Ouch, ND. If you wanted to take some time off we could have given you plenty of better options to consider.

Sometimes I feel badly about, like, being the World's Oldest Intern(and I'm not even that, really, because I don't get class credit) but you know, I do lots of shit that nobody else likes and with a smile, most of the time. I'm not really ready for anything else, exactly,except I wish that a few of my stories got a little attention, but sometimes I think "I'm forty-one years old and started off Cheating Death(TM) and whatever. Was it all so I could look up phone numbers in Brattleboro, Vermont?"(Although I don't mind doing that, and I'm old enough to appreciate that it would be a beast of a job if I had to do it Joan and Betty style, without the internet, but still.)

7mm Kidney stone, so that's fun

Yowza. Hubby had a big one once that took lithotripsy to get rid of. Once he changed from hard, city water to bottled water, his incidence of kidney stones went way down.

Ouch, ND. I'm at least glad it isn't the pancreatitis.

I'm home and exhausted.

Ouch, ND. May it be resolved quickly and painlessly.

Now I'm thinking about drinking less of my somewhat-hard tap water. And giving my cats bottled spring water. Ouch, I say.

We don't buy bottled water anymore--no ripping off tribal lands for corporate profits, thanks. But we do filter our tap water, and I think it makes a difference. Brita filters, FTW!

We have water bottles in the fridge, and we carry one with us when we're out--no exorbitant spending for water or soft drinks, that way. We've done it for twenty years now. I wonder how many filters we've consigned to the landfill?

The bottled water I buy is from a spring in the mountains above Salt Lake City.

That does sound picturesque, Connie.

The most popular brand of bottled water when I lived in NC was "bottled in Salisbury, NC," according to the fine print. I'd been to Salisbury. I imagined somebody out in the back yard with a hose, filling up bottles from the municipal water supply--which may have been a Northern Exposure episode one time.

Speaking of springs, though. There was a place in the NC mountains where my dad loved to go for Sunday dinner, and at least one partial week during the summer. They had one-room cabins strung around a small pond, and an old farmhouse, where the owner-operators lived on the second floor. The first floor had become a small general store, kitchen, and big dining room. Meals were served family style--fried chicken, mashed potatoes, beans and corn, biscuits, and pie or cake for dessert. There was absolutely nothing to do--not even canoes for the pond. It was patronized by old people, who sat around on the porch and dozed between meals.

The place was famous, though, for its spring. People would bring quart milk bottles and thermoses (before plastic milk jugs) to fill with spring water to take home. Another time, entirely.

There's a brand of locally-sourced spring water here, I've forgotten the name of it. And I do have a Brita pitcher, which I forgot about! What else have I forgotten? Was the source of the Nile under my kitchen?

Glad you're home, Drew. So sorry about the whomping kidney stone. While I'm very happy it's not pancreatitis, kidney stone isn't any fun either. Much healing~ma