Touch

Every day I go to odb.org - Our Daily Bread - it is a Christian website that gives daily short articles that prompt the reader to think about their relationship with God. Today's article was about the healing power of touch, focusing on Jesus healing the leper, and I was surprised as touch has been on my mind a lot lately.

Today my therapist hugged me at the close of our session, and I realized that it was the first hug I'd had in a couple of weeks. My mother doesn't hug, neither does anyone else I see, and being bereft of physical contact is something I'm finding very challenging. I'm not sure what the solution is. One of the reasons I miss my son as much as I do is that he is a very physical human being, and I got hugs all day long. I took them for granted; one thing this past six months of my life has taught me is that one should never take any aspect of any relationship for granted.

It's a beautiful day today. The weather is hovering around 20 degrees (70 degrees F), the sun is shining, trees are sprouting blossoms and leaves, and gardens are full of daffodils and tulips and other spring flowers. My little plot out front is bright and cheerful. It's lovely to have the windows open; the cats like that as well. I love spring.

Speaking of cats, I had to lock them in the kitchen last night. Both of them decided that my desire to sleep was unacceptable, and they kept sitting on my pillow and meowing me into consciousness. I don't like barring them from my room, but egads, they were annoying.

Tomorrow I have to mow the lawn. My brother has been over to show me how to use the lawnmower and put gas in it. I am nervous, I've never cut grass before!

Bookish Stuff

So I've given up on reading The Great Zoo of China by Matthew Reilly. It's awful. And you know a book is awful when you're avoiding all reading in order to escape from a bad book. This book was a bad rip-off of Jurassic Park, but set in China, and using dragons instead of dinosaurs. I remember how tightly written Crichton's Jurassic Park was and how bad this is in comparison. The dialogue is so bad. I hate not finishing books, but I'm going to pass on completing this one.

Instead, I'm going to read A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab, which is the first in a series of urban fantasy novels set in London. I don't always like urban fantasy, but the back of the book really intrigued me, and the clerk in the bookstore was very positive about it; she was reading the second in the series at the time.

I'm continuing to make my slow way forward in The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukerjee. It's fascinating reading. I'm only reading a bit at a time because my brain can only process a little science in one go, but it is excellent, terribly informative without being incomprehensible. I highly recommend it.

My reading trend is to be reading something fictional, with short bursts of non-fiction a few days a week. I'd like to start reading Les Miserables bit by bit in the same way I do with non-fiction, but it's still sitting there on the coffee table gathering dust. I think I might try The Hunchback of Notre Dame instead; I am determined to read all the big fat classics before my eventual death. Hopefully that's decades away because there is so much left to read!