We are playing Christmas Vacation in the Community Band that I am a part of, and I’m really feeling the Christmas spirit early this year. Not sure why, but sometime you just “need a little Christmas. Right this very minute.”

I decided that I needed to watch National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation to see where the theme song connects — and it’s right at the very beginning, running during the credits.

I had forgotten the undercurrents of this movie; the nostalgia Grant feels about his family Christmases, the difficult relationships with his parents, siblings, and in-laws are so very real. Maybe you need to be a grown-up to really get this movie.

The next door neighbors, with a young Julia Louis-Dreyfus, are perfect foils for Chevy Chase’s Christmas idyll.

I’m not sure why I need a little Christmas, but it’s not too late to start watching holiday movies. Even if you don’t celebrate Christmas, there’s a universality in the themes.

After three years of silence, I’m feeling the need to share my thoughts. I remember when my father discovered email as a vehicle for delivering his treatises on his theology. Now that I’m at the age that my father was when he discovered social media, there’s a certain connection that I wish I could share with my dad. I might need to talk about theology, but it’s more likely that I’m going to journal my thoughts. And musical theatre and movies, which are the song tracks of my life.

Hopefully you’ll join me.

Palm Sunday paper frond and The Scream (from a neighborhood scavenger hunt) sit side by side on the dining room window.

Wow. A lot has changed since I last opened my blog and thought about writing.

We are putting messages in our windows for our neighbors since we can’t actually talk to them.

We’ve gone from boots weather to spring but I am not worried. There will be boots weather again. So disappointing, but it is Chicago. We are known for our many seasons: boots weather and construction weather.

As retirees together with two years of experience under our belts, we generally have this “home alone together” thing pretty down pat. We each wake up at different times, make our own breakfasts and coffee, and settle in to our tasks for the day. We meet up for meals and some shared media time. It works for us and we are pretty happy campers.

Walking at the empty golf course saves our sanity. We don’t care if we look funny.

Nothing much is new in the quarantined life. Except that we can’t go to the gym, band, church, book club, the botanic garden, restaurants, parties, work at the homeless shelter at our church, or basically do the things that create sparks in our retirement lives. We get out occasionally to walk and have graduated from our bandanna masks to actual tailored masks made by a crafty friend.

You are all in the same boat with us, those of you who follow me from around the world and from here in Illinois. I keep looking for the silver lining in all of this, and I can see a few glimmers of hope.

When Music Man retired, he said that he had a series of projects to do that would likely take years. In year three, he’s working on financial records. His shelter-in-place project is a continuation of what he was doing before, but now he’s got even more time. Lots and lots of time to go through our old tax records and throw stuff out. Lots and lots of recycled paper and bags of shredded paper. And we don’t intend to take this stuff to the condo or retirement home, whichever comes first.

Potato Pancakes from the Village Grill

I’ve been cooking up a storm, as many of us are, and my Google calendar is now full of saved recipe links. It turns out to actually be a good way to save recipes — the Google calendar is searchable and I put the link in the Notes section. Pretty slick and easy to go back and find a recipe. We are also trying to support local restaurants by ordering meals several times a week. Posting the photos on the restaurants’ Facebook pages keeps me improving my photography skills as well.

We’ve learned a new skill — videoconferencing on Zoom. It’s how we are doing church these days, but I’m a little concerned about its privacy problems. There’s Skype, Messenger chat, WhatsApp chat, and good ole FaceTime on our phones. A plethora of ways to reach out and virtually touch our family and friends.

So that’s what’s happening here, friends. Pretty much the same thing that’s happening across the world. We are in this together, and together we can save lives if we take it seriously. Tell me what’s going on with you in the comments.

I’ve been missing you.

This morning I ran through my memories on Facebook and it was a sunrise moment, shedding light on months and months of writer’s block. It caused me to open up my long-silent blog and reach out to my friends. At least I hope we still are friends after all this time.

This was taken in Siena, Italy, as I threw open my huge hotel room windows with a morning view over the Tuscan countryside.

FROM FACEBOOK

It’s been six years since I had my total knee replacement. Three more knee and foot surgeries later, I’m still not fabulously happy with the outcome of my TKR, but I know that the stability of my bionic knee is better than that of the one I haven’t had done yet. I’ve been hearing about huge progress being made in stem cell regrowth of your own meniscus, but my forays into stem cell therapy have had minimal positive results. So I continue to put up with occasional pain in my left knee and a lot of stiffness in my right knee. I’m linking here the recent information I’ve found out that I should have known six years ago. Maybe it will help some of you to avoid what happened to me.

 I WAS ALREADY AT RISK AND NO ONE TOLD ME

“We came to a consensus that contemporary literature supported the following definition of acquired idiopathic stiffness: a range of motion of less than 90 degrees persisting for greater 12 weeks in patients without complicating factors. Moreover, we found the prevalence to be 4% after primary total knee arthroplasty, with females and obese patient being at increased risk.”

Idiopathic Stiffness After TKA: Is This a Thing?

https://www.healthline.com/health/total-knee-replacement-surgery/arthrofibrosis#prevention

HE REFUSED TO GIVE ME A CPM MACHINE

Despite the studies showing otherwise, I was one of the people who should have had a CPM machine. My doctor refused to give me one, even though I begged. https://www.verywellhealth.com/do-i-need-a-cpm-following-knee-surgery-2548662  

THESE ARE THE THINGS I PROBABLY SHOULD REQUEST THE NEXT TIME

This week, I got an email and blog post from a blogger that I haven’t heard from for three years. She told a story that resonated with me; she got sick of worrying about SEO and sponsors and monetizing her blog and just stopped writing. She went so far as to say that she didn’t really care if anyone read her blog, since she was mostly doing the writing as a way to collect recipes for herself.

Interesting. There are other ways to collect recipes, but I sure could empathize with her decision to stop worrying about making her blog make money and just use it as a sounding board. That’s mostly what I have been doing all along.

It’s been quite a while since I wrote anything meaningful, and today may not add to the gems I have written. Yet, I feel the urge to get it down on paper and out there…

As I do every year, I am prepping our house for a visit from our relatives. Almost every year for the last thirty-six years, Music Man’s family has flown in from the West Coast, stayed at our house for a couple of nights, and then we have driven 200 miles together to go to our family reunion. Every year I say I’m going to start the prepping and fluffing earlier, and every year things get in the way. I love having them visit, let’s be clear about that, but unfortunately due to my poor planning, now I have about 72 hours to get everything ready for house guests.

But what got in the way today, you are probably asking? Let me count the ways…

1. Catching the award travel plane reservations on the first day I could buy tickets for our trip to France; that took a few hours, but is oh-so satisfying to use points to get to Europe and far more important than cleaning.
2. Cleaning out my guest bathroom, which ended up including sorting medicines and pitching expired stuff. That led to cleaning out the back-storage closet where we keep medicines and supplies. You know, like the FOUR heating pads we have collected along the way. I’m trying to figure out how anyone could need four heating pads, but we are certainly prepared for any such emergency.
3. Cleaning out my shoe rack, because of course I am a professional at buying (and returning) travel shoes from Amazon in the attempt to find the perfect shoe that can be worn with both trousers and dresses. I know there is such an animal, but I can’t get it in the size I need. Since I was already cleaning my shoe rack, then I had to go through the boxes full of orthotics and inserts that I have collected to keep my sad sore feet a little less sad and sore. Once again, I haven’t found the perfect match between my feet and my orthotics. But I have enough of them to outfit an army, it seems.

So now, I’m tired and ready to sit down with some juice derived from grapes and watch some British television. But I still have to put those orthotics away and clean off my bed before I can lay me down to sleep. And then I felt the need to write, so here you are. In the immortal words of Julie Powell, in Julie and Julia, is there anybody out there? I feel you…