Apparently, I’m starting to sleep in. 🙃
I didn’t wake up for the last time until right around 7:45, just in time to have my super dried out, glued-shut eyes crack just enough to see Heather’s hand wave back while I waved goodbye to her as she drove away.
Don’t think I got enough to drink yesterday. 🙃
My chronology of events might not be great today, but after getting up, I got a little bit caught up trying to capture old Facebook conversations in their original form and saw something that threw me for a bit of a painful loop.
Gratefully, as I was struggling with it, I was reminded of what Cory told me the other day, how when hard things come, he’s stopped fighting them and just surrenders. I asked him what he meant by that, and basically, at least the understanding that I got, was that instead of trying to fight against the thing that’s attacking, he just turns his attention to taking in light.
So after remembering that, I put it into practice and was able to step away from the pain and fears that we’re trying to creep in.
Thx, Cory 🙏🤍🙏
The neighbor I’ve been helping out called this morning to check on things, and I chatted with him a little bit.
Spent sometime trying to answer questions online, but without much success. I answered maybe two or three today. Spent some time on my file sorting project. Talks to Cory for a bit and thanked him for what he had shared with me about surrendering.
Checked the dry well hole, mucked and dragged, and then… performed surgery on the dog. 😅
I used the super sharp scalpel that I utilized when performing surgery on myself some years back. It was so sharp that I barely felt anything, and I’m thinking it was similar for Zorra today. 🤞
When she’s in pain, she usually whines or yelps pretty good, and she barely twitched her back, a few times and seemed just to want me to scratch her.
It was a lengthy process cleaning out all the crap that was in the wound, and as best I can tell, I think I was dealing with two problems at once? I’m pretty sure she had a burst epidermoid cyst. After doing some research, and watching a video that looked pretty much like what I was dealing with, I felt pretty good about the burst epidermoid cyst diagnosis, but the big chunk that came out looked a lot more like lipoma tissue.
So I’m thinking that maybe she had a pre-existing lipoma there and then had a burst epidermoid cyst on top of that?
🤷
Either way, the surgery was completed, though I don’t think I got all of the cyst material out. That means there is a decent chance it’s just going to grow back, unfortunately, but I didn’t have the surgical implements to remove the stuff, nor did I want to be digging around in the poor puppies back, even if she wasn’t really feeling much of anything.
I know I didn’t really feel much of anything once I got deep enough doing minor surgery on myself several years ago. 😅
Shout out to my mom for trying to help me diagnose using just the pictures that I sent her.
And here’s one one of what it looked like after I was pretty much finished.
I didn’t take any pictures of all the cottage cheese type goo that was coming out.
Maybe that’s for the best. 😅
Anyway… I spent some time doing some online stuff, continued trying to work a bit, continued file sorting and finally sent my Havasupai Trip Story to my friend Chris.
I had meant to go back through it and rewrite it better and give it to him as a wedding gift, but I just… never did it. I think part of the reason I never did it is that I overwhelmed myself trying to make it too perfect, and then I just stopped writing it.
It’s been on my to-do list for years now, and I finally just gave up and sent him the original. An original that I wrote out and didn’t even read back through after writing it.
I don’t know if I ever read it all the way through after writing it until today–after I sent it to him. 🙃
I don’t think I’m ever going to actually rewrite it. Maybe…
I think what I’m actually going to do is just go back through it, cleaning up the typos and errors, and changing the formatting (paragraph structure) and adding emojis that fit my style of writing that I don’t think even existed nearly 20 years ago when I wrote it.
But I’m going to leave all the actual content the same, so it’s authentic to the original writing.
Reading through it today, I could tell exactly where I would do paragraph breaks and add emojis that I feel like I can tell I would have added had they existed or if I had known how to add them in Microsoft Word?
Anyway, it was cool to read through the story again.
Was quite an experience, and I’ll have it up online for y’all to read if you’re interested in a few days or so, probably.
When Heather and Hans got home, I wandered outside as we all looked at the drying hole together. I also talked to them a little bit about Zorra and that experience.
While Heather and Hans worked on trimming Rivers hooves, I brought Fiona out to munch on some grass and listened to scriptures as she munched.
Heather made a super tasty dinner, and we all chatted and laughed.
Good stuff. 😊
As I worked more on my file sorting project, I came across lots of different memory files and pictures and videos and spent some time reminiscing.
Life is so short.
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 