Tomorrow marks the beginning of the fourth calendar month since the jaw operation April 6th. Seems more like years. What did it feel like to not feel it at all? The upper palate is still half frozen and I can feel some swelling in the cheek just beside the base of my nose, maybe an inch wide and and couple of inches long. It feels like a sore muscle. The problem is it subsides so slowly I have to think about what it felt like two weeks or a month ago to see any progress. It doesn't "ache" anymore, but it's still numb and solid even if it is shrinking. It isn't really uncomfortable. The area under the eyes and the top of the nose appear to be back to normal. The tip of the nose and the base of the nose are pretty close to normal. The interior gums at the top of the mouth are tender and it still have that solid rubber hockey puck feeling, but not nearly what it was. I think another two months will do it. Another three months and I'll take another sleep test to see how much of the apnea is history. I'm hoping for a lot of history. At least the air pump is gone. I know, it's sounds weird to me too.

Another thing. (what, another New Year's resolution? Shit, when are these going to stop?) I've pretty much kept the weight off I lost after the operation, but I'd like to lose some more and I'm not going to lose any more unless I get some exercise. I really don't like exercise. Except walking. My new apartment is 1 1/2 miles from work and walking back and forth every day, at least during the summer, would be about right. I used to walk an hour in the evening in Napa and now I need to start again. The apartment is up on a hill near a neighborhood with a theater, restaurants and coffee shops at the bottom, which takes care of the weekends. Coffee at the bottom of the hill. This is maybe another "say it but don't do it" routine, but who knows, I have actually walked for long periods in my checkered past and felt good for it.

I remember running Greenlake in Seattle before going into the Army, jump boots and a sweat suit for 3 3/4 miles, every evening for, what, six months. Hated it. Didn't like a lot of the stuff they got excited about in the Army. Bayonet practice. Didn't like bayonet practice, except, well, during my days in the Army there was some chance I would have to use it. I didn't really want to get sliced and diced too damned easily just because I didn't stick some wooden stump hard enough with my bayonet out in the middle of some dust filled field yelling kill! kill! kill! at the top of my lungs. Lost all interest in bayonets when they diverted me to Korea. Commanded a desk. Sat at my desk in combat boots. No running in the Quonset huts now troops, general won't allow it.

What movie character is the woman in the picture above playing at being? There were two or three others with the same getup, dark glasses and black hair. I want to think it's Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, but it's probably somebody else. Short term memory loss. I should've made it a point to get a shot of every one of them, but then I should have set the correct camera exposure too. I like the décolletage. Of course.