Saturday, October 1, 2022

 Saturday, October 1, 2022

I slept well, as I usually do. Elsa and I got up and did a 3,000-step morning walk. On Punawele, we ran into the resident ducks and Dave with his wife and their good dogs, Charlotte and Lulu., on Punawele. The dogs walked past Elsa without breaking stride. Elsa barks at them like a crazy lady. Until I learned their names, Dave’s dogs were Good Dogs, and Elsa was Bad Dog.

  No one signed up for my Saturday office hour. I always have mixed feelings: sad because I need the stimulation and happy to have free time. I don’t really need extra free time. I have plenty.

  I was moved to check the Facebook page of an old school principal of mine in New Brunswick. N.J. There was quite a to-do during his tenure. He got one of the teachers pregnant. She had broken up with her girlfriend about six months earlier. He married this woman, and they had two more kids. The man’s first marriage was a disaster. He said he was warned not to marry that woman. His current marriage to this schoolteacher appears to be a rip-roaring success. I remember the woman as being very loving. There was a picture on their Facebook page of a bunch of kids, some visitors, with the mom curled up on the couch with one of her kids. That’s always a trigger for me. My mom was against cuddling. My dad caught a picture of her with my sister on her lap, enjoying the contact. I don’t think I ever saw her that way, even with my sister. I had that with Mike. Boy, do I miss it.

      I showed Yvette how my wandering second toe on my right foot was doing much better. The chiropractor had recommended I put a toe separator between my toes while I slept to force the toe back into place. I tried that. It didn’t work. My wandering toe moved the toe separator and had her way with my big toe. At one point, the bottom of the toe was at close to a 45% angle, and the top segment of the toe was bent over even further. The first knuckle was swollen and inflamed. It had been chafing against the inside of the Croc.

      The podiatrist suggested I should wear Oofos. I had two pairs. They became my shoe of choice to eliminate the chaffing. Yvette remembered that I had a set of yoga toes among the yoga stuff. She dug it out and placed it on my bedside table. I started putting them on every night before I went to sleep. I removed them at some point during the night when I woke up because they were irritating me. The toe looks remarkably better. It is often straight and next to the first toe, where it belongs, instead of on top of it. Very interesting.

  Having decided I might feel lousy because of excessive chocolate consumption, I vowed to lay off. I did an entire day without Hersey milk chocolate anything with whole almonds. It felt fine. I didn’t mind a bit. But once I have one, I finish off several ounces without batting an eye.

  Yvette came up to do her laundry. It was a way for her to spend time in my company without having any conversation. I stay in my old-lady chair while she works across the room. It was a relaxed, incidental conversation. When she finished, she sat down for a minute, and Scott joined. We laughed together. Delightful.

  I had given Extraordinary Attorney Woo a break while I watched something else. Whatever I watched couldn’t have been particularly memorable, or is it just my memory doesn’t remember. The characters in Woo were getting more complex, as were the relationships between them. A bad guy turns out good, and a good guy turns out to be not so good.