I saw my surgeon last Thurs and am finally scheduled in to have it opened up and fixed -- but not till Mar. 28th. That leaves me with almost 2 more months of pain and reduced mobility (plus another month or so afterwards). A little Googling showed me that patellar clunk syndrome, which sounds all too bizarre, actually occurs in about 4% of TKR patients and it caused by a build up of scar tissue on the back of the patella. That part is easily fixed. Of course we don't know what went wrong to begin with, but my rheumatologist figured it out in 15 minutes yesterday. I hadn't really liked her after the avuncular manner of my previous dr, but she proved with her knee assessment and willingness to do battle with the pharmacy gods that she is good. My GP has gone away for 2 weeks without notice, and I was reluctant to try and explain my need for drugs to a stranger at his clinic, so I asked my rheumatologist if she'd do it, which would also save ma a wait in the clinic. She got me my scripts and saved me another painful outing. I've ordered groceries delivered today becaus I just couldn't face pushing a trolley (shopping cart) around the supermarket.

Sort of a book report: I started as my new BBBB Angel in the Whirlwind by Benson Bobrick to get a fresh course on Revolutionary America. I had to put it aside because his description of colonial era American did not match what I knew from my own genealogy. It was the same "the settlers came and settled" and even that there was not much interaction between colonies. I now know that between arrival at Plymouth and the revolutionary war my ancestors moved from Massachusetts to Rhode Island to Connecticut to New York and up the Hudson. Maybe the various governments didn't converse but the people were on the move. I've tracked one line back to the early Dutch settlement of Albany which is about as "ethnic" as my tree gets. From my grandfather's WWI draft registration, I found he worked for a company which made machinery for the newfangled cardboard boxes that were replacing wooden boxes. From his WWII draft registration I found he never became an American citizen but remained Canadian. How he got from Canada to Michigan and why he sold the farm in Michigan and moved to Niagara Falls, NY, is still a mystery. Before I came to Australia and honed my ear to new dialects of English, I would have said Canadians sound just like Americans. Now I hear differences in my surgeon (he's Canadian) and on TV. I watched a doco on David Thompson who explored and mapped the western half of Canada and realized how much Americans don't know about Canada. Since I'm carrying a few drops of Ontario blood, I should learn some more.

New BBBB: Deluxe by Dana Thomas about the popularizing of luxury brands. Non-bedtime reading is Michael Connolly's The Reversal on my Kindle and Ken MacLeod's Newton's Wake, where I am sounding out Glaswegian in the far future.

In typical Aussie weather behavior we went from 38C to 9c in a week. My poor tomato plants!