• a variety of fine pickles •

i needed to have a good time something awful. mary and i had some kind of fun today, that's fo sho!

it was rainy and gray today, but we managed to have a great time. as evidence of a great time had by all, here's proof. mary had gas.

we gassed up and went to mary's cardiology appointment where she was fitted with a 24 hour holter monitor, and then had an echo cardiogram. i got to see mary's heart... it was really something to see someone's heart beating; the valves opening and closing, the rushing sound of blood and the visual to go along with it. that was pretty amazing.

after the doctor's appointment we headed off to the orchid for thai food.  mary had never had thai food, so i introduced her to my favorite thai dish, shrimp padd thai. she liked it, and i just can't get enough of it. i wanted to take a photo of the padd thai when it first came out, but i was so excited that i just started chowing down and forgot to take a picture until we were nearly done.

mary's shrimp padd thai



the 3-ring binder menus at the orchid. pictures! w00t!



then we headed off to the tattoo shop where cameras and camera phones are strictly verboten, so no pictures of the actual tattoo process, but both of my tattoos only took about 10 minutes, and mary's only took about 5. that's right kids, mary got a tattoo as well! we got the same tattoo.

that's mary on the left and me on the right. i know i said i was gonna get my heart covered with a star, but i decided at the zero hour this morning at mary's house that i would get the heart fixed after all, just filled in solid black. mary called me day before yesterday and said she wanted to get the same star tattoo as me, so voila! as seen above. mary's is a smidge smaller than mine, but it's the same star. we're like sisters, mary & i.

and peek-a-boo: all those wires are from the holter monitor.

so now the grand total of tattoos: 6.



 

i kept saying "5 is enough. i'm done." 

sure.

tattoos. people either love them or hate them. people either have them, or they don't.

i have them. i have 5 of them. no, my parents aren't thrilled about it.

of all 5 tattoos, all are in places out of the view of the general public save for one. I have a small tattoo of a heart on the inside of my left wrist that i had inked 2 years ago on valentine's day. the heart had nothing to do with it being valentine's day; it was for other reasons, to remind me that my heart belonged to me and no one else. it was supposed to have been a solid red heart, but something went terribly awry when the artist went too deeply with the needles on the inside of the heart. if you know anything about tattoos, you know that the outline is always done first, and it's usually done twice with a very fine grouping of tattoo needles, usually between 2 and 5. the shading can be done with a larger group of needles, anywhere from 7 to somewhere around 15-20ish or so. i'm not really sure how large they can go.

about 2 days after i got the tattoo, a perfectly heart-shaped red scab came off of my tattoo. yeah, it was pretty grody but also it left only the outline of a heart. 

the outline, also done with too heavy a hand, is a little blown out, or blurred. you can see it a little closer-up here.

as you can see, there is residual ink in the middle, but only a small bit. the result has turned into what my mom calls my "heart-shaped ringworm", and what my friends have begun referring to as my "prison tat". i fully intended to go back and have it fixed as soon as it healed, but clearly i never followed through with that plan. i joked that although i got the tattoo to remind me that my heart belonged to me, my heart was telling me it was empty.

come on, it was only a joke!

i'm not going to have it fixed. i don't take color all that well. black is my best ink. this friday i'm having it covered with a small, solid black 5 pointed star, just big enough to cover all of the red. fortunately the scar tissue is minimal, and has left no raised scarring.

my friend mary is coming with me, and i'll make sure we have a camera to have the cover process fully photo-documented! i'll post photos of the new tattoo as soon as i get it!

 
yay for stars!