Five days, if you count today and the wedding day. Three, if you leave off the “crusts.” If I said I wasn’t nervous, I’d be lying. Honestly, though, I’m not worried that I’m doing the right thing. I mean, seriously– how could I NOT spend my life with the happy flower man and the pooch with glowing, alien eyes:

Now I get to throw my useless nervous energy into the weather. The prediction for Saturday is rain and 50-something degrees. Fabulous. Let’s just hope those weather men went to “we’re pulling your leg” school.

It feels like a big step. It IS a big step. I just hope I’ll be warm enough to take it in my sandals!

I have no idea what I was thinking. I won’t justify my actions. Call it hunger, call it stupidity. I just got my tooth (#19 for those of you in the dental know) drilled and filled. For this, my gums were shot full with two needles worth of some unknown numbing agent. Call it Novocaine. 

At work, a quick check in the mirror confirmed that no, my left cheek doesn’t pop out like Mount Olympus, even though it truly feels like Chip ‘n’ Dale. Apparently I can talk, too, if more slowly than usual. But here’s where I got in my own way: I hadn’t had my breakfast yet (two walnuts and a pinch of raisins don’t count. No matter how skinny you are/want to be.) So I made myself a piece of rice bread toast and smeared it with peanut butter.

Brilliant!

I can’t open my mouth to begin with, and now I’ve just added a tablespoon worth of glue. Yummy, peanuty glue that tastes like manna from planet fat, but guarantees that my conversational response time will be even slower than it already was with multiple needles of Novocaine jabbed deep into my oral cavity.

Getting the dark spot on a prominent tooth removed before the wedding: good idea. Gluing my trap shut: well, it depends on who you ask. I’m sure there are people around me who don’t mind the silence, actually.

There’s a lesson in here, somewhere….

I’m not sure that a 25 mph collision qualifies as a “car accident,” but as far as I’m concerned, if Geico had to get involved, it earns the moniker. This one happened more slowly (see 25 mph) than others I’ve been involved in, and so I had more time to examine my thoughts behind the crash.

First and foremost, I remember thinking “steer into the skid,” over and over, even as I did the opposite. The road was narrow, the ice impassable. Had I steered in the direction of the skid, I would’ve broadsided my car against the guardrail. As it stood, I just tapped the front bumper.

I didn’t jam on the brakes, either. I simply realized “you’re going to hit it.” There was no way to prevent impact without making the skid worse, and possibly spinning out of control.

Then I remember thinking: Damn Kings of Leon. Their voices on my iPod are somehow responsible.

Since I was going slowly, I didn’t do serious damage to my vehicle. There was no way to assess the damage directly after impact, though, since the road had no shoulder, and visibility was approximately 18 inches. There was also blowing snow, black ice, the whole lovely winter storm warning kit-and-kaboodle….

The rest of the trip home was the REAL nightmare.

From getting stuck behind a broken-down snow plow, to getting stranded on the snow berm the broken-down truck didn’t plow and getting winched out by two good samaritans, then fighting my failing windshield wipers to no avail and driving over a mile with my head stuck out the driver’s side window, like a damn dog….

This was my Monday night.

Tuesday morning, the roads were bone dry. I drove in to work, wondering if what I’d gone through the night before had even happened. How was it possible  that I was stuck in 2 feet of snow, that my cheeks were snow-stung and pink with windburn? Tuesday afternoon was bright and sunny. Within twelve hours, the spring storm melted off the roadways, as if it had never been.

For a moment, I could identify–to an infintessimal degree–with victims of violent crime. On Monday night, I was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. If I’d delayed my trip a half hour, I would’ve come in behind the snowplow, clean and easy. Instead, I’d left work a few minutes early to make sure I would make it home before dark.

It dumped again this morning, leaving drifts over my shoulder. It was just a hair shy of outrageous, shoveling a winding path through such tall snowpack at 5:30 in the morning. 

With the week I’m having, I won’t be entirely surprised to come home to green grass, robins, and daffodils in full bloom!

Starting with the first day of spring, we had temps that headed into the mid-70’s.  I went running in shorts in the mid-afternoon. Twelve hours later we had several inches of snow on the ground. Apparently, our air masses are schizophrenic.

There’s something both freeing and terrifying about having the weather drop fifty degrees in a few hours. Freeing: because anything can happen. It’s liberating.  Artistically, it’s a boon. But such rapid bait-and-switches are terrifying, too. I mean, are there baselines at all? Where’s the bottom?

If even the weather is so inconsistent, what the hell can I expect from the stock market?

Laws of nature are supposed to be more grounding than the laws of man. Now, I doubt that the weather will ever offer up anything as ridiculous as the twinkie defense. But I don’t have to drive through the courtroom, either. This morning I was excited for a little white stuff to steer through. I wasn’t prepared for full-on whiteout conditions.

Swerving along the side road to work (the interstate was closed, due to hazardous conditions), I kept thinking: yesterday I wore sandals. Yesterday I sat out to write on the picnic bench and IT WAS TOO WARM to stay outside!

Yesterday’s gone. Snow’s here.

Tomorrow, I just might be back in linen skirts again.

It may be totally unrelated, but timing-wise, it seems to be more than mere coincidence. Less than a month after I started to eat a vegan diet, my gastrointestinal system went kerplooey.

The symptoms are pretty specific and yucky. And they don’t always come on. But when they do, it’s unbearable. I had a few weeks of relief, but lately, it’s kicked back up again, after a bout with a nasty stomach flu. Now, whenever I eat a few bites, my esophagus wants out of my body. Today I made the mistake of drinking a few sips of a cup of coffee, and I felt like my entire upper g.i. was going to explode.

I have no idea, logically, medically, why my body should require meat or cheese. For the life of me, I can’t fathom that biological need. But for some reason, none of this happened while I was indulging in red meat and mozzarella.

I will probably go through the whole western medical process, just for shits and giggles. But with a months-long waiting list for a gastroenterologist in this part of the map, I just might see what some free range chicken parmagiana can do.

At first I thought I was crazy. Then I convinced myself it wasn’t really happening. Now I know it’s true. Weird, but true.

My body changes size radically from day to day.

I can vary by five pounds A DAY.  My waist often expands or contracts a full inch literally overnight. That’s a full clothing size difference! So when I say I have nothing to wear, I mean it. For my body, at that moment, may not fit anything in my closet.

It’s not like I’m sitting around bingeing or purging or starving or overdoing it on junk food, either. I eat only foods that are sugar-free, gluten-free and (mostly) vegan. So it’s not the half a cow I consumed with a bottle of wine and baked Alaska. I eat almost the same things every day. Yet my body changes seemingly at will.

At least I’ve solved one of the mysteries this week: yes, there really is such a thing as stairmaster butt. It’s muscle. I run less in the winter, and hit the elliptical hard. My jeans won’t close around my hips anymore. Since it’s unlikely that I will get over my fear of running on ice anytime soon, I’ll just have to go a size up until the spring.

The rest of it, though, still eludes me.

I would much prefer not to be such a shape-shifter. “Plateau” sounds dreamy, to me. I wish I could hit a number and stay there, rather than bouncing all over the place. But I guess my body has an artistic temperament, too. Neither my brain nor my waist like to be trapped in one place, one pair of jeans.

Now if only I could afford to buy two of everything, I’d be in business!

Tuesday’s hike was getting a little long, or thus spaketh my blisters, when I spotted the largest paw print I’d ever seen in my life. Along with it’s three brothers. The prints were spread out across a stride bigger than my entire person. The front paw alone rivaled the size of my head.

Uh-oh.

I immediately started singing some made-up song, something along the lines of “Hello, bear, don’t eat me please,” and called to the dog. For the life of me, I couldn’t see a second set, though the human footprints ahead were pretty thick. Luckily, I couldn’t see the bear, either, though I made the executive decision to turn around as quickly as I could and get the hell out of the big guy’s backyard. “Leaving now, bear, please don’t eat me, la, la, la, la, la….”

I’ve seen lion tracks before, and actual mountain lions. But I’ve never in my life seen four prints the size of a small dinner plate, apiece. Somehow, seeing evidence of a gigantic (and, I imagined, man-eating) bear scared the crap out of me in a way a lion never could. I still have some sense of cougars as magical creatures. As if the lion I saw was there to protect me. No way could I ever think that about a refrigerator-sized bear. I would’ve been an appetizer.

In the back of my mind, I harbor a bigger fear than getting eaten by bears. I worry that my ability to spot animal tracks might mean the end to any chance of returning to an urban center of civilization.  I want to be a city girl, I am a city girl, and I am increasingly becoming country-fied.  I suppose I could view my Pocohontas skills as insurance that I return. Brooklyn woman spot bear tracks, Brooklyn woman leave woods and therefore live to return home to the mother ship.

Of course, I also have enough Brooklyn in me to plan a hike back up there over the weekend.

Maybe I’ll bring a camera and win some National Geographic contest. (A triptych: Here’s me. Here’s the bear. Here’s me losing my left leg to its oddly-powerful bite.) We’ll see what my blisters say. “Tempting fate, bear, la, la, la….”

On Wednesday, the wind went wild. Only a few hours after Barack Obama was elected president, the winds of change blew through Wyoming.

Yes, there are indubitably more scientific explanations for the weather event, but this is my blog, and I’m sticking to my own brand of meteorology….

We lost some trees (read: gained some firewood) and had to track a couple garbage cans down the street. The wind kept it up all night long, raging against anything that dared stand in its way. My house dared, and it creaked with the effort all night long. A successful effort, it pleases me to report. 

By Thursday, the air was relatively still, again.

It felt, for all the world, like some despotic monster raging against the loss of a political dynasty.

I cried last night when I heard the news. It still seems too good to be true–I guess I’m shellshocked after the last eight years. I keep expecting bad news around the corner. I want so badly to believe that we are this ready, but I can’t let my shoulders drop. I’m tense. What if all this gets taken away? I suppose it will have to be good enough that it happened in the first place.

Our first black President.

Damn. I’m crying again.

After a quarter of my life under the worst administration in history, I finally feel represented. As trite as it may be by now, I am hopeful. We have a leader who can speak well, decide his own policies, and offer a voice for people who never had one in America before.

At the risk of sounding just like every other wide-eyed liberal, I’ll stop here. And cry some more.

It takes a decent amount of feeling badly to get me to go to a doctor. The degree of badness required isn’t equal, body-part-wise, either. A week with an upper respiratory infection is plenty. My stomach–well, that remains to be seen. Because the bad feelings I was left with after the office visit were worse than what I’d come in with.

To start off with, there are no more than a half-dozen gastroenterologists in my insurance network. The only one within 200 miles of me doesn’t “do” office visits. You have to meet with his nurse practitioner. So I met with the nurse practitioner. She asked me maybe five questions about my medical history, then had me describe my symptoms. I did so. From that, she determined that I need an endoscopy, a colonoscopy, and biopsies of every digestive organ.

Really?

The nurse never took my temp, or blood pressure. I’d been running a fever all week. Now, I’m no medical professional, but wouldn’t that be important to suss out? Also, how can you prescribe the appropriate anaesthetic without determining if I have a heart condition?

I called the office the next day to find out how much this was going to cost me. The doctor’s fees alone were more than $3,000. Then I was told to expect separate bills from the surgical center, the anaesthesiologist, the lab and the pathologist. Five bills in all. It’s looking like at least an $8,000 fee. For the doctor’s CYA.

I cancelled the appointment yesterday. My own diagnostic skillls said it’s a gastro-racket. I can’t see throwing money at the problem without good odds of a diagnosis. 

So my belly is still funky, but my head and my heart are in tandem. And my wallet is eternally grateful.