Bleeding Tonsillectomy Wounds, Third Marriages, and a Kibosh on Adult Baby Stories

Meredith tried to interest her parents in a Hello Kitty wedding but they weren't interested.

I don't have anything profound in the least to share this evening -- not that I do under normal circumstances -- but my pseudouncle told me that the Adult Babies post has begun to grate on him. He said every time he clicks on my blog to see if I've posted anything new, he sees one of the pictures of the adult babies (I think I may have taken one of the pictures down, as it was starting to creep me out as well, although I may have just had a Vicodin-enhanced dream that I took the picture down) he becomes just a little more weirded out by the pictures. He said he'll wash my car for me on his next day off if I'll either take the Adult Babies post down or post something else after it so that he doesn't see the adult babies unless he scrolls down. As my car most gravely needs to be washed, and as I'm likely to be either too weak to wash it myself or too wasted to drive legally or safely to an automated car wash, I find myself blogging at this rather odd hour.

I had to go back to the hospital yesterday to have one of my wounds cauterized. Despite my valiant efforts at keeping myself hydrated, the scabs over two areas dried up and came off, which caused bleeding that wouldn't stop. I wasn't hemorrhaging, but the bleeding was likely to continue until something was done to stop it. My surgeon cauterized all the surgical sites since I was knocked out anyway and he thought the other wounds didn't look all that terrific, either.The cauterization procedure itself didn't cause me any pain, as I was knocked out for it, but it's about as sore now as it was the first day after the surgery. This, too, shall pass, but I'm growing weary of being stoned.  I'd forgotten about this after other surgeries, but a point may be reached where one can have too much of a good thing  --  even where something so delightful as hydrocodone is concerned. I look forward to having a clear mind.

My doctor asked me to give up studying for five days. I've humored him by putting my materials away since then, and I'll stay away from them for the most part for the next three days, but  friends and relatives quizzed me using some of my pre-prepped study materials. My total study time each day  was somewhere around three hours each day, however, as opposed to my usual twelve-to-fourteen hours of studying per day. I'll need to get back to the more intense studying next week, but I can afford to take things slow for a couple more days.

The week after next,  I'll need to adjust my study schedule so that my day off is on Saturday because I must provide music for a wedding. The wedding will be an interesting one. My friend Meredith's parents are getting married for the third time. It's not just one of those sentimental renew-the-vows sorts of ceremonies, either. It will be an entirely legal wedding. Meredith's parents were first married about two years before she was born. They first divorced when she was somewhere around three. Then they each remarried others, but divorced their respective spouses and decided to give marriage to each other another whirl when Meredith was eight. This time the marriage lasted seven years before they decided to pull the curtain on it.  Meredith's dad remarried twice in the time following their more recent divorce. The first of his subsequent marriages was annulled, while the second one lasted scarcely longer than the little tulle-wrapped packets of rice handed out at the wedding reception. (Meredith's dad is so incredibly frugal that he gathered up rice packets that were not used, unwrapped and poured them into a canister, and cooked and ate the stuff until it was no more. He was eating the leftover Jordan almonds as well until he broke a tooth on one of them once the candied almonds had started to get a bit stale and even harder than usual, if it is even possible for Jordan almonds to be any harder than they usually are. Meredith said she believed  her father endured physical pain in throwing out the Jordan almonds but that, with the cost of dental implants being what it is, he could not justify risking any more teeth on them.)  Meredith's mom had a live-in boyfriend to whom she was engaged at one point, but she never actually remarried.

Meredith's parents are eccentric people.  Her mom is an accountant. While one can never  expect that every single person of any given profession will fit neatly into some sort of compartment, most accountants with whom I happen to be acquainted are sensible, practical, matter-of-fact sort of people. Megan's mother fits the prototype of an account in terms of her skill set. She has multiplication facts committed to memory all the way  to ninety-nine times ninety-nine.  Why in hell would any  person -- even an accountant --need to clog his or her brain with such dispensable data? Autistic savants and others [my dad] can calculate them so rapidly that it's almost as though they've memorized them (even I can calculate them in my head, though I need a few seconds to do so), but not Blondina. As an undergrad accounting major, she went to the trouble of painstakingly memorizing all the way through to one hundred. And she can quote tax codes in her sleep. In other ways, however, she is the very antithesis of what one would expect an accountant to be. When Meredith and I were in high school, Blondina unexpectedly inherited a decent chunk of money. I don't think even Meredith knew the total sum, but I'd guess it was somewhere around a couple hundred thousand dollars. Late one night when I was sleeping over at their home, I came downstairs from Meredith's room to get a drink of water (I don't drink bathroom water; it's one of my quirks)  to find Blondina seated at the kitchen table with an almost anguished expression on her face. I asked her if anything was wrong. She explained that she had come into a wad of money. She had narrowed how she was going to use the money down to two options: #1, she was contemplating purchasing a racehorse; #2, she was  considering putting the money away in a college account for any future grandchildren. The two options she gave would seem to be so diametrically opposing that it would be hard to accept that the same person came up with both of them. Perhaps therein lies the answer. Maybe there is more than one Blondina inside her head.

Meredith's father is named Chad. (His twin brother is named Jeremy. If you know much about the early-to-mid sixties music scene in the U.S. and Britain, you'll probably make the connection. His parents were perhaps a bit frivolous.) Chad is a psychology professor in the University of California system. (Thank God I never had the misfortune of enduring him as a professor.) He has been arrested numerous times during the annual Black Friday protests against furs (and realistic fake furs) at Union square in San Francisco. (I totally understand a person's distaste for the use of real fur in clothing, at least here in the lower forty-eight,  as down and suitable synthetic fibers can keep us about as warm as fur would.  Realistic-looking fake furs, though? That's a stretch.) Chad is a vegetarian about 97% of the time, but roughly one day out of each month, he goes on a binge and  eats practically his weight in bacon. He looks almost like a semi-starving polar bear going after his kill when he eats his bacon. Chad doesn't waste anything. He rinses, saves, and reuses saran wrap, which is  more challenging than it sounds. He doesn't use facial tissues, relying instead upon the use of cotton hankies to clean up the by-products of his chronic allergies. Meredith's mom insists on using a separate washing machine to launder her clothing and linens. I can't say that I blame her.

i do not yet know what musical selections I will play for the wedding. I don't even know what instrument I'll be asked to play. For all I know, it could be a kazoo The traditional Wagner and Mendelssohn are not out of the question, as they're going for the traditional wedding routine with the blushing bride wearing a formal white gown, the groom in a tux, and with ushers and bridesmaids and the full treatment. It would seem to be a bit excessive for a third wedding (TO EACH OTHER!!!) for a fifty-something couple, but who am I to judge? 

Will the third time be the charm for this couple, or will their rather obvious differences force them apart once again? Time alone will tell.

Her parents didn't take the bait on the zombie apocalypse wedding she proposed, either.