My faithful followers will have noticed that I have not blogged in two and a half weeks.  The main reasons for this are 1) a miserable bout of pneumonia, and 2) getting caught up with Christmas preparations.

This was my third go-round with pneumonia, despite the fact that I have taken the “pneumovax”, the pneumonia vaccine, within the last ten years.  I have found that there is a kind of merciful amnesia that helps the memories of pain and discomforts to fade away.   The ailments that I remember are the most recent ones, namely the hacking cough that was so severe that I felt I had fractured a rib on the left side of my chest.  Even lidocaine patches and pain meds were not enough to fully control this pain.  Speaking of pain meds, one overly generous dose of cough syrup was enough to give me nausea, that sick feeling that makes one long for the pain to return…

There were joys as well.  David and Amanda and Jonny and Katie came to our house and stayed for two or three days, and brought energy and a sense of fun with them.  They especially enjoyed playing some new card games they had discovered, Sushi Go, Dixit, and Anomia.  The ones that required rapid perception and reaction left me and Carol in the dust, bemoaning the deterioration of our nervous systems with age.

There was good news on the basketball front.  Although Jeremy Lin was demoted from the starting lineup, he played well enough from the bench to help the Lakers beat two of the best teams in the NBA, the Toronto Raptors and the Golden State Warriors.  It seems that Byron Scott and the coaching staff has come to agree with my view that Kobe’s ball-hogging low-percentage shootings ways have been hurting the team, and he was furloughed for two days, one of which led to the win over the Warriors.

I am going to wrap this up here.  There seems to be more to report, but it is not flowing to my pen (wordpress) right now.  In any case, I appreciate your reading, likes, and comments.

Till next time, your blogging friend Ed.