I am out of the cast!  Yesterday Dr.  McInnes removed my cast and replaced it with a "non-walking" boot.  The "non-walking" boot is light and foamy, held on by 5 wide velcro straps.  I'm supposed to wear it when I sleep, but the boot is removable.  I'm supposed to remove it when I wash (yay - I can wash again) and when I'm doing range of motion (non-weightbearing) exercises. 

I washed, scrubbed a month's worth of hardened squamous epithelial cells off my lower left limb, and then moisturized and applied some deep tissue massage, foot reflexology, and foot manipulation.  I feel like I'm almost ready to walk; but I'm supposed to wait another 2 weeks for that. 

It is impossible to determine how much range of motion I've gained at this point because it will take some time for the stiffness to work itself out and all the swelling to disappear, but I'm hopeful.

Seems I can't leave my site alone.  There were so many clean-up and maintenance jobs that I never had time for while I was employed and every time I think I'm done I remember another one I wanted to do.  I re-architected my blog stylesheets (invisible to the average user, but it makes maintaining easier).  I set a javascript for my blog archive table of contents that automatically determines the proper stylesheet (according to current month) when the page gets loaded in a browser. 

I like to give credit where credit is due.  I adapted the javascript I found at www.alistapart.com/articles/alternate.  Thank you! 

I'm currently working on a script to test my links for 404s (file not found), so that I can delete dead links.

I've been installing, uninstalling, and reinstalling ImageMagick for days.  I had it working but it wouldn't work on jpegs.  How stupid is that?  Seems the default ImageMagick package doesn't have built-in jpeg support.  Unfortunately, I haven't gotten it to work since I installed a jpeg package and tried to integrate jpeg support into ImageMagick.  I've check out lots of install tutorials.  Seems lots of people have trouble with it.  ImageMagick is an OLD program.  I've attempted to install it at least 3 times on 3 different systems over the past 10 years. 

I'm hoping for an interview at the UW Genome Department next week.

All I've seen is what is outside my window;  birds.  We've already had some hail and some snow flurries.  Wednesday morning there was persistent frost on the grass, ground, cars.