Scattered Thoughts . . .

W e usually start all the Christmas festivities immediately after the holiday I despise, Thanksgiving.  There are one or two other holidays that bother me a bit but I truly despise Thanksgiving.  I always make the best of that holiday anyway and, by the end of that long holiday weekend, all of our Christmas decorations are up and the tree is decorated.  This year, however, Christmas came a little earlier.  We started our Christmas gift-giving on Halloween night! Those who read this blog regularly probably already know that this year has been absolutely miserable when it comes to my health but I'll add a little background here anyway.  This year started out with an ambulance ride to the hospital and I've had about a dozen visits since then for follow-ups and tests.  I had a more extensive bone marrow biopsy not long after my ambulance ride to the hospital.  Shortly after that biopsy, I fell on the biopsy site.  We've had to cancel about a half dozen weekend out-of-town   tri

A s expected, we had a great time with the kids and grandchildren here at our house for Christmas!   We celebrated on the day after Christmas Day this year.  We went back to our already established tradition of starting our day with breakfast once everyone arrived.  This year, however, it was a late breakfast.  We had an egg casserole with a French toast bread base, maple and brown sugar sausage links, bacon, and cinnamon buns.  I didn't get much food and, actually, I didn't get a single cinnamon bun but what I had was very good.  For the most part, all the food was eaten so it must have been good.   In this blog entry, I included photos from this fun day and I closed this blog entry with a video which does a better job at showing some excited grandchildren.   The house was quiet earlier in the morning before everyone arrived as Gee and I filled the living room with presents...  stacks and stacks of presents... The stacks of presents were even climbing up the walls like in a Dr

O ne of Sheila's childhood friends passed away a few years ago.  She left Sheila with a porcelain frog because...  well...  Dawn loved frogs and it was something that Sheila had always been very aware of throughout their childhood.  Sheila inherited this frog as a reminder of Dawn always being with us.   Well...  this porcelain frog sat comfortably on the step outside our door for only a month or so before I accidentally bumped it while doing some landscaping.  The frog fell off the step and shattered into too many pieces to repair.  I felt terrible so I immediately brought Sheila out shopping so we could pick a new frog.   We found a frog statue that is a frog sitting next to a Welcome sign.  We placed this replacement frog at our front door on the topmost step to our front deck.  This frog, by now affectionately name Dawn, sat there safely for years.  Unfortunately, the sun has not kind to this little frog and it is deteriorating terribly now.  I figured Christmas would be a good

T oday is Sheila's birthday so, Happy Birthday to Sheila! She took a couple of days off from work so we started her birthday celebration a couple of days ago.   It has been a wet, damp and muddy weekend so far.  We have some fresh snow on the ridge of the Worcester Range just outside our living room window, which looks really nice, but our yard is a squishy swamp and the driveway is like quicksand which is typical silty Vermont mud.  This month has been brutally bitter with high winds whipping across the flats and rattling our roof all day and all night long.  Between the wind, the rain and the mud, this really is rather typical weather for Sheila's birthday. Anyway, Sheila opened her birthday gifts the other night.  One of the gifts was a nice app-controlled heated coffee mug.  She seems to be enjoying this gift so far this weekend so this turned out to be a nice gift and especially for someone who works from home. There is no need to be microwaving cool coffee anymore!  The m

This has been an absolutely brutal Christmas week so we have postponed Christmas until... well...  until things improve significantly. I haven't even written lately because my own health has been that poor.  I've still been trying to recover from a disastrous attempt at a colonoscopy in early September. It has been a terrible few months as far as my health goes so I have not written here in the blog nearly as often as I normally do.  Sheila is still struggling with terrible side effects of her cancer treatment.  Sleep is difficult for her for various reasons including pain, headaches and night sweats.  The sleep deprivation takes its toll on everything. On top of all that, she's even been trying to shake a nasty cold for the past two weeks. While Sheila has been trying to shake her cold, I developed her cold a few days ago and a nasty cold it is. No amount of cold medications have been able to even slow it down a little bit. I was up all through the night the other

I'm not sure I have written anything here about this past Christmas morning with the grandkids. Uggg... I just checked to see if I did anything with all the photos from Christmas morning and it turns out that I have not! Wow... I am really behind in writing here on this blog and sharing photos.  So now I'm sitting here thinking about why I am so far behind in keeping the blog up to date...  I also probably haven't even shared much from Liza's wedding... Thanksgiving... and a few other things in December, January and February. Poor health, feeling miserable, being exhausted, and a lot of medical appointments  seems to have completely consumed our time and energy. Between the two of us, we really haven't done much in a couple of months. We're both exhausted and, until the past day or two, we've been feeling quite lousy, generally speaking. One morning after Christmas, the house was quiet and the toys were sitting there under the tree and it reminded me of