Sylvia's Journal

My sister Ankie is kindly correcting my anatomical mislabeling. That is easy for her to do because she learned the names of body parts in medical school many years ago. For me this is new territory. But I am learning. Now I am checking Wikipedia before I write anything down. The humurus is not funny but Latin for shoulder and what I called the IT muscle has nothing to do with storage and retrieval of information. It is the iliotibial band that goes from hip to knee. It is still very tight and I am faithfully doing my exercises, except this morning. I am hurting too much from standing up way too long at Gary and Christine’s Christmas party last night. So I am sitting down with my leg up on a stool and writing while drinking the first of my obligatory large glasses of water for the day, alternating with hot tea.

The house is quiet and cold. Outside everything is still white but the real immediate post-snowstorm beauty is gone. Some snow has melted and some has been contaminated with nature’s debris.

Late yesterday afternoon I was supposed to have flown with Mike, one of my plane co-owners, to Pease Air Force base to pick up our plane that is newly outfitted with a Garmin system. I have never flown with anything quite as sophisticated as a computerized and moving map. I did not quite need such a luxury but my instrument flying co-owners insisted. Of course it is safer because you can’t quite get lost that way. It would have been my first solo, on my way back after dropping Mike off. But it was not to happen. Part of me was relieved. Going solo is the next step for me. It may need to come after re-visiting Gardner airport, rather than before. The Gardner trip is planned for next Saturday.

I put in a full workday to get as much set up for my upcoming trip to Ghana (January 4) as I could. We are launching a leadership program in one region and hope that the results of this program will excite the country’s health leadership as much as it has done elsewhere. We are starting from scratch, with no leadership team on the ground, few connections and a very tight budget. Setting this up from a distance is hard, especially this close to the holidays. I am activating the connections I have and creating new ones through cold calls. The overall design starts to fall into place and I am keeping my fingers crossed that we get the budget that this new venture needs. I am thinking about our peanut budget and how it would barely pay for a day’s worth of work in the settings that Sita now works in. Sita gets to be in the Cadillac events, while we are barely making bicycle status. It’s nice when your kids do well.

I finally got to see Sita, 36 hours after she got home, yesterday morning. She brought me a beautiful wall hanging from India, picturing Krishna surrounded by 6 of his girlfriends, bringing him baskets of fruit. We are looking for wallspace and have temporarily tacked it up on the one remaining space in the hallway.

Under protest from Sita and Jim, Axel and I stunk up the house by cooking more shrimp to bring to Gary and Christine’s Christmas party. And then we left, leaving them in the stink, still protesting while we urged them to get used to it.

The party was nice, with many people we did not know. There were wonderful discoveries of people we’d like to see more of. A band was installed in the living room, taking up half the space. We left when it was just starting to warm up. The music was great and I was aching to dance, but that will not be in the stars for some time. A couple of hours standing up is still very hard for us. Like a bunch of old folks we left when the party was starting to get interesting.