Almost Two Weeks Now

Apart, that is. My mom and dad.

Mom's healing process is so glacially slow that it's like watching an inchworm pinch upward from the down-end of a teeter totter to the end that's in the air, then try to push with all his might to get it to teeter. Or would that be totter?

It's likely that she'll have to have this back surgery where a neurosurgeon injects a kind of "cement" between the compressed vertabrae in order to spread them out again. From what I've read, it's becoming pretty common. But...yow!

Whatever she needs, we'll get through it. When our family circles the wagons, we're pretty tough.

On another topic, my grades are done!!! This means I can now look at the list of things I need to do during the 27 days left on my semester break, and become overwhelmed, and do a little woe-is-me dance, then recover, then start to check off the things that I can manage to do (since I have no magic healing wand to help my mom), including:

1. Find yet-unfound box of winter hats and scarves I haven't seen since we left Phoenix.
2. Make a dent in the revisions for the yet-unwritten book I worked on all last summer.
3. Watch some yet-unwatched DVDs with Scott.
4. Go back to the gym I joined and and add some variety to this yet-unvaried elliptical boredom.
5. Finish Christmas letter and email it.
6. Write recommendation letters for three students who annoy me more each day.
7. Resolve never to write another recommendation letter.
8. Make sense of this flurry of words I'm lost in, in about 9 writing projects.
9. Pray more without any words.
10. Stop being so obsessively connected to lists.