Things I'm thankful for

The lump was nothing.
My little sister sits at the confluence of two family lines of breast cancer. On the plus side, it has yet to kill any of our forebears; our two grandmothers survived long enough to die of basic old-people diseases, and this October will mark our mom's 20th cancer-free year. So when my sister found a lump in her breast this week, she had legitimate cause for concern. Fortunately, she and I are of the Jake School of Worry, which dictates that we not waste time dwelling on potential bad news until it becomes actual bad news. I don't talk about it much, but we're a lumpy people anyway; I have six pilar cysts on my head that are nowhere near as grotesque as the ones in these pictures (mine are more like nipples—worthless Barbie-size head nipples that don't even do nipple-like things like alert me when it's cold out). Anyway, when my sister found a lump in her breast earlier this week, she calmly went in for a detailed checkup. And then calmly emerged with a clean—albeit slightly lumpy—bill of health.

The glove was found.
The fiancé was in scenic Islip, New York, early this week, so he took a train into Manhattan to see The Farnsworth Invention. By the time he left the theater, he discovered he'd lost his glove somewhere. He called me all forlorn and glove-bereft to tell me about it on his trudge back to Union Station. And then he called me half an hour later from the train to say he'd found his glove. He'd randomly entered the same car on the same train to get himself home, and his glove was actually still sitting on the seat where he'd left it.

It was only a flesh wound.
I was cutting some crusty bread for dinner a few nights ago with my freshly sharpened bread knife when whoops! I sliced right into the top of my thumb and across my thumbnail. It didn't bleed much, but it hurt like a Romney presidency. Once we determined the gash wasn't an immediate threat to my career as a hitchhiker or a concert pianist, we put a bandage on it and ate the part of our dinner that didn't have any blood on it. And now that the pain is gone, I'm mostly concerned about my sliced-up thumbnail catching on things until it grows out. So I'm still wearing a bandage, which is so bulky it's wreaking havoc on my typinb.