Good news at last!

I had a busy morning, medically speaking.  I had two doctor's appointments -- one with my GP and one with a gastroenterologist whom I'd seen in October because my liver enzymes were elevated.  I have a sinus infection (which is NOT the good news) and was prescribed antibiotics (which WILL be good news in a couple of days).  But the real, here-and-now good news is that I asked my GP how my weight this time compared to my weight last time I saw her -- I've lost 20 pounds!  Shocking, I know.  But hooray for me!  The gastroenterologist also had good news -- my liver enzymes, while still higher than they should be, have come down significantly.  They still have a way to go before they are in the normal range, but he said that he was proud of me and that he is not worried about the numbers.

And, something I just kind of realized over the last week -- I've gone down a pants size (hooray, except that I bought a pair of pants last week in the larger size and now have to constantly hitch them up) and I realized when I was at Great Wolf that my bathing suit from last year is now a little roomy on me.  

Hooray!  Calloo Callay!  

We have to take these little victories as they come.  Onward!

On a completely different note -- last week, on a cold and rainy day, I was led through the rabbit-hole of the internet to a YouTube video of a 1933 movie called The Story of Temple Drake.  I watched the whole thing, in eight parts, and it was really very interesting. And I was SURE that this story was familiar to me.  Imagine my surprise when a little further research revealed that this film is based on William Faulkner's novel, Sanctuary.  The movie is a pot-boiler but, then again, so is the novel, which I promptly checked out of the library.  I haven't read Faulkner in 20-odd years.  I just love the first paragraph:

From beyond the screen of bushes which surrounded the stream, Popeye watched the man drinking.  A faint path led from the road to the spring.  Popeye watched the man -- a tall, thin man, hatless, in worn gray flannel trousers and carrying a tweed coat over his arm -- emerge from the path and kneel to drink from the spring.

Who is Popeye?  What's he doing in the woods?  Who is the man.  Why is he hatless?  Where is he going?  

Love it, love it, love it, especially on the heels of Faulkner's fantastic introduction, in which he says, 

This book was written three years ago.  To me, it is a cheap idea, because it was deliberately conceived to make money.  I had been writing books for about five years, which got published and not bought.  But that was all right.  I was young then and hard-bellied.  I had never lived among nor known people who wrote novels and stories and I suppose I did not know people got money for them.  I was not very much annoyed when publishers refused the mss. now and then.  Because I was hard-gutted then.  I could do a lot of things that could earn what little money I needed, thanks to my father's unfailing kindness which supplied me with bread at need despite the outrage to his principles at having been of a bum progenitive.  

Oh my gosh, I love it so much:  "of a bum progentive."  Faulkner protests a bit too much, I think -- the Introduction seems to me to be a way that he can disavow the unsavory subject matter and still tell a good story.  I'm in the early pages yet -- I can't remember if I read this during my class with Dr. Bradford on Faulkner.  But I'm reading it now.  Hooray, again!