Feb 13, 2011

Red Cross

So I went to a Swiss doctor for the first time yesterday because I was having another one of those episodes where my body falls apart as it's own special way of telling me to stop working on those slides because really, who cares if the font is all the same size and perfectly aligned.

Anyway, the nice Swiss doctor lady huffed and puffed and drew some blood and told me I had a Blut Entzündung.  I nodded and said thank you but obviously I had no idea what that meant so I went home and looked it up, and the only translation I could find was sepsis, but I figure that can't be right because otherwise I'd probably be dead by now.  My guess is she was feeling a bit dramatic when she woke up this morning and decided to spice things up.  Who can blame her, really.  It must be so boring seeing rich Swiss people with the sniffles and telling them that yes, it's just a cold, so once in a while I guess you start feeling a bit Puck-ish and you diagnose them with something ghastly and preferably fatal. 

Must be even more fun when the patient's a sniffling foreigner who's pretending to speak German but really she has no idea what you're talking about.

Ah, yes.  Swiss humour.  Gets me every time.

Feb 7, 2011

You say po-tay-to

Picture, if you will, a potato.

It's not a pretty potato.  Not the kind multi-starred chefs would serve up as is, whole, lightly grilled with some olive oil and rosemary.

No.  This potato is the dumpy kind.  Its color is slightly off.  It has sprouty bits in several places.  And instead of being nice and evenly oval, it's got lumps and bumps all over.  It might still be good to eat, perhaps in a mash with a nice pad of butter, but it certainly isn't a looker.

You've got it?  Good.

Now imagine we take this potato, and we run it through the spin cycle.

At this point, you're getting a pretty good sense of what I feel like after my second session of my new personal-trainer-approved fitness regime.

Apparently, it's meant to give me some muscles and make me look thinner.  A lofty goal, certainly, and one I could get really behind if only I could still walk.  Or stand.  Or tie my shoelaces.