Corned Beef Hash (with complications on the side)

I love corned beef. And potatoes. And onions. It therefore follows logically that I should love corned beef hash like life itself. Instead, for most of my life the mere sound of the three words made me actively nauseous. Seriously, at the sight of a can of the stuff in a store, I'd have to leave the store till I got hold of myself.

First, of course, canned corned beef hash bears no slightest resemblance to the real stuff. Second, piling it a foot high on a kid's plate and making him sit there for hours till he eats it all is a fairly evil thing to do to a kid. I actually had to go back to the table, even after rushing to the benjo to vomit what I'd already eaten. It was pretty mean.

Anyhow I was happy to find that, after no more than fifty years, I've finally gotten over it. Landlady made (excellent) corned beef hash for breakfast, using beef she'd put up herself and freshly-grown baby potatoes, and I don't think I've enjoyed a meal more in my life. The boys helped clean up the pots.

Then, just as I was getting ready to go to work at the Lair, they went off on their unsupervised morning run. I've been preventing that lately because of Little Bear's paw, but didn't supervise them closely enough this time. Landlady raised some really impressive blisters assembling furniture yesterday, and had a tissue bound on her right hand with duct tape this morning. I went up to get my medkit for a proper bandage, and when I got back the boys had abandoned the pots and everything else. They came back in fairly short order, winded, thirsty and happy, and no harm done.

I've been spending my afternoons sans prosthetic leg, hoping this damned pressure sore will heal. Having finally gotten a break from geiger counters, I need to be working on the Lair. But I'm only there in the mornings: It's gotten very hot in the past week, and frankly by noon I can hardly walk anyway. The sore never quite goes away, but only flares periodically. Lately it's been pretty bad. The only effective treatment I've found is self-mutilation followed by a period of being truly crippled. That is, I have to dig the dead skin away from the sore so it'll grow back healthy, then spend weeks completely off the leg. The first I can do, the second - not so much. So I compromise, and spend half-days one-legged on the sofa. And so once again it'll go into some sort of remission, but never really heal.

If anybody ever tries to sell you amputation as some sort of fashion statement, don't fall for it. No matter the quality of the prosthetic, it's really not an improvement. It's true what they say: Your feet are there to keep your legs from fraying at the end.