I slept 11 hours, not counting the hour about 4 when I was reading a book. Yes, that helped a lot. I'm reminded of my sore shoulder, the other one, 10 years ago. That one was caused by an old mattress, the telephone catalog order job, and excessive computer use. It used to flare up and make me miserable in school, though there was a lot else going on at the time as well. Getting a new mattress helped considerably, as did quitting the job. This time, not throwing anything onto the shoulder is getting it better. I should also get back to Tai Chi.

I discovered, as I got up at 0400, that St. Nicholas had been by. (I was carrying the Rich St. Nick present on the way, as I did remember.) He'd left me the Silver Anniversary Lego set! That's gotta be 25 years in the US, because we used to get Lego bricks in England every week, 30 years ago. There are 1201 pieces, in packages by color: red and white, black and red and yellow, blue and yellow, etc. The "1" brick is a silver color!
Besides my toy, St. Nicholas left me some Christmas Turtles (take THAT, oh recently-deceased aunt!) and M&Ms. In contrast, he only gave Rich a chocolate orange. He gave two of the kids Minnesota Mosquito traps, and the other two got "snowman poop." (Heard you've been naughty, so hear's the scoop. You get nothing but snowman poop.) In real life the stuff looks like mini-marshmallows. Good thing Vince didn't get a pink slip on Friday to go with it!

They ran the California marathon in the morning. Getting to work at the catalog place used to be an adventure on marathon day. The winner was a young man from Morocco. Meanwhile, the dog kept sitting and looking at me with great hope in his eyes, but I didn't take him on a walk.

I'm still not prepared to get ready for Christmas, either actually or emotionally. In the hopes of a jump-start, we went to the National Guard band concert this afternoon. The first half was ordinary songs (my favorite being the Indiana Jones medley) and the second half was Christmas songs. There were two people getting medals, and the conductor, who also happens to be the band teacher at Jesuit, did the announcing for those. I was reminded why it is I used to hate Vince's band concerts. The teacher really needs to improve his speaking. Fortunately, though, he wasn't introducing the music. Their encore was funny: it started out as "From the Halls of Montezuma" and suddenly was "Jingle Bells," some march morphed into "Up on the Housetops" and under another march we could hear "Deck the Halls."

Then I had a very frustrating trip through the enormous new grocery store. You walk a lot farther but they still don't have what you want. (I wanted a boston butt, settled for a loin roast.)

I note the Three Rivers Stadium is also falling apart. My brother-in-law showed us "scarfing" of concrete, which could make you terrified to ever go over a bridge!

I'm two pounds down from the first day back, got rid of three magazines on the trip, sent off the St. Nick stuff, and went on two walks, about 3 miles each, one on Sunday at the Pittsburgh Zoo, and one on Tuesday. As you see, though, I didn't improve today. Oh, well.