Snowbrush

Peggy and Walt are skiing, and I am trying to decide whether I want to be on my feet long enough to shop. If, like most of the world’s peopl...

I had a good birthday, having received money, flowers, cards, phone calls, dinner out, and a banana pudding. Some people who I would have li...

More mountain climbers die on the way down than on the way up, partly because they become so fixated on reaching the top that they ignore th...

I attended a presentation on public hangings in Oregon last night. I was specifically interested in the knots that hangmen used, because it ...

My letter to the volunteer receptionist at Sacred Heart: I am sorry that I do not remember your name. I tried to get it from Sacred Heart, b...

I took a stroll Friday, eleven days after surgery. I couldn’t walk without limping unless I kept both knees bent. This gave me a Groucho Mar...

The surgeon drained 30 cc’s of fluid from the back of my knee yesterday. Fluid accumulation is a painful and recurrent problem for me, and I...

Six days post-op. For several days, I could bear almost no weight on my leg, and since I was supposed to keep it elevated above my heart, I ...

The volunteer who checked me in at the hospital was a woman in her upper seventies. Two things struck me about her. One was that she was imp...

I am of better cheer today, three days post-op. I had little pain until Peggy removed the ace bandage on Tuesday to change my bloody dressin...

Sacred Heart was like an assembly line in which patients were passed off as quickly as possible between admissions, short stay, pre-op, post...

I only slept a few hours last night before drinking a half-gallon of water and a mug of coffee before my NPO deadline. I am less nervous tod...

While I was admiring the neighbors’ new motorcycle today, Baxter ate a box of rat poison that he found in their garage. I caught him in the ...

I’m trying to tie up loose ends before my operation next week. Yesterday, I spent four hours installing a recessed light in the laundry room...

I worked flooring the attic today. My left elbow never healed from a fall in 2003, and has increasingly come to limit how much I can crawl. ...

I just finished the first editing of my journal for 2003. The text came to 151 pages and the editing to thirty hours. I used to do three or ...

The local sewage plant flooded this week, making it necessary to dump raw sewage into the Willamette. All of the major rivers—and most of th...

I purchased a pair of $80 mitts today. It was a painful sum to spend, but Raynaud’s Disease has so affected my hands that the least chill pu...

Oh, but the tedium of winter. Another month, and spring will come; another three months, and the worst of the rains will be over. Already th...

Peggy and I climbed Tire Mountain today where, after eating, I had a terrible spasm in my lower back. After I was able to stop cursing and w...