I’m recovering from surgery. I also have a headache. Those two are related.

On Friday afternoon, I had dental implants installed, and “installed” is exactly the right word, because it denotes home improvement and carpentry. Basically, the oral surgeon drilled two screws into my upper jaw, much like you might screw a cabinet into the studs in a wall. The screws will serve as the roots for two crowns. I tried to use Tonglen meditation during the process, but breathing into the pain seemed much more difficult than, say, actual breathing, so I just counted my breaths until it was done (278 breaths) Then I was released to my husband with a piece of bloody gauze sticking out of my mouth, a bottle of painkillers, and a bottle of antibiotics.

Surgery on Friday afternoon took an hour. Recovery takes six months during which I’m sort of on a modified liquid diet. I say modified because I’ve never successfully followed a diet for more than a week. In any case, it was the headache the next day that was the problem. That headache was like:

a. I had consumed a bottle of red wine and then smashed repeatedly the bottle against my head; or

b. I had reclined in the street and let a tractor roll over my face; or

c. I had reclined in the chair at an oral surgeon, paid him thousands of dollars, and had him drill two screws into my jaw.

The painkillers were Tylenol with Codeine, which frankly are not so much “painkillers” as much as “pain dampeners” and possibly “hunger exacerbaters.” Despite knowing about the surgery for three years and having pages of instructions on what I could eat, nothing that I bought ahead of time was appropriate. Nothing.

So, the next day, this lead us to Whole Foods, or as it is frequently called Whole Paycheck (Note: Type “Whole Paycheck” into google and you get Whole Foods, I kid you not), where we spent $85 on frozen fruit for smoothies, most of which I blended in about 2 hours. So that’s really only $42.50/hour worth of food for me.

But back to our still-drug-induced self-indulgent rambling account of surgery.

So now, I’ve taken my antibiotics and painkillers, and we have Rob the contractor here installing heat even though it’s 85 degrees, but he’s available, so that’s fine because we really do want heat eventually and we’re afraid if we send him away we will not see him until January. (Note: We like Rob. We really do. Please, Rob, if you read this, come back and finish the heat. Please. We’ll pay you whatever you want. Seriously.)

But then power goes out because of some work in the neighborhood, and it stays out for five hours, until it comes back on suddenly and sets Jim’s computer aflame. That’s right–a power surge set the computer on fire despite being plugged into a surge protector.

It’s a good thing we were here because otherwise the house would have burned down. So upon seeing the flames shooting out of the back of Jim’s computer, we doused the flames with frozen fruit. Just kidding. It was an electrical fire. We unplugged the computer, turned off the power, the fire went out. And then we kicked the computer repeatedly simply because it was there.