农历新年

Happy Chinese New Year! It's the Year of the Rat, the year 4705 (4706, according to some) on their calendar.

I woke up early but stayed in bed until about 6:15 because I wasn't going to be able to do anything -- no breakfast, not even any coffee, not even take my medications except for the blood pressure. Finally decided I was not going to get back to sleep, so I got up, made my bed, took my blood pressure pills, petted the cats, fed the cats, petted the cats again, brushed my teeth and got together the things I needed to take with me to the hospital.

Tom got up not long afterwards and went out to shovel and snowblow. It seems that we got about eight to nine inches in this most recent "weather event", which is nothing compared to some places south of here that got up to twenty inches. With another four to six week potential snow weather ahead of us, we are already within a few inches of setting a record. To show that the human spirit remains undaunted, though, a 70-tear-old man went out into that storm and robbed a bank in Sauk Prairie.

Parts of the interstate south of Madison were closed and people were stranded for many hours. That makes my little stranded episode of ten or fifteen minutes on the way back from Texas pretty insignificant. I have a friend in Rhode Island who was stranded on the interstate overnight back in February of 1978. She only had to travel about five miles to get home from the school where she worked, but because she had gone around with one of the buses trying to get kids home, she got away quite late and was trapped. She spent the night with total strangers in their car. This is why we travel with sleeping bags, blankets, water and so on.



Anyway, the colonoscopy went well. In fact, the person scheduled ahead of me had to have a breathing treatment, so I was in and out faster than expected. This is my fourth one of these and the first one that I actually slept through. The results were fine. I have pictures, but I think I'll spare you the details. (Nope, no "YouTube at 11" on this one.)

For dinner Tom is making Chinese. I had hoped for his famous Firecracker Chicken, but the nurse told me to avoid spicy foods for the day. So he is planning something Chinese but not so fiery. Then he will head to Spring Green for his meeting (and hope the road is cleared) and I, unable to drive for the rest of the day, will stay home and read and pet the cats. The volume of Thomas Aquinas that I ordered from the library is there, but it will have to wait until tomorrow. Maybe by then the new Joan Hess mystery will also be in. I told you the librarians probably think I am weird when they look at the books I check out: philosophy, Bible, eastern religions, mysteries and cartoons.