Long weekend wrap-up

Which is long? The weekend, or the wrap-up? The weekend, definitely; the posting, probably.

Apart from the cruise that Turtle and I took back in May, I went into October not having used as much of my vacation time as I thought I had. As a consequence, I found myself needing to burn (or lose) 13 days by the end of the year. I've elected to take a handful of Mondays and Fridays off, which makes for some nice long weekends, and never mind that my days off are mostly booked with last-minute medical and dental appointments. Gotta use up that flex spending account, you know.

Friday

Sat at my computer until 10am or so, and then went out for a bike ride. It was windy, I'd been fighting some kind of bug, and I hadn't been on the bike for a couple weeks. After 11 miles, I decided I wasn't feeling it and threw in the towel.

After lunch, I headed down to Plano, where I had an appointment to have an echocardiogram. This, because of something my internist's PA thought she heard during my routine physical. There we were, talking about cycling and whether or not it was strictly necessary for me to have a prostate exam this year, and she dropped the bomb:

"So... what are we doing about this murmur?"

I chuckled. "Go on, pull the other one."

"No, really," she said. "You have a heart murmur."

"I've never had one before, and I didn't have one when I came in earlier this year," I said. "And that was to make sure some tightness in my chest wasn't heart-related."

"Well, you have one now," she said, apologetically.

So I had the echocardiogram, courtesy of Pam, the pleasant young technician who turned the monitor so that I could watch the valves of my heart flapping open and shut. I was struck by how much an echocardiogram resembled a sonogram.

"So, can you tell whether it's a boy, or a girl?" I asked innocently.

Pam blinked. "Excuse me?"

"You know, can you tell its gender from the picture?"

She searched my eyes for a long moment and correctly concluded that I was full of crap.

"Behave or I'll take away your pillow," she said.

"Yes'm."

Saturday/Sunday (core weekend)

Lots of the usual. Goofing off in my PJ bottoms, unraveling the mysteries of CSS-oriented design. Watching The Libertine on DVD (an unexpectedly grim experience). Going to church. Eating too much pizza (both days). Re-watching X-men III: The Last Stand and catching some interesting details I'd missed the first time around. Reconciling several months' worth of bank statements.

Scintillating, no?

Monday

Got up, showered, and headed to the dentist's office for a crown replacement. There was nothing really wrong with the existing one, aside from the fact that my previous dentist did a botch job on it. After more than five years, I still couldn't chew anything more resistant than a banana on that side, and the blasted thing was oversized enough that I frequently found myself masticating my own tongue. Why do it now, after so long? Gotta use up that flex money.

Got on the bike again, felt good, and managed to finish up before the construction workers awoke from their siestas to mess with me. When I returned from riding, there was a message from my internist's office on the voicemail, the gist of which is that my heart is perfectly normal. Either it's perfectly normal to have a certain amount of murmur, or the murmur has mysteriously disappeared.

The human body is so weird (and so is mine).