Hottest day of the year, so of course I'm going clothes shopping!
Note--we have airco at home. A lot of people in the Bay Area don't. They all seem to head for the mall for *their* airco. The place was a zoo.
I get there and head for Macy's. Now, I've been looking forward to fall clothes because the colours were supposed to be greens, rusts, pumpkin, mustard, etc. I get there, and what do I find?
Coral! Watermelon! What sort of cruel trick is this? I can't wear anything in the pink to red range--I look like an ad for fever. Yeah, those colours work fine for blondes and anyone with yellow to tan in their complexions, but my fine celtic pink-white? No way!
The camel and chocolate might work, and the jury is still out on purple, but what the heck happened to the promised colours? Not like I'm shopping last year's stock or something.
Okay, off to Nordstrom. I hadn't been thrilled with them the last time I wandered over, but what the heck.
Another note--I am somewhere between a size 16 and 18, which means I'm usually hanging out in "extended sizes" land. I'm in proportion, which means I want something with fitting. Anything that's boxy is a loss.
Obviously, the national buyer at Nordstrom doesn't want any woman larger than a size 12 coming into their store. The clothes that I saw at Nordstrom would embarass a K-Mart. Cheap fabric, blowsy design, and just nasty-looking colours and prints. This stuff is buscha-wear, and I don't do that.
What's the deal, Nordstrom? You used to be a place I could get career-wear. Someone in your management has decided that they don't want my business. Are you so focused on the size 0 crowd that you're willing to drive my business to Macy's?
Last week I was in the middle of a set of blood tests because my creatine kinase levels were stratospheric.
Monday was the latest in the series. I just told the lab tech to "aim for the notch" on my left arm (Wed's test), and she was able to get the 5cc needed for the test.
Monday night, one of the doctors who had been monitoring all this called--my CK levels were down to 220 from a high of 4000 (yes, that's three zeroes) on Thursday. Kidney tests came out fine--I spent the weekend making extra sure I was very hydrated so all the cruft that was working its way out of my system wouldn't have a chance to clog things up.
This doctor's advice--get back on the suspected med, keep working out at the same levels I was doing (this guy is a known workout fiend), and get another blood test in two weeks to see if it's elevated again.
This morning my primary physician called--he'd been out on vacation, so he had just caught up with the fun and games. His advice--*stop* the suspected med, but keep working out and see if the CK goes back up again.
That makes a lot more sense--if the CK levels go up, I think they'd like to have a better reason *why* they did--doing the meds and the exercise would leave them with a "what's causing this" problem, and having to guess or swap out meds and hope.
I'd really rather avoid that.
Alex Taylor has a history of the look and feel of the www.apple.com pages. Somehow, the "gameboy look" circa 1995 managed to escape the snare.
Just as well--that was an amazingly ugly, hard to navigate, and difficult to update or customize site. I was working on the Apple Sales sites at that time, and we fought like crazed wolverines to avoid having to use that design.