Kaput

First, the dermatologist report. Everything is fine. He looked at the brown spots on my face, took some more pictures, and said not only are the spots harmless but one of them seems to have faded slightly since my general practitioner took photos a few weeks ago. I find that hard to believe, but I'm rolling with it. We're leaving them alone.

I also asked him about some actinic keratosis spots on my head, and he pulled out the dry ice and prepared to freeze them off. "Now, this will feel like a cigarette burn," he said. I thought silently, "Do enough people still smoke to even know what a cigarette burn feels like?" The freezing itself wasn't too bad, but for the next hour or two I felt (and probably looked) like I'd been stung by bees, which seems much more au courant as a comparison.

Bonus: He was a surprisingly sexy dermatologist! Young, fit, with alluring brown eyes above his face mask. I never saw the lower 2/3 of his face so I suppose he could be snaggletoothed or have a horrible facial tattoo or something, but I doubt it. He moved with the assurance of someone who knows he's good-looking.

Anyway, I was out of his office and back at work within an hour. I am glad to get those keratoses taken care of. They don't hurt and they're not dangerous -- although a small percentage of them can become cancerous -- but they bothered me. The last time I went to a doctor about them, I got some cream to use over a period of months to get rid of them, but it didn't work well. This doctor said that particular cream was too weak. He told me he'd write a prescription for something stronger for future use. Apparently I need the industrial-strength chemical peel to take care of these legacies of my childhood in sunny Florida.

At left is another one of the stamps I got in my mixed assortment. I liked this one (from Hungary) because it features poppies, which we have growing in our garden.

Oh, and our workplace fridge? Well, we went in yesterday morning and found it had been completely defrosted. We turned it on, put everything back inside, and soon realized that it wasn't cooling at all. Whatever was done to defrost it also completely killed it. So it looks like we need a new fridge.

The maintenance guy who did the work felt bad, but I told him it wasn't his fault -- and I really don't think it was. I suspect there was so much ice that it damaged the coils and removing it caused the system to leak coolant or otherwise go on the fritz. I had a fridge in my New York apartment that was the same way -- it was hideously frosted over when I bought the place, and I defrosted it only to find it would no longer work. It's a thing.

(Top photo: West Hampstead street scene, last weekend.)