Yvette's Inner Geek Blog

It was unseasonably warm on Halloween* this year. On Saturday, November 1, Ben raked leaves and I spent some peaceful time lying in one of the piles before we shoved them into bags. The sun was extraordinarily bright, as you can see from my squinty eyes in this photo.

Then we had beautiful fall weather for a couple days, and a cold front came in with some rain. It snowed in the mountains, and then last night the rain turned to snow here in Utah Valley. I woke up on the Day After Obama Won to see a soft blanket of snow, only an inch or so, covering the yard. It was really beautiful. It mostly melted by the afternoon, but not before Ben took this sweet photo of a wilting, snow-covered jack-o-lantern on our front porch.

*Oh yeah, Halloween. I Twitter my thoughts but then sometimes forget to expand those thoughts into blog posts. Some friends came over and we ate chili (Ben made an amazing Beer Chili that I have demanded he make again soon) in pumpkin-looking bread bowls and drank hot mulled apple cider (that was spiked with rum for a few of us). Tons of kids came to the door, so it’s a good thing that our friends brought extra candy. Read more…

Because I wish I could see my friend Bryan in the Lincoln Lodge Halloween comedy show tonight. Especially after watching his heartbreaking portrayal of Frankenstein in this video :

Go see it tonight at 9 if you’re in Chi-town! I’ll be at home in Utah, eating chili in pumpkin-shaped bread bowls with friends and passing out candy to little costumed beggars. I dug up some purple and orange strings of lights that I might hang on the tree next to our front door, and I’m putting out several glass candle holders with tea lights to illuminate the porch. We have a couple pumpkins out there already, but they aren’t carved yet and I doubt they will be tonight.

My friend’s 13-year-old daughter plans to hold a scythe while wearing all black, including a black faceless mask, and stand very still in our yard before scaring the bejesus out of as many people as possible.

It’s been relatively warm today, reaching almost 70 degrees, so I think hanging out on the porch will be a good possibility. If we get cold, I’ll have some mulled cider on the stove to warm us up… and adults can get extra warm with a splash of rum in their mug. Rummmmmmmm…

Awesome: Wild birds.
Not Awesome: Wild birds that fall down a derelict stovepipe chimney and become trapped.

Once upon a time, last week, I was sitting at my computer wondering why it was so hard for me to start blogging again. It was a dim, cloudy day, and rare (welcome) storms were approaching my Utah home. At 3:50pm, I heard a horrifying scriiiiiiiiitch-ing noise and thought that something was scraping maniacally against a window–or I was about to become a front page newsworthy victim of some horrible suburban home invasion.

Gushing adrenaline pushed me out of my chair and into the living room, where it became apparent that the noise was coming from the chimney of our never-used wood (or is it coal? We don’t even know) burning fireplace. A poor bird was stuck in there. (Can you help identify the bird? See below.)

Panicked, guilty horror washed over me, which in my brain goes a lot like this: ohshit ohshit ohshit ohshit!

Why guilty horror, you ask? Because a few months back the same thing happened with sad results. The scritching noise started as I was heading out the door, late for work. I called Ben, who had a similar reaction. We weren’t really sure what to do, and I had no idea how to disassemble the fireplace or the chimney, so I went to work. I called a chimney sweep, who quoted me $100 to come out. I called Ben again, and he came home as soon as he could to attempt a rescue… which was successful. But the bird wasn’t moving much when he pulled it out, so Ben set him down gently in the garage near the open door where he staggered on his feet for a minute before falling over. Sadly, it died right there in front of its big-hearted rescuer.

And here’s the part where I look like a neglectful homeowner and horrible person: we realized that there must not be a cap on our chimney, or it had broken, thus allowing a bird to fall down in the first place. But we never fixed it. So yeah, the whole story you’re about to read could have been avoided… but at least this time there was a happier ending. So I’ll get back to that now.

3:50 I first heard the sound and concluded that it was a bird.
3:51 Ohshit ohshit ohshit ohshit
3:52 I realized the rain had started, so I ran upstairs to close the skylights.
3:53 I ran back to the living room, but the noise had stopped. Loki was sitting two feet away from the fireplace, staring intently at where the noise was but also looking somewhat bored at the same time. How do cats do that?
3:55 I called Ben to tell him about the noise, and that it had stopped, and that I was pretty certain there was a dead bird in our chimney. Or maybe it was alive, and I should try to rescue it? But what if it was really dead? He asked me what I wanted him to do, and I pulled out my seldom-used Girl Card and squeaked, “Can you come home and take care of it?”
4:01 The bird scared the shit out me as I was about to hang up the phone. “I’m coming home now,” Ben said. I spent the next few minutes clearing things away from the fireplace area and pulling out small-ish cardboard boxes and a flashlight.
4:22 The bird went crazy in the chimney again and scared the bejesus out of Phoebe, the scaredy-cat who had been downstairs up until that point.
4:42 Ben arrived. We closed the doors to the bedrooms, wrangled the cats into the basement and shut that door, and opened all the windows on the first floor in hopes that the bird would be able to fly through one after its release. We have double-hung windows so we could open the top portion, assuming that the bird was more likely to fly high. Ben had the forethought to turn off the ceiling fan in the living room.
4:46 Ben pulled off the top lid-thingy on the stove to peek inside. I felt like an idiot, because I think I could have done that. But all we could see was a tail, so I happily relegated myself to flashlight-holder and picture-taker.

The next several minutes were nerve-wracking because in my head, the bird could die at any moment. The shrill sound of frantic talon-scratching on metal was welcome because at least we knew that the bird was still alive. Ben shook the stovepipe to encourage/force the bird to put its feet at the base of pipe, which caused it to climb up a foot somehow. So we waited patiently, and eventually it came down far enough for us to see what its body looked like.

Ben had the genius idea of bending a wire coat hanger to use as a scooping prod. No, of course he didn’t use the hook end to poke the bird! The first time the hanger touched the bird, it freaked out and climbed out of reach again. In the meantime, we scraped away some of the ashes at the base of the hole to allow more of the bird’s body to show. Eventually it slid back down and this is what we saw:

It was a much bigger bird than we thought it would be, which made it impossible to rescue in the same manner as the other bird (which had been small enough to fit underneath that flue bar in the middle). Ben tried one last time to coerce it over the flue bar, but its beak was at least 1.5 inches long and it retreated again.

Then Ben had another genius idea… to try opening the metal flue. Once open, he could see the bird in the pipe and was confident the bird could fit through that opening! I suggested he put on some gloves before sticking his hands up there in case the bird pecked or clawed or there were sharp edges inside.

So I took over as the holder of the flue handle to make sure that the flue didn’t slam shut with Ben’s hand or the bird inside. Ben used the coat hanger and something cute like “Hey there, little bird, we’re here to help you!” and pretty quickly told me to stand back.

And then the bird flew out! It flew up toward the ceiling immediately, paused for a fraction of a second, and then flew out the closest open window. I was very thankful that the top half was open… the last thing we wanted after freeing the bird was for it to slam right into a window.

We ran outside to see where it went or if it faltered, but it flew a straight course over our neighbor’s house and disappeared into the neighborhood. It was sort of anti-climactic… I mean, would have been nice if the bird had perched on the lonely nectarine tree in our backyard and chirped a little thanks before flying off, right? Needless to say, we were relieved and happy that the bird made it out alive and apparently well. A thousand kudos to Ben, my animal-loving hero who’s not afraid to get dirty:

It took a total of 45 minutes to get the bird out from the time Ben came home. Not too bad, I guess… I would say that we’ll now be able to do it faster next time, but I’m hoping there won’t be a next time. We’re getting a cap on that chimney ASAP. Also, a sign that says “No Birds Allowed.”

Can anyone help us identify this bird? From the long, conical black beak (not pictured, but it was around 1.5 inches, I’d say) and the striped pattern on the wing, I think it could be a female woodpecker of some sort, or something similar, but I can’t find a close match in my bird books or online. Those spots on the belly and the orange feathers (underneath the tail and it thin stripes on the wings) are really throwing me for a loop–not that I’m a really seasoned birder or ornithologist.

Head to tail the bird was perhaps 10 inches long and upon a quick glimpse as it flew out the window, I remember the trunk being a little fatter, kind of like a pigeon’s. The eyes were a solid black-brown. I didn’t use flash on the photo of the head because I didn’t want to scare the bird any more than it was at that point. Also, and I don’t know if this will aid in identifying the bird: it didn’t seem to like being stuck in our chimney.

[After posting this blog entry, I sent an email to Sharon over at Birdchick.com. I caught her online and she replied swiftly (it's a birding pun!) with a positive ID on our little mystery bird. Because she linked to this entry as a challenge, I'm going to hold off on my follow-up post for now... but you can see what people are people are guessing here.]

I felt a little like the witch in “Hansel and Gretel” watching my cat crawl into our stock pot to lick out bits of rice and chicken curry flavor. Except I had no intention of really cookiing her – she’s still far too skinny…

Don’t worry, I’ve since sterilized the pot so that I can use it to boil fresh corn from the local stands! And for Cincinnati Chili when the weather cools down. Isis was very pleased after eating a little human food.

Phoebe has now officially been with us for over a year, and still amuses and annoys us daily. She loves to play with fake mice and to tear off their tails, and bites their faces until the inside (probably toxic) filler is exposed and we have to throw them away. She hides them all over the place and will carry on with a pathetic, in-distress meowing until we toss one for her to chase. Also, in a previous life, she was a meerkat.

She’s also just tall enough to put her soft, adorable little declawed paws on the dining room table while standing on the floor. She did that for the first time when we had a confiscated mouse (with its neck cracked open) sitting on a napkin in the middle of the table. She was trying so hard to get it wihout actually getting on the table, since she knows that she’ll be swiftly swept off or sprayed with a water bottle, that we threw it away before taking a photo of the nearly deapitated orange mouse. Maybe we should start saving them in a jar (hidden in a cabinet, of course) to use for fun around Halloween…

Not only did Ben use trigonometry last week, he built some damn sturdy shelves for our storage room. My photos, let me show you them.

You can see the lines from where the old, rotting shelves used to be glued, and where they interrupted the drywall and were subsequently torn out. Note the sawdust on the floor: real men use miter saws at the project site.

Another close-up of the fancy angled support beam (which was only necessary on one of the shelves because the wood warped a little). The cement floor was uneven and required the use of shims to even it out. I would have just stuck some folded paper towels or something under the wobbly corners, but that’s why I leave the engineering tasks to Ben.

Here you can see Ben sliding on the painted plywood shelves (with sanded fronts so that certain accident-prone wives get fewer cuts and splinters). The spiffy design of the shelf makes use of the rafters for no-tipping support, but these shelves are free-standing otherwise. The middle shelves are different heights to accommodate the different boxes and containers we plant to keep there.

The tools of the trade (miter saw and safety goggles not shown). Hey… is that a new staple gun, Ben? And a Home Depot receipt? The answer is yes, and I got to play with the staple gun. It was more fun to use than I expected, and all I did was shoot up some extra bits of wood.

Nice job, Ben! Now how about all the other stuff on your Honey-Do list, hmm? 

My enginerd husband has now finished buiding (from scratch) and assembling some sturdy shelves for our storage room. The frames are made of 2x4s (FYI: they are actually 1.5″x3.5″) and the 2′x4′ shelves are cut, sanded, and painted plywood. It’s all screwed together and even tucked behind the exposed rafters to prevent tipping. He’s so handy! (Sometimes I even the domestic chore score by heating up dinner in the microwave.)

One of the frames warped a little, which prevented the plywood shelves from properly sliding into place. I didn’t know anything about this issue until he asked for my help. When I entered the storage room, he handed me the rubber mallet and crawled into the frame. First I thought he had been huffing something out in the garage, since hammering anything is always his Duty As A Man, but then he told me what was going on.

He was going to use his Man Strength to straighten out the frame from the inside while I hammered a cross-beam into place that would keep it straight. Oh, hey! I suddenly noticed that there was a cross-beam on the bottom of the frame.

So he did his job, and I enjoyed wielding the mallet for a few satisfyingly effective whacks. As he crawled out of the frame, I marveled at his ingenuity because I probably would have tried to shove the shelves in and broken something and then gone out to purchase a prefabricated shelf. The corners were quite fancy, and by that I mean not cut at right angles.

Ben smiled, quite pleased with himself, and said, “I used trigonometry!”

What a nerd, right? And so adorable. I think I’ll keep him (especially now that there’s more space in the storage room).

(The awesome stains on the cement floor are courtesy of the previous homeowners. Ben scrubbed the area clean before setting up the shelves, but we didn’t think it was worth the extra hassle or expense to try to remove the stains or cover them up with paint.)

What do I have to say for myself on this Monday morning? I had a good weekend, though not a hell of a lot really got done. I ended up having to work a half day on Sunday (blargh, I thought weekend work was over after quitting my hotel job). I didn’t finish any of the posts I wrote; even the one I’m most excited about which is an overview of all the 2008 summer movies for geeks. Iron Man is the first one on the list, and it opened already… man, I wish I had finished that Friday night. But now it’s Coming Soon to a blog near you.

But Free Comic Book Day on Saturday!  W007! Last year, I got there too late and a lot of the free stuff was gone. But this year I got a nice stack that hopefully will turn out to be good swag when I read through them. I did read through the Simpsons comic, though, because it’s generally my favorite free comic book.  

But the family room has a third coat of red paint on it now, and while it still needs more touch-up work (plus a second coat of white on the ceiling and new canister lights installed and Ben wants to tear out the two doors so they’re straight and put on new trim), it’s getting closer to the Most Awesome Hang-out Room Evar!!!1111 

I’ve been pushing for a foosball table ever since we moved in. Ben will someday give in and we will play and he will pwn me and I will be sad. But it will be worth it because foosball rocks! And my occasional victories will be cause for celebration! Fuzzy navels all around!  (Or just orange juice with 7up in it if you’re my Mormon friends or my friends’ kids.) A pool table would be cool, too… but same story on the pwning I’m sure and really, I’ve been spending too much time console gaming lately (in our beautiful red-walled room that I really love despite it’s unfinished nature) to even think about having another worthy piece of gaming equipment in my house. Besides, we have a big screen TV in the spot where a pool table would otherwise go.

Also, I beat The Simpsons Game last night. I had to play "Dance Dance Revelation" against God on three consoles: the Praystation, Xodus Box and Hii. The existensial ending wasn’t as contemplative as it could have been because I found out that I’d only "completed" 68% of the game… so now, if I want to be OCD about it, I have to go back through many of the challenges and collect game cliches, bottlecaps, coupons, Krusty cards and Malibu Stacy cards. Which of course I’ll do, and probably rely on a game cheat website for the really hard ones. Hey, OCD doesn’t necessarily mean not lazy, m’kay?

Here’s what the final Dance Dance Revelation scene resembled (though I played it on the Xbox 360, with all the family members on the dance pad rather than just Bart). The best part (aside from the Scorpions’ "Rock you like a hurricane" song) are God’s lines. And the fact that he’s a gamer. But don’t watch it if you plan to play the game and want to experience the whole story line for yourself….  

This past weekend, Ben and I had planned to drive to Las Vegas for a much-needed long weekend away from Utah and the house. Unfortunately, the house kept us here… because we decided that it wouldn’t be prudent to spend money in Vegas immediately after making the first, very-very large payment for our roof.

Being responsible. Teh Suck.

(Besides, this gives me more ammo to push for a trip to San Diego Comic Con in July!)

Oh yeah, have I mentioned that our roof is finished and the skylights that we purchased in October are finally installed? That HUGE headache might be easier to write about after it’s really done, because we still have to fix drywall in several places upstairs and stain the inside trim of the skylights (which we could have done before they were installed, as it turns out, but we were so occupied with finding someone to install them that we never even took them out of the box). And I have to call the manufacturer from whom we purchased said skylights because one of the handles is broken and the pole for opening the mini-blinds (that we still need to install on the inside) is not long enough for my short arms like Sales Guy said it would be. Ben doesn’t even need the pole because of his height.  He has a freakishily large armspan, not unlike that of a condor.

(I was going to say golden condor, and then link to the Wikipedia page about the freakish 30-foot or whatever wingspan of that amazing bird. But then I discovered that the cartoon condor I imagine every time I think of a condor was actually an ornithopter [a mechanical bird] from the shown-on-Nickelodeon-in-the-eighties Japanese TV show “The Mysterious Cities of Gold.” Damn cable television interfering with factual knowledge. See, creators of cartoons? See what power you have over the young minds that turn into older minds? Oh, wait, you were already QUITE aware of that power, and you perpetually laugh in the face of responsibility that should accompany it, don’t you?)

Wow, I’m already way off topic from what I thought I was going to write about.

Where was I? The damn house? God, do I have anything else to talk about? Of course not. I bought a house and it will never ever be anywhere close to finished in the way that I once imagined. Oh, those were nice times… times when I thought that the house would be “pretty much perfect” in a couple years. HA!  HA HA!  I laugh at your naïvete, former self!

Ahem.

This weekend, after having a nice anniversary dinner at the Macaroni Grill (after waiting an hour for a table because it was also BYU graduation weekend but we didn’t mind because we talked and “reconnected” and all that smooshy relationship stuff), we accomplished some more house-related stuff and tried not to think about how we could be in Vegas right now, dammit. We pitched the oldish and somewhat mildew-y tent, which I then spent precious daytime hours cleaning with a sponge, smelly lysol solution and a garden hose. That was a sonofabitch to clean, because it’s a huge 4-16 person tent (depending on the size of the people and their stuff, I guess).

Incidentally, if you own an Armadillo tent made by Walrus, that company went out of business and there are NO ONLINE INSTRUCTION MANUALS TO BE FOUND. If I’m irresponsible enough to let my tent grow some mildew, how could Tent Company possibly expect me to hold on to the instructions for setting it up? Anyway, with the help of Ben’s gargantuan armspan and our combined we-should-be-in-Vegas brainpower, we figured it out. Ben retreated to the garage to clean (and maybe find one of the fifty screwdrivers he owns so that he doesn’t have to borrow my ONE ratchet screwdriver that I keep very close tabs on because I need to know where to find one when I need it).

We had also planned to paint that third coat of red on the family room walls, but didn’t. Ben painted a couple of coats of white on the top half of the back wall that primed for red, and also put a coat of white on the ceiling. It’s looking really sweet. Hopefully this week we’ll buckle down and spend a whole evening just doing a final nice, even red coat so we don’t have to think about it anymore and can enjoy the red room.

What other exciting, boring stuff went on? Ben changed the oil in his car and I cleaned up inside and did the cookin’ like a proper wife. Yeah, we had breakfast for three meals in a row! We also planned out where we will transplant the weirdly placed tulips and the still-surviving young hawthorn trees in our yard (farther away from the house than they are now, thanks to stupid previous flip-this-house homeowners) and where we will plant two more trees. And all of that will help decide where the future sprinkler system will go because if you want grass in Utah, you have to water it, and Ben has been using a garden hose and moving sprinklers around the old fashioned way for two summers and it’s time we install a more efficient, less time-consuming system.

Ah, gardening. I also spent a little time with my two square foot gardens. It’s a neat system and I recommend it for fisrt-time gardeners, even if you’re like me and really are only sort of on the ball in the third year of gardening. My gardens have not yet looked like Mel’s do in his book, video or website, though.

There, that’s my weekend update. Stay tuned for LOTS more excitement. Maybe someday!

A couple days of stress later, we’ve decided to keep the satin-sheen red paint on the walls of our family room.

I managed to cconvince Ben that he did NOT need to repaint the entire family room again with primer plus two coats of paint.  The walls still need a third coat of red, though, and hopefully that will even out the splotchiness a little. I am very happy with this decision and hope that everyone is happy after the third coat of paint is on and the white accent wall is finished.

I wish I had done a little more research on red walls before diving in. Apparently it’s a lot harder to paint a room red than any other color. WTF? It’s just another color. But it’s also the color of red after it’s exposed to oxygen, so maybe that has something to do with the level of difficulty? The shade has a natural coagulant or some shit? Whatever, as long as it doesn’t scab up. That’s gross.

And suddenly I realize that I’m more tired than I thought and I may edit this post tomorrow morning to rub out that last paragraph. But then I’ll leave this paragraph in and leave you wondering if the scab paragraph is the one I’m talking about, or if there was another grosser paragraph that you never got to read.

Oh, what mysteries lie ahead of us! Joy and excitement and a good night’s sleep all around! 

This post was mostly written and should have been published on March 11, 2008. 

According to a poster at the Utah Valley Regional Medical Center Emergency Room, the average  (national?) time spent in the emergency room is 2.5 hours. Ben and I were fortunate, because our trip there Monday evening, from entrance to exit, was a short two hours.

Ben dislocated his shoulder last night [March 10] in a pretty bad way. He has a history of shoulder dislocation, and because of that we’ll never know how far he may have gone as a baseball player. He runs like a gazelle and fields like nobody’s business… but throwing a ball in is pretty much out of the question.

Was he playing baseball when he dislocated it this time? No. Was he playing another sport? Nope. He was upstairs working on the house after work and the phone rang, but there is no phone upstairs right now, so he ran downstairs and grabbed the ball at the end of the banister to help him make the 180 degree turn into the hallway to reach the room with the nearest phone. Except… *pop* his right shoulder came out of its socket and he didn’t make it to the phone.

I was the one calling. Just to let him know that I’d stopped by the store after work and would be home late.

So my poor husband was writhing in pain and finally made it to the phone to call me back. But I was at the store, so I didn’t hear the phone ring the first two times… and when I did pick up the phone about fifteen minutes later, he told me in very short, frustrated sentences that he’d dislocated his shoulder… and I mistook Ben’s communication of pain for him being mad at me for not coming home sooner. Whoops.

I didn’t stick around the store much longer, and when Ben called me again I was in the car on the way home… and it was clear that I needed to get him to the emergency room STAT. Normally he can ease his shoulder back in on its own, but this one was staying belligerently out of its socket.

As I drove home, I was overwhelmed with guilt from not recognizing that he was in a serious amount of pain over the phone, from not being able to come home more quickly as soon as I realized what was going on, and (the big kicker…) from being the one to call and technically cause the dislocation. Oh, and I felt terrible for him for being in so much pain in the first place.

When I finally got home, I left the car running in the driveway (though I did tack on some extra guilt to my conscious for letting the car idle, even in an emergency situation). I escorted Ben into the car and tried to get him to take some ibuprofen to start reducing the swelling, but my man does NOT like to take "unnecessary" medication and wouldn’t take any. We even had some extra Lortab heavy duty painkillers left over from his visit to the emergency room in August he tore his leg muscle… but no, he refused to take anything. I wasn’t going to fight too hard against his stupidity while he was in pain, so I just became the ambulance driver and tried to avoid bumps because it quickly became apparent that they are the worst thing for someone whose shoulder is out of its socket.

A pretty sucky ambulance driver, though, because I wasn’t confident that I’d be able to find the hospital without taking a wrong turn. I knew how to get to the hospital further North because that’s where we went in August, but the one that’s closer to home is in an area with twists and turns that still confuse me when I have to drive around there. So I called one of our friends and had to briefly explain the situation.

While I was on the phone, before we’d hit the freeway, Ben started telling me to pull over because his shoulder was slipping back in. So I got off the phone, pulled over, and sure enough his shoulder "undislocated." And Ben breathed a sigh of relief and told me to just go home and not waste a trip to the emergency room.

"Though it did make kind of a crunching sound when it went back in," he said.

I laughed, threw up a little in my mouth, called him a dumb ass, and kept on driving to the hospital. Something instinctual telling me that if a shoulder is dislocated for an hour, and especially if it slips back in with a crunching sound, that an x-ray is probably in order. He admitted that it was still hurting, though not as critically as it did while it was out of place.

Then Ben got mad at me when I made him get out at the entrance to the emergency room while I went to park the car in the boonies. "I can walk," he said, clearly not envisioning his shoulder popping out of its socket as we walked like I was.

I think he said something like he’d never talk to me again if I made him to the apparent "walk of shame" into the emergency room. I rolled my eyes, as any sane person would, and told him something along the lines of "I’ll dislocate your other shoulder if you don’t get out of the fucking car." God, he’s a pain in the ass when he’s in pain. Remember, he still hadn’t taken any sort of pain medication.

We waited for a little while in the emergency room and humbly watched other people arrive after us and actually be seen by the doctor before us. People with heart or stroke issues or probably high fevers. Still, even when we were almost the last ones being forced to watch the awful local news station (I really, really hate local newscasts), we still made it back to radiology pretty quickly.

Ben had four x-rays taken, and reported that he had to move his shoulder in very uncomfortable ways to get into the positions that tech wanted him to. Happens to the best of us, right? Anyway, the emergency room doctor examined him and told him that everything looked okay in the x-rays, but strapped Ben into a serious immobilizing harness and made us take more Lortabs home.

Then we learned something that gave us hope and practically turned this sneaker-wearing emergency room doctor into Obi-Wan: that there was a surgery Ben could have that might repair his shoulder to workable order. He’d had an arthroscopic surgery 11 years ago, but apparently that was the "light" shoulder surgery and clearly hadn’t worked for him. The other option is more of an open surgery that would put Ben’s arm completely out of commission for several weeks, but the end result (with proper physical therapy) could mean that Ben would one day be able to throw a baseball overhand again. Not Major League fast, but overhand at least.

For me, and I think for Ben, it made the emergency room trip worth it.

Since then, he’s seen an orthopedic surgeon who was eager to cut his shoulder open ASAP and promised a good recovery. Ben wants to wait until fall to have the surgery so that he can finish some more stuff around the house and take care of the yard over the summer. We’re both excited about the prospect of his shoulder recovering to a normal capacity, but nervous about the actual surgery part. And we’ve put off discovering what percentage of the surgery our insurance will cover.

Don’t worry, we still have a few Lortabs leftover from the hospital "starter pack" to carry us through the shock of how much the surgery might cost us…