My daughter stepped backward into a gap between a step and a closed train door and slipped in, so her foot was really jammed heel first and it tore the tendon. She describes moments later sitting on the sidewalk in agony - I can imagine. And limped the rest of the trip through Italy (her friends have some mobility issues so there was a cane and a pair of walking sticks with the group already. She commandeered the cane for much of the rest of the trip.)

Thought for the day. My smart scale (connected to my Withings Steel HR fitness tracker watch and to MyFitnessPal food tracking app) wished me Happy Birthday. This time I knew better than to snap a photo - last time I tried that I realized that from above my distorted naked self showed up on the shiny surface of the scale around the LCD screen. It also tells me the weather forecast and how many steps yesterday. Over the past six months I've made a concerted effort to lose just over 40 pounds. I'm nearing my goal, but as I do I'm reminded of one of the last conversations I had with my mother before she was in the hospital with metastatic breast cancer. At 75, she had lost weight and was where she had been hoping to be for decades. But I realized soon after that she lost it not through hard work but because of the cancer that was killing her. I will be sure to make my annual physical appointment this year and get whatever battery of tests they recommend just to be sure that I'm still healthy. I'm sure I am, but this idea is occupying some real estate in my brain, so I'll follow through.

My brother is preparing to move away from the Pacific NW and is selling not just his house but many of the contents. We've been talking about methods for sale - I won't use Craig's List any more down here, it's full of crackpots, but he's having pretty good luck with it. He asked about using Facebook Marketplace. I've looked at it on occasion but never participated in any of the sales. Do any of you use that? Does FB take a cut? I suggested he could also join NextDoor, but he'd be a very new person to the list and there just for sales so I don't know if he would be easily able to list because of that.

Finally, it has cooled enough that I'm going to start decluttering some of the pots of plants I managed to keep alive all summer into their target destinations around the yard. It means getting out the tiller in a few areas and working over the soil, pulling the grass rhizomes out, planting and mulching. I'm looking forward to changing the appearance of the front (at least one side of it for now). This is a thing I can do that will be fun for me and make the yard look interesting, and doesn't cost anything since the plants were given to me by friends. I also need to get the limb saw and its long wooden handle and start trimming branches that go into the bulky waste pickup next week. I didn't do that 3 months ago because I was swamped with getting ready for the knee surgery.