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Well, I broke my foot juggling. Yeah you read that right, I broke my foot juggling.

Here's what happened: We were doing a Shooting Star pattern. That is a 5 person star pattern with only 4 people. When you run out of clubs you run through the middle of the pattern to the gap and start receiving new clubs.

I ran through the pattern one time and as I was turning, my shoe caught on the fabric floor covering— kind of a heavy burlap like material. My foot rotated 90 degrees to the inside and I put all my weight on it. Pop! Not a delightful sound.

Anyway, after a couple of hours of emergency room waiting, I finally got x-rays and it was obvious even to me that a bone was broken. 5th metatarsil, for the morbidly curious out there.

For the even more morbidly curious, I'm going to take a picture of my foot now that it is turning all black and blue, with a fancy racing stripe down the outside and sandal straps across the ankle. Here are the sporty pics.

Just so you know, it didn't particularly hurt, nor does it hurt much now, though I am living on Advil to try to keep the swelling down. The moral of the story is that you can't tell if a bone is broken unless it pierces skin or you feel grinding. Though the livid markings are probably a big clue. So get an X-ray, darn it!

I've been blissfully unemployed for 6 months now, living off savings. There really haven't been a lot of significant events worth noting down. But then I remembered that this isn't Dear Diary.

I've been juggling a lot. I mean it. I'm getting juggling callouses. Some of that is about to end since this is the last week of classes at the University of Colorado and the students that populate some of my groups will be winging it for parts unknown after finals. There is a smaller group of grads that I expect will still meet during the summer, so this isn't going to be total withdrawal.

It just means that I will have more time to actually work on some of those projects that I had queued up from the before time when I was employed. Some time in April I discovered that I had recovered my will-to-work, and could now actually take on a project that required me to make informed decisions again.

My biggest concern right now is that it is allergy season. I did a massive amount of work to unjungle my front yard yesterday and paid for it last night with a 4 am, hour-long sneezing and nose blowing fit. The original plan was to do a similar job to unjungle the back yard today, but frankly, though the nasal spigot is turned off, I currently feel as if I have a huge grain of salt under my right eyelid. I wash my face about once an hour and irrigate that puppy. Then it doesn't bother as long as I strictly avoid touching my eye for any reason.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

He says while managing to stiffle a laugh. I had to stiffle the laugh because it would have triggered a painful coughing jag. Influenza ran roughshod through my family during Christmas. I was the only one sick on Christmas day, but 3 more cases had appeared by Sunday night.

They say that the flu shot can't give you the flu. Probably true. But in my case at least, it activates the same defense reactions as the flu. Thus, I get the sweats and aches and sometimes the headache that I normally associate with the flu. So I tend to avoid flu shots.

But I normally pay attention to the news. In some years, the flu strain is so bad that they hold a second round of flu shots. In these years, I weigh the pros and cons and sometimes decide to take the shot rather than risk the flu.

This year, I got hit by a double whammy. I've been too busy to follow health news. Just too dadblasted much to get done before the end of the year and Christmas vacation and …

So, not only did I miss hearing how serious the flu was doing out in California (where I spent my Christmas), but I was also really beat from long hours at work before vacation.

It's too late to revise my thinking about flu shots for this year. But spending Christmas in a black haze and watching my Mom throw away the vast majority of the turkey, and dressing, and pie, and cookies, etc., just because no one was hungry for 5 days is definitely going to weigh in heavily in the pro column next flu season.