The Winter Curse is well and truly upon us. As happens every December/January we've had payroll interruptions, sickness and now injury. My tests came back as severe osteoarthritis with an out of alignment patella and multiple large bone spurs. I want to believe that poor medical care back when I was a child/young adult caused this, which is entirely possible, but my size has certainly not helped at all. The single best treatment is weight loss, which I am now seriously working on. The holidays are over. But in the short-term I get to start cortisol shots come Tuesday, of which I will only have one in each knee, ever. Apparently the potential for the horrific side effects older people whisper about go up with each round you have. In the past it has not been unusual to have them monthly, but now there are other options. It also helps if you get off your ass, work out and really lose the weight once you get the first one. So I plan to have one in each knee, or at least my right which is horrible right now, and then a round of Synvisc, artificial synovial fluid, which will help protect them for up to two years, and then a brace for my left knee at least, which is the one out of alignment, and then back to the gym. All of which, save the cortisol, will happen as soon as we get paid. I have high hopes.
In the meantime something resembling the holidays happened. Once again it was not what we hoped for thanks to the Winter Curse and my family. But this year Himself got fed up with it all. He's taken on a second job just to save up for the 2016 holidays. Next year we will sign up for all the card exchanges and we will exchange gifts and we will have a merry feast and we will go to the nearby tourist towns to see the decorations, even if I need a wheelchair to walk that far. We will even embrace the Icelandic tradition of books on Christmas Eve, because we need more tradition in this family and it sounds wonderful. He is entirely determined. I think this is the first year he really realized how miserable our holidays are because for the past ten he's worked on the holiday. Or perhaps he just realized that our last decent holiday was ten years ago. Either way, I am utterly tickled. In the meantime I am leaving the tree up for another two weeks just in case we can finish our holiday season. Also because his back is out and my knees are out and neither of us can get the boxes down to put the tree away. If it goes past the 15th I will put out the kink signal and see if we can get help in exchange for pizza.
Insert picture of tree here when he emails it to me.
In the meantime gifts happened. Himself received a pair of socks for the dungeon, in purple of course.
I use Wendy's generic toe-up pattern, more or less, with a short-row heel.
He received a brace of doo-rags to wear to the gym.
Commercially they're geared toward bikers, with the sort of graphics you would expect, lots of Harley Davidson and camouflage and enemy flags and such. He likes bright colors and cat prints and is a Brony more or less, so he picked most of these colors. I picked the purple chevrons and red and black print for him and used Tommy's pattern
And the beasties got new beds. Here are two sisters cuddled into one.
They were on sale for $5 each so we picked up a few, One for each office, one for the living room and two for our bedroom, We had an ulterior motive, they no longer sleep in our bed. No more heavy rocks to try to sleep around at night.
My gifts are waiting for payday,
We watched holiday specials to celebrate as we could. There's a lot more to appreciate about the Grinch when you're older, and you really listen to it. But Charlie Brown left us both cold. He is miserable at Christmas not because of commercialism but because he's bullied horribly by all his "friends". We were both horrified when we realized what they were really saying to him. And really, reciting the Gospel doesn't help at all. Here's to hoping Charlie grew up, moved away, went NC with his entire home town, and ended up with a wonderful group of new friends who never called him a blockhead. We also tried John Devner and the Muppets but Miss Piggy is the spitting image of my Nanny. She always said Miss Piggy was her favorite muppet and she wanted to be just like her and she made it. So now I can say that I grew up just like Charlie Brown, called a loser and a blockhead by everyone I knew, and I lived with Miss Piggy. Think on that a bit. But I did move away and I do have wonderful friends now. We had a holiday party at the Dungeon and then New Years Eve at the home of friends where we ate too much and played Cards Against Humanity until midnight and had a wonderful time.
And that was December.
Now on to the new year.
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