Three Beautiful Things 11-08-20: Brief Everett Update, Family Dinner Postponed, ZOOM and So Much to Read

1.  Christy talked with Everett's nurse this evening. I have no significant changes to report. Everett is alert. He's cooperating with the medical staff. His team doubts he'll need surgery. His CAT scan results are still pending. He continues on a liquid diet. So far, there is no news about when Everett might be released from Kootenai Health. 

2. In preparation for family dinner, I baked cornbread, not in a pan or a skillet, but as muffins -- they aren't cornbread muffins, per se, but regular cornbread baked in a muffin tin. Later, Christy contacted Carol and me to say she needed a day of rest and asked if we could postpone family dinner. It turned out that Paul, also, was feeling a little scratchy.  We agreed. We hope to get together next week. I talked with Christy this evening by phone, and already she was feeling better thanks to just stopping, getting some more sleep, and taking it as easy as possible. 

3. Val, Colette, Bill, Diane, and I gathered around our ZOOM machines at 2:00 and talked about a wide array of things. Foremost on our minds was the presidential election and we all articulated our hopes for what a change in leadership means to us and our country right now and what we hope for as time moves along. It was a lot of fun to listen to each other's perspectives, whether historical, religious, political, mythological, or psychological. In time, our attention moved to poetry, the power and even the elusiveness of poetry. As a group, we are building a bibliography of books and other sources we mention to each other. I'm very grateful for this. Often when our once every two weeks conversation ends, I haven't taken notes and I don't remember the books, lectures on video, articles, and other fascinating sources of insight and pleasure we all mention. 

I closed out the night by reading another chunk of The Pillars of the Earth. I'm within a hundred pages of finishing this novel and I'm curious what threads Ken Follett will tidy up and which will be left untied and developed further in the next installation of his Kingsbridge series. I catch myself wondering at what point I'll continue reading his series when I finish this book.  I have other books in mind to read next, shorter ones, both fiction and non-fiction. I'm not quite sure how I'll plan this out. 

And then movies. . . I haven't watched a movie for too long. . . I'll never figure out how to fit it all in!