Thank you, Master Joh, for the recognition you have afforded the Broken Coffee Cafe. I am humbled by everything you wrote. I guess it pays to be pissed off with the Unimaginative Shoemakers.

I have taken liberties in grabbing a picture from www.southnfrance.com for the nice trophy to go along with this acceptance speech/post. And I am holding back tears of happiness (and, ok, humility as well) as I write this.

I wrote as I saw and as I felt, with a bit of embellishment from the devious imaginative muse every now and then, and never thought that there was something to it.

Dear Reader, the cafe is the recipient of a (soon-to-be) prestigious award for literature in cyberspace:

The gold medal of The Doodle’s Best in Propaganda Writing.

The Broken Coffee Cafe shares the honor of this recognition with Tamark’s More Than a Mouthful and Lurchie’s Anthology of Snippets.

I want to thank everyone who continue to order Broken Coffee, with the dregs and all.

Thank you for the comments, reactions, encouragements, and rants, that make me realize that even my nonsense makes some sense.

Here’s to all the propagandist bloggers (and all other sorts) in the www.

Salut! 

Passe and limpid as it may sound, I’ve been truly busy.

First, the operation.

Which, for the curious, went out fine. The doctor did a good job of it, slitting my knee open just a teensy bit and extracting the lump from it within the hour. Then the good doctor stiched up the wound, and, until now, I barely feel the excision point, which is now healing nicely. I had grossly imagined that I’d end up with a gaping hole smack in the middle of my knee. So I’m really glad that it’s a pretty neat work. The only drawback during my operation was the assisting nurse who made me feel nervous. She was an intern, poor girl. I was conscious the whole time, and when the doc asked the nurse to hand him the scissors, she did so with trembling hands. Only, she handed him a pair of excising forceps or something. The doc had to stand up and rootle amongst the surgical instruments himself to get what he wanted. I wanted to joke about the situation, but the nurse was so tense from failing in her first practical test that I felt she could inject me with pentobarbital and I’d wake up with my kidneys missing if I did.

Thank you, one and all, for the prayers and well wishes. I made it through. The stitches will be taken out next week, and even now, the wound is healing nicely. There’d be a teensy scar there, but that’s all.

Second, the time.

Oh well, as I am back in the Shoe Factory and was, last week, in the second shift, I can’t just ride off to some Internet cafe (will someone sell me a laptop at a bargain) with a just-operated-on knee and pour out my heart and soul onto the keypad of a PC. I was under the “recuperating” mode, mind. I saturated my brain with primetime goulash from the sole channel that our television antenna could catch in the tropical jungle. I had tone-deaf singers; a stuffed toy posing as a viscious wolf-human and over-emotic real human characters with computer-generated blood-red eyes that were so unconvincing; a crazy spin-off of a Korean teleseries that actually made me laugh; a reality show where everyone cries for one reason or another, or even for no reason at all; and the culmination of a Korean telenovela that featured characters with lousy martial arts skill and appearances as common as my next-door neighbors’ (where’s the thrill in that?) eating my hours away every night that I did not choose to be asleep by seven.

Well, this time, shifts have changed in the shoe factory, and it’s waking up in the middle of the night again for me for the next few weeks so I could get down from my tropical jungle home and fall in with the other elves hammering soles and insteps for the day. (An aside: The Unimaginative Shoemakers have taken to posting parchments of their announcements, thoughts, and rants rather than communicate with us directly. Shoe production has taken a nose dive to one shoe per day, at least in our team, mostly because of this.)

Third, and finally, all the other miscellany.

First day of the dawn shift, my alarm sounded. As I was reaching for the mobile-slash-alarm phone, I felt a sharp burning pain on my wrist, then an angry buzzing sounded near where my head was on the pillow.

It was a hornet! And an angry one. And it stung me!

It may have gotten in from the latticed bamboo slats, probably to take shelter from the rains of the previous night.

But my goodness! Talk about being an ungrateful guest!

Bless genetics because I’m lucky enough to be immune to hornet and bee’s stings and had been known to only suffer minor itching and slight swelling. The sting was sharp, though, and I woke up Ta when I yelped in pain. We had a bit of a battle of wills and wonts when he wanted me to down copius amounts of honey, as in the mountains, the home remedy for stings was honey. It was four in the morning and honey wasn’t exactly my idea of a breakfast for champions. But in the end, a compromise was reached. A teaspoon of honey was the only casualty.

So, Monday morning dawned bright and cheery, and a woman, all wrapped up in scarves and a jacket, with a hornet’s sting throbbing in her right wrist, shattered the morning calm as she drove down on her motorcycle from her tropical jungle home to morph into an elf and enter the gates of the Shoe Factory. After all, what would the world be without shoes?

P.S. For those who tagged me for memes, particularly Lurchie and Gracey, I’ll answer them soon, promise!

I never got around to doing this earlier, but let’s give it for Lurchie, the quilt-weaver who also knows a thousand and one ways to generate cash in a pinch, who finally got the (dot)com that she wished for.

See her new quilt of ideas at http://pencilpushin.com to read about her life as a wage-earner, as a copyeditor, as a mother to two wonderful kids, as a wife to her husband Dhirrac, as a friend, and as a credible resource for anything about telecommuting.
Congratulations, Monkey Keeper.

This is the hypochondriac in me posting this, so pardon the accompanying imagery.

Tomorrow, I’m scheduled to go under the knife. Try as I might not to overthink it, images of me being cut up, sliced and diced still lurk and spring up suddenly, courtesy of the ever-present overactive imagination.

It’s just a minor surgery that would not even qualify me to get disability benefits from social security (heaven forbid!).

It happened this way. Perhaps I received some sort of trauma on my right knee sometime last year. I could not remember how, but I noticed that there was a dot-sized mass almost in the middle of my knee. I didn’t mind it then, thinking that it’s just a pimple or something. But what a place for a pimple to grow on. Anyway, for a year, I ran, skipped, jumped, walked, strode, jogged, pedaled, squatted (although not necessarily as often as I would have wanted) like I usually did. Little by little, my attention was drawn to the dot-sized something on my knee because this time, it has grown to a proportion that could not make me still ignore it. And the pain! Gracious sweet mother! Each time I accidentally bump my knee against something, the pain makes me see celestial bodies float past.

Last Saturday, I had an entirely different business that brought me to one of the hospitals in the city. I decided that, since I’m already there, might as well let a doctor look on the matter regarding my knee. The doc examined the lump and then and there proclaimed that a surgery was in order. He said that it might just be some growth that is benign but a biopsy would still be in order.

Yikes! But he was kind enough to allow me to think it over. So, I decided that he’d remove it Tuesday.

I just came from the medicare office after processing the necessary documents. May things turn out well. I may not be able to ride a bike for a couple of weeks. But it’s okay, considering.

And here’s a picture of my knee with the thing growing there. The growth is right in the middle of the inner circle, drawn on for purposes of relieving boredom.

(Pardon the absurdity, but it’s actually a picture of my knee. )

[surgery images courtesy of dailymail.co.uk and ghia-blades.com]

Today is the longest day of the year, this being the Summer Solstice.

Actually, this Celestial celebration, marked by the ancients as the wedding of the Earth and Heaven, officially begins at a minute before the clock strikes midnight on June 20th, Greenwich Mean Time (around 7:59 AM of 21st June for the Philippines).

The ancients have honored this time with bonfires, feasts, and dancing, grateful for the long day, the shortest night, and the chance to be with those they love.

If it weren’t stormy outside (and if I weren’t in the office), be assured that I’d have a huge bonfire blazing out on a field, with music from the guitar and a makeshift drum. I’d be with friends, and we would wait for the coming of the hour of the equinox, whiling it away with stories and songs.

A happy day to one and all!

Be on the lookout for Fairies!