The front step might have been done on it own, but there was also the driveway, so poorly engineered that people have actually slipped under their parked car in the winter due to lack of room and up-sloping hills on each side.

It was just plain dangerous. Something had to be done.

So the heavy artillery was called in -  Buster, Tass, Seymore and the boys – and thus began the digging, the dirt, the old roots, the jack hammering and the noise. The boys seem to know what they are doing and they show up each day so that’s a good sign.

At any one time I have two excavators under my office window, sometimes a cement mixer, dump trucks arriving to take away the excess dirt and other truck arrive to drop of the rocks for the retaining walls.

It’s sort of fun seeing your house and yard stripped down to its bare bones, but it’ll be more fun when the walls are up, the concrete poured and front step is finished.

I’d say that’s still a good three weeks away.

Wish me luck

The other day I heard a geriatric psychiatrist on the radio talking about the importance of keeping adult brains exercised. Apparently, it helps avoid cognitive decline.

So why don’t they have adult summer camps.

Not learnin’ for earnin’

But learning for fun.

Why do we have to wait until we’re 65 to learn for fun again? We might not be here when we’re 65. IF if we let our brains go all fuzzy and narrow, we might render ourselves incapable.

Contrary to popular belief, adults can learn, if they choose to. The difference between adult and children is that children haven’t yet learned that they can’t learn. And adults get all comfy and set in their ways, if they choose to.

If adults could unlearn that they can’t learn … just think.

Desincrustant.

I never really thought of exfoliating as disincrusting.

But I supposed that’s what you are doing: removing that layer of crust that builds up on your face.

That is why the skin on your face seems so soft when you are finished. It has been unburdened of its crust.

Mmmmmm. Niiiiiice.

So people go ahead, and disincrust yourself today.

We had a sulu-wearing Methodist minister. Very earnest.

And five or six sulu-wearing “guests” who were Shanghai’ed in for the job.

They were actually the bar and kitchen  staff at the little hotel where we were staying.

The boss organized the minster for us and attendance for the bar staff was apparently mandatory. And you could tell by the bored looks on their faces in the snapshots.

Sweet, huh?

There’s a picture of us against an evening ocean-and-sky backdrop that is so perfect you’d think it was a roll-down in a Walmart photo studio.

Some years later, questions about the validity of our marriage cert. were raised by the British Home Office. I was applying for UK citizenship.

One of the witnesses was illiterate and signed with an X. There was some question as to whether it was properly notarized.

So there is some doubt around the question of whether we’re actually married or not.

And I sort of like it that way.

I wasn’t expecting it to be too painful.  Sure I had a few days off, but I was skiing and dog sledding.  Surely that would keep me fit.

Ha.

Hahahahaha.

How wrong I was.

It felt like there was no oxygen in the air above the pool.

I huffed and puffed and gasped for air. I swore at the end of my sprint sets. And I complained like a banshee.

My coach laughed at me.

My teammate commiserated. She had a cold.

So much for maintaining cardio fitness over time.

What will Friday’s workout bring: redemption or death?

He fell out of the tree.

How do you change a blond’s mind?

Blow in his ear.

How do you keep a blond busy all day?

Write “please turn over” on both sides of a piece of paper

How do you make a blond laugh on Monday morning?

Tell him a joke on Friday night

How do you make a blond’s eyes sparkle?

Shine a torch in his ear.

How do you sink a submarine full of blonds?

Knock on the door

If you drop a blond and a brunette from a plane, which hits the ground first?

The brunette. The blond has to ask directions on the way down.

Robert Palmer’s original lyrics “…of lovin’ you” sound so much better. And it probably feels better too.

And “groin injury” really doesn’t describe the 20,000 volt shots of pain going through me every time I move.

It all started yesterday afternoon after work. I felt a wave of fatigue and a chill so I took to my bed for 20-minutes. That’s unusual for me and people wondered.

When I got up to take a call, there was a strange sensation in that ball-and-socket area connecting my left leg to my pelvis. Nothing too serious so I carried on.

An hour later I was stepping out of the car downtown.  The strange-sensation had progressed to hurting-quite-a-bit. I needed to take the “arm of another” to walk the three blocks to the restaurant.

Sitting and eating was fine, but when I stood up to leave some 90 minutes later, a white-hot bolt of lightning rocketed down my leg. I “yelped” out loud (YOL!). It was an involuntary yelp. People looked.

The walk to the door was long, perilous and punctuated by involuntary yelps. The pain was electric: nerve pain, coming in sudden shots, searing. Through the blur, I could see people in the window of the next restaurant gawking and pointing. What they were seeing was an old an old lady, hunched over and shuffling at a snail’s pace, face pinched in pain, yelping.

Next came the stairs. There were about ten, all of them going down. My “arm of another” was off retrieving the car. So I stood there alone at the top of those steps making my plan: Use the railing like a crutch. Good leg first. Ease down one step at a time. Remember to breathe. Like yoga.

I knew it would be hard but I had no idea how hard. It took second-by-second focus and a Herculean determination not unlike that of a climber ascenting (Sir Edmund) Hillary’s Step just before summiting Everest.

We’ll call those stairs “GT’s Step.”

When I reached the bottom of GT’s Step, my knight in shining armour awaited with the family chariot.  But getting me across the sidewalk and folding me into the chariot proved a challenge equally as grueling as GT’s Step.

When I arrived home, I was helped inside. I had to crawl up the stairs.

This morning it was better for the first ten minutes, but the 20,000 volt shots are back. I’m hitting the ibuprofen pretty hard to take down the inflammation.

Right now, I’m attributing the injury to an early morning workout in the pool on Friday. We were doing butterfly sets, focusing a fast, tight dolphin kick. You try to keep the undulation to a minumum and use core rigidity to max out on forward propulsion. It’s a Michael Phelps technique.

That could have put strain on my groin area. I’m hoping that’s it. I haven’t yet contemplated the alternatives (!)(!).

In this part of the world, going to hospital emergency is not an option, unless you’re willing to wait minimum six to twelve hours or more. Recently, the Emergency Docs at the biggest hospital in Eastern Canada enacted a “Code Orange” mass casuality alert just to clear the long line-up of ambulances full of bleeding and fractured people who couldn’t even get into the hospital, much less get treatment. (That state of affair is another story entirely.) I may as well sit in the comfort of my house all day.

I’m under no-move orders today. I’m so hoping this thing will go away. Soon.

All experience or ideas on this welcome. All sympathy and notes of I-feel-your-pain also welcome. I’m not one to suffer alone or in silence.

Yelp!

1. I’m fascinated – no, really! -by heating systems in buildings. The poor furnace maintenance guys have no idea what they’re in for when they come to my house.

2. In my troubled youth phase, I wore a T-shirt that said Disco Sucks, but secretly I loved disco. Don’t tell!

3. I have white patches on my knees, feet, elbows and fingers. Part albino I am.

4. I was a good speller in school, but with age I’m losing that skill.

5. I had poor penmanship in school, but in later years I taught myself italic calligraphy which looks quite nice when I have the right pen and nice paper.

6. My blog name was borne of the dreaded “And what do you do?” question at cocktail parties. With a resume resembling a dog’s breakfast, I never knew what to say, so I just answered “I’m a typist, a very gifted typist.”

7. I’m a gum junkie. Once I start I have to eat the whole package. I just need more and more hits of that fresh burst. But I can go for months without one stick.

8. In airports, I always get mistaken for Ellen Degeneres.

9. At the time I did not know this, but for a short period I was employed by the Eastern European mafia teaching English as a second language.

10. I was once a passenger in a four-seater single-engine plane when the single engine died mid-air. We were going to make an emergency landing on the road below, but out of nowhere in the Icelandic countryside there appeared a grass landing strip which was close enough to glide for and land on. I remain forever in the debt of Jed the US Air Force P3 pilot who handled the crisis like a real pro and put that little plane down without a scratch. He was putting in hours to get his commercial license at the time.

11. I was married on a beach in Fiji. I didn’t ask my other half to take my name. I’m not threatened by that sort of thing.

12. My little typists are 12 and nine. The 12-year old has always been a 42-year old midget (though lately losing her midget status) and the nine-year old was born on the blue moon.

13. I’m struggling in a co-dependent relationship with a cat who is passive aggressive and harbouring resentment over something, but I’m not sure what.

14. I used to live in a house with an address good enough to eat: Rosebank, Tweentown, Cheddar, Somerset.

15. I’m a sambista on sabbatical due to family responsibilities. I played surdo, tamborim and bells. I miss samba.

16. I’m reading a book called The Great Crash 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith who is an excellent writer for an economist.

Cookies are gone. Bourbon’s been slurped.

Presents are all under the tree.

Stockings are stuffed.

Guess who’s been and gone.

Missed him again!

Dang.

Merry ho ho to everyone.

And to everyone a good night.

(This one’s doing the rounds. It’s cute.)

Please join me in remembering a great icon of the entertainment community. The Pillsbury Doughboy died yesterday of a yeast infection and trauma complications from repeated pokes in the belly. He was 71.

Doughboy was buried in a lightly greased coffin. Dozens of celebrities turned out to pay their respects, including Mrs. Butterworth, Hungry Jack, the California Raisins, Betty Crocker, the Hostess Twinkies, and Captain Crunch.

The grave site was piled high with flours.

Aunt Jemima delivered the eulogy and lovingly described Doughboy as a man who never knew how much he was kneaded. Doughboy rose quickly in show business, but his later life was filled with turnovers.

He was not considered a very smart cookie, wasting much of his dough on half-baked schemes. Despite being a little flaky at times, he still was a crusty old man and was considered a positive roll model for millions.

Doughboy is survived by his wife Play Dough, three children: John Dough, Jane Dough and Dosey Dough, plus they had one in the oven. He is also survived by his elderly father, Pop Tart.

The funeral was held at 3:50 for about 20 minutes.

If this made you smile for even a brief second, please rise to the occasion and take time to pass it on and share that smile with someone else who may be having a crumby day and kneads a lift.