Thanks - right now, it's bandaged so completely that I'm not feeling any pain. Just frustration at my slow typing. I'm going to change the bandage later, to something less cumbersome. We'll see if I can balance typing facility with freedom from pain.

Oh lord, that sounds horrible! I've tried working with voice dictation (Dragon Naturally Speaking), and even though it was pretty good, I'm so used to working fast and essentially "thinking" with my fingers first (and not my brain, which could lead to a lot of jokes, but I digress) that voice dictation didn't help me with fic writing.

I'm glad you're largely back to fighting weight, as it were, but the fact that you still have problems from time to time sucks.

I know I shouldn't get all weepy about something like this, and I guess it's just a bit irrational to apologize. Everything you say is absolutely right, and I still feel awful about it. But at least admitting that I'm not apt to be successful at fic-writing helps a bit. (And right now, I don't even have the spoons to look for lovely pictures to make holiday greetings or IOUs, or hunt down nice recipes for people.)

But you have a point about belated stocking stuffers. Maybe that's the way for me to go.

I'm actually working on a second story today - I don't know how in the world my mind works. But I'm going to relax about it.

Thanks to immediate cold water treatment, the burn appears to be reasonably in hand. It's the damned bandage that's bothering me now (every time I try for an "e" or a "u" I get an added "r" which is Making. Me. Crazy.

I know folks are extremely understanding, (Hrm...didn't I aim that sort of message at you last year? And didn't you respond pretty much the way I'm doing? Still, you're absolutely right, and I need to cool the frak out.

*Hugs right back*

Kisses are always appreciated, especially today (Tuesday), which sucked big-time.

Yesterday was a day in phone-call hell, about my health care prescription plan. I am not kidding when I say I spent four hours of the day on the phone to three separate entities trying to straighten out a problem. By the end of the day, all I'd learned was that many people in the company had run into the same problem on the same day, and they were working to fix it.

In the meantime, however, BB couldn't renew his pain medication prescriptions, because the pharmacy, like me and like all my unfortunate colleagues, couldn't reach the entity that handles prescriptions for our company.

Yeah, not a great day, so all the kisses and hugs are much obliged.

Glad you got the card! Apply as necessary, baby animules and all!

Things got about 75 percent better (we still have one technological problem to surmount) but it took a fair amount of pressure and phone calls to get things done. And today, I'm still adulting like crazy today, but I may also be able to relax a little and enjoy the rest of the weekend.

I hope so, too. Of course, it doesn't help that my typing has now been affected by this @#$%! burned index finger.

Thanks; maybe I can figure out some late gifts.

One of the problems is that for me, self-care includes writing fic. Yeah, I know; kind of silly (but it's not pathetic, which I might have said a few years ago.) I love writing fic.

How are you? How are your kittehz, and your parental unit?

but at the moment nobody's physically on fire, at least, which is more than could be said for bits of 2016.

Lack of burning humans is to be counted as a positive these days.

And hey, if your Muse is knitting, that's still creative, right?

Ah, fandom_stocking is wonderful; it used to be on LJ, but moved to Dreamwidth a few years ago. It's much smaller than Yuletide, and has much less in the way of structure. It's truly wonderful - you should check it out next holiday season.

You're right about the drabble thing - people write drabbles all the time for the stocking; my problem is that even when I try to write drabbles, they end up, at the shortest, as about 700-1,200 words, and because I'm a glacial writer, that cuts down on my ability to do anything. However, you can stuff stockings with favorite recipes, pictures that the recipient might like, simple good wishes, recs for vids and fics - so that's what I'll probably do!

Heh ... glad to know I'm not the only one! As for the icon, it's absolutely gorgeous, isn't it? Feel free to take it, with credit to the person who made it (I have their name on it in my icon list.