I look forward to October every year. It's my favorite month except for December, although the leaves here don't really turn until November, but there's such a possibility in October...that it might be cooler, that it might be colorful, that we can make all the wonderful things coming up like the book sale and the Apple Festival.

It started out on a bad note Tuesday. We'd had a nice day: went to Sam's Club for gasoline for the truck, went inside and found some nice sirloin steaks for a semi-reasonable price, and some nifty dark-chocolate covered nut clusters. Nuts are good for kidney patients, and these turned out to be really tasty, with flaky dark chocolate on them. We also went by Dunkin Donuts and got two more apple cider doughnuts, and James made chopped steak and ramen noodles for dinner...

...and forgot to check behind him to make sure the chair was there and sprawled out on the kitchen floor. We had to call the firemen to get him up, and he said he was okay—he didn't even scrape an arm or a leg like he usually does and start bleeding!—but over the rest of the evening he started to hurt worse and worse around his chest, and off we went at 10:30 to Urgent Care. Even though there were few customers, it took us until 3 a.m. for him to get an x-ray and then another 90 minutes for them to look at it. I had a screaming headache most of the time there; had taken three ibuprofin before we left the house and it barely touched it, and someone's alarm was going off constantly, and there was a baby crying, and it was hot in the little cubicle we were assigned to. We were so miserable we both considered just walking out, but we had to check...

So, they said no broken anything and sent us home on a couple of hydrocodone for James and absolutely no energy for me. We got into the house and just crawled out of our clothes and fell asleep on top of the bedspread with a couple of fleece throws at about 5:30 a.m. Ever since now he has this pain around his torso when he twists (can't figure out how it happened since he appeared to have landed on his left side), coupled with the pain in his back that has been so intense he has been taking, in ones and twos, the hydrocodone Dr. Coyle gave him for post-op. I have been wakened every night by his moaning in pain.

So, whap, apparently it was now my turn; tried to get in bed early Thursday night for the book sale on Friday and instead suffered nightmares and knee pain and nausea all night. It was a whole lot of fun for both of us. I staggered up long enough to help with breakfast and feed and walk Tucker, then crashed on the futon until it was time to get up for dialysis transport. I went straight to the book sale and bought thirteen books, and didn't feel fully human again until after supper.

So James ended up going to his club meeting online again, after making it successfully last month on his own (sigh...).

Over the week I also finished putting up a couple of more fall decorations, put the new signs up on the front porch (hopefully the plague of roofers will go away), brushed Tucker, updated my blog, and finally put away the charged power supplies (and sorted out the little woven crate they're in).

I also, happily and sadly, finished the very last Maisie Dobbs book, The Comfort of Ghosts. I've been reading the series since 2007, when I read a great review of the first book. Maisie started out as a thirteen-year-old servant whose thirst for knowledge was so great that she would get up at three a.m. to study in her employer's library to further her education. Her employer educated her, and she went to college but didn't finish due to serving as a nurse in the Great War. Now World War II has ended. Maisie is at the end of a long journey. It was a satisfactory ending, but how I will miss her!

Also, back in the day when James was working, one of the things we used to watch at lunchtime was the New Zealand-produced "reboot"/follow-on of Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds. They did a lot of fan service to the original series and we enjoyed it. However, Amazon Prime only showed two-thirds of the series. I just found out the remainder of the series was on Tubi.

Alas, now it seems our kitchen faucet is either broken or giving up the ghost. Like we haven't spent enough money.

Labels: accidents, autumn, books, dogs, health, illness, shopping, television, treats

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:02:00 PM

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After a Thursday of shopping, we were all prepared to have some fun on Christmas Eve. So we woke this morning, had breakfast, and I took Tucker on his long walk. We headed out early for lunch, intending to stop at Popshelf first for burritos, but traffic was so bad on the East-West Connector (since Walmart was between us and the restaurant) that we just went directly to O'Charley's and waited for everyone else. Juanita couldn't make it today after all, Mel and Phyllis were still being careful, and John never showed up, so it was just us and the Spiveys (including Aubrey). We talked about Marvel films (but not Hawkeye which they haven't seen) and other stuff, and Alice took a photo of us for Facebook.

On the way home we hit Popshelf. It was very crowded at that end of the shopping center because Popshelf is two doors down from Target, so I had James drop me off at the end of the sidewalk and he parked behind Office Max. Well, no sooner had I hit the sidewalk than I heard the weird honk/coo noise that the sandhill cranes make when they fly over—saw two small flocks of them the other day—and looked directly up to see them right overhead, so close that I could make out their long necks with the naked eye! I got two nice photos of them on my phone!

Bought twenty-five burritos and then brought them and James' leftovers home. We were feeling kind of bad not seeing Mel and Phyllis since we still had their Hanukkah gifts, so after I put the food up I grabbed the gifts and we drove back out to their house. We sat in the driveway and chatted with them for a while, and then drove home, stopping at Bruster's for ice cream on the way. James had peppermint stick Oreo, which was a lot more pepperminty than Oreo, and for once they had coffee ice cream (although theirs is nowhere as good as Baskin-Robbins, which is nowhere as good as Newport Creamery's, but them's the breaks) for me. I thought of Billy Joe in the Lassie episode "Yochim's Christmas": "This sure am the life."

Compared to last year, yes, it is.

We got home and settled in to watch Christmas things. First played The Gathering, with Edward Asner and Maureen Stapleton. Forget Hallmark Christmas movies, this is a Christmas film for adults. Then The House Without a Christmas Tree while we ate a light supper (the soup we brought home from Chattanooga). Caught the weather report, watched Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, then went on to The Homecoming: A Christmas Story, which is absolutely my favorite Christmas film ever (you can take It's a Wonderful Life, thanks).

Labels: birds, Christmas, events, films, food, friends, television, treats

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:05:00 PM

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