Another Christmas in the books. I hope y’all had a nice day. My wife gave me the opportunity to opt out of visiting the in-laws, but being the magnanimous guy I am, I decided to pull on a pair of shoes (doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a painful process at the moment) and go along. It was only for pound cake, pumpkin pie, and water (I declined my mother-in-law’s rather insistent – incessant, even – offers to dump rum on the cake; not only was I driving, but I don’t really like rum). Other than my father-in-law becoming somewhat morose, it was a fairly painless experience).

I’m sitting here at work right now (Wednesday has to be the all-time crappiest day of the week to have x-mas on) and even though I’m not really one of these Christmas-type people (never was the same after my dad died, and once my mom was gone I pretty much lost all interest), I can’t think of anything more depressing than working on the day after Christmas. Fortunately, I think the rest of the world is off today, so hopefully everybody will leave me the hell alone.

At least I’m not hung over this morning. Now that I’ve read that beer is particularly bad for gout (which is the diagnosis I’m going with for my foot), I suppose I need to quit drinking it – at least until my foot stops hurting. All work and no beer makes me a very unhappy boy.

The pain has now mostly moved to about the middle of the outside of my foot. Since there’s no joint there, I’m assuming this is due to the swelling. I read that baking soda is good for neutralizing the uric acid, so I’ve been taking that several times a day. We’ll see how that goes. Of course, the sodium is bad for the high blood pressure so I’m taking magnesium for that and drinking lots of water. I also read that coffee is good (keeps the kidneys flowing), so I’ve upped my intake to two cups a day (depending on what you consider a “cup” – my mug is about 14 oz, so two of those).

Oh well, back to work, I guess.