Yep, last day of freedom, and I started it out on the back patio once again. The weather is cool at the moment and mostly overcast but it’s supposed to get up into the 90s by this afternoon. Right now a light breeze is blowing and it feels almost beach-like out here. The air smells WONDERFUL, slightly cedar-scented and a bit damp with maybe just the faintest tang of ocean. I could just park it here for the entire morning, doing nothing more than sucking in lungfuls of air, but that breeze is beginning to feel a bit chill. Maybe I’ll go in and grab a sweater so I can stay out here longer. Really, it reminds me so much of being at the beach! If I close my eyes I can just about convince myself that I’m back in Laguna at our sweet little rental cottage. *Sigh*❤️

Welp, it’s sort of a good thing that I’m going back to the hospital tomorrow. The damage that my feet sustained during my walk a week ago is much worse than I thought at first. Back story: I have bunions on both feet that have been getting progressively worse over the years, to the point now where my big toes are beginning to overlap their smaller neighbors. This makes it a bit of a challenge when wearing closed-toe shoes like trainers. I didn’t think about this much at all when we began our walk but every step I took was causing my feet to slide forward slightly inside my shoes, slamming my big toes into the shoes’ fronts and badly bruising the toenails. By the next morning both big toenails were darkened under the nails, especially the right one. Fast forward to this morning: Umm, it’s getting a bit nasty. The right big toe nail has partly lifted away from the nail bed and I may lose the nail completely. It’s also begun to ooze and the tissue around the nail is a bit reddened and swollen slightly. I’ve been keeping it clean, swabbing it regularly with alcohol and slathering it at night with antibiotic ointment before bandaging it, but more drastic measures may be in order. Yuck. I’m much more susceptible to bruising because of my low platelets and this is probably why I ended up with such messed-up feet. I wish I had thought the whole walk thing through a little more thoroughly. Lesson learned!😔

Yay! Fireflies! I went out onto the back deck at dusk to see if I could spot any of the sweet little winky-butts and they didn’t disappoint, although there weren’t many of them. I know that fireflies are in decline world-wide but we do what we can to try to encourage them to visit our back yard. We NEVER use any sort of insecticide sprays or herbicides and rather than raking up all the leaves when our big oaks get naked in the fall, we let the leaves lie and Rory goes over them with the lawn mower to mulch them into the grass. I’ve heard that fireflies like to lay their eggs in leafy mulch on the ground so I’m hoping that our little resident babies will choose our yard as their nursery.🙏🏻❤️