Here's a couple more words I bet you don't pronounce correctly: patina and flaccid. And that's all I have to say about that.

I have a sore arm (I was doing wall push-ups and pushed too hard), so I'm giving it a rest from swimming because it hurt. My father was a doctor and when people came to him and said "Doc, I can't lift my arm higher than this," he'd say," Well, don't." Excellent advice. Pain, he explained, is a limiting factor and by limiting your movements it enables you to heal. It's a nice excuse to scunge. That was a verb my father used to describe the inactivity of a person who lounged around in bed too long, in his estimation. I looked it up; it's a noun, referring to a not-very-nice person. I like the verb better. While I'm at it, here's another verb I like: guddle (I had to persuade SpelChek to accept it). It's what bears do fishing with their paws. I used it when I had 5/8 of my stomach removed. I said the surgeon guddled in my insides. There goes SpelChek again. And then there's hurple. As I understand it, it's the kind of movement an arthritic old woman makes when she's in a hurry. The poor old dictionary in my computer can't cope with words like that. I have Mrs. Byrne's dictionary of obsolete words. I think they're in there. But I'm scunging in bed right now and I don't feel like getting up to guddle in a dictionary. And that's all I have to say about that.

It's a busy, guilty time of year. In addition to procrastinating about your writing, or whatever you have to do, you have to start thinking about all the people you must greet seasonally. I think we send season's greetings for several reasons. One, you have to assure everyone that you are still here, and hope they are the same. The older you get, the more necessary this is. Gradually over the years your recipient list shrinks and you have to keep it up to date. Two, you must write people you've been meaning to get in touch with for at least a year and you make wild promises like "next year, for sure". There is a sub-category in this item, that being the person or persons you met on a trip/vacation in the past year with whom you expressed undying friendship and another promise to keep in touch. (I'll have to go into a tangential description of what happens in these cases at another time.) Three, it's a good time to sum up your achievements, if any, and those of your children, if any, every one of them a genius, if any. Four, if you do that, you can expunge your guilt for another year, especially if you get in first. SOW, that's when I start wondering why other people don't feel guilty about me, why they don't try to keep in touch with me, why they don't make the first move. Maybe they don't feel as guilty as I do but they should feel guiltier, shouldn't they? Oh dear. The fact is that greeting card lists are fraught with emotion, and you can never start dealing with therm, too soon. (That's why I write generic letters now, every month or so.) Also, there's Canada Post to worry about. Last year, for the first time in several years, I didn't go to Boston for Christmas to spend it with my daughter and her family. I send them a large (for me, pretty large) amount of money. I sent it in US dollars in a money order, Express Post, early , before the Christmas rush. It didn't get there. I was assured it would, not to worry. After a few weeks I cashed in the money order and put it back in the bank, costing me the US exchange and a service fee, but the substantial amount returned to me. In the meantime, I kept on tracking, nagging, in fact, trying to find out what had happened and where that Express Post was. Just before Easter, I had an acknowledgement that the letter was, indeed, lost, and I was given reimbursement for the cost of the postage - about $15. So I went to Boston for Easter and delivered the money in person. Good excuse for a trip?