Two weeks ago I went to John, my prosthetist, to pick up my new right leg socket.  I needed a new one because my stump had shrunk.  I was using 5 or 6 socks to keep a tight seal.

John said I was walking so well with the walker that I should see a physical therapist about learning to walk with a cane and then without help.  I ordered a cane from Amazon the next day.  Free shipping would make the thing come in about a week.

Thursday we were in a strip mall doing errands that included lunch and checking out motorized scooters for an upcoming cruise.  I am walking well but Lord am I slow.  Brooke can get to some place where she can sit down and play 2 games of Candy Crush while I go 30 yards.  This would not do on a cruise ship.

Brooke met a guy on a cruise on a motorized chair that was narrow enough to navigate the halls and the dining rooms on a ship.  We went into Texas Medical Supply to see how a scooter would break down and how heavy it would be.

All the scooters seemed a little big.  This was bad because it takes up half the elevator on a ship.  I’ve been part of a crowd that is silently pissed when the elevator doors open and it’s filled with one person on a scooter and 4 people.

The store had canes at the counter like impulse items.  I fell for it because I thought the Amazon cane was coming in 3 days.  I figured the sooner I start using the thing the better.

The Amazon cane came the next day.  I’m only using one cane to what can loosel;y be defined as walk.  It looks and feels like a cross between a waddle and a controlled fall.  The canes are named Virgil and Kwai Chang.

I’ve been using both new legs for about a month now.  It’s probably longer but I am bad with long term time(weeks and months).  I am using a walker and boy is it slow going.  If I could do the voice I would wear my bathrobe in public and do the pedophile from Family Guy.

A surprising feature of my new limbs is that they are 10 inches shorter than my old legs.  Now I literally see eye to eye with my wife.  I have to hop up to get on my king-size  bed.  Before I could just sit on it.  I like to  say if they were going to take 10 inches they could have taken it off my dick.

Using a walker takes both hands.  If I don’t have the basket attached it’s like I don’t have any arms.  The basket is 12″ x 6″ x 3″.  My scooter basket was as big as a bike basket.  I’m now in touch with my female side in that I prefer the depth rather than width,

I’m slowly raising the level of the walker so I won’t walk leaning forward.  I was two notches up but I fell last week so I’m back to one.  I’ll go back to two tomorrow.  I read in Lifehacker that if you tell people your goals you are more likely to accomplish them.  What few goals I have I need all the help I can get.

One of those few goals is spend 45 minutes on the working tasks on the PC like blogs, my wife’s website, and various programming languages like Java, C#, and perl.

When I was at Legends the wife and I started talking about how I used to defecate before I got Left ( my first prosthetic).  She reminded me that I took the walker into the bathroom.  This gave me a goal for physical therapy.

I would work on using a walker with Lefty.  This would need a lot of work because Lefty is heavy and hard to use as a skip foot.  I would also have to work on lifting myself using just the walker.  So I had a plan.  To quote Julia Sweeney, God Said Ha!

A few minutes after the phone call a lady from the business office came in and informed me that my insurance benefits had run out for the facility.  Since Brooke was still on the cruise I needed to pay for at least 10 more days.  Luckily I had the money to stay but I couldn’t afford the physical therapy.

When I got home I knew I had to swallow my pride and get adult diapers.  The knee scooter could not be maneuvered into the bathroom.  The end of the bed is my cleanup station/accidental toilet until I get my prostheses.

It’s a cleanup station because on the left I have a large plastic trash bag and on the right I have toilet paper and baby wipes.  Baby wipes are very comforting after or instead of toilet paper.  I learned this in the hospital.

It’s an accidental toilet because Depends do a good job of holding feces in but can only do so much when the load is not too solid.   I  have to take them off by myself so there is a point where they are upside down and a lot of the cargo falls on the bed.  This where a LOT of toilet paper gets used and the the baby wipes and air freshener are essential.

I keep the air freshener in the basket on my scooter.

Linux came up on the Windows task picker and blog came up on the Linux task picker, hence the title.

I know the term contractual obligation because Monty Python put out an album to finish out a recording contract and named it such.

I tried a different way of bathing today.  I used to put a small stool straddling the shower ledge and then took off the prosthesis.  I then used a walker with a towel draped over it to get to the bathroom and sat on the stool.  Today I kept the prosthesis on and just put the good leg in the shower.  It felt more normal.

Bathing was one of my three tasks for today.  Taking out the trash and going to the drug store for syringes rounds out the trio.  I plan to combine them after my hair drys.  It’s in the low 40s out there and I haven’t used a hair dryer since 2005,