Friend's lab results are back with *CONFIRMED* lyme disease from a tick bite picked up while walking on Whigby Island.

So for those of you like me who have been told that lyme disease is not a danger in the Puget Sound region, don't you believe it.
A "bull's eye" shaped rash is the classic first symptom and *immediate* treatment means everything.

(On an odd note of additional interest... three weeks into his lyme disease medical regimen, my friend is experiencing the most astonishing reversal of his chronic fatigue... )

I am getting stronger almost day by day now.
I feel as if I have been gone a very long time.

So frightening, every time, to see/feel how long it has been since I was really able to think and follow things through. The apartment is a new kind of wreck now, a daily-changing forced into functioning wreck.

E is not healing, back or hip. No one knows why. Every week is a progression of appointments: p.t. and acupuncture, every day a progression of careful exercises, no twisting, no bending, no raising elbows above the shoulders, minimize driving. He has just started light therapy.

This month we are getting by, next month is next month. In March they will come and cut down the trees outside my window, raze buildings and lawn alike, the driveway where the children come play basketball in summer and the roof where the flickers raise their young. In March they begin the process of turning the lots beside us and behind us into low income housing and community gardening. We are glad for those who will come, but we do not want to be here for the razing or the building.

- - -

Long scare, tonight. In the past six weeks Laurel has come through swine flu, followed by pneumonia, and last night after dinner her brochial tubes "collapsed"? Info came by phone tree from her uncle. Literally playing "telephone" with the facts is hard to take when when a life is on the line.

Her doctor personally checked her straight into a room at the Pocatello hospital, which is infamous for letting people die while waiting in the emergency room. They spent the days stabilizing her. Doctor left orders that she was to stay inpatient her blood-oxygen reached its usual 94% percent, but they discharged her at 90%. She sounded lively and loving on the phone from home.

SOOOO cool.

The correct way to interpret this comic is:

A. OMG WTF when did XKCD start promoting the rape culture this comic teaches that the chick really wants it no matter what she says

B. Panels 1, 2, 3, *and* 4 are ALL happening in Guy's head, as indicated by the single-sided thought cloud spilling over the standard boundary of Panel 4. If Panels 1, 2, & 3 were real and then Panel 4 was meant to be in Guy's imagination, Panel 4 would be set apart and enclosed by a full four-sided thought cloud parallel to its standard boundaries. The point of the comic is that here are two shy people each hoping the other will make the first move, Gal hesitating because Guy won't even make eye contact and Guy because of the fear that Gal would be the sort to answer A.

This has been your comics literacy quiz. Results may be surprisingly relevant to real life.

Seeking quantum engineer to isolate and help patent E's mysterious power to turn the car he is sitting in invisible while sitting stopped at a full red light.

Yes, rear-ended a second time by a second horrified driver who has never, ever done anything like this before.

Yes, unhealed back re-injured in all the same places.

No, have not been checked out by hospital.
*Went to* hospital, in ambulance, at insistence of other driver, police, and paramedics. Emergency room doctor filled out E's paperwork, then took three minutes to force him to sit up, chew him out for not doing so correctly, poke his back once to make him scream, and listen to his lungs. Doctor vanished after that and after couple more hours of waiting in the overbright hallway we had pain meds in hand and to our astonishment the nurses said we could go.
We do not considered this to count as being "checked out" by the hospital.
Appointment with family doctor tomorrow morning.
Letter to UWMC ombudsman today.

Now, E has a well, WELL established ability to be the invisible pedestrian. Multiple long-term friends have witnessesed cars at crosswalks, gas stations, and turning right at intersections carefully look around and then proceed with calm confidence and hit their brakes in shock and horror immediately before or after bumping the SIX FOOT FOUR INCH SLOW MOVING MONSTER MUPPET that was *right in front of them the entire time.* The "Binky Fenderbane" jokes abound. My father tried to work up a rational theory, and the best he can do is that many drivers literally do not see E because he is outside their framework of reality, like Peter S. Beagle's unicorn and that other troll at PvP.

Said theory cannot explain how he is spreading invisibility to the *whole car*.

In the meantime, please stop telling the "Binky Fenderbane" jokes and stories. The Universe is misbehaving. Don't encourage it.

Community Health versus Group Health?

Okay. It's been how many years?

Yet nobody on the Amazon design team has figured out,

that the sense of personal respect, recognition and relationship created by using the customer's name is totally shredded by indulging in the convenience of an ellipses when the customer's name is inconveniently long?

I promise you, "Treebyl...'s Amazon'com" is never, ever, going to make me feel a sense of personal welcome.

The great danger in life is bitterness.

Bitterness is the closed heart. It is the underlying conviction that what one has already suffered justifies a state of constant vigilance against anything that might even feel like being taken advantage of again, and at the same time justifies every personal effort one make to get some compensation back from the world.

Bitterness is the anchor of double standards. Entitlement has no teeth with bitterness: entitlement without bitterness is merely the attitude that one is owed something; it is bitterness that transforms entitlement into the attitude that one *ought to* be owed something.

Gotta go-- Judgement Day is here. Back after the sentances are sealed.