My father retired and then went back to work as a consultant right away, no interruption of service.

Well, yeah. I mean, partly my dad's retiring so he can focus more on his consulting work. But also, apparently, he loves his new house so much he hates to leave it.

Is it too soon to get him a new dog, do you think?

My dad went back as a consultant for more pay, plus had a year's accumulated vacation pay.

Still, I asked "Why? This is what people dream of!"

"I get to travel the world, and people treat me like I'm very important."

Man has a point.

Dear Self-Important Asshole:

You don't have an M.D.; therefore you are underqualified to play God. Ask any MD, and after he's finished pulverizing your ego, get back to me.

The United States, of which you may have heard, considers the age of legal majority to be 21. After 21, American citizens are free to smoke, fornicate, moon the Pittsburgh Steelers, and/or visit physical therapists with God complexes. Nobody gets to stop them, and you know why? Because God doesn't feel like it and nobody else has the authority.

Sometime in your long life, you no doubt took some sort of oath or promise having to do with respecting your patients' confidence. Take a second. Open up the paper bag on the floor, the one next to your thirty months' worth of unpaid bills, underneath the pile of Dear John letters from your girlfriends. Take a good, sincere, look. Notice the bit about KEEPING YOUR DAMNED YAP SHUT.

Yours sincerely,
Me.

So, ita, is your neurologist going to tell them that the medical opinion is that you are good to go or is she going to say the severe concussion/several month's rest thing? Does she think the headaches would abate of you stopped all training?

Project Runway -- Tim Gunn -- such a good sport. Also, how funny was it to see Robert delivering those packages ? How unsurprised am I that Emmett didn't recognize him ?

So I'm watching The Chronicles of Riddick. My god, is this movie beautiful! Or at least the first fifteen minutes of it.

It was my understanding that the reason they didn't want the big physical activity after concussion was that real damage could occur if you had a head injury with an existing concussion. Although many athletes play with them anyway. In school sports the kids will beg to not have a concussion diagnosed because they won't be able to play.

Bottom line. Adults get to make their own decisions.

God doesn't feel like it and nobody else has the authority.

I'm not religious, but I do love this sentence.

Robin, I've already exceeded the amount of rest the neurologist would have recommended for my concussion. If the centre won't let me train now, I don't when they ever will. But I know the head instructor is jittery, and while it's my choice to train, it's his choice to prevent me from doing it there. You'll notice no assignment of usable choice to the PT.

I am having more headaches than normal. But it occurs to me, I'm not having more headaches than the week before the concussion. It was a migraine pileup that preceeded both faints. I used to be having more and worse ones, along with a cascade of other post-concussive symptoms.

I'm miserable now, but sadly I was miserable right beforehand too. I only just realised that.

Does she think the headaches would abate of you stopped all training?

She never said. But she's never causally linked the headaches to training, which I think is fair, because I've had them pretty badly while not exercising at all. Just not this consistently. Her call.

The part that might not get me unbanned is the "of course, at any point post-concussion, the patient is at more risk for another." I'm just not the only concussed one there, and if we add up bangs to the head, I probably don't even rank.

However, I'm recent, and I'm a chick, and I look young. And I was too shortsighted to just suffer at home. I'm fairly sure all those things work to some degree against me.

Week of Dressing Dangerously: the woman's oldest daughter needs a hard smack upside the head.

This may go without saying, but we have never Fame Audited a fetus before.

We'll need artists, great artists, who'll sacrifice their eyes for one brief gaze upon the Brangelina infant (or, as we like to call it, the Infangelina), sketch its glory quickly, then spend their rest of their lives as blind babbling fools, jibbering in some monastery somewhere.

To which we can also say: Oh, TomKitten, your ass just got served.