisted of four major components: meat, starch, and two vegetables. The starch was invariably pasta, rice, or potatoes, very occasionally something wheat-based like bread, pie crust, or something exotic (couscous, tortillas, pita), each prepared in about seven billion different ways. The meat was almost always ground beef or chicken, because those are the cheapest available in a poorly-stocked grocery store. (Sometimes pork, when it was on sale, and occasionally roast beef or ham when we had a budget surplus or a major holiday.) The vegetables were often home-grown and home-preserved, because Mom kept a production garden to feed us. And potatoes were definitely about 1/3 to 1/2 of the starch we ate.
We ate really really well. And Mom prided herself on usually spending about $100 a week on six people. She was an amazing planner. (Is, still, but with much different constraints now.)

Meat:
7. How many times a week do you eat meat of any kind (including fish)?
Every day. Usually twice a day. I wish I ate less meat, but if I don't feed Z meat in every meal, he gets hungry again quickly. He's right, if you're used to eating it, a meal without it is fairly insubstantial. Some of my entree recipes require only a small proportional amount of meat, though, and that still seems to satisfy him, so I do that when I can-- because meat is kind of a budget-buster, and also we don't get to shop that often and run out of meat first. I'd rather treat meat as more of a condiment than a staple, but it's hard, and Z doesn't feel the same way.

8. How many times a week do you eat eggs?
On their own, once or twice. As ingredients, three or four times. They're in a lot of my recipes-- quickbreads and cakes and the such. I don't bake nearly as much as I am accustomed to, however. So now a dozen will last a month, depending on what we make.


Eating all this junk food has astonishingly not hurt me all that much though. I'm down under 200 pounds for the first time in a couple of years, and am back down into size 14 pants, which is the small end of my range. I also haven't, knock wood, been sick all year, really. I'm fighting something now, I thought, except it's been the same for a month, so I'm pretty sure it's allergies. Boo.

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!