For the past two days I’ve been walking again, after a month or so of letting it slide.

 

As the days get shorter, colder and wetter here in the Pacific Northwest, I end up staying indoors more and doing less outdoor work and other useful exercise, so I bring my rower in from the shed and put walking on my calendar. This way, I won’t slowly put weight back on during “hibernation time” in my neck of the woods.

 

I should start playing pickleball again, but since COVID I’m crowd-wary and a lot of pickleball players aren’t vaccinated and don’t wear masks when they’re not playing, so I’m not quite ready to throw caution to the wind and rejoin them. That’s why walking, rowing in my own home, and biking are my go-to exercises.  I can do them alone or out in nature where I’m not cheek and jowl next to human petri dishes.

 

In Other News …

 

I have a call in to my dermatologist to see if I have to continue this month-long chemotherapy regimen on the tip of my nose and a tiny spot on my scalp.  She said it would burn or hurt if it was tackling pre-cancerous cells, and I’ve been using it for three days without any reaction at all, so I don’t think I need to continue it, but I want to be sure.

 

It’s  risky to continue it because my cats are face-rub-bers and top of head sleepers, and the precaution on the medicine says not to let kids or pets come into contact with it.  I have a call in to see if that’s just while it’s wet right after applying it, or 24/7, because if it’s a ’round-the-clock threat, that’s problematic.  The cats cuddle up to me when I sleep at night and I don’t always notice when they do that, and locking them out of the bedroom for 30 days would cause them a great deal of distress, which I would most certainly hear about most of every night. So, I’m hoping I can stop using it or that she will tell me the med is safe after it’s dry (or completely absorbed) so the our home routine doesn’t have to be upended.

 

When I told the receptionist about it, she totally understood — she has four cats — and we laughed about it. We had a really good time, and she promised to have Chelsea get back to me with an answer, even if I hate it. I hope I won’t!

 

I’m wearing the bone bracelet Sherry Sutton sent me. It almost didn’t fit over my hand while fastened, and I don’t have anyone to affix it to me. It’s good that it’s that snug, though: there is no way it can accidentally slide off when I’m out getting eggs, or throwing hay and straw around, or doing anything else that requires lowered hands and arms.  It’s actually perfect.

 

I got satiny bedsheets on Black Friday for something like $22. I put them on the bed two nights ago and quickly discovered 1.) they are slippery and 2.) they  hold my body heat in likely Dante’s inferno when there’s a blanket atop them, so they’re taking some getting used to.

 

I love the way they feel on my bare skin, but the other two factors keep waking me, either to throw the blankets off intermittently so I don’t overheat (even with my bedroom window wide open) or to retrieve the top, unfitted sheet from the floor whenever it slides off.  As a result, they haven’t been terribly “restful” additions, but I still love ’em.

 

I edited 11 additional pages of Bob Brantner’s sci fi manuscript early this morning. I had every intention of doing more than that, but this section required more finessing than usual, so it took me three hours total, including proofreading the eleven pages.

 

Usually I  can do 4.5 of his pages per hour (his pages contain 400+ words; the standard word count in the publishing industry is 250 words per page) but not today. Something didn’t sit right until I realized I was misinterpreting one of his sentences, which is what was throwing off everything that followed it. So, I finally changed that line so it would help the reader follow along and not get off-track in the way I got off-track because of the way it was written. (Heidi Smith did the same thing for me recently when she beta read my upcoming book Trailblazer.  She identified a clunky sentence that threw her for a loop. I rewrote it and voila!  — t’was all better and easy to follow.)

 

What else? Just minor stuff.  I refilled the bird feeder and need to go after the eggs.  Guess I’ll do that now since I’m out of palaver for this time.