Party Countdown

In five days, we're hosting our Christmas party. It seems like just yesterday that it was Thanksgiving and we had weeks to get everything done. Now it's just days. Still, we're in good shape. Thanks to Steve's tenacious work, we've got 95% of the outdoor projects and decorations done. I should finish the indoor decor today. But that's just the tip of the preparation iceberg. I've got several hundred cookies to bake, plus a buffet of party food. I've got two guestrooms to prep and freshen, because Andrea and a couple of her friends are staying the night of the party. And there's still a lot of grocery shopping to do. Before I can bake those hundreds of cookies, I need the supplies.

But at this stage of the game, I'm not overly stressed. Yes, I'm going to be busy busy the next few days. But I don't think I'm going to be up at 4 a.m. the day of the party just to try and get everything done. I managed to host Thanksgiving dinner without a lot of stress. I hope to do the same with this party.

Of course, to accomplish that, I need to quit blogging and get back to work.

Healing

Remember that bruise I mentioned two posts ago? Although it remains uncomfortable, it's healing pretty quickly. The nice thing is I don't have the constant bruised feeling from before, so I think the treatment worked. The area only bugs me if it's bumped, which is to be expected of a bruise. Here are a couple of photos:


This picture was taken Saturday night. The line to the left is my incision scar. The size of the bruised area is about the same as that of my palm.

This was taken last night (Sunday). It's not nearly as red, anymore, and you can see the yellow halo where the bruise is healing. I'm hoping it will be healed enough in another couple of days that it doesn't hurt, anymore. I would really like to get back to sleeping on my stomach!

Deanne

How about a game of pool?

We've always wanted to have a pool table. When we moved back out to the house and decided to use the livingroom as the main seating area rather than the den, we decided to make the den into a pub room. As luck would have it, Sears was having a close-out sale on some of its pool tables and we were able to buy one for half of what we expected. It sat in its boxes for ages. Steve finally had time to begin building it the week before Thanksgiving. He finished it today.

Here are photos of the progress:

It took almost no time at all for Steve to put the basic frame together.

This part was a bit more tricky. The cross boards had to be just the right measurement on the diagonals to insure the frame was square.

Now Steve is adding the slatron surface. We couldn't afford a proper slate table. Slatron is just a type of MDF. It won't last as long as slate, either. It lasts about ten years. By then, maybe we can afford slate. The slatron is now in place.

Adding the felt was another tricky bit. Besides needing to glue it properly, it had to be stretched to make sure there was no puckering or extra fabric on the table surface.

Here's a close up on how the pockets were done. Steve had to cut wedges to keep the felt flat on the curve. Now it's time to add the side rails. They, too, had to be placed precisely.

The pockets are put into place.

All that's left are the finishing touches, like table-top dots.

All done! Steve takes a moment to enjoy the fruit of his labor.

Good work, Steve!

Wasted week

I feel like this entire week has been wasted. I had been so busy prepping for Thanksgiving that I decided to take this past Monday off. I just wanted a day to myself. I took it and it was very nice. Unfortunately, Tuesday found me awakening to a sinus headache that lasted through Wednesday. I could do very little on those two days, because moving around made my head pound. The pain was gone by Thursday morning, and feeling revitalized, I got some work done. But I had to go into Jacksonville for my post-op appointment with my doctor. I didn't have a lot of time, so I barely scratched the surface of my To Do list.

The midwife who works in my doctor's practice encountered complications with one of her deliveries, and my doctor went to assist. Steve and I ended up being in the office for two hours. I got a clean bill of health. He found about 4 mm worth of granulation on an interior suture line, which he treated with silver nitrate. Granulation is essentially where an incision or suture line accumulates some extra tissue. The silver nitrate cauterizes it.

We also discussed the ongoing bruise-like feeling in my abdomen to the left and just below my belly button. The doc thought it was a nerve that was hit by one of the internal stitches. He said they get inflamed and start firing almost continuously. He palpated the area until he pinpointed the pain location via my jumping reaction, then double, and tripled checked exactly where it was hurting. Needless to say I was sick of that pretty quickly! He said anesthetizing the area would calm the nerve and hopefully prevent it from starting up again once the anesthesia wore off. The procedure required two needles. One small one to make the surface area numb, and a second, longer one to enable him to get deep into the effected area. Steve watched the procedure and said the doctor swiveled the syringe a lot once the needle was at the right depth, distributing the anesthesia over a wide area. Thanks to the first needle, I felt none of the second.

Steve took me out for a belated birthday dinner. It was lovely. When the anesthesia wore off shortly thereafter, I really started to hurt. What was normally a bruised feeling had developed into a throbbing bruised pain. It was very sore to the touch and was so irritated that I had to sit in the back seat behind Steve, so the seat belt buckle wouldn't be resting on that part of my stomach. It turns out the area is very traumatized from the exam and needles. I have a large bruise. So I have no way of knowing if the anesthesia stopped the nerve misfiring, because I now have a legitimate bruise there!

I took pain meds to help me sleep more comfortably, which leads me to the whole wasted week thing: I'm groggy beyond belief! I've been up a few hours now and I can barely function. I may as well be a zombie. I'm amazed I can even write this, I'm so slow. I have so much to do, but I think I need to go lie down. Maybe I can regain some level of functionality with a nap.

Conceding defeat

I finally had to give up with my idea of having a blog that was entirely housed on our own server. Our original one worked well, but then I lost the password and Steve's attempt to override it failed miserably. And our second one never worked right, regardless of the effort Steve put into it. Since my PHP programming skill is basic, at best, and Steve doesn't have a lot of time to try and get the thing working, I had to give up. So I went to Blogger to get one hosted there. As luck would have it, it's possible to have a blog hosted there, but tagged to your own domain. Steve set up a subdomain on our server, but it will be a few days for it to be active. In the meantime, I'll just use the Blogspot.

Of course, this makes it sound like I have a lot to say, but I don't, really. Today is my birthday, but we've got nothing planned. It's just as well. I've had a sinus headache for the past two days, so I doubt I could enjoy myself. I certainly wouldn't enjoy the hour-plus drive to Jacksonville. It doesn't hurt too much if I don't move around a lot, so the computer and TV are my companions today.

The house looks like a bomb went off in the livingroom, because I have all my boxes of Christmas decorations out. I'm slowing fixing the house up for the holidays. And the den is still a bit of a disaster area, because Steve hasn't yet finished constructing the pool table. He ran out of the provided adhesive used to fasten down the felt and the stuff he bought to replace it isn't doing the job well.

We're building housing for our new well pump this weekend. It just has a garbage can overturned on top of it at the moment, but that's not a permanent fix. The structure Steve has in mind is simple, but should do the job.

That's about it for now.