I'm back

I hope you didn't think I would announce the impending 4000th post and then quit on you! I am just  coming back from an extraordinarily hard couple of weeks, starting when I tried,  rather arbitrarily, to quit one of my PD drugs without checking in with my neurologist. She might have advised me that it was as addictive as an opiate, with more severe withdrawal than that from cocaine, and that it was not advisable to go cold turkey from five pills a day to none, especially if one had simultaneously stopped taking Gabapentin, a  drug that makes it less  likely to have seizures when you stop other drugs.

At any rate, I found out, even before Libby found a paper on its addictiveness on a Cornell medical website. Five hellish days... thank God for innovative country medical personnel, and for friends who trust you with heir meds.

We had already decided to go to Deep Springs via Death Valley, to see, among other things, a 25 year bloom of flowers, so we just went, with me still detoxing. Which would have been ok, but for the fact that we stopped in Flagstaff to see Dave Edwards, the old Nat Geo photographer who was my first Mongolian contact.  Why a restaurant would put a stool at a table four inches from a ledge 18 inches high is beyond me, but I then I sat in it-- for at least a minute, before I toppled off the ledge.

Then, already in pain, and unsteady, I  fell down  a  flight of stairs at a motel. The resulting bruising was the worst I have ever seen, never mind had. I could not sleep, nor even lie on my back, and was so worried about my getting blood clots that I took a nearly toxic dose of Aspirin for several days...

But I'm back, and rested, and re- calibrated, and, if I can manage to get enough rest, have LOTS to blog about, including many photos of petroglyphs.

Tomorrow...