saddle, sorting, and needles

A saddle, in geography, is defined as the lowest area between two peaks. I think of the week between Christmas and New Year as a saddle week. This one's been pretty productive... mostly.

• I've been doing some tidying, which I have since learned is a tradition in some cultures so as to start the new year with a "clean slate". I went through some boxes of stored goods while grumbling under my breath, thinking it was "junk" we've been storing for our kids. I was all ready to unload it upon them, only to find that it was mostly our stuff we never unpacked when we moved here four years ago. Ooops.

So I'm sorting through that, determined to rid us of "stored stuff". If we're gonna use it, it should be out among the living. I did find a few kid things, so my grumbling skills weren't totally a waste.

• Christmas here was a pleasant low-key affair. Meego and Wolfgang came over for food, gaming, dog walking, puzzle building, etc. And we speaker phoned a bit with Chaco, who relocated to the DC area for work not long ago.

Speaking of food and storage, while I was doing some actual cooking for Christmas, I came upon this little cast iron skillet I "won" back in 2020. As I remember it, the nursing home where I was working at the time had daily random drawings for staff to select a gift from a pile o' stuff during the days leading up to Christmas.

My name miraculously came up, and I selected the cute skillet, I think mainly because it was nicely portable for bringing home on my bicycle. It came with a small packet of brownie mix for making one round brownie in the pan. I remember making the brownie on Christmas, and the 5 of us split it into teeny tiny brownies. 

If it'd been a marijuana brownie, I doubt it would've had much affect after divying it up 5 ways. 

The skillet then got stashed with its larger siblings, hardly thought of again. But this week, I saw someone on reddit, who had received such a skillet for Christmas, asking what to use it for. The overwhelming response was "an egg!!"

Omigosh, it's the perfect vessel for making a one-off poached egg. I've been doing that in the days since the discovery while needing to chip away at all this damn leftover Christmas ham.

• Also this week, I visited that physical therapy place about my fritzed foot. They'd offered a special promo, so I partook. But the foot's been feeling better, and I figured I'd listen to the assessment, then likely continue to treat it myself. 

Welp, that didn't happen. The good Dr. uncovered weakness in my right hip - not a total secret to me - as likely the root of my problem and mapped out a good sense plan of attack.  After the initial treatment hurt so good, I'd plunked down the HSA card and paid for six sessions. 

He wants to do some "dry needling" - a term of which I've heard for treating sports injuries, but know nothing. I'm about to access doctor google, but it sounds kind of like acupuncture, which I've never had. I'm going for it.