Happy New Year :D

It’s only been nearly three monts since my last post. In December life got rather busy, as it does, with preparations for Lego Lover’s birthday and Christmas. Lego Lover had a nice birthday and was very happy on his special day. This has always been the case with him and I hope it always will be. It’s a rather sharp contrast to his brother who has always struggled with little things ruining his experience. Two people with totally different outlooks. Anyway, it makes me so happy to see the joy Lego Lover experiences each year on his birthday.

Christmas also went well. We again had the family to our house, mostly because we now have our patio and we wanted to make good use of it. The food was nice and everyone got one really well. Even those that normally aren’t so lively seemed to have a good time and it was really just a very nice evening we spent togehter. The only negative was later on when my father-in-law had suddenly begun to feel unwell and had to lie down on the sofa until they left. That night he’d ended up going to the emergency room as he was feeling more unwell but he was sent home the following day with an infection.

The new year passed by and we stayed home as usual. Games Fanatic got his favorite potato salad on New Year’s Day instead of Christmas. I figured it was better for him since he’d get to eat more of it and it was less stressful than taking time to make it at Christmas too. I did something different with it and used three different types of potatoes which made it really yummy. The main reason for the change was there were some Kipfler potatoes being sold really cheaply and I wanted to try them since they are usually so expensive. Anyway, it was so good that I made another batch a week later for no special occasion at all. :)

January was a pretty difficult month for us. I won’t go into details here but it came out early in the month that the Scientist’s dad had liver cancer and he was given three to six months to live. Although he’d slowed down a lot in the last year or two, he was still fairly active for someone his age (nearly 88) so the change was marked. Turns out there were no months left for him and he died on the 24th. It happened so quickly and yet in other ways it seemed like a long and agonizing wait for the inevitable. My father-in-law was anything but perfect but I was quite fond of him and felt (feel) the loss quite strongly.

The rest of the month is a bit of a blur in my memory as it just didn’t seem very significant against the backdrop of the family at the time. Over a month later and the Scientist is still caught up on the after-effects of a parent dying as he is the executor and has been going through the stress and headaches of what that entails.

But life has moved on and is somewhat more normal now and with time, I’m sure the difficulty of this early part of the year will move into a memory of this experience. Our tai chi class restarted last month and the Scientist and I continue to also do the Tai chi fan class before that. I thought I had forgotten everything becuase I honestly didn’t put any effort into practice during our break. But I seemed to get back on track after a bit of revision and we continue to add new moves. I’m rather enjoying it except that it’s hard getting the timing right. The first section of the routine is pretty slow but in the next four sections it goes really fast. That transition from slow to fast is giving me some trouble but I am coming along with it slowly. :)

I need to get Lego Lover sorted out with some sort of educational activity to keep him occupied until the end of the year. It’s looking likely I will just have him try the course he tried last year and never completed. There’s no guarantee he will succeed this time but the least we can do is try again.

Healthwise, there have been a couple of issues to come up lately. The Scientist had another bout of vertigo last month that still hasn’t totally resolved. He had one really horrible day where he couldn’t even get up without becoming really nauseous. For the first time ever, we called a locum doctor that comes to the house. The service has been around but we’ve just never used it. It worked out rather well and didn’t cost us anything out of pocket, which is actually cheaper than going to the doctor. That said, if there had been a chance of getting him there, it would have been far move convenient. The vertigo has been determined to be the BPPV type which is the most common.

Meanwhile, I had my yearly visit with the immunologist and there’s not a lot to report of that as nothing much has changed. I did have a couple liver tests that were high so I was sent off for an abdominal ultrasound to check on that along with an x-ray of my hands to check for rheumatoid arthritis since I have had persistent arthralgia in my hands.  The reports on those were supposed to be sent to my gp for follow up but when I went to see her, they hadn’t arrived. Interestingly, I got a phone call from the doctor’s office a little while ago to see her for a follow up so I guess there must be something of note to report.  I have also had some ongoing bowel issues which my gp suspects might be irritable bowel but needs to rule out other problems. She brought up the colonoscopy word when I was last in and feels I should have one since I am now fifty. Is this a rite of passage in our culture? It’s not imminent but I’m not looking forward to that either. I guess I will find out more after my appointment next week.

Last week I got some sort of stomach bug that had my stomach hurting all the time and left me with no appetite. The good side of this was I wasn’t eating so much and even lost a bit of weight. Obviously that’s not going to continue long-term without other interventions. It took several days but I finally shook off whatever it was and seem to have a bit of control over my eating and exercise habits that I’d lost for quite a while. I am getting back into some more exercise again so hopefully that will carry on, Even if I never get back to the regularity of what I once did, just having the exercise more often will be beneficial for me, particularly for those liver tests that were high and probably related to fatty liver more than anything. At least I hope so.

After all these years of seeing bits of anime with Games Lover, I have suddenly found myself more interested in watching it myself. This started one Friday night when I happened to watch a couple of shows on the local ABC3 (aimed at older kids/teens). Neither show was the first episode but I watched anyway. The one program was only onto it’s third or fourth episode so I went back and watched the earlier ones on the channel’s online streaming service. Soon I was catching up on shows on Anime Lab, which streams shows here in Australia. Games Lover and, to a lesser degree, Lego Lover, have been watching programs there for quite a while but I have my own account now. This has led me to look at manga again to read source material for some of the shows. And then on to the live action drama adaptations in Japanese and in Korean. This came about after a Japanese drama started on Netflix. It’s pretty cheesy and cliched but it’s cute so I am sticking with it. This has led me to revisit my interest in learning more Japanese and now some Korean too.

And so that’s the super condensed version of the time I’ve be MIA.