MONDAY UGHDAY

I'm channeling my inner Stewey today and burrowing under the blankets and staying here for the duration.  I grabbed an open chair time tomorrow at noon, so I'll have a Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday  treatment schedule this week because the thought of having to go to dialysis today was more than my poor little brain could handle.

My appointment with the surgeon this morninig went about as well as it could have. He took one look at Buzzy and scheduled me for revision surgery on January 15. The problems I've been having with him (Buzzy, that is) are the result of a huge aneurysm that has developed, as well as complications from the stents and coils and angioplasty that have been done to maintain good access. It feels very much like a Sharks and Jets kind of thing between the surgeon and the interventional radiologists and my dialysis team, but I trust that the advice I got to have revision surgery is sound...so off I will go.

I spent about five minutes on the car ride home bawling my eyes out over this turn of events, but now I think a little time in the cube room studio and Happy Chair today will make it all better.  I suppose that I am being overly dramatinc, but every now and then the wave of crap coming my way is bigger than normal, so I need a minute to re-group, hitch up my socks, and ride it out.

Today is a day for that.

I did go to bed at a decent hour last night, but ended up awake and pondering the damn Greek cookie situation. I watched a couple of YouTube videos with various and sundry YaYas (Greek for Grandmother) making them, and I think I have concluded that it is the mixing method that I'm using that's the problem, as well as a flour issue. Stitchy friend Amanda alerted me to the fact that the nice people at Swan's Down have changed the amount of flour that they put into a box (can you believe that she was nice enough to research that for me?!), and in all the videos I watched, there wasn't a Kitchenaid stand mixer in sight. Just a big huge bowl and a sturdy YaYa mixing the ingredients by hand.

Come to think of it, I never actually saw my mom MAKE these damn cookies. I only saw her enjoying one or two with her cup of coffee in the morning at Christmas and Easter time.

Wait a minute.

You don't think that somebody else made the damn Greek cookies and sent them to her, do you?

(Pause for pondering...)

With my stupid luck, my Aunt Mary actually made these damn cookies each year and sent them to my mom. For all I know, the handwritten recipe that I have used and cherished all these years was not, in fact, a treasured family secret, but rather something Mom found on the back of a box of Swan's Freaking Down cake flour.

(More pausing to question everything in life...)

My Dad's cookies will be made on Thursday, and there should be no drama with these whatsoever. There is no treasured family secret handwritten recipe for these because they were sent to him by Minnie Vacario...a neighborlady from Bellefontaine, Ohio. Mrs. Vacrio would shape them into our initials and send them in a big tin, and Dad would try to hide them on top of the fridge or tell us that they had "booze" in them so we didn't scarf them down in one sitting.

(OK, by "we", I mean me.)

(And there isn't any booze in them, and I'm pretty sure that once I reached a certain ago that would not have been a deterrent anyway.)

So on Thursday I will happily and calmly make cuccidatti...Italian fig cookies. The inside filling is nuts and orange peel and chocolate, and the outside dough is buttery and lovely. I don't think I will shape them into initils, but rather cut them small enough that one or two doesn't tip the scale any higher than it is now.

On the stitchy front, I am organizing myself for next year already. I have this bright idea that I am going to go back to the beginning of this here blog and write down what I was stitching each month every year and if it's not finished...finish it. So in January, I will make a list of all of the stuff I was stitching in Januarys from 2009 to 2018 and that will be my January basket for 2019. If I stitched it but put it in the box, maybe I'll dig it out and finally get it finish-finished or framed.

We'll see.

Well, Dearies...I've blathered on long enough. Time to get on with my TLC day. Methinks three or four hours of Outlander or a nice long nap (or both) should do the trick quite nicely, followed by a good healthy dinner and some peppermint ice cream for dessert.

(Provided, of course, that I can haul myself over to the Martin's for the ice cream!)

Happy Ughday! I hope your week ahead is swell and that you'll come tell me all about it!