In which we invent a new holiday: Black and Blue Friday.

There will be a Thanksgiving rant, but not just yet. A few minutes ago I finished upgrading my system to Windows 10, and I'm still sighing with impatience. I need to get that out of my system by counting some blessings.

My boudoir, to all intents and purposes, is done. I have several small stacks of Things Which Must Be Dealt With, and a few bags that need to be emptied. Eventually we will need to add the new baseboards. But the flooring is down, the furniture is rearranged, the new (old) drapes are up, and Fourthborn's thumb is not-broken after she smashed it with the rubber mallet while tamping planks into place. We finished the job; she decided she wanted to get it X-rayed; and so her first personal trip to the ER is now a memory. Thankfully, she has her own insurance (such as it is), so the only cost to me is a bit of gasoline, an hour or so of hanging out with her in the triage room while waiting for her thumb to get nuked, and a bushel of mommy-guilt.

Pain meds are utterly wasted on her. They gave her 800mg of Motrin in the ER, and it made no difference in her pain level at all. They splinted her thumb to help her remember to baby it, and they told her it will probably be bruised for a couple of weeks and swollen for half that long. We drowned our sorrows in bean burritos at Bueno.

I am reveling in the spaciousness of my bedroom, even with the little stacks and bags which march around the perimeter of my room. I think I will wait for a few days before hanging pictures. I wrangled one stack after taking Fourthborn home this afternoon. Found a handful of credit reports for Beloved, since shredded, and an envelope marked "honeymoon plans - confidential!" that mostly contained information on the place we stayed, antique shops in the general vicinity, and the like. Mostly. The non-mostly made me grin, then blush, then hightail it for the shredder.

I love that man.

I got another patchwork border attached to the medallion quilt in between other tasks this weekend. While waiting for Windows 10 to stop rebooting (and rebooting and rebooting) my computer tonight, I pieced eight strips together to make four plain strips for the next border. I am not in the mood to cut them to length and attach them. That will happen before or after work tomorrow, depending upon when I wake up, how many errands I need to do after work, and how badly I need to sleep once that is done.

We have gotten rain in Biblical quantities this weekend. A young father died in the flooding locally when his car was swept away. Tola emailed me to check for a pulse, and I reassured her that we were just fine.

Fourthborn got the routing filled in on the doors for the linen closet, and we bought the new paint. I'm not picking her up next weekend, because next weekend will be filled with church activities. But I hope to complete the painting and decoupage of the linen closet when we get together in two weeks.

I'm sorry that this post is all over the place, but about the only bits that don't ache are my tonsils (gone when I was three) and my gall bladder (gone in 2001). I may have said the same thing after last weekend, but this weekend we worked hard two days in a row, and we're both feeling it.

OK. Thanksgiving. I was able to gracefully excuse myself from picking up the children's father and his "wife" for the family dinner, because I'm not driving Lorelai these days (and will attempt to sell her for a fair but not negligible price before it's time to renew her tags), and it would have been cruel to try and fit them into the jump seats in the extended cab. 2BDH picked them up. We all had plenty of delicious and varied food. As we were about ready to fill our plates, the children's father asked where I would be sitting. My immediate, unvoiced thought was as far away from you and her as decently possible. He followed quickly with, "Because I'd like to visit with you and hear what's going on in your life." To which my inner, unvoiced snark retorted You had the chance to listen to me for 20 years, why start now? But my better self stifled a sigh and sat at the same table with him. It was fun (kind of) to tell him all the ways in which Heaven is blessing me. I think I managed to avoid smugness. I hope so, anyway.

He asked about LittleBit, who apparently comes to see him about once a month, now that she's cleared for driving again. I told him I didn't know, that we're not close. He asked why. I told him, quietly, about her choices and actions which have shattered my trust, and that we are working to rebuild a relationship, but it's very slow going.

As one of the sisters expresses it so ably, LittleBit shares her father's gift for thinking things are perfectly fine, when they're not, or if they're not, it must be somebody else's fault. As much as I have wept over Middlest's choice to join the transgender world, that choice does not feel like a personal betrayal. The relationship that I had with LittleBit, which I had thought was rock-solid, turns out to have been built on quicksand. Time and the Atonement will heal it. I have time. And I trust my temple covenants and the work of the Dear and Glorious Physician.

At another point in that somewhat bizarre conversation, the children's father said something mildly funny and moderately outrageous. I looked at his "wife" and raised one eyebrow. "Do you want to smack him, or shall I?"  She raised her own eyebrow and said, "That's my job now." I grinned and said, "Well then, you're falling down on the job."

Thankfully, Fourthborn and I each got peopled-out at about the same time, said our goodbyes, and came home for much needed naps. We both find dealing with him to be heartbreaking and exhausting.

So it's Sunday night, and I think it's raining again, and I hope that when I put out the recycling tomorrow night it does not turn into a big mass of papier-mache. There's a whole bag of shredding, which is in no danger of that, but there are three boxes that contained vinyl plank flooring or the junk tile we put down between the concrete and the planks, and we've had winds strong enough to blow the empty plastic bottles (of which there are a plethora) from here to Louisiana in a heartbeat.

I think I'm going to nuke the deer corn bag for my feet, take my meds a little early, and call it a night.