Four subjects
1. I love daffodils. They bloomed and faded while I was busy. I love lilacs and wisteria. I only noticed today that they are in full bloom. The days and weeks keep zipping by me. I always have more things to do than can possibly get done in a day. Oddly this makes me feel like I’ve become boring. People ask me whats going on in my life and I have the same answers to give. I’m still shipping merchandise. I’m still working layouts. I’m still behind on housework. I still intend to get outside and garden, but probably won’t actually do it. All that stuff is interesting to me, but it is hard to make it sound interesting in the 60-seconds-or-less answer a polite social inquiry calls for. Alternately, the person asking the question is a good friend and has already heard all the details of routines. So, despite the fact that being a partner in a cartooning business is out of the ordinary, I feel boring.
2. This week I tried to make an appointment with our family doctor, only to be told that he is on extended sick leave. It turns out that he has cancer, a nasty sarcoma that has already metastasized. The prognosis is not good. For ten years Jim has been there for my kids anytime they were sick. He’s the one who sent me to the hospital when Gleek was knocked flat with RSV. He is the one who helped me figure out which medication Link needed for his ADD. He weighed my babies and measured their growth. He knew all of us by name and always greeted everyone with a smile and a handshake. He long ago made the shift from doctor to friend. I know it is illogical, but it feels wrong for a doctor to suffer from cancer. Somehow it seems like doctors should be immune. I like the other doctors in the office, they are all very qualified people, but I will miss Jim. My kids will miss Jim. I miss him already.
3. Both a close friend and a person whose blog I read, have been suffering from eye problems. This has me paying much more attention to how much I depend upon my sight for the things I do and exactly how my vision works. Then Howard handed me a mini to look at and I had to move it farther away so that I could see it. My hand expected my focal length to be in one place, but my eyes needed it two inches further away. Add to that the fact that my eyes are tired and achy a lot lately and that when I take my glasses off things look different, but not worse. I think it is time for new glasses. This is a logical assumption since I’ve not had my eyes checked for about 6 years. (Not urgent, then no money, then no time) So the logical brain says “new glasses” and the hypochondriac brain is convinced that I’m going to go blind and that it is just the first symptom of a terminal illness. Hypochondriac’s wild theory is supported by these other evidences of eye trouble, perhaps it is a plague of some sort, or maybe a psycho marketing ploy for the movie Blindness. And then I shove paranoid hypochondriac back into her little box and tell her to shut up until I need to write creepy fiction.
4. I finally figured out how Link can get out of the shower smelling just as dirty as he went in even though he swears he uses soap. Tonight I squirted out a small amount of shampoo for him and he gasped “That much?” He further informed me that he doesn’t usually wash the top of his head because he doesn’t want shampoo in his eyes. We then spoke in detail about how he needs to wash all over with sufficient quantities of soap. He got out of the shower smelling really clean for the first time in weeks.