Real life interlude

So two things in the real world have had me kinda spaced the past few days, which could certainly (along with my oft-proven donkey status) have contributed to my dismal poker results this week.

1) After some nervous moments with Amazon.com and UPS, Christmas is officially back on! My packages arrived at the office 30 min. ago, so now I can actually give my wife her Doris Day Collection DVD set and the entire series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I ordered for her. I was sweating this whole shipping thing pretty hard, since buying all those things over again locally would have put a crimp in the financials.

2) Well, the good news is...it's not cancer. The bad news is, I'm going down to Rock Hill, SC (less than an hour from here, where I went to college) this afternoon to sit with two of my nieces while my sister has hip surgery. Apparently the ball portion of her femur has died. There is no blood flowing into that portion of the bone, so the doctors are going to drill through her femur in an attempt to reach good marrow and spur blood flow back into the dead portion of the bone. If it works, great! We get to do the same thing with the other leg next year. If it doesn't, then it's hip replacement surgery. Apparently this is a condition typically found in alcoholics (nope), long-term steroid abusers (nope) or people with bone cancer (no, thank Jebus, but we didn't kow that until Tuesday, so it's been a tense week). So we don't know how or why this happened to Bonnie, but hopefully it'll all get fixed this afternoon.
It's a surgery with a high success rate, and I'm sure it will all be fine, but this has dredged up plenty of unpleasant memories of her husband's death 10 years ago, so it's a little discomfiting to say the least. She's the sibling I'm closest to, despite the 17-year difference in our ages (she's 49), and the thought of anything going wrong just absolutely wrecks me. BUT, I'm going down to sit with her girls so that they don't get all hysterical (not that much keeps Jessica from getting hysterical), so I get to pour my fears out onto my imaginary internet friends (phrase copyright SheVerb) and otherwise bottle that shite up around the family. I'll post an update tomorrow or the next day.

Peace.