The glass is. . .

Nero Wolfe says (roughly), "Pessimists have only pleasant surprises, optimists only unpleasant ones." This was one of my mottoes even before I read that the seventh-of-a-ton detective himself believed it. It makes sense, really. My loving spouse accuses me frequently of being a pessimist. I deny it with the all too common response of, "It's not pessimism, it's realism" but he's probably right. Which is why I was surprised this week to be unpleasantly surprised not once, but twice!

First, I didn't think it would take as long as it has for Zaya to recover from his surgery. He's still in a lot of pain as soon as his Tylenol starts to wear off (which is always before I can give him another dose) and we haven't all had a good nights sleep since the surgery. This is day eight. I thought for sure we'd all be better by now. I didn't remember hurting this long, and I was 14 when I had my surgery. My dad had a good point, though. He said, "Well, he's still young enough that he's got nothing to prove, so he's going to cry at a 4 on the pain scale just like he would a 7 or 8." True, true, so I'm trying to adjust my expectations a bit.(Dad's a nurse, hence the numbers.)

My second surprise is my poor little blog. I was so excited when Kilikina told me about bloglines, and I now read about 45 different blogs, some more faithfully than others. I was excited to see that I had 6 subscribers of my own. Now, I see that I've lost a subscriber! I only have 5! It's ridiculous that I should care about that, but I do. It hurts. Of course, I've dropped blogs before when I decided they weren't what I thought they would be, but being the (apparently) arrogant optimist that I am, I was cruelly smitten by that dropped subscriber. The wound is still raw. I have to remind myself that I am writing this blog to let family and friends know about my little family. If other's are bored by that. . .so be it. I have to keep telling myself that. Grandma P, one of my favorite lurkers, is much more important than whoever dropped that line, and faithful Grandma C, who doesn't have a computer, but requests hard copies sent through the snail mail of my posts, is also infinitely more important than my nebulous former subscriber. So there. Everything's fine.

This optimism is hard stuff, though. Whew.