Kage Baker would have been delighted. Friday the 13th, no matter what it’s historical overtones in general, was always first and foremost a Walt Kelly day with us. Having it fall on an actual Friday was always therefore a mark of good luck in our personal liturgical calendar – all the Freemasons in the family notwithstanding.

I am taking it as a good omen, certainly, what with surgery waiting on the other end of this three-day weekend. The fact that Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a double good thing for me this year – it means that Kimberly will be off work and not have to take a day off  or scramble in order to get me to the hospital. Her husband and son will also be off from their respective schools, and the whole enterprise will be much easier for her.

It’s the folks waiting, the support crew, that has the worst time of it on occasions like this. Me, I’m gonna sleep through most of it – and even when I do technically wake up, I’m going to be in the Twilight Zone until Tuesday or so. I am confident that I will have no duties more onerous than standing up and walking 10 feet for the next week. Poor Kimberly gets to wait through the surgery (which always takes longer than you think it will) and then deal with me off my head, and anxious friends, and God knows what else afterwards.

I at least had company for Kage’s surgery. The ever-lovely Neassa was with me, keeping me sane. I know we ate something – I don’t remember what. I know I had a book – I don’t remember what that was, either. And I know I knitted, making so many errors in my increasing hysteria that the garment was never finished. And it never will be, unless I am moved to rip out most of the back and start over …

This time, I have no worries.

Neassa has sent me a gorgeous box full of entertainments, though, for my hospital stay. A book, and licorice, and a stag mobile (stags are special to me), and a string of amazingly lovely batter-operated lights shaped like dragonflies! I love special lights, and tend to decorate wherever I am with them: these will cheer me up no end. When Kage was ill, I put pirate ship models strung with lights in her room – these dragonflies will adorn my desk, visible from my bed while I recuperate.

In many ways, I am having a pretty good time. And I mean to squeeze all the entertainment I can out of this, too. If attitude really does have an effect on one’s healing, then I am set. I’ve got attitude to spare.