Oh, Dorothy! How awful!

Some 30 years ago, I broke my left ankle while getting out of the car in an icy parking lot. Four years later, I broke the right one in an incident eerily similar to what you suffered. I'm sure you have received loads and loads of good advice already, but here comes my two cents: don't be in any hurry to put weight on the recovering joint.

The routine task I found most difficult was cooking: as long as I was on crutches (ten very long weeks), all I could do was stand at the stove and stir -- fetching and carrying were not possible. Number two was bathing: getting in and out of the bathtub required a fair amount of upper-body strength and no little skill.

But you're right about the decluttering effect. When you can't, you can't, and that's that. I'm sure Roger's cooking skills will meet the need, and I hope you're better than I was about nagging from the sofa.

Our carpenters have finished their work and I paid them on Friday, thus decluttering our bank account of a substantial sum. Now we wait for Himself's all-important meeting with the Release Section at National Defence Headquarters, when he gets the all-important Relocation Package and we find out precisely what the Crown pays for -- and what it doesn't.

If this move is anything like what we went through before, it would be best if we shed as much stuff now as we can. When the packers come and the house is full of cardboard and newsprint, we will quickly lose track of what is where -- that is, if we ever have anything resembling track. I look around the cellar and despair; some of the boxes down there were packed 25 years ago, when my father died, and haven't been touched since except to shift them from his cellar to mine. There are also three cartons of cassette tapes (we don't even own a cassette tape player any more) and two milk crates full of ancient, battered LPs. I can't remember the last time we cranked up the turntable that is still hooked to our stereo, but Himself would weep real, salt tears if I proposed parting with them.

Oy, veh.