Dear Friends and Family:

First, we would like to wish you all a very Happy and Healthy New Year. We hope that your holiday season brought you some peace and joy.

Our holidays were spent relatively quietly and were quite nice. We did have a challenging situation on our hands which started two weeks ago today when John had to go to the St. Vincent’s emergency room because the end of one of his residual limbs started spurting some blood. We had not yet had an experience like that and it threw us both for a loop. It turned out that his skin had just been extremely dry and opened up. John thinks that this might have been brought on by a duck hunting expedition he took part in just a day before when it was rather bitter cold out. No ducks were slaughtered, but Mother Nature might have taken a pretty good stab at his leg.

He has been confined to the wheelchair ever since as we wait with great anticipation for new sockets which are being prepared for him. With any luck, we will have them this Friday. There is always a period of adjustment when he gets new anything related to his legs, but it will have to be better than the last two weeks. This period has brought us both back just a bit to the way things were for a very long time in our lives. John’s independence is very important for us both.

In the meantime all else is well. We had some time enjoying the holidays with friends and with Lucinda’s sister.

Lucinda’s job is quite wonderful. Next week she leaves on a 5 cities in 5 days trip and if John is not yet back to snuff we will hire this wonderful woman named Charlie who came in to our lives and who has helped us greatly with trying to keep up with the house. We will rest much better knowing that she is available and close by. It is also a relief to have our friend Paul who is a retired paramedic nearby. He rushed over on Christmas Eve night when John went backwards in his very light weight wheel chair. It’s great that is light weight so that we can each lift it without strain, but that also makes it a bit less stable. All was well that ended well.

Life continues to have ups and downs and sometimes the downs want to knock us both so deeply to the dirt that you think you don’t want to get up again. But you do. And that’s the hokey pokey.

We love all of you,

John and Lucinda