Not so fast, Youngquist

In my last post here on Blogger that was much overdue, (the delay was unavoidable due to my having very serious medical complications), which were mostly as a result of my having Neurofibromatosis (NF), part of what I state in this post is, "Depending on the outcome of that appointment, I'm not sure how frequently I'll post but I will begin sharing content re my amazing space and the birds I observe from my window, a nice thing to be able to do when recuperating from foot surgery and a mastectomy."

The appointment I referred to was one with my surgeon who reconstructed my foot this past August. A photo montage atop this post feature my progress. The outcome of that particular doctor's visit indicated this: 

Although I will still have to use a soft-shoe cast, I can now switch out of it and a wear a special sneaker part-time, and if I use a cane I am able to walk outdoors, albeit minimally. I will return to the surgeon in November for X-rays and hopefully bandaging can be removed and restrictions on mobility will be lifted.

Meanwhile, it was my hope and intent to return to posting on this blog after such a long hiatus, however, my pain level was/is making it difficult to work at my desk (or do much of anything else for that matter).

I have found some consolation in reading what Stephen King had to say about his first return to the act of writing in the aftermath of his serious accident.

The following is a scan of a couple of pages from his book, On Writing a Memoir of the Craft.

As you can see some words are highlighted with a pink-colored square, these are the ones that truly struck a chord in relation to my struggle to get back on track with my writing posts for this blog as well as my completing my longstanding book project, Imperfect Strangers.

Nevertheless, in spite of my pain, I have been looking forward to returning to the act of writing.

Like King, I've grappled with emotions in my attempt to do so.

He concluded "The scariest moment is always just before you start."

However, for me, that truism is only part of the scariest moment, for now that I've finally come up with some stamina as well as the wherewithal to work on these projects, other scary moments are occurring: There have been power outages in my vicinity that have caused my computer and phone to crash.

These crashes are frequent. Often when I'm mid sentence while typing, the crashes occur and I am constantly loosing work, even though I save it as I go along.

Therefore in terms of my returning to writing, I sadly need to say to myself, "Not so fast, Youngquist"

and to say to my peeps, I'll be back at it as soon as my foot healing is complete and as soon as Spectrum resolves their every other moment of outages.

I'm far more optimistic re my full recovery than I am about Spectrum resolving their issues.

--------------

Oh my! Just as I was about to publish this piece, I had another "not so fast" moment: I was about to hit the "post now option" when I heard the ever-so distinctive voice of a Northern female cardinal chattering in my garden. 

It's almost as if she was saying, "Not so fast Youngquist in being discouraged, you will be able to create stories about avian creatures again."

She can be seen in the next set of images.

As my readers (if you are still with me through all my disruptions) may recall, a female cardinal (who I named Cam) was the inspiration for my Words In Our Beak  book series.

I am not the only one who found tonight's visit by a female cardinal uplifting, I dare say, a lone pigeon did too, as evidenced by the following pictures.

Maybe she is a great granddaughter of Cam? 

Whomever she is, I'm grateful to have seen her in my midst and I'll end this post by saying, that's it for now dear reader, I'll sign off before another outage occurs.