Yesterday it was my birthday, I hung one more year on the line....

Actually it was Monday 9th, but I did remember the lyric on Tuesday.  It was a public holiday too, here in Hong Kong which was nice. Didn't do a lot, though Kira did bring me breakfast in bed which was special :)
 
And over the weekend we had a huge rainstorm. By huge I mean really torrential.  HK always has wet Junes, averaging 300+ mm of rainfall.  Well last weekend we had the months rain ration in 24 hours, and at one point broke the record for most rain recorded in a single hour - I think it was over 140 mm - and they've been keeping records since the 1880's.
 
The approach path to our beach is along a little valley with a stream/storm drain running through it.  The end of the drain is meant to flow through some pipes under the coast road, and thence down to the sea.  Of course the pipes silted up and rusted through years ago, so when we get a big rain the valley floods until it crests over the road and then it all rushes over the beach to the sea.  This time the overnight overflow carved a channel almost my height into the sand - quite a surprise when we went down that afternoon. 
 
I'm happy to report that my pile of rocks was unaffected.  It's getting to be quite a little monument at the far end of the beach.  Its now well over my height, and beginning to attract curious questions.  When I started it I was careful not to strain myself ("nothing larger than my head"). Now I try not to use anything smaller than my head - because the kids like to climb it and then start throwing the rocks down.  Making them bigger discourages casual vandalism.  It also gives me a solid measure of progress. I can now carry lumps to the top of the pile that I literally couldn't even rock from side to side six months ago.
 
Reasons I've given for building it so far include:
    Exercise
    To hide the bodies
    The stones were looking messy - I'm tidying the beach
    I like to sort things by size
    I dropped my keys somewhere near here...
   
On my birthday I spent a fair amount of time just quietly enjoying the fact that this year I don't have the murky future of the transplant and attendant unpleasantness hanging over me as I did last time.

This time round I feel that I'm coming towards the end of my spiral staircase. I'm not there yet - but the light is changing, I can see further, the path is getting smoother, with fewer rocks to trip over, and generally I'm feeling pretty good.
 
In fact, to complete the lyric I quoted at the beginning of this post:
I saw the Doc again last week.  He's given me a date for removal of the Hickman line (again) and we're talking about returning to work - so things are looking good on that front too.