Lorem Ipsum

Happy 2016, everyone!

I have been woefully remiss in posting here of late. I've been posting much more often to Facebook, but even that has been mostly links and such; not much by way of updates on how things are going with me.

So here are some tidbits:

• Had an extremely social couple of weeks at the end of the year; I think there was an eleven-day period in which there was only one day when I didn't have some sort of social thing going on. Singing Christmas carols, seeing The Force Awakens, playing cards with Jay and Holly and Holly's family, hanging out and chatting with various friends, going to Portland, etc.
• Oh, yes, Portland: flew up the day after Xmas, flew back 48 hours later. Was really nice to see a few old friends; alas, didn't have time or social energy to see more than a few. I did squeeze in a quick stop at Powell's, where I almost bought a 29-volume set of the 1911 Britannica (but decided not to), and I unexpectedly wrote two-thirds of a new story while sitting in Common Grounds. (Haven't written the rest yet, but hope to soon.) Oh, and it snowed, though the snow mostly didn't stick while I was there.
• There've been various updates regarding anxiety meds, but instead of talking about that here, I'll try to get around to writing and posting two or three entries on that topic that've been rattling around in my head for the past few weeks.
• My old-family-photos project is proceeding reasonably well. I've sorted and organized and filed into albums 500+ photos of my grandfather's and grandmother's families over the past couple months; given that I'm trying to figure out who everyone is in the photos and roughly when they were taken, it's slow going, and at the current rate it will probably take me another year or two to get through all 5,000 or so of the digitized old family photos, but it's interesting and fairly satisfying work. I reached a point where I could no longer hold the family tree in my head, which led me to buy an application called Family Tree Maker, which led me to try out ancestry.com, which has led to hours of addictive poking through old records to try to figure out who all these folks were. I'm pretty much done with my grandfather's family photos; I'm well on the way to done with my grandmother's; then I'll work on the ones of the two of them during their 60+ years together; then my mother's family.
• Various people warned me that ancestry.com's data was sometimes inaccurate, but I got seduced into thinking most of it was pretty good. One of the things I learned from it was that my grandmother's five siblings all died in 2007 or earlier, which meant that everyone who could tell me who some of the folks in these photos were was dead. But a few days ago, I learned that my great-aunt Hap, one of my grandmother's sisters, died on January 1, 2016, at the age of 103. I don't know what her state of mind was, but I could potentially have been asking her questions for the past couple of months, if only I'd known she was still alive.
• A week and a half ago, my left palm suddenly started to hurt, for no apparent reason. I figured it would go away on its own, but it got worse for several days. On Monday, I saw a doctor; they took X-rays, and concluded that there's nothing wrong with the bones, it's just tendon trouble. So I've been wearing a wrist brace these past few days, and taking anti-inflammatory doses of Advil. It's definitely feeling better than it was, but still not completely better.
• Sadly, that meant that I had to postpone the scuba lesson I was going to take this weekend. I'm hoping my hand will be all better in time for the rescheduled lesson in two weeks.

I feel like there's more to say, but I think that's enough for now.