slowly healing, with feline friends

It’s been a week and a day since my right knee was fully replaced. I can walk about the house without any aid, and I can use my collapsible Traverse trekking pole when I’m outdoors to help with stability, just in case. Otherwise I stay indoors and move around helping to keep things clean and straight as best I can. These past few days I was able to do things like wash dirty pots and scrub the kitchen sink, as well as fix spaghetti Saturday night. These sound like such little, trivial tasks until you can’t do them or only with difficulty. Even getting a shower requires I wrap the incision with Glad Press ‘N’ Seal to keep water off and out of the wound to avoid any possibility of infection. Right now my dressing is almost totally clean when I change it daily. One more week of this…

I’m not the only one needing special comfort. Lulu went to visit the vet on Thursday, the same day I had to visit my surgeon for a post-0p checkup. She went to get her teeth cleaned and checked. Unfortunately for her she lost three, two of which are feline equivalents to wisdom teeth. When she came back she was OK, but she started to stay next to me a lot more than usual. Friday night she came up and slept next to me in my chair for comfort.

She’s since gotten back to her old Lulu self, but this past week seems to have deepened a bond between us even further.

The Florida Gingersnaps have been out and about in the central part of the house, running and playing. At 16 weeks, which was the week of my knee operation, they were six plus pounds each, or two pounds ahead of schedule. Kittens are supposed to add a pound/month. The Gingersnaps and Lulu seem to be getting along pretty well. More than once I’ve seen all three just lying close to each other on the floor, usually when the Gingersnaps get tired from chasing toys and themselves.

tos binging

With my knee in its healing phase there’s not a lot for me to do outside of personal rest and home PT. For whatever reason I started to binge watch the original series Star Trek on Netflix, the series I came close to memorizing back in the mid-sixties when I was in the equivalent of middle school in Atlanta, Ga.

As a kid I’d gotten a small reel-to-reel GE tape recorder one Christmas, and I quickly pressed it into use recording the audio from each episode. I eventually had two stacks of tapes, one for season one, and one for season two. I never recorded season three; after spending one evening watching “Spock’s Brain,” I never turned Star Trek back on again because that episode was so bad. I spent the rest of the third season replaying my audio tapes, imagining the visual portion of Star Trek while the audio and music played from my tape player. After the original series was canceled I concentrated on Apollo up through 1972, when I graduated from high school and headed off to college. Those tapes got recycled into other recordings, and eventually into the trash when they were worn out.

Over the years that’ve followed I’ve watched some of the movies (“The Wrath of Kahn”), some episodes from the spin-offs like Next Generation, and even gone back to watch the occasional rerun of the original series. To this day I still can’t watch “Spock’s Brain” or any of the third season episodes.

These past few days were an opportunity to kill some time by binge watching TOS. I’ve had a Netflix account now for years, starting back when you got physical DVDs in the mail. The physical media’s long gone, but I still stream. So I fired up my iPhone 6s+, pulled up the Netflix app, and went slumming through all those old episodes.

The version of TOS that Netflix has are the updated episodes where CBS went back and redid nearly all the old special effects. Planets really look like planets, especially when that planet is Earth (“Tomorrow is Yesterday,” “Assignment: Earth”), the spaceships were cleaned up, as were the movements of ships in space. With all the science fiction that has been produced since TOS first aired, it only made sense to update the effects. And I certainly appreciated those updates.

The only problem is that those cleanups made all the episodes look that much worse for their age. What was entertaining and exciting for a middle-schooler in the 1960s now seems worn, frayed around the edges. The plot holes are too obvious and too numerous to mention, cause and effect too silly. I grew up during the period of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, watching real astronauts fly into space. It was watching real rocketry that made me believe we might have something like Star Trek in the future. When it all got shut down and replaced with the Shuttle, Star Trek became part of the “kid stuff” I left behind. Along with a lot of other silly Hollywood science fiction.

I’m glad I got a chance to skip through all those old episodes. I think I finally got the very last vestiges completely out of my system.