celebratory hmph

Ahoy, mateys! Let's embark upon yet another fairly vacuous update voyage.

Medically, things are looking great! After, ugh, five whole years of this surgically-induced bedtime, my wounds are about 95% healed. I've been able to get up in the chair on weekends (thanks for the inspiration, mr. controller), and I'm pondering the risk/reward balance of doing so more than just once or twice a week. It's a bit of an adjustment - I've become rather complacent in tolerating the bummer that is 24-hour bed rest, which means "normal" getting-upness at least feels like a lot more tedious work. But oh, what a dream an actual shower would be... Anyway, I look forward to the readjusting party, because chair time is freedom!

Also, could it be: did I really make it through all of 2016 without a single trip to the hospital???

Elsewhere? Yeah, about the rest of life. This year sucks, and I've done essentially nothing with my time. But hey, enough optimism... I got a new computer! On top of that, I used it as an excuse to get a new TV, tee hee hee. My new laptop-in-name-only is proof that if you spend enough dough, you can get a feature that should be an option on all lapsters. That's right: I have a matte screen again! You may recall that I made a big deal about having my first glossy display way back when, trying feebly to cast it in a positive light (zut alors, I used to write so much better.) Since the days of that dinosaur, I've been through another machine that had an even more egregious offender of a pixel placard. There was no pretense of "antiglare" on that one - with a dark desktop background, I could read the tag on the curtains behind me. Ick. Now, well, I suppose I'm oblivious to my horrible posture, but at least movies and games don't have a haunting aura of my ugly mug lurking in the background (rather, foreground, honestly) of every dark scene.

Oh, right, it has processy bits too, but that's not as amusing!

Hmmm... What else? I know - I'm desperately in need of a new music adventure. I can only buy so many albums from my (fortunately prolific) go-to favorites before I reach the saturation point, at which I realize that I already own all of the good ones. So if you've got something/someone to push on me - the weirder the better - now's your chance to take over my speakers. Pretty please, indulge me. I might even offer my own recommendation oddities in return.

Okay, let's call time and hand in. Happy end-of-this-miserable-stupid-year, pals.