overlap

It's been a funny old month, and it's not over yet. Taking a week off appears not to have agreed with me so well, at least in terms of keeping to a regular routine, and so I'm still lurching from late nights to late mornings with less than a full night's sleep every night. This time of year has rarely been an especially great one as far as I'm concerned, but it's something else with someone hovering just outside the intensive care unit's doors. A good few years into a variety of illnesses, there is a certain inevitability about it all, and even with several years' estrangement I've found it harder than I might have expected at certain points. There's a tough choice ahead of me, and while I can see how people can find it hard to do anything other than being there at the bedside, there's a definite appeal for me in leaving things at having visited on a particularly good day as happened the other week. I'm not interested in hurting anyone, I don't take any pleasure in doing something that might not be what is expected, but the prospect of someone that I live without seeing for years at a time all hooked up to a variety of monitors and medical apparatus is not a sight I'm especially keen to go looking for. One visit was hard enough. With all this on my mind, it's perhaps no surprise that I've been a little distracted, slow to react, ungrateful when given good advice, and generally less than useful. For that I can only apologise, and for the reason that I know it's taking a certain amount out of me, I'm keeping my thoughts to myself rather than opening up. It's one of the things I like about e-communication, that content is the starting point, but I'm not a lot of good at the moment so where I can cope with factual content, like answering straightforward computer questions, I'm even less of a net contributor in other areas than normal. This story is going to keep going up and down, maybe for weeks, maybe for months. Today is a definite up point, which is how I'm here talking about it rather than busy dealing with it. In the meantime I'll stick to my traditional seasonal methods of distracting myself with inappropriate gifts and making plans - life goes on, and I somehow now have a new pair of boots to get used to. Reduced to barely twenty pounds, I could hardly leave them there. Happy seasonal merry-making!