Peeking into the rock

Not quite before breakfast, but I ate while I wrote. Only 1329 words on the new chapter (34!). Stopped because I need to think about what happens next. What happened here was a report about a coal miners' strike in the lands owned by Yanek's biological brothers. What happens later in the chapter is a general strike by the workers in the city where Yanek is now. What happens in between is a complicated puzzle piece. And somehow all of this has to actually be about Yanek's ultimate relationship to a wild sow earth spirit.  And he still needs to get his soldier's discharge pay and buy a new drum, and yes the drum needs to be gotten before the strike happens, so maybe that's next.

You know those books where there's like three characters and all the action takes place within twenty-four hours and on the premises of one particular building?

Thios book is the opposite of that.

on another front: due to a miscommunication with an office worker at the doctor's office, instead of ordering my knee xrays I appear to have gotten a huge slice of my written medical records. It's pretty interesting, to me: the interesting part is that it would look really boring to an outsider. Considering all the conditions I'm diagnosed with, and the medications and behaviors I've undertaken to address them, I am a healthy, boring person. My latest labs are sterling -- middle of the middle, totally unremarkable. Except the colitis, which is mild. Oh, and my lumbar MRI reveals "moderately severe" stenosis of different kinds at several different vertebrae, but we all know that means nothing (really, people with horrible MRIs can be limber and painfree, while people with nothing showing at all can be crippled and suffering). Even the surgeon who proposed to replace my knee joints couldn't really make that strong a case for it now that I've read her notes.

All the notes, by the way, every single one of them, say "looks well and is not in distress." Which means, I guess, that it is a formula, since that's three doctors and a physical therapist.

Another note: the surgeon said the right knee was worse and proposed to operate on that one firstbut it doesn't hurt at all these days: it's only the left that hurts ever, now.

The next thing I do will be to work in the garden and talk to Bonnie, then I'll run errands, go dancing, and write a little before bed, probably on one of the other little projects.

We have a yearly tradition of walking to the pumpkin patch a few blocks away and getting all the children in the center a tiny pumpkin.  In past years this also involved a really odd storytelling couple who looked so corny you couldn't believe they knew what they were doing, but they did, and the preschool children at least got quite a lot of of it.  but this year the storytellers moved to a pmpkin patch which is too far away, and we just went to the same one without storytellers and it was fine.

Seriously, it's a really fun time to take twenty or so children to a pumpkin patch. The babies of course are equally interested in the dirt and rocks as they are in the pumpkins, and the toddlers mostly want to run around, and the preschoolers want to climb on the decommissioned tractor and mess with the wagons. The adults, of course, want photographs.  My favorite is going to be one of the series where I had like six children all trying to sit on me at once because I was holding a baby sister (no, they were not all trying to sit on me because I am that awesome, though me being that awesome of course has a bearing on it).

And then we came back and it was the quietest nap time ever.  Really.  The kids who always fight going to sleep didn't, and the oens who usually wake up screaming after half an hour woke up serene (mostly). There were two kids who cried for a bit when they woke up.  One was an almost-three who also wanted a diaper all afternoon -- she was positive that she didn't want underwear, she seemed almost frightened of it: I figured that something in the nightmare that woke her up sapped her of her confidence for the rest of the day, and we found her a diaper, and she was fine. This was her third trip to the pumpkin patch, by the way. I have a picture of her at eight months pointing to her name on the cribs that we used in the teen program back then.  Actually, I have a jillion pictures of her doing baby pre-literacy things.

on another front, I am beign saved, once again, from my own depressive, lazy, work-avoiding nature by the arrival of my friend Bonnie.  I have a weekend to get my bedroom ready for Shukuntula to move in. I had a month and a half, but I squandered it. And Bonnie is here to help me! And I have acquired enough mental health to let her.

on yet another front, tonight Truffle decided to take her battered toy corgi for a walk.  She held that thing in her mouth for the whole walk, which was the version that goes around two blocks -- that is, six blocks linear (I tried to get her to go farther, but she had a specific itinerary in mind.) She didn't do much but cart that toy around, so I imagine I'll be washing the tile floor by the back door in the morning.  She's taken things on walks before, but always dropped them after a block or so.