My sense of humor is definitely skewed.

I walked into my cubicle the other morning and found a nicely wrapped package in my chair, from my attorney. Feels like a tin of something, hopefully dark chocolate. Huge, properly fluffy bow on top. I walked into his office, grinned, and told him I didn’t know he knew how to tie bows. (The man is a former Marine.) He said that he recycled the ribbon from the stash at home.

It was a good-sized box. I quipped, “I don’t suppose that’s a new liver for Beloved?” Took him half a tick longer than usual, and then he laughed.

The news here is marginally more hopeful. More blood work on Monday, a visit with the radiologist on Tuesday, followed by fitting for a mask that will hold his head still, as in bolted to the table still, and he starts radiation this morning. The metastasized mass is on the outside of the brain, where it will be easy to reach with radiation. I’m thinking of it as something like unto a particularly lethal barnacle. It is narrowing a canal and compressing nerves, which is causing the headaches and probably the numbness on the left side of his head, maybe also the vision problems. The radiologist is very hopeful that 15 treatments will solve the problem. In the meantime, Beloved has strong pain medicine that takes his headaches from 9/10 down to zero, and he is sleeping better, and longer, and I can hear the difference in his voice.

I took yesterday off, and we got the wills taken care of. I do need to give our attorney a little more information, but we are scheduled to go back after Christmas and pick up the finished products.

The main part of the knitting is done on Beloved’s sweater. I picked up 150 stitches along each front for the button bands, and in knitting those first stitches I intentionally twisted all the live stitches across the back of the neck, rather than binding them off and picking up fresh ones. I need to measure Beloved’s stomach, because I think it has grown since I measured him and made the calculations. If so, we can blame that on his liver, which is inflamed and enlarged. The sweater does not quite meet in the front. If that does not block out, then I am thinking of knitting a fake waistcoat front in Packers gold and stitching it to the sweater fronts, behind the button bands, and having those bits meet in the middle. It would definitely be an unconventional way to close a sweater, but then Beloved is not a particularly conventional man. He thinks that sounds cool.

All but two of the envelopes are addressed for our Christmas cards. Those two will go to the missionary elders serving from our ward, and Beloved has their addresses on last Sunday's program from sacrament meeting. I just printed off a new page of return address labels and have grabbed the roll of stamps. I will mail off the last two packages and the envelopes I have stuffed, after work tonight.

We had quite a storm blow through last night. I think it did something to the neighbors’ storage shed. We heard tin rattling, off and on all night. I just heard another spate of it.

Happy Thursday, everybody!