Thank you

And to all of you who are lighting candles and beating drums and warming up the prayer circles and, I dunno, dancing naked under the full moon, we are an equal opportunity crew around here.

To each and every one of you who has thought of Nel kindly during this time:

Thank you. She is simply thrilled at the thought of all those candles over the entire world going up for her. Such a bonfire of thoughts and good wishes for Our Nel, it is overwhelming and joyful.

The surgery will be on Friday starting at about 10 am ish our time (so 4 in the morning EST if you guys have gone over to DST by now). It should go on for 4 to 8 hours, they won't give a better estimate than that. But as you might imagine we are rather hoping for longer rather than shorter. A short operation will mean that they were unable to get all the cancer and in that case they will out in a sort of shunt to get the bile into her digestive system and out of her bloodstream and then close her back up. So we want a really, really long one.

We are so Catholic. Both of us. We both immediately said something like this --So at three o'clock they should just about be putting you back together, what a good sign.*

Then we laughed our butts off. You really can take the girl out of the church but you can't.....

*For the not-Catholics out there: three o'clock is the traditional moment when Christ dies on the cross. A moment of silence and reflection is traditionally observed. It is the momnent when, according to an old hymn, sunset first begins to turn to sunrise -- the movement of time and focus from the privation and reflection of Lent to the joy and celebration of Easter begins.