Sylvia's Journal

We had Faro and his parents over for much of the Thanksgiving holiday and although I was feeling crummy, it was wonderful to have them around and watch Faro trying to crawl, play guitar and learn Dutch children’s songs.

We also talked with Tessa who has nearly reached the halfway point of their road trip. They are starting to think about the return trip, taking the southern route, which makes a lot of sense.

After another horrendous coughing fit that woke both of us u last night, and completing my second week of feeling poorly, it was time to pay a visit to our new doctor.  He congratulated me on seeking help (of course) and then told me I had ‘walking pneumonia’.  This simply means you don’t have to get hospitalized and can keep walking, a mild form of pneumonia or bronchitis, he couldn’t quite tell.

I received an antibiotic injection and prescriptions for two kinds of antibiotics, one for now and the other as a backup to use when I get on my way to Japan and still feel crummy. I would like to enter the plane on Saturday morning as a healthy person. I also would like to come out healthy on the other end because at Narita they have giant heat sensors to pick out people with (any kind of) the flu. And who knows what happens then.

I also went to see the foot doctor for another cortisone injection because I would like to be able to walk in Japan. Lately, a walk around the block ended in a hard to disguise limp. The last shot was 6 month ago. So tomorrow I should be well again.

I notice my entries are getting further and further apart. I believe it is because of sinking from a cold into something more serious over the last 2 weeks, when I returned from Bangladesh.  Still, in the meantime we went south to DC and west for thanksgiving and north for post-Thanksgiving.

In Franconia (NH) we experienced our first snow of the season. It is really winter there. Canon mountain had all the snowmakers going on full blast when we arrived and was fairly white when we left (snowmakers still going but now complementing the natural layer that had fallen overnight).

The softly descending snowflakes on Sunday morning put me in a poetic mood, with a poem surfacing without any effort from my side. It was my first poem in ages.  Snow slows things down, even when just watching it from a warm inside. It also creates a mood of ‘now.’  Both seem to be important for bringing forth the muse.

We drove our second cousin once or twice removed (?) to Cambridge. She was part of the mini family reunion we had up there at her New York uncles’ and California aunt’s old vacation home in Franconia.

We took advantage of being in Cambridge and went to see Lincoln and then have a lovely after theatre culinary experience at a Kendall Square wine bar called belly. Although we are vegetarian wannabees we cannot help ourselves to order steak tartare at those rare occasions when it is on the menu – it was well worth the trangression, and nicely bracketed by an arugula salad and a beet/bean salad.