No salted caramel macarons for me, then

Well. Today I went to Hutt Street on a follow-up visit to the nice surgeon who removed my gall bladder and, while he was in there, (gulp) biopsied (is that a verb?) my liver.

The good news is that there is no new bad news about the liver, and that everything that was eating at my innards has now been surgically removed and is healing up nicely. The bad news is assorted: (a) that gallstones can in fact form in the bile duct, so there's no guarantee that I won't grow more, and (b) the confirmation that the condition of my liver is not at all what it should be (NB this has nothing to do with drinking, so there) and if ignored and neglected could easily lead to something called non-alcoholic cirrhosis, which is exactly like alcoholic cirrhosis except that you didn't have any fun. And cirrhosis -- well, you know.

Now Hutt Street, as Adelaideans know, is an excellent place to have coffee and cake. I had coffee. No cake, no biscuits, no gorgeous French patisserie and absolutely, positively no salted caramel macarons. Not today, not next week, and only very occasionally as a special treat ever again. Sugar, fat and alcohol, formerly three of my main food groups, are off the menu for the foreseeable.

The bright side is that if I take this seriously, as who would not, then my days as a traditionally built lady might be numbered. Goddess knows I'm already ten kilos less traditionally built than I was when this all hit the fan two months ago. It could be the start of a whole new look.

Relief

So, that thing that felt like a permanent lump in my throat? The one that (as an ex-smoker in her late fifties) I was starting to get vair vair jumpy about?

It's not a lump of any kind. It's just a non-serious and easily treatable condition.

Not only that, but I rang the practice last Thursday and they gave me an appointment for today. Even more astoundingly, I found a good park straight away in a part of town not known for ease of parking. The ENT dude was only running ten minutes late, the examination was about a quarter as unpleasant as I had been expecting it to be, the diagnosis was straightforward, and the clever young doctor was a sweetie.

And it isn't even raining. Some days just work out nicely.

Everybody needs good neighbours, especially me

For the last week or so, the bloke across the road has been using some kind of power saw on what looks from the pile on the nature strip like the entire original floorboards of a small suburb.

Over the weekend the bloke on one side of me, into whose horticultural adventures I have never inquired too closely, had clearly had delivered the second large load in three weeks of whatever fertiliser it is that he seasonally has large loads of delivered. The farmer's daughter in me could swear that it is pig manure, than which there are few more disgusting smells on the planet. Also, there's been a breeze down our way lately.

And yesterday what I thought must be an earthquake -- something that made the sofa suddenly acquire a built-in massage capacity, caused the ceiling to shift alarmingly and repeatedly, and set up a deafening rattle and hum in all the windows and all the plates and dishes on the shelves -- turned out to be the boys down over the back fence on the huge block -- about six or eight normal suburban blocks' worth -- that is currently being levelled and earth-rammed to provide foundations for a pile of medium-to-high-density housing to be built to the glory of the bank account of a notorious Adelaide developer, bashing the dirt down with their big yellow toys.

This house is 100 years old and, in the way of such houses, quaintly home-made from the original two rooms backwards. Like every house in Adelaide since the drought began, it has a number of cracks, and it contains evidence here and there of ancient termite damage. I expect it to collapse around my ears at any moment, and hope to survive to collect the insurance and build something with solar panels, rainwater tanks, a large state-of-the-art en suite bathroom, double glazing and a cat run.