The Seated View

“Because of you, the sun shines brightly here.” That’s a quote from last year’s blogiversary post , posted exactly a year ago today. In it, I wrote about the amazing improvement it won’t take me 10 years to get back to normal in my health, strength, and stamina in the 10 years I had been blogging. Ironically, here we are a year later, and I’m back to having just enough energy to drag myself through the day. I’m pretty sure I’ll get back to normal much faster than before, though. I started blogging 11 years ago today, and it remains one of my favourite things. Being able to share my thoughts about life, the universe, and everything with all of you, and get your perspective on different topics is a privilege. It makes me think and laugh and I’m honoured that you pop by to read my words. My recent experience with the ICU and the close-to-death thing made something else abundantly clear. We are not just part of a community. We are family. Some days after I woke...

It all started with the cherries. Cherry sauce is required for ris a la mande, the special Danish Christmas dessert. It has a French name, which apparently makes no sense at all in actual French. Every couple of years, we freeze 5 pounds of black Bing cherries in the summer and come November, carry them to my mother’s to make cherry sauce. It’s a long, involved process resulting in the most beautiful concentrated dark cherry sauce dotted with whole cherries. You drizzle that over the ris a la mande and… Heaven in a bowl! My mother insists on using a Danish product to thicken the sauce just a little, and followed the usual procedure this year. No need to look at the instructions on the back of the package, right? I know you can hear the foreshadowing. Turns out the product had changed, becoming much more concentrated. With the result that as the cherry sauce was being poured through a sieve, what came out on the other end of the sieve was a jellied cherry-sicle....

I’d committed to doing the 5K in the Walkto Fight Arthritis this past Sunday and was very much looking forward to it. There was no reason to believe that I wouldn’t be able to do it — in the last year, I’ve wandered around various areas of the city for 5 km or more on a regular basis. I’d even gotten through the first week of June without my usual post- Hell Month flare. Not so fast.   Because the flare had just gotten sidetracked on the way to my house. It arrived Friday with a vengeance. Apparently delaying for almost a week had allowed it to build up some extra oomph. I haven’t flared that high in years. (click to enlarge photos) A surprising amount of the pain was located in my right elbow and it was clear that pushing the joystick on my wheelchair for 5 km would kick me into an injury that would take weeks to heal. I reluctantly decided to drug up and do the 1K instead. A decision that really bothered me after committing to a 5K and raising ...