Give my knees to the kneedy

Thank you John Prine for that line.

Fridays are supposed to be easier. They are the end of the work week, and where I work, most people work at home which makes it quiet there. The Boy doesn't have school or work, so there is no hurry getting him moving. And I usually don't have to spend the better part of the morning reading five-year-old Motor Trend magazines in a variety of waiting rooms.

Fridays are WHM's early day - REALLY early day. If NCN goes to work in the morning, it means we end up with the grandkids very early. Like 6:50 this morning. And they were raring to go.

Fortunately we had some leftover strawberry pancakes and LOTS of syrup, so feeding them went pretty well. The picture up on top is kind of fun. At first glance it's not that easy to tell if Riley is enthusiastically laughing or screaming in unbearable pain. It turns out that he was screaming right after banging his nose on Darci's elbow when he dived on top of her.

Like I said, they were raring to go.

At the last minute Mrs Notthat remembered that The Boy had an 8:30 physical therapy appointment, so there was a bit of a rush getting him going.

And then I had to do something I have never had to do in my life - get an x-ray of a body part not directly involved in chewing. My right knee has been fairly painful the last couple of weeks, the result of me trying to be more aggressive in my walking/jogging/don't be so dang overweight program. So I went in to have it x-rayed and then have the x-rays looked at by a "conservative" specialist ("conservative" meaning that he is not of the "cut first, ask questions later" club).

After filling out a bunch of paperwork, four different x-rays were taken by a nice lady who seemed very relieved I had worn shorts and didn't need to remove my pants. 

After waiting for the x-rays to be ready, I walked up to the specialist's office where I got to fill out a lot more paperwork and wait a LONG time before seeing the guy. He only looked at one of the x-rays then tried his best to make me cry by pushing, pulling, and twisting my knee. His conclusion is that I've got a partially torn meniscus, the pain is caused by ragged edges that tend to work there way into painful positions (and can work there way back out), and the recommendation is to go in and clean it all up. The good part is that this is not like what The Boy went through - since I'm old he won't even try to repair the tear, so the recovery is all of about two days.

So it looks like sometime in May I will have my first operation (again, not counting those involving my teeth).

At work our division had an "all hands" meeting this afternoon where attendance was more or less required. This meant that most of our group was in the office, which meant it was not a nice calm and quiet Friday, which meant I actually had to be reasonably productive. Looking. At least until the meeting, where all I had to do was pretend not to doze off.

The meeting was followed by a beer bash that had biscuits and gravy and an excellent bean dip.

Really. So it was an odd Friday, but not all bad.

That's it - move along...