Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Well, the work week’s over, but not the travel.  After work this afternoon I hopped a plane from Milwaukee to Detroit, and drove down to Toledo (Perrysburg) to visit with my mom.  She’s been battling shingles since November, and still has burning and skin irritation.  It’s really frustrating her, but I tell her that I still have itching on my scalp and some strange sensations left over from my own bout with anthropomorphized building products that started last June.  Oddly, she doesn’t find this comforting.

She’s had much more intense pain than I did - mine started in my eye (!) and traveled over my forehead and scalp, hers branches out from her torso.  While treating her for her pain, her doctor began to suspect other causes, and ordered some imaging that disclosed a crack in one of her vertebrae and some disc damage.  This coming week, she’s having some sort of injection that is supposed to provide some cushioning.

While she was speculating on several incidents that could have caused the fracture, I told her that I and my brothers were squabbling over which of us had stepped on a crack, and whether it was on purpose.  Luckily, she found that amusing.

It’s actually a pretty busy weekend for my mom.  Her sister is flying in from Myrtle Beach tomorrow and will stay with her for a couple of weeks to be sure that the injection procedure is stabilized.  She also has subscription tickets with some friends to a play tomorrow and an opera on Sunday.  When she heard that I was planning to stop by (I had purchased my plane reservations without consulting her), she actually tried to dissuade me from coming because she was afraid she’d have too little time to spend with me.  I checked to see what it would cost to change the reservation to just fly back to Seattle tonight, and the price was virtually the same, so I told her I’d go to the play with them if I could get a ticket.

So that’s how I’ll end up going to see Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat tomorrow afternoon.  I don’t have much history with musicals since seeing movies of My Fair Lady and Sound of Music in high school, and this production, apparently, is entirely sung, with no spoken dialogue.  I’ll let you know how I like it.