Nothing like starting off a post with a restroom mirror selfie. This one’s from four days ago, taken between Mohs procedure sessions at Tucson Dermatology. I had to have a basal cell carcinoma removed from the skin in front of my left ear. The Mohs procedure is a multi-step operation: the doc had to cut away bad tissue three times before he was certain he’d gotten it all. Four hours from start to finish. I go back in five days to have the stitches taken out.
I don’t know if UV exposure from a flying career aggravated my propensity for skin cancers or if it’s merely genetic. Given that my father, some of my sisters, and both of my own children have had skin cancers, it’s probably the latter. Since the first one in 1997, I must have had more than 20 basal and squamous cell carcinomas surgically removed, not counting the dozens of minor ones frozen off with liquid nitrogen, some leaving scars and some not. Of the scars, all on my face, the worst one is on the end of my nose where a skin graft didn’t take, leaving me looking like one of those drunken Dutch peasants in a renaissance painting. But hell, during my time working at the VA hospital and my visits to dermatology clinics over the years, I’ve seen faces far more ravaged than mine, and count myself lucky.
Daughter Polly turned 51 on Monday the 16th. She wanted crab legs, so we took her to dinner at Red Lobster. We hadn’t been to one of those in literally decades; I had assumed that like most chain restaurants they’d gone downhill, but am happy to report the opposite is true. Our eyes were clearly bigger than our tummies and we a took a ton of leftovers home with us.
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Landlocked Tucson is not the seafood desert one might assume. As the crow flies the Sea of Cortez, which separates the Mexican states of Sonora and Baja California, is only a hundred miles away, close enough that we sometimes catch the edges of hurricanes. There are several Mexican seafood restaurants here and all of them are good, the Mariscos Chihuahua chain in particular. And now we can add Red Lobster to our list of favored seafood hangs.
Son Gregory, who lives with his family in Henderson, Nevada, a suburb of Las Vegas, turned 60 last Tuesday, the 10th of March. Yesterday the odometer on his BMW hit 100,000 miles. It was a little less than 10 years ago that I drove to Las Vegas in my truck, flatbed trailer in tow, to take Gregory to San Luis Obispo, California to buy that motorcycle, just one year old and lightly used, trailering it back to Las Vegas afterward. Below, left: Gregory and his bike yesterday; on the right, Gregory rolling it onto the trailer in California the day he bought it in 2017.
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p.s. I had to confess to Gregory that I totally missed the 100K odometer rollover on my Goldwing a few years ago. He tells me such a lapse would have haunted him. Good to see he shares my neuroses. I mean, that is good, right?