Monday, March 31, 2008

"I've Been Tagged For A Meme"

And my co-workers are wondering if I've just mentioned some new software we all have to learn.

This one is from Ms. Judy. The rules are:

1. Link to the person who tagged you.

2. Post the rules here

3. Share 7 random or weird facts about yourself

4. Tag 7 random people at the end of the post, linking to them.

5. Leave a comment on their blog so that they know they’ve been tagged.

Seven random facts about me:

Okay, now I'm supposed to tag seven people, except almost none of the people I could possibly tag have blogs. However, they've all sent me e-mails that I have yet to answer with headings like "Three Facts About Me" "Things You Didn't Know About Me" and "Drive Your Girlfriend Wild With Extra Inches." Oh wait, that last one was something else.

I'm going to tag Ambivablog. Oh look, she just invented another meme.


Friday, March 28, 2008

Caught In The Act

Jim and Me watching a free Today show concert by the Monkees, August 1997.

This was posted on YouTube, and a friend alerted me.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

It's Clocky!


"The alarm clock that runs away and hides to get you out of bed. Clocky gives you one chance to get up. But if you snooze, Clocky will jump off your nightstand and wheel around your room looking for a place to hide, beeping all the while. You'll have to get out of bed to silence his alarm."
Guaranteed, the first thing I see when I wake up in the morning will be my cats beating the crap out of Clocky.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

I Am A Human Being!...with a cold.

If I owe you a phone call, once again, I don't hate you. I have another cold. This one seems to have settled in my sinuses and I have to sleep sitting up, like The Elephant Man. It's the same kind of cold my hair guy had last weekend so I had to reschedule my appointment to this weekend, so now my hair is big and lumpy like The Elephant Man's head.

I've been going to work every day and functioning at about 80%, but I look and sound like Elmer Fudd.

"Hewwow?...I have to hang up now. I'm vewwy vewwy tired."

By now, I've given up on being amazed that I've caught every virus circulating in the tri-state area and I'm just waiting for this nonsense to pass.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Another Fifth Beatle Bites the Dust

Their original road manager, Neil Aspinall. I remember reading about "Nell" in all the teen magazines and later in all of the Beatle-ologies.

He was being treated for lung cancer at Sloan-Kettering. I wonder if he was an in-patient. If so, he would have been on the floor Jim was on, with the motion-sensitive beds.

In other news, I set up my new Home Micro-Theater while I was on hold waiting for the guy from the store who was going to walk me through it.

Monday, March 24, 2008

This Sounds Like A Joke, But It's Not

Peter Tork, Advice Columnist.

Good advice, too.

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Spring Eating

Street Fair season has begun.

The weather was beautiful today. Better than the weather report had said. Better than I'd thought. Better than we ever deserved. It was a little windy, though.

I caught a giant pillow fight in Union Square. I'd thought it was a bunch of white flags and we were surrendering to somebody. The wind blew feathers and fiberfill all over the neighborhood, and people got on the buses and trains with little pieces of feathers and fuzz stuck to their clothes, carrying it to the boroughs and suburbs. You probably have some on you right now. I'm serious. Check.

The stuff blew all the way down to J&R near City Hall, where I went to get a mini-home theater system, which I am now about to hook up to my mini-TV and mini-tape deck and mini-VCR-DVD in my mini-dwelling.

Friday, March 21, 2008

Spring Cleaning

I splurged this afternoon on a professional window washer, this old Ukrainian guy with two younger assistants--I'd thought they were his sons, but he introduced them as "No, they're family." 

I could have cleaned the fire escape window myself, but I wasn't going to take a chance with the other one and a six-foot squeegee. Meanwhile, the guy popped that window out of its frame in two seconds. It got a total cleaning for the first time in 25 years.

The windows looked as clear and shiny as two giant soap bubbles, and now I'm going to have to clean the rest of the apartment because the clean windows are making it look dirty.

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

The Only Thing You Need To Know About The Credit Crisis

Okay, pretend that Steve Martin is Bear Stearns.

Monday, March 17, 2008

"You'll Have the Results in a Couple of Days"

I went to the radiology for the spot mammogram. They checked out the ex-rays and told me to stick around until 12:15 for a sonogram. 

I tried to get a clue from the sonogram technician, which shows you how terrified I was, since they're not allowed to tell you anything even if they knew.

"So, I guess they saw something on the mammogram that they want to check out, huh?" I said, with all of the nonchalance of somebody about to be executed.

"They want to look at it from another angle."

"It?"

"Yes. The mammogram looks at it from one angle, and then the sonogram looks at it from another angle."

Okay, but nobody's telling me what "it" they're looking at. "It! The Terror From Beyond Space"? "It, the Thing That's Going to Spread Through My Body And Kill Me"?

Hopefully, "it" will turn out to be benign, or at least very, very small.

Update, from the doctor's office:

"Benign breast tissue with calcifications."

"Benign breast cyst."

"Recommend follow-up in six months."

Whew!!!

Now, on to all of those good deeds I promised I would do.

Friday, March 14, 2008

Another Test

"This is Lenox Hill Radiology..."

"Yes?"

"Is this Melinda Bruno?"

"Yes."

"You were in here for a mammogram on Tuesday?"

"Yes???"

"There is a tiny area..."

Long story short, I have to come back for a spot compression on Monday morning. This takes a close-up of the tiny area to get a better idea of what it is.

"We wanted to let you know on Friday so that you wouldn't worry this weekend."

Oh yeah, I'm not worried at all now.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

The Return of Waiting

Okay, so I had the mammogram last night at about 7, which would have been too late for the place to have called my doctor if they saw a big, whopping tumor then. So that means I would get the call today.

So every time I come back from the ladies' room I creep up on my desk holding my breath until I see whether or not there's a message light on my phone. And if there's a message light, I keep holding my breath until I retreive the message. I'm getting good at holding my breath. They tell you to hold your breath while the mammogram machine is taking the ex-ray. I remained as motionless as a statue, lest a blur on the film obscure something that could kill me.

Then I figured, maybe they don't know I'm in my office and they called my house. "No new messages," the machine said. Relieved, I went out for a walk at lunchtime. I justified a new handbag, a copy of Mojo Classic's "Summer of Love" special, and a bag of candy. I deserve this, to make up for the pain of waiting, I tell myself. Followed by telling myself, "Oh, if I have to get surgery, chemo and radiation I may lose time from work, so I'd better not buy anything."

This is a familiar feeling, this waiting. After Jim died, people were asking me, "How did you function through all that, and through all your own scares?" I functioned through a List of Things To Do. I multi-tasked, to show the anxiety I was stronger than it was. And I figured, whether the news is good or bad, at least I have all these things done.

It's time to go wax the Pentagon.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Diamond Girl

Okay, so the girls at Elliot Spitzer's favorite high-end ho-house were rated according to the "Diamond" system: Three diamonds, seven diamonds, etc.

So, what if you were a Three Diamond ho? Would you be jealous of the Seven Diamond ho? Would you go to the Madam and ask for more challenging assignments?

Bruno Watches "Bruno"

I'm going up to Lenox Hill Radiology after work for the mammogram I haven’t had in two-and-a-half years, which is enough time for something to sweep through my body and kill me. It’s unlikely, though. But another hurdle to jump over before I can get on with the rest of my week; a week of “I’m afraid of my phone again.”

I didn’t get very much sleep last night, partly because of restlessness about the mammogram. Also, I started watching the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony and I wanted to see the Dave Clark Five, which is now the Dave Clark Three. I’d been looking forward to seeing Mike Smith to see if he’d recovered from being paralyzed for life, but to my dismay, the other Dave Clark Five guys said that he’d passed away just a few days ago. Jim would have been very sad to have heard that.

Then at midnight I turned off the TV and started reading more “The Kite Runner” and I was starting to get sciatica pains, badly. But I had to see how the next part turned out and the next part and then when I went to lie down the nerve pain hurt too badly to breathe. My first line of defense is Capsaicin crème, a generic brand from the 99 cent store. But that did nothing, and I resorted to the nuclear option, half a Percoset.

This usually takes about a half-hour to work, so I got up and turned the TV back on and stood in front of it channel-surfing. I found a quirky little movie called Bruno on the Long Island station, about this cross-dressing whiz kid and his butch grandmother, Shirley MacLaine. I couldn’t sit and got tired of standing, so I lay down on my exercise mat in front of the TV.

At one point I’d thought I saw Brett Butler in a nun’s habit and figured I was hallucinating. But I checked out Internet Movie Data Base just now and it was her.

The sleep was good, but too short. And now I’m scared of the mammogram.

Friday, March 07, 2008

The Easter Bunny on Acid

Artandghosts. HT.

Thursday, March 06, 2008

Does Novocain Make Your Whole Body Tired?

Note to anyone, male or female, who attempts to put on lipstick when you can't feel your lip: No matter how good your eye/hand coordination is, you will end up looking insane.

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

My New York Age is 32

In this city, that's 50 with a normal person's income.

What's your New York Age?

Monday, March 03, 2008

Free Mary

You can see entire Mary Tyler Moore Show episodes here, interspersed with annoying ads for Royal Caribbean.

You can also see them every Monday night on American Life TV. Tonight they were showing the one where Rhoda says, "This is my date, Mr. and Mrs. Armand Linton."

I loved this episode when I first saw it, when I hadn't even started dating yet, and 38 years later, it still picks me up out of a bad mood.

Eighties Music Test

How well do you remember 80's pop music lyrics?
I rocked out, which means that on about 15 out of 100 questions I said to myself, "Oh, who knew what they were saying! I was deaf from too much arena rock."

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

nyc bloggers map