Vacation!

Thanks to my niece Kim, we had a good excuse to take a proper vacation this year. Kim and her husband Mark had their wedding in beautiful Hatteras, NC. Clare, Steven & I arrived a week early and had a much needed and very relaxing time in the sand and surf.


This is the house we rented with some of my siblings. For the first three days we had the place to ourselves. It was a strange feeling, the three of us rattling around in a five bedroom, six bath house. It was certainly a luxurious place to us, with pool, hot tub, huge tv, all of which we barely used since the weather was perfect and we were on the beach and in the ocean most of the time. I'm grateful for the accomodations, and yet I'd have been perfectly happy with much less.


The house in the center of this photo is where the wedding was held. This four story house makes the one we stayed in look like a shack! It was a great place for a party, and I'm glad it had an elevator, considering I'd just finished my sixth round of chemo and was a bit weak. This house was completely destroyed by a hurricane just 5 years ago. Apparently, the revenue from renting it out was enough motivation to rebuild, on this narrow strip of sand where houses aren't meant to be.

The newlyweds, Kim & Mark


Most of my family (two nephews weren't able to come)

Cape Hatteras lighthouse - Steven & Clare climbed the 270 or so steps to the top. I stayed on the ground.

Our first evening there, Clare was totally captivated by the ocean, and by the shore birds.

Clare hadn't been to an ocean in three years. We were fortunate to have great weather all week, and the ocean was still warm. Being south of the cape, where the island turns back southeast, the surf is very gentle in Hatteras. Steven and I both got some swimming in, and we took Clare out past the breakers where the waves would lift us off our feet and set us down again, much to Clare's delight. I have very strong childhood memories of beach vacations (usually in MD and DE) and I was happy to get to share the experience with Steven (whose beach has always been California) and Clare.

Clare hanging out with my eldest brother Mike and his wife Janna

The wedding was simple and elegant and beautiful

Clare made a friend and they played all week!

My youngest brother Greg and his daughter Lily

Clare had a great time learning new dance moves from the best man.

I know we never would have taken this trip if it hadn't been for Kim's wedding. It would have seemed too far (six hours of flying, followed by four hours of driving) too expensive (thankfully, my parents helped with airfare, and sharing the house with three other families made a huge difference). We are all really glad we went and will cherish the memories forever.

Omnivore’s Hundred

I saw this on Sylvia's blog and it looked like fun...

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating (I couldn't figure out how to "cross out", so I did my "nevers" in red).
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:
1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp - I think gefilte fish is made from carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari - love it!
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich - plenty of jelly please!
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes - though it's been so long I can't remember what it was
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes - Cherokee Purple and Pineapple are faves
22. Fresh wild berries -
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters - best when raw, though I think they'd be too polluted now.
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float - Yum!
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects (not on purpose)
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu (pufferfish)
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50.Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV - Had a homebrew that was probably this high
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis - I would try this
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost - would love to try this
75. Roadkill - yes, I would, especially if I saw it get killed.
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab -though I prefer picking blue crab meat
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano - I've grown poblanos, but never had them as a mole
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

If I only had a brain!

I'm not remembering stuff.
Steven told me he had at 11:00 appt on Tuesday. I think he must not have told me anything beyond that, as he often doesn't elaborate, and I feel like if he'd said more it might have stuck in my brain. But I did not remember at all - not even after the fact, like, "oh yeah, now I remember you saying that". I've asked him, when that comes up again, to write it down or say something like, "which means I'll be taking Clare to Bubbie's early". Because when I was waiting for someone to help me at the hospital I was thinking that Clare had only been at her grandparents' since noon or so, instead of 10:30. No wonder they looked like they were ready for me when I picked her up! They generally have a 3-hour limit before they get impatient, and I'd thought Clare had only been there for an hour & a half.

Just now I was picking up toys and came across a penguin toy that I didn't recognize. Clare said it came in an egg, and I just barely remember, but not really. Was it from the egg hunt or did we buy it at the thrift store? I'm leaning towards the latter, but it's really not clear.
Surely, it doesn't matter where a toy came from, but other stuff I'm going to have to start jotting notes. I wonder if there's any tips online for memory loss.

It's no wonder I'm having such a hard time figuring out the details for my projects, things like how to put together the platform for her bed, do I want it to be larger than the mattress or to just fit, can the headboard attach to the wall or does it have to attach to the bed... and, oh yeah, I better make a list for the fabric store so I can look for some dark blue velvet and some star buttons for that headboard (because in a store is when my memory loss is the most pronounced!).

Thank God for my ruby slippers! I'm going to need all the help I can get to find my way back to normal after all this chemo. ~~~there's no place like home...there's no place like home~~~

Eating locally!

a rare "Purple Peruvian" potato

Beef, swiss chard and white & purple potatoes

Clare enjoying the meal

My friend Beth brought me some purple potatoes from her garden, which were really yummy, and I was inspired to dig some from my own potato patch. The result? This weekend we enjoyed a delicious, locally grown meal. The pasture-raised beef came from Ironwood Farm, and the potatoes & chard were brought in from our own garden. We felt so blessed to be able to eat so well and so locally.

RAIN!!!

Well, this is what I get for saying we never get rain! About one hour after my post mentioning our lack of rain, we got dumped on - 1.75" in about 1/2 hour!! The next day we got 1/2" more.

The pictures above are actually from last summer. Do you see the "dent" in the rainbow in the top photo?

4 out of 5!

I just completed chemo Round Four out of the five that I am getting. One more round (another month) and I get a CT scan & MRI to see what effect it has had on the tumors in my breast & liver. The scan I had in early June after just 2 rounds showed amazing shrinkage, so I am cautiously optimistic. Dr Royce, my oncologist, said that if the liver tumor is but a speck on the MRI I may be able to get surgery. Woo-hoo!


The treatment is beginning to take a toll on me though. I am awake tonight at 2:30 am because of what the chemo is doing to my digestive system. My tummy is ever gurgling and sounds like a ripe melon when I thump it. Eating is always a gamble these days.

I am really looking forward to being done with the chemo and working on regaining my health. I want to cleanse my liver of the chemo & other accumulated toxins, work on helping my body be better able to get rid of rogue cancer cells that will pop up. I'm learning so much these days! (always seems to happen just when I think I know almost everything... go figure!)

Garden News

I pulled some volunteer melons today. That was hard! Last year I grew two types, and both were delicious. In order to save pure seed without isolating my plants, I decided to grow just the little green one this year (Petite Gris de Rennes). And since there's no way to tell which of last year's melons volunteered, or if they were from seeds from store-bought melons, I needed to pull those. Not that I need more - the ones I planted have really taken off and have over a half dozen developing melons already. Last year's were planted so late - middle or end of June I think - that I did not get many melons to ripen.

In other garden news, I have some volunteer tomatoes, so we won't be completely without. The ones I planted were held in their pots too long, are heirlooms that tend to get leaf curl, and who knows what else went wrong. Well, bad plan, for one thing. I thought it would make sense (and this plan was developed PRE-chemo, so chemo-brain is not my excuse) to put the tomato cages in place early and plant peas on them. The peas were planted mid February and did great; they were still producing a few as of early July. So I needed to transplant these already too large tomatoes into cages covered with pea vines. Can't move the cage, can't get a shovel in there. Not to mention all the volunteers I'd let grow -- carrots, lettuce, chard everywhere.

And speaking of chard! I haven't planted chard in probably 4 years. This year I have the best chard crop ever. It is scattered here & there -- two plants came up in Clare's flower garden, several on the edges of the raspberry bed, and bunches in the other beds. And these plants are producing HUGE leaves. We've eaten chard daily for the past week and a half, and every other day prior to that. It's gotta be the water. I have the soaker hoses on a timer set to run for 1/2 hr every other day. My last timer would only allow me to set particular days of the week, so I did three days/wk and probably only 20 minutes or something. Everything is doing a lot better this year, and it isn't because we've gotten rain. Elsewhere in the city rain showers have been frequent, but here in our little corner we tend to miss most of the storms this season.

Hair

"You look great!"

Umm, I know how I look, and I don't care. In fact, it is the least of my concerns these days. Why do you mention it? And by the way, don't say it if you don't mean it because I can tell who really means it and who's just saying it.

I wish looks weren't such a big deal in our society. My shaved head seems to be a big deal to lots of people. A much bigger deal than it is to me. To me, it just IS. To Steven & Clare, it is just how I look now. To my mother-in-law and her friends, it is something to comment on and try to make me feel better about. I guess they would not feel good if it was their heads so they doesn't understand that someone can be okay with it.

The hard part is that I've stopped shaving and am letting my hair grow again, and I think it looks rather scruffy unshaved. It didn't fully stop growing, and I figure only 40 - 50% fell out, though that's a really hard thing to estimate. I've always had very full hair, so when it started falling out it was so messy and uncomfortable - itchy down my back and sore scalp. I'm glad to have shaved it off, and now I'm curious to see how it will be to grow it back. It may be time to get some new hats to cover the scruff!

Bernalillo

Before I met Steven, I lived for a few years in the town of Bernalillo. Across the street from Our Lady of Sorrows church there is a former convent which was used as an art gallery at the time, and I lived in an old adobe barn behind the convent. It was a beautiful property, though a bit rustic. There was a fruit orchard, grassy lawn, and two big old mulberry trees that were planted by the nuns around the turn of the century. The barn roof leaked occasionally, but because of the adobe construction it was wonderfully cool in the summer and comfortable in the winter. It had a very nice view of the Sandias from the front door, and a horse pasture across the side street.

Steven, Clare & I went for a drive Sunday and stopped to see the place. I'm still recovering from the shock! The barn is still there but is boarded up and looks like it will be demolished soon. The metal roof has many, many holes in it and is flapping eerily in the breeze. Even more alarming is that the entire yard - the grass, the orchard, the two huge, lovely mulberry trees - is gone. I so didn't expect that. The place looks desolate. And the horse pasture is now a Flying Star! I had been away for ten years and EVERYTHING had changed.

My "secret" past

When I was 20 years old, I became pregnant. I put that baby girl up for adoption when she was born. It was the best of all options, it seemed. My parents were not willing to help me. The father was not interested in a relationship. At the time, I was direction-less, working as a cashier and taking community college classes in things like astronomy, art history and architectural drafting. I was having sex with Joe because my life sucked, and I was young & horny. I would probably have told him no if I wasn't so desperately lonely.
I came to believe, over the years, that adoption was the best option when a young, unprepared woman gets pregnant. I convinced myself that it's win-win-win, no one gets hurt, everyone lives happily ever after. It was not until this past year - twenty-two years later - that I've realized the denial I've been in. I mean really, *nobody gets hurt*?! That's what I thought of myself, I guess - "a nobody". I cried for a month after she was born. I still cry about it. I went away to college, two hours south of "home". I stopped thinking of my parents' house as home and tried to get on with life. I made new friends, but I was even lonelier.
It occurred to me today that when I was a young adult, I thought in order to be a good parent I'd have to *know* something, but I didn't know what it was that I'd need to know. All around me, the parenting I observed was completely authoritarian. I knew of nothing else. But I also knew I couldn't do *that*. Something else I knew was that I didn't have my act together, and I hoped I would by the time I had a family.

Well, I don't think I've got much figured out, but I have learned that I don't need to. All I need to do is love my daughter. Why didn't somebody tell me that? Why didn't I just know?

Here's some irony: Clare was born just a week after my first daughter's 17th birthday. There's 17 yrs, 7 days, and about 7 hours between them, and they were both born on Wednesdays.

Fate?

I came across this photo the other day in my family photo album. Pictured are my dad's sister, mother and maternal grandmother. I never expected to have such a bond with these three women whom I never met. The baby, my aunt, passed away just months after I was born, at the age of 41. The other two each lived to the age of 56, which for the grandma was just a few months after this picture was taken.

I didn't even know I was at a higher risk for breast cancer. There was no caption for this photo that read, "each of these women died an early death and you could also". Now we know. Now we have DNA testing. Now my daughters can be on the lookout. They can have the blood test to determine if they too carry the mutant gene, and if so they can take precautions. And maybe when they are my age there will be a cure.

The big news

So much has happened since my last post - where to begin?

Steven found employment! After 7 months unemployed, he was hired by ITT Tech as a "representative" (salesman in disguise) for prospective students. He's having to learn a lot and will be in training for a while longer, but it pays better than the job he'd had, and so far the people are not jerks to him. Also, the other rep who was hired the same time as him is Jewish, so for once he is not the only Jew. I think he'll do well at this job.

The other big news, which came 5 days after the job success, is that I was diagnosed with breast cancer. How far along is it, what "stage" am I, has it spread to other areas... these are things we are trying to determine. I had a chest x-ray, blood work and a bone scan done Thursday, and this coming Thursday I go for an MRI of my breast and a ct scan of my liver. Then I don't see my surgeon until April 7th.

I'm not sure how to feel about my surgeon. Her name is Anne Wallace, she is very nice & empathetic, informative and patient. She seems like she knows what she's doing, but then again I have nothing to compare her to. I think I need to get a second opinion at least. I do not like all the delays there seems to be, though part of it is that the MRI had to wait until 2 weeks after Clare weaned in order to get a good picture of what's going on.

Yes, that's right, at 5 years old she was doing what all normal primates do at this stage of development. And she was showing no signs of wanting to quit. So now at bedtime instead of laying down and nursing her, I give her a bottle of warm almond milk and a massage. The bottle feels very strange to me, since I never did give her one as a baby (other than the medicine she needed as a newborn). But she has a need to suck and had no desire to suck on herself. Also, she was used to a bit of warm milk (human milk, not almond milk) as she drifted off to sleep, so I've tried to make it as similar to her old routine as possible.

I try to keep from dwelling on the idea that I have this awful thing growing in me that could cause my death. After all, aren't we all dying to one degree or another?

The hard part is when everyone's gone to sleep. If I'm not really really tired, I have a hard time getting to sleep some nights. Fortunately these are rare. It's 11:23 PM and I just took some calms, which should help.

It's scary, but I can't be scared. I have Clare an Steven who need me. They need me in so many ways.

And to fret & worry about the "what if"s doesn't make a lot of sense. because there's always the "what if" that's the opposite of what you're worrying about. What if everything turns out great? then you've just wasted all that time worrying when you could have been living joyfully. And my being freaked out or worried just brings the whole family down.

I want to be happy. So I am.

Demolition Day

On New Years Day we decided it was time to say goodbye to the gingerbread house. To see the action, watch part one first:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv_OwaDgmJk

Then part two:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9FtVXCRJxs

That was definitely more fun that building it!