April is for Drowning in Paperwork (and Apparently, Everything Else)

Two years ago today, I loaded up my car with Lucy, Daniel, and what I can only assume was an unreasonable amount of optimism, and drove across the country from California to Wisconsin. Yes, Wisconsin. People questioned my sanity. I questioned my GPS. But here I am — thriving in a single-story, zero-threshold home where my knees and I have reached a fragile peace agreement.

Speaking of knees: that agreement has been violated.

Three weeks ago, I strapped on skis for my 47th year of pretending I'm still 30. Four days on the slopes. Four days of skiing with legs as straight and stiff as pool cues because bending my knees had simply stopped being an option my body offered. When I finally hobbled into my orthopedic surgeon's office, the x-rays told a story so dramatic it deserved its own true crime podcast. Bone on bone. A bonus bone spur. Arthritis glowing white on the screen like a haunted house. The surgeon's face said it all.

So! One knee replacement in May, another in June. I've essentially scheduled myself for a two-month renovation project — except I'm the house.

The cruelest irony is that I've done everything right. Les Mills Body Combat four times a week. A personal trainer twice a week. My legs are genuinely muscular and capable, piloting around a pair of joints that have simply given their notice. It's like having a Ferrari engine bolted to a wagon with square wheels.

In tech disaster news: I got a new Mac in January. Transferred 28 books to it. Reformatted the old one. Then — in a move future historians will cite as a cautionary tale — I wrote down my new password incorrectly, lost everything, and now I’m spending the better part of my sanity converting Amazon PDFs back into Word documents and scrubbing out the digital gibberish the conversion leaves behind. All 28 books. I have learned. I have grown. I am backing up everything to OneDrive and possibly also carving it into a stone tablet.

On the bright side, my new novel Harbour of Lies is coming along — slowly, in the way that pantser novels do when you've introduced all your characters but have absolutely no idea who killed whom or why. Classic. I'm racing to get it to my editor before surgery turns my brain into warm pudding.

Dewey on Gotcha Day

And because apparently I make bold life choices in clusters, I adopted a rescue dog the same day I got my surgery news. His name is Dewey — yes, after the Dewey Decimal System, because I am exactly that kind of author and he came with that name. He's 1.5 years old, 73 pounds, and currently convinced that the safest place in the world is directly against my legs. We are working on this. A walker with wheels and a seat is arriving Friday. I have sent away for his DNA results, because understanding his breed mix is the difference between "quirky couch companion" and "instinctual prey-stalker" — a lesson my late Doberman/Boxer Daniel taught me thoroughly.

If you've survived a knee replacement solo, I'd genuinely love your wisdom. I'm doing this as an outpatient, fiercely protective of my independence, and operating on the theory that if I once managed a cast on both my right arm and leg while living alone, I can handle this. Dewey may complicate the physics. But we'll figure it out.

Cheers, Alec