Well you’ld think a year of Covid isolation would have led to endless drivel from your tireless correspondent … but honestly what’s to say? Complaining about a plague of locusts just doesn’t help.

But the learning a new skill thing really has been a treat, and so while sparing you recipes despite this being a blog [there’s still time, ed.] here are some of my crochet creations.

Happy Monkey:

Mr. Squiggles:

Dogs and Cats in hats:

Catnip Mice:

A Christmas Pickle, a tradition that was news to me!:

A Dozen Easter Eggs in a Basket Hat:

And my latest pride and joy, the vegetables, especially the avocado:

Well what’s a blog without recipes and crochet patterns! I incorporated a few patterns from the web and did some intense staring at images to create this little cutie-pie so a little bragging seems appropriate.

And before assembly:

With a little (a lot) help from the interwebs, and some research into just how big those ears should be and what colour cloak, etc., a very satisfactory baby alien was born. And a hat to match for a human baby:

A new skill brought to you by Covid 19 quarantine!

life goes predictably haywire. And then unpredictably haywire. Skipping over the homefront, where things are now almost peachy, who could have predicted Covid-19? Well it turns out a fair number of virologists have been trying to get bat viruses more attention for quite sometime. I have listened to a podcast way above my pay grade for years, called This Week in Evolution that has a sister podcast called This Week in Virology. Again, they get going about eucaryotes and all sorts of exciting tiny things I do not understand, but the broad picture they also paint is fascinating and informative. They understand numbers and testing and mutation and make much more sense than what one encounters on the news.

We lucked out and spent half of March and all of April and May in Penetanguishene where being quarantined on the shores of Georgian Bay felt pretty perfect.

Keeping my mum-in-law safe and fed and warm as she adjusted to life back at the cottage under most peculiar circumstances (not to mention how cold and windy it stayed) felt important and useful as we both chafed at the bit, missing home. And the birds! It was so quiet and at dawn the birds would get very excited:

But we left home so our son and his best pal could have the house while they quarantined after returning from Thailand as the country was closing its borders. And they have all been well, so knock on wood so far so good. And NFLD has had no new cases for a donkey’s age so while I cannot go there, the family that are there have some economic freedom and as people who know the inside story will know are thriving much to my joy. Which explains why I learned to crochet during the cottage vigil, with, if I do say so myself, some degree of success:

Just a catch up post to say how grateful I am to be home and safe and to see if I can get this ball rolling again!

Good Morning. And a very Happy Thanksgiving to my American pals, who deserve a day of rest and merriment. But enough about you.

One of the ostensible purposes of this blog has been to try to help anyone else out there who has been suffering from the unintended consequences of inguinal hernia surgery and chronic pain, and when I last left off I was pretty much at the end of my proverbial medical rope. But a light has truly been shone on my troubles and it seems somewhat miraculous.

Compounding my issues, as attentive readers [hahahahahaha, ed.] will remember, I broke my left femur in 2015, and the pain issues flared. Taking solace in audio books, I sat and listened to Norman Doidge’s The Brain’s Way of Healing, and couldn’t help but know I had to take on my pain problems in a different way. And I worked hard at my yoga, and it did help, but I also relied on narcotic pain medication, albeit a small dose, and had accepted my lot. My last contact with doctors had been pretty conclusive. You have tendinopathy and adhesions and a torn hip, a chunk of metal in your left leg and some mesh in your right side and we have repaired you as best we can and have little left in our kit bag other than cortisone shots in unmentionable places which I have had. Have some more tramacet, and let’s up your medical marijuana prescription. Now don’t get me wrong. I have had excellent medical care in a difficult and not obvious situation. Some unfortunate doctors along the way, but mostly really knowledgeable and compassionate people doing their utmost in an intractable situation.

And then here I was, two years after breaking my leg, thinking why didn’t I just go to Toronto to see if the lasers mentioned in chapter 4 of The Brain’s Way of Healing might be able to help the pains in my right groin. So I got on the web to have a glance at my options only to find that the specific laser therapy mentioned by Dr. Doidge, Bio-Flex Laser, has spread like wild-fire and was available at a number of locations here in Ottawa.

After 14 laser sessions focusing on my right groin, and 7 very helpful manipulations working on the inflexible muscles I had developed in my back through years of careful movement trying not to trigger pain but creating a world of problems of its own, I found myself thinking I didn’t really want to take my tramacet. Not a huge moment, just a sort of casual, humph, I don’t think I need it. And here we are, a week later, and though my body still sometimes seems to crave that relief, I am certainly in no more pain than when I started, and a significant medication down.

There are beginning to be solid medical studies showing the efficacy of lasers in all sorts of situations, and this one in particular caught my jaundiced eye:

Effects of low-level laser therapy on pain and scar formation after inguinal herniation surgery: a randomized controlled single-blind study.

And just in case you don’t feel like clicking on that exciting sounding link, here are the results and conclusion of the study:

As my father-in-law once said, I never wanted to be 86 until I was 85. My brother was also succinct one year: think of the alternative …

Feeling it was a good year, as one’s expectations sink with each passing year, but no broken bones or dead parents seems like a rip-roaring success in comparison to much of my 2010’s, and capped by the engagement of our daughter, a classic ending for a comedy, we shall bank this one as comedy not tragedy.

                                 Xty 2015                                                             Xty 2016

I’ll take it!

Love and best wishes to all.