2/3 Alpharetta is like a pedestrian zone, except for cars.

2/2 We’re flying to Atlanta this afternoon so J can spend a few days in the office of her company. I need to be very careful not to carry or lift too much, especially not the wheelchair in and out of cars.

2/1 Back to Manhattan last night, a journey through rain and fog. A journey on which I passed only a single car, which lets me conclude that I was pretty much the slowest on the road. I did ask J to tell me if she felt I was going too fast, and she said yes, actually.

I did too much. I cleaned the apartment by carrying chairs from the living room into the bath room and lifting the sofa table onto the sofa and then setting the robot loose. I also mop-cleaned manually with a broom after I could not get the mop robot to work, and all that was, unfortunately, too much, and my ribs hurt again like a few days ago and I wonder just how much healing I may have destroyed, how many days I’ve thrown myself back.

1/31 I can’t believe how my ribs are proceeding to repair themselves. I’m moving around, I hardly ever spend even a few minutes in the same position, not even while sleeping. The pain seems to limit my range of motion only mildly. And yet the pieces grow back together. It must be a link that is slowly solidifying. Why does this work for ribs, but not arms or legs, which must be carefully aligned and prevented from moving? – It may no longer be an acceptable form of writing to leave a question open like this. You can always ask, and so I do, and I’m told that this is indeed a special ability of ribs. They need to have it, because the rib cage must be flexible for breathing.

1/30 Ride the wave of the painkillers, never let it crash.

1/29 Pain differentiating.

1/28 More knocked out than I wish to admit.

1/27 Okay, two broken ribs. X-ray in the emergency room. The fractures are minimally displaced – which I guess means the ribs will not rejoin completely aligned, which once again begs the question just how long I will continue to need them. – The only thing that really hurts is when I cough. Unfortunately I need to cough pretty much all the time.

1/26 Slipped and fell as I cleaned the bathroom, probably a broken rib. The initial thought, as I slammed my back into the toilet seat, was how good a provision it is to have ribs and that they just did their job, but as I assessed the amount of pain I realized that the ribs may have just done their job by breaking. – The intimacy of someone caring for you when you can’t move.

1/25 I’d need a workflow. I copied the essay from the scan page by page, pasted into a document, fixed the paragraph boundaries, removed the line-end hyphenations. I will have to do an actual read-through to find the characters that were misinterpreted. Then at some point convert into EPUB, run it through a translator. These are all such mechanical, tedious tasks. There ought to be a way to make something take the initiative to translate anything that is in any medium, any language, into anything else. We can’t be far from that.