#MicroblogMondays: More odds & ends & updates

• I went to see my family doctor last week about my recent too-close encounter(s) with gallstones  -- our first face-to-face visit in two years!  As I suspected, he's sending me for an ultrasound and some bloodwork (which I had done earlier today). I called a couple of local ultrasound clinics (including two where I've been before), but nobody could take me this week -- and dh's jury duty starts next Monday. I don't drive (I have my license but I am not a confident driver and am very much out of practice), and would need him to drive me to most of the places I called. Fortunately, however, we have a bunch of medical offices within a three-minute walk of our condo building, including a lab where we've had bloodwork done before, and an imaging centre in the same building (that I found while Googling "ultrasound clinics near me") where I was able to book an ultrasound for a week from Tuesday/tomorrow. I will walk there myself, if dh is still enmeshed in jury duty. Yay! 
• I've mostly been feeling better this past week, but I didn't have a great Saturday night/Sunday morning... we were at Little Great-Nephew's birthday party and although I was trying to be careful about what I ate, I guess I wasn't careful enough. Sigh. 
• (Most) of my past posts related to gallstones/gallbladder issues have now been tagged as "gallstones/gallbladder" for easy reference (for me, if not for you!  lol). I've found that if I try to tag (or otherwise edit) some of my early posts from the first few years of this blog, it removes all the paragraph breaks, resulting in one big long block of copy -- leaving me to figure out where the paragraph breaks once were, or should be, and put them all back in again. Fun, NOT. So some of those are remaining untagged for now.
• We had a lot of fun at LGN's 2nd birthday party this past weekend (although we're both still exhausted from it!  lol). He was hugely entertaining. :)  Fist-bumped the non-vaxxed person there in greeting, and then retreated to what I hoped was a safe distance -- although that was hard to maintain in a relatively small house with 11 adults, one toddler and two dogs in attendance...! 
• I took a ton of photos -- and was reminded again (the moment I brought out my phone/camera) not to post any on social media. (Eyeroll.) I posted ONE baby photo and ONE recent/undated photo of LGN on Facebook & Instagram (one of those "how it started/how it's going" posts -- the first photos of him I've posted in more than a year) on his actual birthday, after both his mom & grandmother had posted multiple photos... I figured that was safe and inoffensive enough. But I had no intention of posting anything from the party (I would have LIKED to, but knew it was verboten) -- and I'll be honest, I felt a little irked to be reminded, AGAIN. Sigh. Families are complicated sometimes... 
• I know nothing about French politics, but pronatalism in politics seems to be alive and well in that country: apparently, former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, father of four, is claiming in a new book that current president Emmanuel Macron lacks authority because... he has no children. :p (Cue a mega-eyeroll from me.)(Macron's wife has children and grandchildren from a previous marriage.)  British writer and broadcaster Bibi Lynch (who is childless not by choice, and whose work I was introduced to by Jody Day of Gateway Women), responded in an opinion piece in the Telegraph this past week.  You may have to register to read the article.  Sample passages: 
• "Why are politicians forced to deal with this? Why do we judge them not on whether they are good people, strong people, ethical people, selfless people or worthy people — but on whether or not they have their own little people?"
• 
  "...the answer to the question of why politicians keep playing the pronatalism card is simple: it appeals to the masses. It’s crass, lazy shorthand for "we’re just like you; we know what matters to you". It doesn’t matter to politicians – across all parties – that their ‘hardworking families’ rhetoric painfully excludes people like me." 
• "People may make children, but children do not make people." 
• How is it almost the end of November, already?? 

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here.