Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

• made food and drinks and transported them to different rooms! I took tea and toast into the living room for breakfast. I could refill my own water bottle. I could make dinner when everyone else was too tired to.

• many little dog walks! I'm getting around the house fine now (if slowly, but that's as much a function of "can't bend the ankle so have to take small steps" as it is anything else) but I am using one crutch outside where the ground is a lot less even than it is in our house, and I can hold Gary's leash in the other hand. He's been really chill about it, which is nice because he hasn't always liked the crutches in other contexts so far. It was a sunny day again and it was lovely to be outside with him. Lots of tiny walks seems good for me too: mother_bones at one point described his keenness for walks as "physiotherapy for his papa." "Puppyotherapy," diffrentcolours added.

• I made tea for everyone once we got back from B&M! This involves so much going to and fro in our kitchen, and even getting the milk out of the fridge is really hard without being able to shift your weight from one foot to the other: where you stand to open the door often leaves things out of arm's reach, if your arms are as short as mine anyway!

• emptied the dishwasher! This is one of my usual "first thing in the morning" chores (since MB tends to run it last thing at night) and I haven't been able to do it because it's another shifting-weight-from-one-foot-to-the-other situation, especially while you're holding stuff too, especially when most of it is breakable... I have genuinely missed it (though D has done a good job of taking over while making both his and my breakfasts before he starts work on weekdays)

• went to B&M! Technically I have done this in the last month, but D had to push me in the wheelchair. This time I could walk around, I brought the crutch to be on the safe side but I probably didn't need it much. My foot was sore when we got home, not the ankle but the foot, whose muscles were telling me they weren't used to this. And I think the ankle was a little swollen; deflating the air in the cast was enough to help with that. But it was nice to feel like I had done as much as I could today

When you tell people you broke your ankle, they'll think about what a big deal it is to be able to walk the dog again, maybe not about what a big deal it is to be able to make tea again, but they both feel pretty equal to me.

In other updates: my brain seems to have remembered how to walk already, and the ankle still doesn't hurt at all. It doesn't even feel that weird today, though I have a feeling it's probably about the same and I'm just used to it. And using my "outside" shoes has evened out the level of my feet which does make walking easier.

It is annoying that I don't get any tactile feedback from the bottom of that foot because of the boot. That's the only reason I had to be really careful coming downstairs this morning (well, that and that of course it means I can't bend my ankle): turns out even with shoes on I rely on some feeling getting through, and nothing gets through the hard plastic base. This makes it a little more difficult to step over D's feet too, which I have to do to get to the best place in the living room for me to sit now because I can put my leg up. So it's a nuisance not to have that feedback, but it's not that bad.

I thought I'd sleep with the boot off but I ended up putting it (mostly) back on, just without the hard plastic front piece and with the straps a little looser. And no inflation. This was fine until I needed to pee in the middle of the night, but I'd taken the other of my pair of crutches upstairs with me at bedtime in case I needed it and using that worked out fine. So that crutch is next to my bed now and it feels good to have a plan for that.