Expansionism, my ass.

And that’s no crack. My ass is expanding.

The elbow surgery rehab is not going well, frankly. Or rather, the rehab is going well but I’ve been experiencing some interesting side effects. And by “interesting”, I mean “oh FUCK no”.

Here’s the nutshell acccount: because I have to baby my left arm, I’ve been relying almost exclusively on my right arm for all my typing, cooking, driving, lifting, nose picking, wiping, yanking, and door-opening needs.

But I had the same surgery on my right elbow two years ago. Guess what several months of exlusively relying on THAT reconstructed elbow for typing, cooking, driving, lifting, nose picking, wiping, yanking, and door-opening, has done? I’ll tell you.

YEEEEOWWW!

That’s what it’s done.

Back to the doc.

Doc looks, squeezes, frowns, writes some stuff down, and says, “Stop. Doing. ANYTHING.”

“Both arms?”

“Both arms.”

“How am I gonna drive home?”

“Except that. But then, try not to drive. It twists your elbows when you steer.”

So yeah, I gotta stay pretty much inert from the belt up so my left arm can continue healing, and my right arm doesn’t blow out all the work it had done months ago. Typing – that thing I’m doing here in defiance of God and sense – is particularly verboten. The lifting and dropping of fingers on a keyboard contracts all those rubber band ligament things that connect digits to elbows. Ditto mouse use. So I’ve gotta wrap this up in a minute.

But here’s the thing(s):

I have to work. Where I have to type and use mice. Mouses?

My work is 50 miles from my house. That’s a hundred miles a day steering.

I don’t have any more days off after using them on surgery recovery.

NewWifey(tm) is still away on her cross country cross stitching adventure. I’m fending, pitiably, for myself. That means cooking.

All I can do is sit. I hate sitting. I get bored.

What do I do when I get bored? The same thing YOU do when you get bored. I eat.

I weighed myself this morning. I’d been putting it off because my clothes were getting tighter and I prefered to believe they were shrinking because I was just doing Man Laundry (washing machine AND dryer set to “Breaker Overload”). But when even my shoes started digging into my flesh, I knew I had to face the scale.

11 pounds. I gained 11 pounds in a month from sitting around and boredom chowing.

I was so depressed I went into the kitchen and made this:

I scrounged around in the kitchen and just tossed some leftover bits together. So it’s kinda like paella, but with half a bag of barley instead of rice, clementines, thyme from my window box, the last dregs of stock, an old onion, and chicken thighs. I guess I should call it “Cebada con Pollo y Clementina“, since this is the internet and all food descriptions/pictures here seem duty bound to look and sound more impressive than they are. Plus, the foreign name adds to the impression that I’m impressive. I’m always on board with that.

Ok, gotta stop typing. Gotta start eating. I’ll be back when I’m up FIFTEEN pounds. So…tomorrow.

One last thing, because vanity trumps pain. Here’s a pic of a chicken dish I did a while back after a buddy gave me his crop of tomatillas and some really interesting Peruvian herbs that his Peruvian neighbor grew. It made a terrific sofrito – and look at that color! Same basic technique as the dish above, but wildly different flavors:

That’s it. I gotta go before I’m disarmed, literally. I value my arms. Almost as much as food.

Ciao!