Sorry I missed yesterday's entry. Penny had a doctor's appointment in the morning, and by the time I made it back to work, I was in no mood whatsoever to be talkative.

So the news, in summary, is that Penny's hearing is at about 75% of what it ought to be -- she can't really hear out of her left ear at all, and her right ear isn't all that great, either. She has an appointment on the 21st for surgery -- they're going to put in tubes, and remove her adenoids.

Which means that next week, we have two appointments; one for pre-op bloodwork, and one for a basic checkup and to pick up the post-op meds and such in advance.

And of course there will be at least one post-op checkup.

Silly me, thinking I might be done with doctor visits for a few weeks. I'm bleeding out my vacation time, two hours at a time. Ug.

I want February to be done so badly, I can taste it.

On the other hand, I've been re-reading Silver and Green lately, which is the novel K.T. and I were working on that isn't quite done yet, and I'm actually pretty impressed with it. There are sections where our villain starts rambling, and he needs to be reined in a bit, and edited so that he's not jumping back and forth in time quite so badly. There's some awkward phrasing in a few places, and a couple of spots where we jump from thought to thought without any transition.

But on the whole, the story feels pretty solid, and it's pretty good writing. Even the chapter that I thought was really horrible and needed a total rewrite isn't as bad as I remembered; there's only one really hideous bit, and it could be smoothed over with just a couple of extra paragraphs, rather than a rewrite entire.

So I'm feeling pretty pleased about that. It's not often that I come back to something after a year and a half and still like it, much less like it better.

This morning's radio show, as I was heading in to work after dropping Penny off, was the BEST. RADIO. SHOW. EVER.

The morning DJs are Chuck and Jenna, who are married, and "Woo-woo," who I think is technically an intern, but she's been doing the show with them for at least three years. Jenna had her first child just shortly after I had Penny, so I had a lot of fun following that pregnancy and the baby's early months. She's pregnant again now, due to pop any time now -- the show topic last Friday was old wives' tales for ways to bring on labor, which was hugely funny.

Anyway, the topic under discussion this morning, between songs and commercials, was the really awful salaries that our local cops are paid, considering the dangers they face. Woo-woo's brother is a cop up in Richmond, and he'd loaned the show his police belt and a pair of handcuffs and a couple of the wire zip-ties that are replacing handcuffs.

To demonstrate their effectiveness, Chuck used one of the zip-ties to cuff Jenna and Woo-woo together. As they're exclaiming about how uncomfortable the ties are, Woo-woo suddenly shouts, "JENNA! DID YOUR WATER JUST BREAK?!"

Chuck laughed. "Ha, ha, very funny, Woo-woo."

"I'M NOT KIDDING! CHUCK, TAKE THESE THINGS OFF RIGHT NOW!"

"...Jenna, are you okay?"

Jenna said something, muffled, too far from the mike to be heard clearly.

scramblescramblescramble-- Traffic report.

When the traffic report ended, Chuck came back on the air and said, with a thin veneer of professionalism over a mountain of panic, "Well, it seems we've got a situation, here. Jenna's going into labor, and she's still cuffed to Woo-woo. So we're going to call Barry or Heather from the afternoon shows, and get them in here, and then I need to find some wire cutters or something... We, ah, might have a little dead air, here. Bear with us."

I was laughing so hard, I nearly missed the turn into my office.

--Liz