Call Me Karl

Yes, it’s a few days beyond Wednesday. The birthday celebration lasted longer than expected (as it should), and the brilliant work of a beloved engineer left my home PC unable to open the Blogger site. There are many entertaining tales from the last couple of weeks; I just wish I could share all of them with you.

But let’s start with a tragedy.

This is how I looked just days before my birthday:

I was sporting a near-gin blossom, rockin' the Karl Malden look — bulbous and deep red and just plain ogrish. I’d love to say it was from all the partying and boozing it up … but it was a weird infection in my sinuses. And it was twice as painful as it looked; just rolling over in bed brought tears of pain.

I knew this was serious, as I had a staph infection in my sinuses back in college — an infection that landed me in the hospital (quarantined!) for nearly a week. See, your sinuses are near your brain, so doctors get a little worried when things go funky in that area. And I could tell from the pain that something similar was brewing.

But that’s not the really painful part. Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey saw me schnozzled.

*sigh*

Thanks to antibiotics and steroids and a smart ENT, I was nearly back to normal by the birthday bash … but a lot of folks are still calling me “Karl.”

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