Good Things (and a new book!)

• Tonight my daughter AE sent me this lovely spring picture from Seattle and said she thought of me on her walk. I love daffodils and, even more, love that my eldest daughter thought of me and told me about it!

• The RA pain that surprised me this week depressed me at its return. I took this as a lesson from God to see how easily I can fall into either/or (good/bad) thinking--as I succumbed to imagining I'd be saddled with RA pain and would not be able to do my shoulder exercises and thus would get more disabled. Fortuitously, the bi-weekly Humira shot did its magic a few days after its intake. I am lucky that the medicine is still working in my body, which gave me the relief to realize that I tend to fall into disaster-thinking and should instead appreciate the day at hand.

• The worst day of pain was re-aligned in my mind by a phone call from eldest son DC. He called to tell me that his daughter Avery had seen my picture on my blog and said "Nana" for the first time (for me)! He kept asking her who the picture was, and she continued to repeat "Nana" much to my joy.

• I just read a really good book that I consider to be better than The Hunger Games. It is The Passage by Justin Cronin, who is an English professor at Rice University in Houston, TX. He is going to be the speaker at the Corpus Christi Literary Reading Series next weekend, which is why I purchased the book in the first place. A friend told me it was about "vampires," which made it sound like sensationalism. That could be a description of the evil forces that come about through a South American virus, but it is more a tale of redemption. It is 700+ pages long and is the first in a planned trilogy in a dystopian USA. I liked it even better when I read the interview with the author at the end of the book.