Please forgive the bad paraphrasing of Dolly P's famous song from the movie, but today I finally got a full eight hour day. Not complaining, in fact when things are slow I would much rather be occupied for a half day than bored for a full one, it's just that over Christmas it's nice to get a few extra buckazoids to pay for the orgy of gift giving.

I started this morning still trying to get over the affects of the anaesthetic they gave me yesterday. Normally I have very little after affects but this time the anaesthetist saw that my heart rate had dropped to 30 beats per minute and put some special juice that was supposed to pep up the old ticker. I wish he'd asked me since as both a diver and runner my resting heartbeat can get down to 20 or so, and lying there on the table with happy juice coursing though my veins I couldn't get much more resting. I didn't notice anything at the time but afterwards my mouth felt like Death Valley and Dry Gulch combined. This morning there are still remnants of it. How dry do I mean? Well let's just say that the cookies they gave me in the post op recovery room didn't get much saliva when I was chewing them. In fact, I think my mouth was drawing moisture from the cookies. I had a hell of a time swallowing!

Fortunately we missed the worst part of the storm that has embraced some parts of the Maritimes, missed that is the torrential rain and most of the high winds. What we didn't miss is the storm surge. Adjacent to the apartment building where we have temporary accommodations there is a municipal park called Deadman's Island. This place is the burial ground for the British Naval Prison which used to be where Armdale Yacht Club now makes its home. Normally it is a small cleared area with a memorial and a few bench seats right next to a treed hill where most of the prisoners who died while in custody are buried. Today at high tide plus the surge, the memorial park is under water. If you were sitting in the bench seats your feet would be in six inches of North West Arm. I had commented to Barb only yesterday that the park was beginning to erode and that if they wanted to keep the place they had better truck in some loads of fill.

We are getting the apartment ready for our daughter's visit, cleaning up the office and setting up the inflatable bed so that she'll have a placed to lay her head. She will be arriving after work tomorrow and we'll head out for some last minute Christmas Eve shopping together, she and I. Then it'll be late Christmas Eve supper (we have seafood crepes planned) and donning the Christmas jammies and of to the land of nod to await Saint Nick. I am really excited and looking forward to her visit.