Anyone who follows this blog knows I’m a little late this week. I had planned to have a review of Jeffrey Ford’s new collection,  A Natural History of Hell: Stories. I still plan to get that done, but I hit a bit of a snag. Here’s the deal—Carol and had planned to take a printing class at the Cooperstown Farmer’s Museum last Saturday (they have a cool 19^th c printing press there). We had arrived and were on our way to the printer’s shop when, well, there was an incident.

Long story short, I got dizzy, blacked out and fell on my face on the sidewalk. Carol took a picture in case I ever questioned why she called 911, and I must admit I looked horrible. Worse than usual, even, which is why I’m doing everyone a favor and keeping that picture off the internet. Regardless, I took a ride in an ambulance and spent the next five days in the hospital while the doctors tried to figure out what happened to me.  The consensus is there was no heart attack as such, rather that I suffered an irregular heartbeat that didn’t get enough blood to my brain. So now I’m home with two new pieces of plastic in my heart and a lot of pills. I’m not what I’d call all right, but I should be in time, but I won’t be doing any remodeling for a while. I also discovered something—me and morphine? We don’t get along.

In the fall I also managed to smash my glasses and crack the orbit of my left eyesocket. Fortunately my eyes are okay. I likely won’t be having surgery on the eye, now that I’ll be on blood thinners for at least a year, which makes surgery of any sort problematic, but it should heal on its own. If not, they’ll figure something out.

Not how I planned to spend Saturday. Or the next month or so.