Christmas! Over! (Whew!)

Made it through Christmas! When you're in the church-music biz, especially when you play bulky heavy things like percussion instruments, "the joy of Christmas" takes a lot of work.

A couple of hours before the service, I reconditioned the heads on my timpani, which I let the high-school kids use during most of the year. That's a trick I haven't used in a very long time, but fortunately I still remember how. So that was good--at least now my drums sound only a single pitch when you strike them, not some sort of head-out-of-tune-with-itself tone cluster.

During said reconditioning process, I managed to manhandle my drums out of playing position (so I could work on them) and then back into playing position (where they'd need to be for the service). I didn't fall over (came sorta close a couple of times), didn't drop the drums. So that was good.

Performance went wonderfully!

In the MS side of the world... I had complained to my herbalist about having cold legs. He put something into the formula to address that, and it is definitely doing something on the neurological level. My legs are numb, my right leg is nasty numb, but something is definitely different. It's not exactly less numb, but it's differently numb. Perhaps I might say, I'm feeling the numbness more acutely, in greater detail. Anything that involves getting additional data from my legs, I take as a step (as it were) in the right direction, but it's making for odd walking and it's definitely quite weird.

And a small, new, worsening: I've always been forgetful, I had "absent-minded-professor syndrome" years before I went into full-time teaching, but nowadays I'm having a hard time remembering random things, especially random words; again, this is something I've been "doing" for years, but it feels like it's getting worse. Today, I went off to the church to take some pictures before they took down all the lovely decorations (here's a sample), I got home, I got out of the car... and I could not, for the life of me, remember having closed the church door after having opened it to go inside. Well, I was terrified... Right away I got back into the car, drove back to the church, but fortunately, I had indeed closed the door, the church was locked, all was well... except my memory failure cost me a half hour in round-trip driving and a few extra terrifying moments because I'm having challenges feeling the pedals and sometimes I wind up stomping too hard/suddenly on the brake pedal.

I told my doctor once that I thought my memory was going... I asked him, "Is it... The Disease???"

He said, "No, you're just getting older."

Great. I'm not sure which one makes me feel better or worse.

And now that I tell that story, I don't remember whether I told it to you before or not...

Great. Here we go again.