Homecoming

Very happy to be safely home in New York with little cat Mickey. London was excellent, but extremely tiring; my cousin P.'s wedding was lovely in every respect, but my favorite part was pretty certainly seeing the bride and groom ride on camels down the Kings Road! (Picture courtesy of Georgina.)

Kate Atkinson's new novel is stunningly good, but I am too tired to write more about it now (but read it!); the flight home passed very quickly, too, as I was able to get Mark Billingham's new Thorne book (not out yet in the US) and Mo Hayder's Poppet (which I see now I could have had on US Kindle after all, but it is traditional to acquire a few large-format UK crime-fiction paperbacks at Heathrow), which carried me very nicely through the journey.

Edibility

Book cakes. (Via.)

NB I am keen on these book cakes, only I wish not so many of them featured fondant! It is usefully sculptural, but it is not deliciously edible - the best-looking and -tasting wedding cake I ever ate was at my friend Peter and Michelle's wedding in New Haven, it was decorated like a piece of Wedgewood porcelain, with blue fondant and white decoration, but underneath the fondant was a whole other layer of delicious vanilla buttercream (the cake was vanilla with raspberry filling), so that the beautiful exterior layer could be discarded without penalty.

On an associatively related note, I often use a meditation DVD that is extremely useful, in that it features different recordings of different sorts of guided meditation at varying lengths, only marred by the fact that the speaker has one of the most annoying voices I've ever heard! There is a "hearing meditation" section in a number of them, and my attention is always snagged when he says the phrase "the faculty of audibility - hearing meditation." I do not think audibility is the correct word - it is a good example of unwanted elegant variation!

Swiss dot

Sadie Stein has a wedding dress in her closet.

The plagues of Job

Just about survived my trip to Baltimore.

I was still really pretty sick the whole time, and the last straw - it was ill-timed to say the least - was that when I woke up on Saturday, my eyes were very gummy in a way that made me start worrying; and by late afternoon (the wedding was at five) it was horrifyingly evident that I had been struck down by one of those plagues that makes you feel a true pariah (I had it once before, which is how I knew what it was): bacterial conjunctivitis!

I was dabbing my left eye (only one eye was really bad) with a tissue during the service, and slapped the sunglasses back on afterward as the situation was wildly escalating with every passing minute. I had to explain to anyone who asked that it was not an affectation but that my eye was truly so disgusting to look upon (teaspoonsful of yellow-green pus streaming out of it, and so grotesquely swollen that I looked as though I had gone eight rounds with the heavyweight champion of Sao Paolo!) that I had to keep it covered; the glasses stop you from rubbing or touching your eyes, too.

(The reception and dinner were held here, in the remarkably beautiful library of the Peabody Institute. The rehearsal dinner the night before was at Da Mimmo's, famous for its veal chops!)

So during the first part of the wedding reception I stepped outside and put in a call to the practice where I see a doctor, and he called in a prescription to my local NY pharmacy (it did not seem to make sense to try and find a Baltimore pharmacy that would be open on a Saturday night, and my timing really was most unfortunate!).

I took an earlier train home than I had planned and made a beeline to the pharmacy; I know from past experience that the antibiotic eye-drops are basically a miracle cure. But when I got there around 1, they had no record of the prescription having been called in, and I proceeded to spend an extremely frustrating hour and a half calling the medical answering service again and again until I finally got an answer back. By this time I had given up and gone home; the doc said he'd tried many times to get through to the pharmacy, but not been able to until just then (3pm Sunday by this point, almost 24 hours after I had first talked to him). So I went back over there, but they only had one of the two kinds of eyedrops and I had to go to another Rite Aid pharmacy to get the more important of the two! By this time it was almost four o'clock...

It was a huge relief to put in the first set of drops, I must say...

In fact it is much better than it was last night and this morning already; I took some Benadryl before I got on the train, and it brought down some of the swelling. Not so leaky now either. But - talk about disgusting!

I have now been sick for a week, and with no exercise - I would guess it is at least a couple days more before I should even attempt an easy hour on the stationary bike...