Apparently I am now a terrorist, according to Sarah Palin, because I read and support wikileaks. I should be hunted down like Alaskan vermin or Osama Bin Laden. In fact I look forward to the next wikileaks batch, which will be about international banking. That should disturb the hornets nest.

My niece posted this wonderful art photo on Facebook

Snow, first of the season on the ground in our garden. The two eldest sons and us, we are off to the family Christmas party. We were supposed to have left now. With some trepidation I have to return to work on December first. I still don't sleep well. I cannot lie on my left side and wake every time my body wants to roll off my back. Thus in the morning I tend to slumber on, trying to catch up on the night's lack of rest. I was telling Cathy that I think it will be at least another two months before I am back to normal. She said it would be good for me to work as I have become too inactive and this I see is true, but brrrr, I am not looking forward to being up at six in the dark and home at six also in the dark. It serves me right for choosing to live so far out in the suburbs.
I think we are leaving....

(Later) The party was fine, although the huge family was reduced to only about 40 attendees this year. I found that I have lost my nerve in the car, especially returning in the dark, my son driving quite fast, sometimes with wisps of snow blowing low across the road. The persistent thought that we might crash and that, of course, my chest would open up again, I found quite terrifying. I closed my eyes and recited protection mantras silently to myself. They did not help much.

Arrived home safe and sound and watched "Casino Royal" up to the bit that made me cry the first time. Eva Green is lovely and will be recognised as a great actress someday. This is the third film I have seen her in.

Woke several times in the night, but slept in till nine. I feel ancy today, perhaps because I have to go back to work.

Last Friday I started this record of flagged visitors on the right. It is hard to understand why I get visitors from quite exotic places.

I am still at home recuperating slowly from an operation on my chest. I will have to return to work in just over one more week. I can't imagine what it will be like to get out of bed at five to six again and get through the day without the afternoon nap to which I have become accustomed.

I just got a call from an old old friend and when I mentioned that all the furniture in the Stieg Larsson book I am reading seems to be also from IKEA, she said that she had stopped reading him in horror. She said that there is a vogue for describing unspeakable violence towards women, while pretending to be feminist. We both watched Medium from the beginning and have noticed how the crimes on that show have become more violent and almost always involve violence against women. Her feminist roots rebel against this new excess of violence against women. I very much see what she means, but will go on with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo mainly because I enjoy the amateur quality of a book written for the entertainment of the author with no original intention of publishing it. His first title for the book was Men Who Hate Women and he wrote three books before approaching a publisher. He was dead at fifty. However gruesome some scenes are, I enjoy the read much as I enjoy blogs more than learned articles.

First there was the problem. What was the problem? It had something to do with knowing. I could remember the dream, but I could not remember what the dream was about. There was an apartment very sparsely furnished, comfortably empty. We lived there and we were happy, but we had a problem and I can't remember what it was. As usual, I woke in discomfort, mildly cursing again that I could not be inured by sleep. Surely it had been long enough, I reflected, to find a comfortable position to lie down in, but it was not yet to be possible. I got up and swore off the pain killers in the drawer next to my bed. What had I just dreamed and what was the problem? I still don't know.

^

My best friend has just challenged me, (and inspired me), to write something on my blog even though I don't feel that I have anything to write about.

Above is an old picture of me with my brothers. Quite a bit more of me than now protrudes from my belly. I found the picture, reading over the 2008 entries of this blog, an entertainment of the last few days, as I sit at home waiting for my lungs to settle comfortably back into my rib cage. I saw the surgeon on Tuesday and he told me that I was repairing well and that I might stay at home until the end of the month. Just as well, as I don't feel up to returning to work yet.

This same best friend does not work on Mondays and we spent a congenial four hours on the phone and Skype, chatting like the two old men we have both become. He is a good friend and has been since I first came to live in Canada in 1973.

My younger brother, the handsome one on the right, just called me from England. His amateur dramatic society is putting on the same play I was in late last year, Hay Fever. It would be such fun if he played the same part I played. At the time I kept quite careful notes on a private blog and now I have the opportunity to invite him alone to read it. Even more fun would be to be in a play with him one day. We both like small parts and, in an amateur way, I dare say that we can both be quite funny.

The brother in the middle is my genius older brother, never an actor, but a recently retired professor. Teaching, I suppose, has elements of acting to it. So there you have it: three very different brothers with very different careers. Very soon we will all just be old men sitting in rocking chairs remembering...

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you,

then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi