Back in the Saddle Again

I have just four words to describe my first post-surgical outing to the PNE:
Deep.
Fried.
Oreos.
Yes!

Okay, I would have to step down as the Crown Princess of Verbosity if that was my entire post, but luckily there's a lot more to say on the subject. I'm not sure what lead me to think, "Gee, I have been in bed for a month straight and have had major surgery, so I should really ease myself back in to the land of the living by going to Vancouver's largest summer fair on a long weekend along with thousands of other people who would shank your mother for the last mini-donut....for 8 hours."

Actually, that particular thought process was caused by a few key factors:
1) I'm kind of a moron when it comes to gauging my tolerance for things.
2) I heard the siren song of the funnel cake in all its deep-fried, powdered-sugary-y seductiveness. Also: the siren song of the cotton candy, the poutine, the fresh-squeezed lemonade, the donairs, and (of course) the deep-fried oreos. It was a veritable siren-song doo-wop group.
3) It was a chance to spend time with several of the friends I still have in Vancouver. Plus, sometimes you've just got to give your hip a little pat and say, "Okay, hip. You've been in the driver's seat for the past month, but now it's time to scootch over to the passenger's seat and buckle up tight because I'm about to rev the engine."

The problem with going places post-hip-replacement is not the walking, though granted that sucks quite a bit. No, the real issue is sitting. There are many different shows at the PNE (the horse jumping....the Chinese acrobats...the SuperDogs...the random guy in a booth who spray-paints a Hummer about 8 million times a day then cleans it with some special cleaning product and progressively gets more loopy as the spray paint fumes get to him) and all of these shows require sitting on hip-precaution-breaking seats. I therefore had to travel with a chaperone: my huge-ass hip replacement cushion.

I thought I was being crafty by shoving the hip-replacement cushion into a backpack. The problem: getting it in and out of the backpack was harder than squeezing my ass into skinny jeans. It was literally a two-person job. Maybe my hip-replacement cushion had also been snacking on some deep-fried oreos, because as the day progressed, it got harder and harder to wrestle it into the bag. Worse: the person who ended up helping me was Shira and Jeff's friend C., who I barely know, and whose system has not built up a tolerance to my usual level of ridiculousness. (He was, thankfully, very nice about the whole thing). Nothing like the phrase "Hi, nice to meet you. Want to spend part of your relaxing weekend help me shove an ass cushion roughly the width of your grandma's Laz-E-Boy into this backpack 8 or 10 times a day?" to really make an impression. Really good way to meet people in Vancouver.

Still, it's good to know that I'm easing my way back into the saddle (the metaphorical saddle...the literal saddle would break hip precautions). Giddyup!