The saddest Chipoodle in all the land.

As I mentioned previously, Randy had orthoscopic surgery on his right shoulder yesterday. And although I think I made it clear that I-- being inherently full to the brim with raw caregiving instinct-- was counting the seconds until I could drive across town and pick his disoriented ass up, I managed to quell my tender nurturing proclivities long enough to stop and grab some lunch. Conveniently enough there was a Chipotle Grill right across the street from the hospital, and once I got up to the counter I cheerfully asked the woman in charge of tortillas if this particular Chipoodle was sadder than other Chipoodle Grills.

"You know," I said, "because of the hospital." She responded by asking if I wanted rice. Naturally I took that as a sign that we were on the same page. Then I realized that this stupid restaurant had exactly three tables and ten stools inside, and I was forced to haul my soft Chipoodle tacos out to the unshaded patio and eat-- alone, mind-- in front of ten chilly stool-sitters with nothing better to do than watch me eat from behind the floor-to-ceiling window like a dining etiquette firing squad. Every time a wad of guacamole plopped out or a smear of sour cream leaked onto my hand, I expected one of them to grimace and hold up a placard with a "4" on it. And it was 118 outside. All in all, my stained tee shirt and I are pretty sure we came in last in the Chipoodle Style Olympics.

So then I go and get Randy, right, and he's a little miffed because they decided to discharge him earlier than planned but I was busy speed-eating and shielding my face from the judges' panel. (Apparently when the first thing the patient does after coming out of the anesthesia is lean over and rip the EKG sticky monitor off his chest with his teeth and spit it onto the floor because it's itchy, damnit, and hey! someone bring me a Diet Coke!, yeah, they go ahead and shave an hour off that asshole's recoup time.)

"Whatever," I said, tying to keep him from standing up. "You're the guy who missed the birth of his first child because you 'stepped out' for a second to try that new barbecue place." But I was really thinking that the longer they kept him yoked to the hospital bed, the lower the odds that Mr. "Ew, I Think That Advil I Took Made Me Sick" would yak up his oxycodone in my car on the way home.

"I came right back!" he argued. And right about then he realized that half of the whole top of his body was bound up in a pretty complicated sling, and man, he'd better get to getting that thing off immediately.

So over the course of the past two days my life has pretty much revolved around stopping Randy from unpeeling the sling ("I just want to stretch my arm out! Geez!"), fixing the entertainment system every time he pushes some button that he thinks means "make it louder" but really means "feed AM radio through the television and set the DVD player on fire", and confiscating the remote controls. I'm also on Cracker Recon Duty, and that's been kind of exciting. We got the variety pack and that turned out to be a good move, I think, despite my initial misgivings.

He's also got some shit going on with his lower back now, too, and with all of the requisite ice packs his core body temperature is roughly 84 degrees. It's fun. We're having a good time. This afternoon, as an example, after Randy got all crotchety and called the cops about a bunch of used cars parked for sale at the top of our street? Yeah, when the responding POLICE OFFICER showed up and wanted to talk to the guy who called the CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT to bitch about six parked cars on a SATURDAY, I got to ask him to "hang out a second, okay? Let me get his pants on him."

And then the cop told me that I looked really, really good for SEVENTY-FOUR YEARS OLD.