Two weeks ago yesterday Elizabeth and I took off for a bit of a whirlwind vacation, mostly centred around the wedding of our friends Mike and Cassie Robles (née Townsend). The wedding was in North Carolina, and my parents were conveniently vacationing in South Carolina, so it was a good opportunity to visit them at Hilton Head Island. It was a bit cooler than we’d hoped for but the island was still quite beautiful. I got this terrific shot of a heron that was a stalking the bait bucket of a guy fishing on the beach:
The wedding was a small affair and quite beautiful, with two of the geekiest and most adorable sets of vows I’ve ever heard. They make a terrific pair:
It’s stressful taking such a brief vacation, both on the body and the wallet. I wound up doing about twelve hours of driving over the course of four days, which was a pain but made the most sense given our options. There just aren’t many good ways to fly to the east coast out of Seattle these days.
Adding to the stress was a mysterious lump I discovered on my neck the same day as my flight out to North Carolina. I noticed it when shaving in the morning, and unfortunately didn’t have access to my car, so there was no hope of getting to see my doctor in Lake Forest Park. A lump in your neck isn’t the kind of thing you want to leave unchecked, though, so I wound up walking about twenty minutes to the nearest clinic I could get an appointment at, and got prescribed antibiotics even though the doctor couldn’t really find any definitive sign of infection.
The good news is that the lump shrank over the ten days of the antibiotics to the point where I can now only barely detect its presence. I can still feel it, though, albeit only very slightly. I saw my regular doctor yesterday and he’s convinced it’s just vestigial and benign at this point, and even if it takes another couple of weeks for it to entirely vanish I don’t need to worry about it. He also gave me a shot for my allergies which have been acting up (I had woken up with a rash all over my body on Sunday).
To top it all off, though, I returned home from the vacation to discover water leaking from the lighting fixture in my kitchen ceiling. I contacted the construction people but because it was Sunday night there wasn’t much to do except let it drip until morning… when morning came, they discovered that an exterior nail had actually punctured a pipe in the wall, and the leak in my ceiling was the result of it trickling down there. Since then I’ve had to put up with construction workers coming into my place far too early to make repairs to the drywall. At least they are taking responsibility for it, but the impact on my sleep has made me extra weary.
I consider myself to be a pretty patient individual, but this construction is taking its toll on me. I will be very glad when it’s complete.
Dan.
