A hobbit haircut; operations are go; and Indian!

Ottawacker Jr. is much better today, still a bit “off” but night and day compared to how it was yesterday and the day before. If he hadn’t had a hospital appointment, we’d have sent him in – as it was, he got to go in after the appointment.
 
My own day started with a visit to “Salon Elégance” for a haircut with Odalia (at 8 a.m., thank you very much). Not sure how I feel about it. The usual conversations take place to the extent of my boredom with how I look. She opens with “how about layering a little” and I say “you mean like Cate Blanchett?” This is where it all starts to go wrong.
 
“Who’s Cate Blanchett?”
“She’s an Australian actress, really good, she was in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and tons of other stuff. You’d recognise her if you saw her.”
“So, you want your hair to look like a hobbit?”
“No,”
“Right, hobbit.”
“No…”
 
My hair now looks like a hobbit’s. It’s a step up from the Donald Trump hair cut I had in the Spanish Instituto de Belleza, but not a big step up. More like a hobbit-sized step up. I must learn to control my mouth.
 
Driving home in a slightly reflective mood, I picked up the other two Ottawackers and we went to the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO), where you still can’t park. This time, we were seen pretty quickly by the really nice surgeon, who went through the results of Ottawacker Jr.’s second MRI. The lesion in the elbow joint hasn’t improved – in fact, it has slightly worsened – so the diagnosis of osteo-chondritis dissecans (OCD) has been confirmed, and the operation is therefore the route we will take.
 
We were introduced to a nurse practitioner called Samm, who went through the various procedures with us. Again, lovely, reassuring, helpful. She told Ottawacker Jr. he would get a bit of time off school and that the school would have to put in place various protocols to ease his reintegration and accommodate his return.
 
“Oh,” he said, “like what?”
“They’ll have someone to help you take notes,” she said. “And you won’t be able to carry anything, so you’ll need to be helped with that. Plus, no gym classes or anything that might risk injuring the arm.
“Yes, yes, yes,” he said. “But, you mentioned I got time of school? Like, a month?”
“No, more like a week or two.”
“That’s OK, two weeks is good,” he said. “And someone does all my writing?”
“Well…”
 
Having explained that Ottawacker Jr. was having the operation on his left arm and he is, in fact, right-handed, I started the long procedure of winding back the opportunities to skive that the operation might afford him. We ended up with a week off school and nobody to take his notes for him. Set his expectations low. This was in addition to the disappointment he had regarding the opportunity to not play Ottawacker Curling in the consulting room (the game where you slide someone sitting on a chair as close as possible to the wall without hitting: the fun comes, obviously, once you lose and send someone crashing into the wall. Our last visit had no doubt caused ructions, as the wheel slides had been disabled. We had to mime the game, which while funny, was not as funny.
 
However, he wasn’t too disappointed when he got dropped off at school around 11.30 am – and he has already probably told his teachers he’ll be missing a month as the result of the operation, will need to be carried around in a sedan chair, and that the accommodations will probably include being spoon-fed his lunch by the principal.
 
Spent the rest of the day tidying up the translations, which were submitted ahead of schedule. Aren’t I great? Went downstairs, having noted that Arsenal had put Real Madrid in their place and were due to be eliminated by PSG in the semis (hopefully), looked at what we had in the fridge, and then decided we were having Indian take-away for dinner. It’d been a big day, and all that.