I sat here staring at the same old wall

And now, my father is back home. He'd got home on Thursday, actually, and I didn't even have to take time off work to deliver him. Instead, my sister, of the saddle and all that, took her afternoon off and picked him up at the rehab clinic. The clinic, after a bunch of final checks and congratulations and accidentally bringing him the wrong breakfast (they discovered the error as they set the tray down), gave him a pamphlet of instructions which he hasn't yet read (he also hasn't read the ones the hospital gave him after surgery), and a balloon, and released him to the winds, or at least the Thai place they got lunch.

According to my father, when he got home the cats spent a few minutes carefully examining my sister and ignoring him. Then the middle cat finally cautiously approached him, and then did her sort of falling-headstand thing on his foot. She's extremely fond of feet, mostly falling over them. Before too long they were using him as the large mattress they like him for.

Here's how glad my father was to be back home: he didn't sulk or grumble once about my WiiFit exercising. My stepping onto and off of the balance board had been the occasion of his grumbling over and over about how I was impossibly distracting to him, and at least for the first day, he wasn't at all upset. (By Saturday he was sighing as if I were greatly inconveniencing him by stepping while he went on watching the evening news.)

He did sulk, in that protest-too-much fashion, about how many phone calls he was getting, although that mostly because we're down to the one working phone and that's put in the least accessible phone jack not actually in my room. The most important one of these calls, though, was from the visiting nurse, setting up the next day's appointment, and there was some talk about whether I needed to pick up prescriptions before going to class on Friday.

Trivia: In April 1471 Louis XI banned the import of spices to France by land. Five years later he rescinded the ban. Source: Gold and Spices: The Rise Of Commerce In The Middle Ages, Jean Favier.

Currently Reading: Binary Star #4: Legacy/The Janus Equation, Joan D Vinge, Steven G Spruill. The editor mentions this is the first time in the book's series that a woman was one of the two writers. I suppose that's not too excessively far into the series to happen. The first Binary Star was one of Fritz Leiber and Norman Spinrad; the second Gordon Eklund and F Paul Wilson; the third Ron Goulart and Isidore Haiblum, and really, if Joan Vinge is to take a backseat to anyone it's Isidore Haiblum.