I listened to the new Green Day album American Idiot 4 times today in the car as I drove to Bellingham and back - and sat in border lines. I have to say that it is an amazing - nay, I will unabashedly say brilliant - album (you should all buy it!) and that I'm a little bit in love with Billie Joe Armstrong.

Mum and I went tonight to the Chan centre at UBC to see a choir performance of a huge Berlioz mass. It was really cool. There were 3 different choirs added together with an orchestra. The horn sections of the orchestra were spread out through the theatre in the upper levels and during a bombastic section of the performance there were horns blasting in every direction. It was pretty awesome.

Speaking of awesome, the theatre itself was one of the most beautiful I've been in. Elegantly shaped with wood and chrome accents and a soaring ceiling. Colour me impressed.

The mountains had disappeared for a few days into The Grey (you might have to be a Vancouverite to truly understand) but have returned with a beautiful dusting of snow. Ooooh! They look so pretty and it makes me very happy to look out my window at work and see them like that. It makes me wish I skied. Well, not actually, but they're still pretty.

I put up my Christmas tree and it looks pretty too. I decided not to put up the ornaments that I hate and normally hide at the back of the tree, though. Instead, I am going to donate them to the Sally Ann or something so that maybe they can be appreciated on someone else's tree, even though they're kind of fugly. That's one of the cool things about this world, though. One woman's fugly is another's Christmas tree treasure.

I have been on a cleaning and purging kick at the moment. I cleaned the closet in our bedroom and got rid of 3 big bags of stuff and have since taken a huge bag of books to the second hand store for trade (yay! more books!). It would be so nice to have a significant decrease in clutter by the time we have people over for festive festivities PLUS I'm seriously sick of looking at it all myself. Down with clutter!

It turns out that the injury to my meniscus was a false alarm and I actually only have some degeneration of the cartilage due to a fairly common muscular imbalance causing mis-alignment of my kneecap. An MRI (paid for privately to avoid the 5-month waiting list - horray for 2-tiered medical) showed the damage, which is somewhat fixable through rehab exercises rather than surgery. I can't repair the cartilage as such, since once it's gone it's gone for good, but I can at least halt it from progressing further and make my kneecap track properly in its groove. Yay!

I'm thrilled that I won't have to have my knee cut up but in a way I'm sad because it means I'm going to have to do the work myself to get it better. Stupid work! My symptoms are still much closer to that of a torn meniscus - pain location, functional problems - but everyone knows that machines don't lie.

Or do they..?

I saw the gyno today and it looks like I'm going to get three surgeries for the price of one (free, 'cuz I live in Canada) to deal with my polyps and (hopefully) my cramps. I'm going to get a laparoscopy, a hysteroscopy and a D&C all at the same time, since they've got to put me under a general anaesthetic to do any of them individually. The whole general anaesthetic thing is kind of freaky, mostly because the last time I had one, I puked for 2 days following the operation for my wisdom teeth. I wasn't worried about my tooth pain at all but I sure wasn't having a good time with the vomiting.

Let's hope all this can happen soon and go well so I can move forward and get back on track with my health.