The Pillow Book -- Bedtime Story (Part 4) -- and foot (Patreon)

A couple more chapters of The Pillow Book. 🛌 It's starting to get steamy. Literally and figuratively🥵.

Look what I did. In a classic (and beautifully cliché) move, the ol' Universe told me to slow down. I was carrying a small carpet to my car, couldn't see my feet, hit the paving stone (which isn't even at all with the ground) wrong, and rolled my ankle.

As I lie there on the ground, in the cold, in my pajamas, in only my socks (like all the sins bundled into one), I'm like do I want someone to come by and see and help me? Or will they chastise me for being shoeless? There was also a glance upward and a wink: "Sure hope it ain't broke" prayer.

I really couldn't put any weight for the rest of the day and it seemed to get worse. So I very precariously dragged and drove myself the next morning (by myself, R has always refused to drive even though he has a U.S. license and can drive, even though I've pleaded, please help on on the long trips, whatever) to a clinic and got a bunch of x-rays. Good news! Not broke. Bad news! Badly sprained and couldn't walk for several days. Got to use crutches though. That was fun!

More good news! I can pretty much walk okay now. This happened exactly a week ago. A little pain, but not too bad. I stopped taking the pain meds, so I could judge how far to push myself or not. Probably at 85%. So, yay! Cleaning has resumed.

The lesson I learned from it all was that I've been working on the house for a couple months and have only managed to clean out a fourth of one closet. The almost 40 bags I've bagged were all things just piled in open rooms. So I did some research and found a place where you pay them per little truck (kei tora) to take what you have and they go through it and do what needs to be done. It's money I need for other stuff, but by my own meager cost-benefit analysis, it'll be worth it. And I can't do it for everything. But yucky rice cookers, toaster ovens covered in grease, floor fans that don't work...that kind of stuff, I will be happy to get rid of and not try and figure out what one-day-a-month place takes them, and where, and what time. Recycling in all very komakai in this city.

I've got other posts I'm working on for you, as well as a new episode of the show. I'm still hanging in there. I also want to make a poll as how I can move forward with the show. This whole watershed period and time away from making episodes is making want to rethink and refurbish and re-energize the podcast. I have some ideas, but I want to throw them out to you all and get real feedback. So I'll be working on that (the poll post).

In the meantime if you have any ideas, do message me! Like, the type of shows you like best or what you want more of, what you want less of, what I've never done but you'd like to see me do. I'm listening ٩(๑❛ᴗ❛๑)۶

Oh! And I got the final pdf of the new (in September!) middle grade book: Legends of Japanese Mythology: Meet the Heroes, Spirits, Monsters and Yokai of Japanese Folklore (Legends of the Past), so that improves the old mood-a-roonie.

Here I leave you with a little red box. There are hundreds of these hidden all around the house. In drawers, closets, shelves. Fifty years of living there and fifty years of storing little treasures in boxes. I'm collecting all the keys. But really don't know what to do with little tools or nuts or tidbits that look to be important, but for what?

I'm really coming to understand how "throwing something away" is a very hard thing to do.

If you made it this far ↓ trigger warning...creepy dr. But...nice?

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Creepy little post script: So, when they did the x-rays on my foot, they take me into the room. The nurse leaves, the dr. comes in and I'm lying flat on my back looking at the ceiling. He's moving my foot into a position, leaves, takes x-ray, comes back, moves foot again. Five times. And one of those times, I swear I could see him lean way down and I swear it felt like he rubbed his cheek against my foot. It was so fast and he stood right back up. I tensed, but he was already out of the room taking the x-ray. It's more baffling than anything else. My feet aren't all that. Weird. But in the long list of weird, unsettling, and horrific things that are going on this doesn't even register. More: What the?

Adore you, stay safe and warm, more soon, XO,

terrie 🦶