Happy New Year! Hopefully a safe, happy and healthy one for all 🖖.

Like so many people, I've come through a year charged with alternating hope and sadness. I start the new year with a repaired literal heart, and recovering from my open-heart surgery, which was both painful yet rewarding. I still cannot turn to put on my seatbelt without hurting something, but I am at least alive, and able to get about and do the things necessary to live. I see this as a hopeful metaphor for us coping with a new and worrying political regime in the US, and concerning changes in the whole world. It's not what we wanted, we who care about humanity, but we still have our lives and where there is life there is still hope.

None of us can change the world, we are limited in our reach. But what we can do, we do, those who care about our fellow-travellers. We reach out to those in our families and communities, offer our love and support, and we do not turn away those who need succour. I encourage everyone

An after-affect of chemotherapy, occurring when hair grows back.

"I look like i have a lambskin on my head!"
—grundoon, when her hair began growing back.

Christine had started chemotherapy some time before we were married back in May 2005. Her hair really began to fall out noticeably the day we were married. She said she looked like a mangy dog; I disagreed, she looked perfectly

Naked Came I, subtitled "A Novel of Rodin", is a biography/novel of French sculptor and artist Auguste Rodin, by American actor and author David Weiss. Published in 1963, the novel was a commercial success, and it is one of the books I've seen regularly over the years at thrift stores and in garage sales. It was also apparently abridged in Reader's Digest. After many year's of seeing this book around, I found a free copy in my library's gazebo, and