constance | some preoccupations (Reply)

Rachel's newest habit
Rachel the Cat has always been a quiet thing except right around mealtimes, but lately she's taken to sitting at the edge of the hall and meowing, starting at about 10pm and stopping only when I get up and start my bedtime routine. I can only guess that she's talking to me: "hey get up and get your butt in bed so I can jump all over you and lie on your forearm while you contort yourself to scratch my belly and read at the same time okay that would be great thanks." I mean, at least I like to think that.

my pulse rate
Man, one thing about losing weight and getting in shape is that your pulse rate tends to, you know, drop, and if your pulse rate was normal back when you were fatter and more easily winded, once you can walk a fast four miles while barely breaking a sweat, your pulse rate drops to Practically Dead. My resting pulse rate now runs somewhere between 45 and 50, which for the record is not quite high enough to run the apheresis machine down at the Red Cross donor center. Which means that platelet donations now take about two and a half hours and I have to be monitored and reset about fifteen times. Which also means that I have taken to taking my own pulse at random times during the day, something I've never done before but which is becoming a kind of compulsion.

little shots of hot sauce
Specifically, a hot sauce called Texas Pete's, which is not, interestingly, bottled in Texas at all. (In case you were wondering, there are few foods that a squirt of Texas Pete's from the little bento bottles laurelwood gave me do not improve.) And then when I'm done doctoring my chicken-and-artichoke sandwich, I just suck the rest of it straight out of the teeny bottle, which has earned me a few Looks but is totally worth it.

my pathologically careless boss
who this weekend cut the tip of his finger off using a bandsaw. He had to have surgery and a skin graft to repair it, and every time someone so much as mentions it I get a sympathetic cold shiver down my spine. I haven't seen him since the accident, and I am having these ridiculous visions of pedicles and horrific disfigurations that are definitely informed by a long-lived and ongoing obsession with Harold Gillies. I mean, reconstructive surgery's come a long way and I know it. But my irrational brain is fixating. And shivering sympathetically.