The smell of victory? It's in the air.

You know how there are some smells and tastes that just stick in your head? Even ones from when you are little? Like Thanksgivings where the smell of turkey emanated throughout the house for hours and your mouth watered for just as long. Or Christmas time and you can smell the cider and hot chocolate and pine everytime you open the front door. And all the goodies baking in the kitchen. They tend to stick in your head. And then when you stick them in your mouth, sometimes it is a wondrous thing. But sometimes it can be a disappointment. Like the first time you tried to eat playdough.

However, today's taste of victory will be oh so sweet. T- 1.25 hours. And then it will be mine. Because this ridiculous cast will be off my leg. AND my foot will be FREE!

hallelujah.

what my foot will look like in 1 hour:

Please and Thank You.

Yes, the WEATHER was a chilly today. And yes, I was wearing shorts. AND sandals. The cool brisk 37 degrees of chill outside in the morning cannot deter me from avoiding the fact that the snow season is coming up. However, I dressed for the high temperature of this fantabulous October day. Not the morning one. So, now it is quite pleasant outside and sandals and shorts perfectly suit me and this balmy 54 degree weather. Please and thank you, I would like one, just one more day to have the opportunity to put both feet into sandals - not one in a sandal and one in a cast, thank you.

ALSO, I would like to formally apologize to the guy who sits next to me in math class. Yes, I have had a cast on my legs for almost 6 weeks. Yes, it is quite, quite hairy as it is next to impossible to shave it -trust me, I tried. It is probably more painful for me to look at than for you. Perhaps you dislike the fact that the amount of hair on my leg is competing with yours? Or the fact that you are so captivated by this phenomenon that you cannot focus on the chalkboard or what the professor is saying.

However, you Sir, may celebrate come class time on FRIDAY. I will be rid of this cantankerous thing. And then, you are free to stare at our moustached-and-portly-enough-to-resemble-Professor-Slughorn-from-Harry-Potter-professor and try to decrypt the mumbo-jumbo of scribblings on the board that by some MIRACLE translate to be the lecture for the day.

I, on the other hand, will celebrate by shaving off a piece of me. Or many pieces of me. And I will wear sandals one more time.

peachie-O!

Sometimes school gets overwhelming. Especially when I have to run like wildfire up 4328954 stairs to get to one class..... and then do it all over again an hour later after another class. Not so much fun.

Especially with one of these puppies on your foot hanging on for dear life like the anchor in the sand:

BUT these make any day better:

Good thing I have a pound of them sitting on the desk in front of me.
Soon to be NONE.

boating!

to me, this is the epitome of summer - carefree, relaxing, sunshine, water, friends, fun.
what else could there be to distract me and pull me back to the real world? NOTHING.

(Yes, I stole this picture.)

today I did one of these:
,
while riding one of these:

while being pulled behind a red one of these:


The first time was closer than the second. I almost had it the second time, too.


I will be very sad when I can no longer do any of the above
because my foot will have one of these:


september 4th = no more boating.
no more boating = summer is over.
ergo, september 4th means summer is over.

that will be a sad, sad day.

HOT or NOT?

So in honor of the movie last night, I'm starting a HOT or NOT list. But not like the one on the movie. (sorry, kins....I'm pretty sure I can't get away with that one :) as much fun as that would be.)

So today's HOT: I can bend my toe. Hallelujah. Almost exactly 2.5 months after having a little construction done, this is miraculous. Literally... it's a miracle. It was so that I would be able to get my full range of motion back to where it was before surgery. This was meant to break up the connective tissue that was getting in the way. He did the smaller parts on the first 2 jabs. And then on the 3rd jab, I could almost instantly tell that my toe could move. It was so... surreal. In the 3 seconds that that jab was in my foot - which felt more like 3 years - I could instantly tell my foot was getting better. A miracle.


[the first picture is the day i got my surgery done - an interesting day, to say the least. To say the most: I basically spilled ALL my secrets to my older brother when I was coming back into consciousness. Because of this, I no longer hesitate to tell him anything. Mostly because he'll hear it anyways on September 4th. :) Lucky him. The other two pictures are from the day they cut my cast off. And I almost put up the other ones, but I thought I'd save them for later. In the third picture you can see where they wrote 'yes' on my foot to make sure that they operated on the correct one so that I wouldn't sue them later. Except I have to get surgery on both feet, so it wouldn't have mattered if they did do the other foot.]

today's NOT: (sorry if this next part semi-grosses anyone out...) I got a needle that was about 3 inches long repeatedly inserted (read:jabbed!) into my toe. I'm not normally one to cry about anything. Instead, I just made do with yelling "ow" as loud as I possibly could in order to deter anyone who was thinking about possibly getting the same surgery I did. However, I can't really badmouth this lovely shot that I was so blessed to receive multiple times. I can now stand on my tippy-toes. I guess I took that for granted before. (Kind of like how much I take crinkling my nose for granted. And then when I get a sunburn, I realize how much I hate not being able to crinkle it - especially because I crinkle my nose when I'm laughing. Ergo, getting a sunburn = no laughing.) I have renewed my 7 year old dreams of being a ballet dancer now that I can stand on tippy-toes (both of them!!)...... So I guess what this means is that however much I want this to be a 'NOT', it really deserves to be a 'HOT'.

And now I really should get back to studying up on gene expression and the lac operon. Tomorrow's final exam (20 essays, ranging from 4 sentences to a page each): piece of cake. I hope - no, I KNOW.