It feels like we’re at a transition point here, both in the tone of this journal and in the rhythm of Team Anderson’s day-to-day life.  I think we’re moving away from the tense, frightening roller coaster we’ve been on lurching from one crisis to the next and we’re entering the phase of just getting on with life and exploring the new normal.

Yesterday really was a good day.  It’s hard to overstate how uplifting it was to realize I could recognize those cormorants at that distance.  And today was a good day too, but in a much quieter, more mundane way.  It’s the most normalish day we’ve spent together in at least two weeks.  There’s less news to report today, which all in all is a good thing.  I’m reporting it anyway though, because we want to remember and because it’s such good self-therapy for me.

The day begins with the same basic routine: first breakfast with the meds, walk to Caffe Umbria, have coffee and quiche while I write up the second post of the day - because actually my day began around 2 AM when I woke up, couldn’t get back to sleep, and decided I might as well hide out in the bathroom and write up Friday, the day of my first walk along the river and the ophthalmology appointment.

My vision is a tad worse when I walk to the coffee shop this morning, but I don’t feel alarmed this time.  It’s feeling more like a recognizable pattern than a real ebbing so I don’t read anything into it for now.

Coffee comes, coffee goes, and then I head back to the apartment.  It’s a more typical day for one in December in Portland, meaning that rain is projected throughout and there’s no real prospect for another walk along the river.

It’s not long after I return before it’s time for Rachael to pick up the phone and WhatsApp Susan for a three-way extended chat with her in North Carolina and Suzanne and Janos in Germany.  It is so great to hear everyone’s voices and to share this experience.  We really do have to start picking up the phone and reaching out more often.  We enjoy an extended, wide-ranging conversation with so much to cover - their lives, our current drama, plans for the coming year, hopes for the future.  Personally, we’re still holding out hope that we’ll be able to make it to that penciled in reunion in Annecy in May we’ve been planning on; though of course we aren’t close to knowing enough yet to do anything more than speculate and imagine the possibilities.

The rest of the day is pretty humdrum, in a good way.  Rachael makes it to a workout at 24 Hour Fitness, the same gym just two blocks away that she went to for years when we lived here.  She’s well received, enjoys her workout, and will return tomorrow.  Normal.

After her workout she walks over to Whole Foods to pick up some items that arrived at the Amazon Lockers (with apologies to everyone who thinks we shouldn’t be giving another damn red cent to Jeff Bezos, a sentiment I whole-heartedly endorse).  She brings home a case and screen saver for my new phone, a portable CD player so we can start getting some music into our lives, and an important device that’s more or less an item for the hope chest for now: a mount for my Varia rear radar light, so that if and when I start biking again I can use the Varia to warn me of overtaking traffic on my blind side.

And then we head over to the storage unit - an easy trek, because it’s immediately across the street from us.  We return with a few dozen discs we haven’t heard for a long time - Gorka, Kaplansky, Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer, Bill Evans, the Bach cello concerti, a real hodgepodge (but no Bartok, Frank).  Also with a box of old photos that I’ll start culling through on rainy days to see if there’s anything I want to work with.

Later on I’ll get a comment from Jacquie whining that the last entry was just too dark and depressing, so I feel bad and decide to write my third post of the day (Solstice) to shed some light on the saga.

And that’s the day really.  There is one more thing to take note of though - the state of my essentially blind right eye, the hallucination generator.  One thing is that the hallucinations have virtually stopped and aren’t really a problem any longer.  The last time they created a real disturbance was when waiting in the check-in line at the airport Thursday.  So that’s a welcome change.

The other thing though is that some sort of very slow, nearly insignificant change is happening.  I haven’t really talked about this before, but even at its darkest it’s never gone completely lights out.  There have always been a few spots, mostly far off at the periphery, where if I wiggled my fingers I could just see a faint, very blurry outline of part of my hand. 

But that’s changing.  Now there are a few more areas where I can make out the outline of my hand, even to the extent that in a few spots I can almost count the fingers.  Today though, when I look at my hand there’s more.  I can make out the blurry outline of my forearm beneath it, propping it up; and lower down I can just make out the bend in my elbow and barely tell the difference between whether my upper arm is covered by my blue t-shirt or my orange rain jacket.  Barely.  Who knows what this means or may lead to, but it’s definitely different.