This morning I woke (before 5:00) to rain.  We haven't seen that here in a long time, but since we are getting irrigation tonight it came as no real surprise.... <g>

Soon I will get to work this morning binding.  While I always enjoy the handwork part (and finished the first one last evening) I can't continue on the rest of the set until I attach their bindings (by machine) to them.  Just waiting until my coffee kicks in!

Alex popped over last night for a late dinner (when Tom had made our dinner he whipped up a couple of extra burritos for Alex) and ended up helping me with an external drive he'd bought for my previous laptop but which I'd never used.  Today he's going to help me with the external CD reader that arrived on Monday (but which I haven't even taken out of the box!)

I'm looking forward to having laptop access to ALL my digital photos!

Alex is also going to come over this evening for the first candle.  

His gift from me will definitely come in handy when he heads up to Flagstaff this weekend to snowboard, when (after this current storm front) conditions should be considerably better than his first trip of the season a couple of weeks ago.

I, of course, received MY gift from him early - and have been enjoying it.   

I've finished all ten episodes of the 4th season of The Crown, and last night watched part of the first episode of the docu-series The Surgeon's Cut.

As unlikely as it sounds, “The Surgeon’s Cut” is really about artists. Their métier may be on the margins of medical science—heart transplants, brain surgery, liver grafting, procedures inside the womb—but their personalities are as large, singular and even eccentric as the most “creative” individuals. They possess the same kind of vision and the same kind of drive. What they manage to do is create miracles. 

Documentaries often succeed, rightly or wrongly, on the basis of how sympathetic their characters are. Each of the principals in “The Surgeon’s Cut” could be reciting an actuarial table and still be fascinating, but the things that they do explain, in clean, uncluttered fashion, are almost otherworldly. Kypros Nicolaides, the star of episode 1 “Saving Life Before Birth", is based at King’s College Hospital in London, where one of his specialties is endoscopic laser surgery on fetuses suffering “twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome”: One twin is getting too little blood, which means it is not developing; the other is getting too much, which means a strain on its heart. What Dr. Nicolaides does—through a lens we get to share—is breathtaking, and nerve-racking and not always 100% successful. But the efforts are, by definition, heroic. Likewise, Dr. Nicolaides.