Today’s review is of Mollie Katzen’s Recipes: Soups. It’s good, but it didn’t bowl me over. Which is too bad, because it’s exactly the kind of food I could use right now.

Sorry for so few reviews, posts, visits to other folks’ blogs, etc. this week. It’s been a very low-energy week. I finally saw the gastroenterologist yesterday, and he basically told me this: yep, looks like my gallbladder is slowly deteriorating and on its way out. But until a test like the HIDA scan or ultrasound shows that unequivocally (the HIDA results were borderline), a surgeon won’t be willing to take it out. So in the meantime, we try a few drugs that probably won’t do much but might if I’m lucky, and mostly we wait until my gallbladder gets bad enough that tests aren’t equivocal and a surgeon will take it out.

As the doc said, “welcome to 2007.”

On the one hand, I’m glad to have surgeons be a bit conservative, and not want to just open patients up and take out our innards at the drop of a hat. Every time we go under anaesthesia and they open us up there’s some risk, even if the procedure is incredibly minor, like this one. However, when they know a certain set of symptoms and test results mean they’ll have to do it eventually, then I can’t help thinking delaying is mostly about insurance: i.e., they won’t do the procedure unless they can prove to insurance they had to. Which means that in the meantime, I have pain and nausea.

*grumble, grumble*

Well, at least it’ll force me to eat a very low-fat diet, because damn do I hate nausea with a passion.

Anyway, I am aware that most of the site (the regular pages, rather than the blogs) is inaccessible right now. Unfortunately I need to wait for Jeffrey to get home from work to do anything about it if it doesn’t recover on its own. In the meantime, I can distract you with the rather hysterical shirt design Jervis came up with:

Level 70 Hottie

Also, since most of our old WoW guild has kind of died away until nearly all that’s left in terms of active players are a bunch of us who all know each other in real life, Jervis decided it was time to just go form our own guild, so we could have a guild vault and all that fun stuff. I don’t know who suggested it, but somehow we ended up with a guild name of “Innocent Bystander.” I find it incredibly funny to have that under my character names!

Since I’ve been so low-energy this week I’ve been playing around in the Pirates of the Burning Sea open beta. I love that game, and look forward to perhaps writing something of a review of it. I adore playing around with the economy. Wealth is your friend. Of course, going out and pirating merchant ships is an awful lot of fun too…

Oh, and I almost forgot. Apropos of nothing, you’ll need a whole box of tissues for this story.

We were taken by surprise when our Level 70 Mom design turned out to be the runaway success of this year’s holiday season at our Cafepress store; we made it in time for Mother’s Day this year, but apparently the winter holidays are seeing a big resurgence in love for moms. We quickly designed a Level 70 Dad design to go with it. When that proved popular as well (apparently all the cool parents are wearing gamer gear this year!) we knew we had to branch out a bit. You guys sure do keep us busy! First, for married couples, the 70 Husband and 70 Wife designs (hmm, I guess since my husband helped to come up with this idea it would probably be anticlimactic to get him one of these for his holiday present; back to the drawing board!).

[Urk. Brief pause to convince my cat to stop stepping on the mouse button. Devil-kitty indeed.]

And finally, the 70 Boyfriend and 70 Girlfriend designs:

In unrelated news, today’s book review is of the Red Lion Inn Cookbook, Third Edition. It’s one of the major books that provided the recipes for our Thanksgiving feast. Enjoy!

Afterword: You know, there’s something wrong with a day in which I get most of my major productivity done before 6 am. Not that I’m complaining about being productive, mind you.