Dies Atra

Here we are again at the low point of the year, a day of death in our family calendar and also the third anniversary of the day I fell and broke my right arm just below the shoulder. A dreadful winter ensued. It still aches a bit, like an old love, when I think about it. Something happened to the right wrist at the same time -- it was never explained to me exactly what, and some x-rays turned out to be missing, the day I sat down in front of a dr who was prepared to explain. My thumb and first two fingers still go numb when I've been driving for a while -- it must be something to do with the position of the arm. It's gradually getting better, but so slowly that the grave may supervene. A carpal tunnel operation was suggested -- "it's no big deal," the surgeon said -- but I didn't like him, and the thought of being again without the use of my right hand, however briefly, was a very big deal to me, so I didn't go ahead with that.

These are all things you don't want or need to know.

Now that I've got broadband, I thought I'd try to incorporate a picture in a post, the way the grownups do. It hasn't arrived quite where I expected it, but there it is. It's Edmund Gorey's "Fruitcake". A dear friend sent it to me as a Christmas card once. I prop it up to inspire me when I'm writing Christmas cards, and it wouldn't be at all a bad idea to start on that job today.

The visit of my husband's publishers went very well yesterday. The woman who is actually going to do the editing and layout stuff came, as well as the man who is in charge of the whole operation. They got an idea of the scale of the task (it's huge). My job is now to translate the several hundred files it consists of into MS Word and send them off to London on a CD. My husband still works on a DOS-based system. Modern technology makes it easier for a publisher to prise such a work from the author's hands -- the files I convert and send won't necessarily be in their final form; changes are easy, and my husband can go on making them.

If I now put in another picture, where will it appear? Let's try. It went up there at the top, next to the first one. I still have a lot to learn. It shows James and Alexander, at the Games last summer.

My email address is now jean@milesandmiles.demon.co.uk. I phoned Demon yesterday and to their credit, I got straight through on the second ring, no Mozart, no need to choose one of five options. None of the passwords we had been struggling with the day before seemed to work, so the nice young man reset both the connect password and the email password to the same thing, and sat there with infinate patience talking me through the process of entering it in all the right places. The mytob virus presumably continues to plague the old address, somewhere out there in space.

And, oh yes, knitting. I finished a skein of yarn yesterday, and am approaching the final swirl on Swirly 2.

Later: I edited this post, using Rachel's suggestion in the first comment, and, as you see, moved the pictures around fairly succesfully. The sky's the limit.