The Day My Music Died

White Rabbits! And things are looking up, and away. The foot is improving, Robin got my Yahoo mail working again on the default mail app on my mobile devices, the supermarket app is working correctly as well now, I finished my favorite game's weekend challenge, and thanks to that extra hour of sleep I was finally able to tackle two of the four boxes of stuff what I've saved from 25-50 years ago. All the songbooks I'd collected back when I played guitar, all the pages of meticulously-copied lyrics with their chords notated, all my stuff from my days in Rutgers' Queens Chorale, all gone now. I shall not be bringing my 50+ year old guitar with me to England, that's going to my musician friend Phyllis. I don't remember when I stopped playing, it was probably sometime during my first marriage, but in any case if I ever take it up again I will no longer need the paper I'd retained that was the main method of musical communication. Paper is heavy, and if something no longer sparks a memory (let alone joy) it doesn't need to come with me. I couldn't bring myself to look over the greeting cards I've kept (I now have four boxes worth), maybe I'll review them again post-retirement and pre-move. But the gist of it is, this long journey that got jump-started back in August when Robin moved the AC then had to empty the rafters and one non-stop bullet-dodging thing led to another... it's finally over. It's all put away or shredded or properly stored. Even the side quests like my latest batch of read comics and all those jackets we culled have now found new homes and will be picked up tomorrow. We are back to where we should have been months ago; even better actually, as we've cleared out stuff we hadn't intended on doing for at least another year. I applaud standard time!

Best Foot Forward

Happy Hallowe'en! And my biggest fear of the last week has now been allayed. My toe is not in fact broken, just badly bruised. The foot doc recommends thrice-daily soakings in warm water and epsom salts as well as careful monitoring. But what a relief! Psychologically my foot feels better already. Now if only I could fix tech that's gone awry. Apparently while trying to re-log into my grocery store's app which has been down for a couple weeks, I found out I hadn't been getting new email on my iPad or phone from my Yahoo account since Monday. Robin and I tried to fix both, and I wound up downloading the Yahoo mail app which is working at the moment but I still want my device's default email app fixed, and I still can't log into the supermarket app. On top of that, Liverpool lost. :( Ah well, tomorrow is another day. Too tired today to tackle the last of the "rafter boxes" so we can finally store them in the office closet, and thank goodness we get no trick-or-treaters as very few folks even know where this house is, so all I need is, say, an extra hour's sleep...

The Cramp Crows at 4 AM

OMG, that was bad. That was around the worst calf cramp I've ever had. Just when I thought it was fading it roared back again. So glad I ordered the heat packs, I don't want to go through that again. And it was happening in different spots, both the back and front of the calf. Glad my doctor recommended PT to strengthen my lower body, I really feel like I need it. The toe is improving, a large bruise has started to come out at the base which I hope means it's healing; I'm optimistic that it's just a bruise and not a break, but I'll find out for sure tomorrow. I conked right after I logged off at 5:30 today, and so I'm up a bit later than I want to be, but maybe I'll sleep through the night thanks to a shower and my gigantic leg warmers.

Hibernation Mode

So, so hard going into The City these days when I just want to curl up at home, but it's unfortunately mandated. And at least the trees are in full foliage at last in NYC! But it's exhausting anyway, particularly with the foot pain. The right calf is taking much more strain than it should as a result of the left toe pain, so I expect a cramp or two is in my near future. Glad I ordered the heat packs my new doc recommended, they'll be here Saturday so that's when the healing can start (as I'll have been to the foot doc early enough to do something about the toe as well). This is the rest of my life now, dealing with one pain after another...

Shredded and Wobbly

While I did job stuff from home, and a few personal things like sorting out my OMNY card wallet (I'm now fine with the commuter card, but I wanted to add a new payment method for my half-price senior card that I use when I'm not commuting and that's finally done; alas, they're unable to delete my old cards from my wallet which I think is ridiculous), Robin got busy shredding the last of our old finances. He's also done his two boxes from England, so all that's left of what used to be stored in the rafters is four boxes for me to go through, and the pain from my injured toe is preventing me from doing much else. My new (now local) primary care doctor was of no help there (although otherwise I thought my annual physical went well, and she did recommend I start exercising my lower body more at home which I do need to do), so I'll be returning to my podiatrist this Saturday to confirm the toe isn't broken, just bruised. I think I'd be in a lot more pain if there was a break, but with neuropathy you never know. In other news, I'm off to watch what I hope is the final game of the World Series so Milwaukee can go ahead and celebrate.

Stepping Lightly

The purple discoloration on the middle toe continues, and after being encased in a sneaker and being walked on in Manhattan during the day it does hurt a bit more than it did yesterday. The other frustrating thing about being a diabetic is how slowly we heal, so I'm putting arnica on it and waiting for the medical verdict. And since I work from home tomorrow I could afford to stay up a bit late this evening and watch the Brewers and Rays battle to a tie (at least as of this typing) so who knows if we'll go to a Game 5...

No Jacket Required

Today's big project was jackets. Robin accumulates them, and I think they're mostly wonderful, but we can't or don't want to take them all to England with us, and we needed the room in our coat closet and the "closet of boxes" where we were keeping the overflow jackets. Nobody really needs overflow jackets. I have so many KPMG ones, I suspect most of them will go after I retire, but for now at least I've put my Rothstein Kass ones into the recycle pile. Of greater concern is whatever the heck I did to my left middle toe yesterday, it's all bruised and battered. I don't think it's broken, even with my neuropathy I'd probably feel that, but the same numbness is actually a blessing in disguise as it's not really hurting me that much if I don't walk around on it. I hope my new doctor can shed some light on the subject when I go for my annual physical on Wednesday. Meanwhile I'm continuing to root for the Brewers to take it all in four games, but it probably won't happen, Tampa Bay isn't, well, the Yankees or anything...

Another Boxing Day

Not the football kind, although Liverpool (my favorite team) beat Brighton (my second favorite team that I'll learn to root for once we're settled in England) by my favorite footie score, 2-0. But no, this is actual boxes. And today's side quest turned out to be stuffed animals. When we fostered Mango for those few weeks we found he was quite fond of stuffed animals, small pillows and the like, so I've now gotten rid of the majority of stuffies both large and small and they're waiting for Jonny or someone like him to pick them up and make a cat very happy. One box is done and in the closet, where my INSIDE JOKE run sits atop it, one of the card boxes is put away and one is still out, and I have to review four other boxes as and when so they can follow on and we can slide the doors closed until I retire and our winnowing kicks into high gear. The remaining four boxes to be shredded, as well as three bags full of stuffies and five shopping bags of comics to be given to whichever neighbor wants them, now sit in the living room, along with two of Robin's long coats which will go into our coat closet as he culls his jacket collection. A very successful and tiring weekend!

Card Stock

After a disappointing morning wherein we had a slight tiff about something that turned out to be an Elayne Brain Fart, followed by our favorite sushi place being unexpectedly closed (at least the drive there was pretty as we wound through local streets in near-full fall foliage), the EnWinnowing proceeded apace once we arrived home. It's really just getting the boxes that used to be in the loft/rafters out of the library so Robin can once again repurpose it to finish his latest painting, but along the way we're finding lots of what he calls "side quests." Two of the boxes supposedly contain greeting cards, and they're now joined by one and a half more boxes of cards. The ultimate goal here is to put seven boxes in our home office closet, but when we cleaned out the closet floor we found more totes and plastic bags full of goodness only knows what, so those now need to be sorted through before I can proceed. I know I'm keeping the greeting cards mainly because of the way reviewing them made me feel. As I age I think I'll become more and more susceptible to those sort of sentimental nostalgia,, which I consider valuable. I need something to jog my memories, and all the comic convention stuff isn't really doing it so that's now jettisoned. Oh, and it appears the Brewers are set to win the second game of the World Series against the Rays, so I'm pleased about that as well.

Memor-Elayne

Today's self-appointed task, which roped in Robin of course, was going through the boxes marked "Comic Convention Stuff" that had stood in our loft from when we moved in to a couple months ago. I was surprised to find it wasn't "stuff what we used to take to conventions" at all, but rather "collections of convention programs, comics, cards, and other mementos." Since I honestly don't recall doing most of the stuff I did then, and the programs themselves didn't aid my memory, into the trash they went. The two now-empty boxes will house all the greeting cards I've received (two other recovered boxes are also full of cards, I've saved them since I was a kid), and after I retire I'll go through them again to see if they spark memories better than convention programs. One thing I seem to have picked up in the post-COVID era, besides my desire to avoid crowds which means no more major comic cons for me, is that I just don't feel like hanging on to things from past lives if they don't enrich my present. I'm not quite at Kondo level, but at the same time I can't help but remember my college buddy Bill-Dale Marcinko, who died way too young due to a fire in his abode which the firefighters couldn't vanquish because they were unable to get past all his papers and zines and comics and other collections with which he couldn't part. His memory is not just a blessing but an object lesson. We'll see how well I've learnt it.