A Christmas Postponement

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 night because my nose was running like a waterfall. I went through an entire box of tissues that night. I was already in a weaken state, as I mentioned above about my attempt at a colonoscopy, so this cold has really sent my mast cells into a hyper-frenzy which compounds and adds some complications to any cold.

The previous night, I was up all night because I couldn't breath with all the stuff running down the back of my throat. Lying down only caused me to choke. It then came as no surprise that I've had no voice this week. Actually, our Amazon Alexa hasn't been able to understand my hoarse voice this week either! So much for all the voice activated home automation we've added to the house in recent months.

Liza, John, Lukey, Kenzie and Sheila's parents were supposed to join us for a Christmas breakfast and opening Christmas gifts here at our house this morning but we canceled because of how lousy I have been feeling. The kids will have to open their Christmas gifts from Gee and Papa another time.  It turns out that Lukey and Kenzie developed a stomach virus last night so we would have needed to cancel today's celebration anyway.  

On the positive side, we've been video chatting with Lukey and Kenzie everyday since Christmas Eve when they opened one of their gifts from Gee and Papa.... a new Amazon Alexa Show! It has made communication with them a whole lot easier so it was a great gift.  (We sent an Amazon Show out to Adam in California too for the same reason!)

And now, it appears as though Sheila is developing the stomach virus too...  we'll see how the day progresses...

So, we've all been sick this Christmas week.

Sheila and I went out to dinner one night the week before Christmas week and did some last minute shopping too...

Sheila made some flavored coffee in our coffeemaker a few weeks ago but we quickly realized that we were not able to rid the coffeemaker of the smell and taste of the flavored coffee. We had already been talking about purchasing a new coffeemaker anyway but this turned out to be our first Christmas gift surprise this year... a nice new coffeemaker for us to use for non-flavored coffee which also happens to make tea, iced tea and iced coffee... it even froths our cream! And, in order to avoid ruining this nice new coffeemaker with flavored coffee we now have a nice small coffeemaker for Sheila's flavored coffees...

Sheila and I opened our gifts to each other on Christmas morning. We had a very nice, but very quiet, Christmas day...

Sheila received a new GPS Garmin for her new car and it even features Amazon Alexa voice control of all our home automation from the car as well as voice directions, traffic updates, lane advisories, braking warnings, collision warnings and even a dashcam. Of course, since it has Amazon Alexa integrated into the device, it has all of Alexa's features available to use while we are in the car. Now I just need to install it.

The Christmas gifts still await the grandchildren...

Hopefully, everyone will be healthy again very soon!  Even though health problems have put a serious cramp in Christmas spirit this year, we're still looking forward to our annual Christmas morning celebration.


POST EDIT:  After writing this blog entry, I grabbed some tools and Sheila's car keys and headed out to the car to install her new Garmin GPS device...  a very easy install!  Sheila was napping when I headed out there but, just as I finished up the install, she came out with her cellphone to finish the install for Bluetooth and Alexa features.  It works great!  We're looking forward to putting it to the test on our next road trip!