Today started far too early, at about 12:30 this morning when Richard woke me up in a lot of pain. Normally I can wake up fairly quickly, but I had just fallen asleep only about an hour before and had a hard time dragging my brain out of the fog. Luckily I managed to wake up enough to drive him to the hospital (although I think it was to our benefit that there were few cars on the road to distract me because I’m not sure I was entirely awake even then). We spent the next six hours at the emergency room while they poked him and prodded him and took blood and filled him full of painkillers and made him drink nasty concoctions of dye and ran a cat scan and finally determined that he has diverticulitis and is pretty lucky that it was caught before he had to be admitted for surgery. And hey, it's been probably a year since I've taken him to the emergency room (because the last time he went he was in Riverside and had to go by himself), and at least this time it wasn't due to his asthma. One can always find the bright side to anything if one looks hard enough, even after one has spent six hours in one of the most uncomfortable chairs ever manufactured from cheap molded plastic listening to blood pressure monitors and loud drunken people getting mad because no one asked them to give a urine sample, or explaining to extremely patient policemen just how it is they happened to 'run into' someone else's teeth.

So by the time we got home there was only time to catch a quick nap of about an hour before we had to get back out of bed and somehow make ourselves presentable and coherent enough to interact with the guy who came out to evaluate our house and give us an estimate for solar panels. To summarize – yes we can put them on our roof, yes we could probably avoid ever paying for electricity again, and by the way those things are expensive, even *after* the state rebate, which we may or may not get because that program has been running out of money much faster than expected. We agreed to at least put in the application for the state rebate funds, which gives us a few months to think about them, and for me to panic about what we would need to do to get this started, and for us to remind ourselves that if we’re going to be serious about our impact on our environment, this is a really good first step. But it’s expensive. Really really ouch expensive.

And then it was off to the pharmacy to fill Richard’s prescriptions of some heavy-duty antibiotics and painkillers and also to find a picture frame for one half of the wedding gift for the wedding we went to this evening, and while we were there I decided I might as well get a flu shot because I have been saying I should do this for years, and I am somehow convinced that if I get a flu shot I will miraculously avoid the several-month-long sinus infection from hell I have been getting every winter for the past few years. And then back home to eat lunch and then try to sleep for another hour before we had to get dressed and hastily wrap the present and find the card for the reception and go to the wedding.

The wedding was lovely, as weddings usually are, and the reception was far too much fun, or at least it was fun for those of us at our table, where we spent most of the time amusing ourselves by taking wild and wacky pictures with the disposable camera they put on our table, voguing with our plates in the buffet line, and making lanyards from the raffia that decorated the table, and very little time actually paying attention to what was going on with the bride and groom and everyone else. And none of that fun had anything to do with the fact that Richard and I have had very little sleep since Thursday night and he was heavily doped on vicodin, I am sure of it.