Some mornings, you sign in to IRC and get the sense that it's going to be one of THOSE days:

[09:03]    * esmerel-laptop rocks in the corner, gibbering. *
[09:06]    * neclimdul sips his coffee and stares at the screen blankly *
[09:35]    walkah: Vertice: whores? where!?

Dear Jeff ...

I don't chronicle your week-by-week progress here. It's hard to explain why. I think it's a combination of protectiveness (of you) and fear (of what the rest of the world will think). I think everyone knows from either reading the teamjeffie updates, or reading between the lines here, that you're lucky to be alive at all. You're lucky to be awake, and breathing, and aware of anything at all.

This has been going on -- for four stinking months:

The infamous thumb brace
by domesticat.

If you're curious, it's De Quervain's tendonitis. If you put your left hand in the position shown in the photo, and pull your thumb in tight against your hand, then you've just made a silly gesture with your hand because someone on a blog told you to do so.

*sheep!*

If you then extend your thumb out to form an 'L' shape, and you want to scream with pain when you do so, you have De Quervain's tendonitis. Congratulations. Now quit doing things that hurt yourself.

Quoting from 'Alabama storytelling legend Kathryn Tucker Windham dies at 93'

"She was an absolute legend," Wayne Flynt, an Alabama historian and professor emeritus at Auburn University, said today. "She was certainly the premiere storyteller in Alabama, and maybe one of the premiere storytellers in the South ... And, of course, she was a bang-up good journalist."

I present Edmund's nonverbal, but very clear, instructions to Jeff:

UPDATE: the project now has its own permanent page at http://domesticat.net/quilts/penrose