Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Amazon Ratings

Today I popped on to Amazon to check the rating of my book just for fun and found that I was right behind Kenneth King! The Kenneth King! Yeah, baby!
Ratings fluctuate by the hour; luckily I've been holding fairly steady in the 8,000 to 10,000 range for the past few days.



I hate to be a pest, but if any of my friends who haven't posted reviews of my "Opus-in-Ink" could do so on Amazon, I'd be very very grateful. The publishers at St. Martin's would also be grateful. In fact, the entire Universe at large would be grateful. The only person I can think of who probably couldn't be bothered to be grateful would be Rob MacGregor, my theatre pal who now resides in Istanbul (for reasons perhaps unmentionable)...

Friday, April 17, 2009

Sans Appendix

I made it through surgery yesterday. I had been having a hellacious pain in my lower right side for the past 6 months and in trying to track down what the pain was, I have endured a Catscan, an MRI, a colonscopy, two ultrasounds and various bouts of being poked and prodded by doctors, nurse practitioners, physicians assistants, and whoever else happened to be in the examining rooms at the time.

Finally I was sent to a kindly surgeon who performed laparoscopic surgery on my abdomen yesterday to find out what this mystery pain was. As it turns out, it was something that was sort-of but not quite fully ruled out a few months ago.

I am now appendix-less. My poor old beat-up appendix was hard where it should have been soft, due to recurring infections. It might have gone gangrenous given half a chance (just to spite me, I'm sure). I now have three tiny holes in my stomach where they inserted the laparoscopic camera and who knows what else, which will probably not even be noticeable scars in a year or two.

Such relief, I tell you. I am obviously sore as hell today, but pain meds are a goodly thing.
Soon I will be wiggling my way back to belly dancing and losing weight! Yahoo zzzzz...Oh, did I doze off? Pain meds are gooooood....

On a positive note, I am teaching myself Adobe Photoshop special effects. Here's a sloppy first try of an old picture of me: