Holiday Hands

The past few days, our region's been in a deep freeze.  As in, when it crept above the freezing level this afternoon, it actually felt warm to me.  Unlike most of the country, we've been spared the devastating blizzards and mudslides and storms and winds, but it's still been very cold.  And very dry.

All day at work, I handle books.  Paper, as anyone who has worked with it can attest, sucks the moisture out of one's hands like nobody's business.

And my holiday projects are all in Paperclay.  An air-drying clay that shares paper's ability to dry out one's hands.

So, basically, despite my heavy-duty cream, my hands are shredded, split, bleeding messes right about now.  But, hey, anything worth doing is worth a little blood now and again...

Thus far, my holiday projects are going decently. (Though I've yet to hear if Phase I reached its intended destination in one piece - it should've gotten there by today at the latest, but I don't suppose the post office takes horrific weather into account when giving shipping estimates.) My holiday shopping's more than half done, save one impossible-to-predict relative.  Tomorrow, I plan to make out holiday cards.  I haven't read a book in over a month (as my sadly neglected book review blog can attest), and my sketching's slacked off since I started holiday project work in October, but, hey, can't complain.  If I'm not precisely on the ball, thus far I've successfully kept the ball from rolling on top of me.  And sometimes that's all one can ask.


Oh... if anyone remembers about the dog who was having issues, he went back into the vet this evening.  To summarize, he'd developed a terrible limp in his hind end that screamed "dysplasia," but was in fact a bad leg infection.  At this time, his liver was found to be disturbingly enlarged.  For the leg, he was prescribed painkillers and antibiotics, but, being the only dog in the planet who carefully chews every bite of food before swallowing, our attempts to pill him failed miserably after a week or so, when he realized his kibbles were tainted.  Nevertheless, he was doing better until a week or so ago, when he started limping again. And pills, as we've discovered, aren't going to help.  The vet said she cold do injections, but she needed to see him first.  So now they're trying to determine if the infection's back (so he would need one kind of injection), or if it's pain (which would require a different injection.) One can be done at home, the other needs to be done at the office.  And the liver will require a biopsy which is a pain in the rear to schedule this time of year; this seems to be an independent issue, near as we can tell.  Hopefully, we'll have an update on the leg/limp end of things tomorrow.