The Other Don Kelly

I am currently reading three books:

Foster (by Claire Keegan), is about a young girl who is sent to live with another family. The book isn’t a long one (I’m about halfway through); it’s very well written, and a sweet story (so far), but there’s a growing feeling of foreboding, of another shoe about to fall… Anne recommended this to me after she read it. Interestingly, the story takes place in Wexford, Ireland, where some of my ancestors came from, and where we spent some time on our honeymoon.

Cloud Cuckoo Land (Anthony Doerr) is another recommendation from Anne. I just got it from the library last night on my tablet, so I’m only a few pages in but I’m already liking it.

The last book is a loan from Jeff. Evening in the Palace of Reason (James R. Gaines) is about the fateful meeting between Johann Sebastian Bach and Frederick The Great, the generational and cultural clashes represented by that meeting, and the resulting creation of A Musical Offering. It’s a great story, but the best part of this book is the background material: digressions, biographies, histories of musical theory, the Reformation…

I keep moving from one to the other, to the other. They’re all great.

Some other recent reads:

Still Life by Louise Penny, the first novel in her Inspector Gamache mystery series. Anne loves these books, and so do several of her friends and they’re always talking about them, so I thought I’d give the first one a try. The book was pretty good, and I can see why people like it, but I have to say I’m still not a fan of mysteries — especially here, where the author’s head fakes, misdirection, and general control of the information flow was a bit on the clumsy side. I’ll probably read the second one eventually (where the author may hit her stride a little better), but I’m making no promises about the entire series.

So I started seeing a dermatologist last spring, not long before our big Alberta trip. He gave me the once-over — I even got a biopsy — and recommended a new eczema medication called Adbry. It’s something you take by injection every two weeks, with an initial double dose which you have to redo if you mess up your dosage schedule, so I held off on the new medication until we got back.

It took about a month to kick in, but then it really started working — I have no idea of the how’s or why’s, but my life was like “eczema? what eczema?” This was the most effective eczema treatment I’d ever had, and one of the best things in my life.

Until it wasn’t.

Adbry has a known side effect, affecting about 8% of the people who take it, which causes them to get conjunctivitis (aka “pinkeye”), and I won that lottery: starting sometime in November my eyes started getting itchy, and irritated, and really red. (Again, I have no idea of the mechanism, but it was like all my eczema problems were taken from my skin and transferred to my eyeballs…) At first it wasn’t too bad, but then the constant watery eyes started to affect my vision, especially for things like reading, and the irritation made sunlight, or even bright lights, uncomfortable. I saw the dermatologist, and he referred me to my eye doctor. The eye doctor initially tried some milder treatments, which were OK but not 100% effective so he put me on steroid eye drops, and they seem to be doing the trick. I am now tapering off the drops, and going for weekly eye exams — steroids come with their own set of issues. Meantime, I discontinued the Adbry.

I had a problem, I took that stuff, now I have two problems… the eczema is kind of manifesting again, but it’s not all that bad yet, and the dermatologist may have another treatment recommendation for me when I seem him in a few weeks.

Anne and I were exhausted on New Year’s Eve after all our traveling, but we rallied a bit and had a few friends over: John & Donna (with Finn and Sloane) and Sean & Jennifer. Snacks, drinks and catching up, low key and pleasant; John & Donna left with the kids relatively early but Jen & Sean were here almost to midnight. (We made it to about 12:10 ourselves, watching the neighbors up the street shoot some fireworks before crashing.)

New Year’s Day was pretty low key — we did a short walk down to Sand Island with John and Donna (again with Finn & Sloane), and even saw some people doing the Polar Bear Challenge in the Lehigh.

Yesterday I got together with Doug, and also Renee & John to do a towpath ride — we rode to Easton and then took the trail up to Tatamy and back. It was a pretty big ride for this time of year, almost 39 miles, cold and even rainy at times. After I got home, Anne and I made a housewarming visit to Scott & Kellyn at their new home, and then I came home and visited naptime …

Today is a rainy day. Anne is in NY visiting with her sister, and I am here working through my to-do list backlog (cello, blogging, etc). Trying to stay on top of things, trying to keep some new leaf, or even the same old leaves, turned over. I’ll probably post some resolutions in the next day or so.

Anyway, Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas! We are currently not in Denver, celebrating with Emmi & Kyle; we did a giant 24-hour yo-yo trick instead, down to Philly and back: we got a ride from Donna to Doylestown, took the train to Philadelphia and another train out to the airport, and then a cab to our hotel, where Ben joined us. We took the 3:00 AM hotel shuttle back to the airport, which was a madhouse but we finally got through security, and we were actually looking at the Departures board when our flight went from “on time, gate whatever” to CANCELLED!

This was extremely frustrating and depressing to say the least, and also mysterious — huge swaths of the country were experiencing snowpacolyptic travel problems, but that didn’t include either Philadelphia or Denver, at least not directly… As near as we can figure now, all sorts of baggage had been erroneously routed to Denver Airport, on top of (and probably as a result of) all the weather problems, and they just went into emergency mode and started canceling flights. That’s all speculation of course — Frontier Airlines (motto: “Never Again!”) was remarkably unhelpful and unforthcoming.

Meanwhile, back at the airport: we booked new flights for Monday on another airline, best we could do but we’ll still get our (somewhat abbreviated) visit, and then we made our way back, train by train, to Doylestown, where we got breakfast and were eventually rescued by Shari & Rick. We were back in Bethlehem, exhausted, by about 10:30 AM and we all just went to bed for a few hours.

So Christmas day is Anne and me and Ben this year. We Zoomed with Emmi last night, and did a Christmas morning walk with Donna and John, and are now preparing dinner (and snacking). So Merry Christmas!

I did a solstice ride yesterday, out on the shortest day of the year, and probably my last ride of the year (considering current weather and our holiday itinerary). I just cruised down the towpath to Hope Road and back — I’ve got a slow leak in my front tire, which is 7 years old and probably needs replacing, and when I got to the boat club noticed it was getting low, so I turned around there and put some more air in when I got to the old lock-tender house ruins. I have “slime” in the tubeless tire, but it didn’t seal the leak; it only gummed up the valve, making inflation difficult… I topped off the air again at Sand Island.

The day was beautiful even with the cold, but the trail was soft and sloppy, and between my slogging along, and the two re-inflation stops, I took 2 hours for a 14 mile ride. Bottom dead center, the end of the season, and I guess I’ll have some maintenance projects waiting for me in the new year.

We went to John & Donna’s last night for a Solstice Party: mostly the ukulele crowd plus a few neighbors, and very nice. (I left a bit early because of cat allergies.)

Anyway, this no doubt concludes my blogging for 2022. Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! I’ll see you in 2023.

PS Anne got me a tablet for Christmas. Sweet! (I got her a cookie cookbook from King Arthur Flour.)