Teppy, you are not being a downer. You are allowing us to share your life, including your sorrows. You will also share with us when you have joys, when you have wonderful things happen, when you have triumphs, when you have funny moments. That's what we do. So please accept my sympathies, and warm fuzzy comforting thoughts.

Also please accept some eye-rolling at your boss. And possibly a minor smite, such as "may your boss get stuck in an elevator, and may the technician called to assist, be so new that s/he must resort to using a badly translated manual edited by someone who screws up like the boss, leading to several misunderstandings about how the elevator is supposed to work, therefore causing the boss to be stuck for about an hour and a half, rather than being rescued in half an hour".

Teppy, that is a shame - sorry for your loss.

I finally ventured out and bought paper products - not before it was direly necessary and I am at the stage of being sick where walking down to the corner Walgreen's and back ends up with me completely covered in sweat. And that is despite temps in the teens with windchills in the single digits. The wind actually felt good to me.

And that's just wrong.

I'm a little tired of people dying, god damn it.

Whoa, yeah.

The truth is not a downer, it's just the truth.

So sorry for your loss, Steph. May your coworker's spirit find peace and ease.

And felicitations and salutations to Aeryn Alter. Many great people are wishing you great things. You've got it made!

Andi, I love your smites, you have the best imagination ever.

In thank-goodness news...I had a terrific conversation with my beloved Niki today.

Her trip to move to California went really well ("I could get used to first class!") and her life in Santa Cruz is better than any of us could have hoped for. In fact, a severe muscle problem she was having seems to have spontaneously disappeared. This means more walking and potential better health.

I had so wanted to believe the ocean would do her good. It seems to have!

I was afraid I would miss her desperately, but I can only be glad.

Must send a, You are beyond awesome, message to the daughter who is keeping her. These situations don't always go well. This one? Perfect.

Eeek, sumi, that is no fun! Here's hoping you start feeling better soon.

Thanks. I guess it's a good thing I took this time off - although being sick isn't how I thought I'd be spending my vacation.

bonny, I'm so glad that Niki is doing so well! Much joy in that.

sumi, that is totally unfair for you to have to be sick while on vaca. I hope you feel better soon.

I wish ease for both sickness of the heart and the body to all those who are ailing.

I'm sorry you're having such a concentration of badness, Teppy. There does seem to be a number vortices of evil going on. Remember Tammy, the granddaughter who has done so much for my late cousin and his wife? Her mother, the one whose husband died five days after my cousin's funeral, needs a hysterectomy and may have cancer, but the mother doesn't have insurance and keeps putting things off, despite her daughter's pleadings. Also, Tammy now has shingles. Tammy has aspects of being one of us. The card she put in my Christmas present has a woman looking at a cookbook and saying, "And the blood of a newborn...a newborn what? Satan, why are your recipes so difficult?"

In good news, the dentist was able to clean out a little decay and then glue back in the gold onlay that fell out yesterday. When that happened about this time last year, I had to have the tooth pulled.

Tammy's shingles are probably caused/exacerbated by the stress she's been going through. She needs to take a break.