And speaking of dermatology,

I have an eight millimeter by eleven millimeter gouge in my face today. It took off a third of my left eyebrow and left behind an oddly colored (secondary to iodine) divot in my normally-lovely visage.

Such is the joy of being a freckled, fair-skinned redhead. You could trace the veins on my chest to their source and would be amazed at the transparency of the skin on my calves. And I'm prone to actinic keratoses, the precoursor of skin cancer, thanks to Dad. Thanks, Dad.

I got sunburned (true story!) in Copenhagen, Denmark. in JANUARY. It was sunny that day, between 9 am (when the sun got up) and 3 pm (when it went back to bed), and I got sunburned.

In Copenhagen. In Nyhavn, actually. In January. Which made my dermatologist crack up.

All told, getting a precancerous lesion cut off my face was better than what happened in Nyhavn that day, which involved a statue of Birgit and a drunken Swede and a lot of promiscuous kissing (not on my part) and beer horns you can't put down because they're curved or have big balls on the end, and isn't that a fun trick to play on the Americans? It was less painful to get lidocaine infused into my skin and a lesion scraped off than to deal with the fallout of getting Gammel Dansk'ed on a college field trip.

Which tells you something about my experience with dermatologists. It's a good thing when I'm told that whatever bump has popped up will probably take care of itself, unless I really, really want it cut off.

The best bit of the visit was when the dermatologist apologised for taking off a third of my eyebrow. I pointed out that a) my eyebrows are so fair I have to draw them in with a pencil; and b) that I'd already hacked off a portion of my right eyebrow with a pair of tweezers, so what was the problem? and she replied, "Well, at least you'll be even."

So now I look like Divine. With a divot. Which might be something I could parlay into a second job, so I'm not complaining.