December 30, 2006
snowy dog -- and a little knitting content
we had a great time at the dog park, as did the black lab convention (truman, trouble and darcy). as we got ready to leave it started snowing and we took a few photos, including this one:
wondering where the promised knitting content is? look closely -- somebody's wearing the sweater formerly known as the alpaca sports bra.
of course, every time he wears it i'm reminded that i desperately need to frog the cuffs and make the sleeves about 3 inches longer. not sure what happened there. we measured it beforehand, but something went terribly wrong....
winterwonderland, part deux
i love our new digital cameras. i got terry a little digital elph, and santa brought us a digital rebel. we are now digital camera rich! we still haven't gotten a memory stick for the rebel, but i've been having lots of fun with the little elph, which is ridiculously compact and takes nice pics.
speaking of which, here's a photo from the back deck. i'm not sure if you can tell, but we have about 18 inches of snow back there (not just from today -- most of it from snow storms while we were gone over christmas).
this afternoon, we're taking truman to the dog park to frolic with his friends, trouble and darcy, and their parents, steve, jara and catherine. steve and terry are going to ski around, and apparently he and jara are bringing baby emma's new chariot-on-skis. should be quite a sight.
incidentally, this will be my first trip back to the dog park since truman was bitten by that mean dog. good times. if we're lucky, maybe we'll see that dog and his owner, and i can ask her for that $800 she owes me (yes, the price went up during our three subsequent vet visits to have the stitches redone and then taken out).
let it snow
it's a winter wonderland here this morning.
a lovely way to be when you have a fireplace full of javalogs and nowhere you need to go.
December 29, 2006
home again, home again
we made it back from phoenix in the wee hours of thursday morning. it feels like i've been gone forever. going into work thursday was very rip van winkle ... i was just happy they hadn't given away my office.
meanwhile, terry retrieved truman thursday from his happy dogsitting retreat, and i'm happy to report that he looks about a million times better than when i last saw him -- no longer wearing the embarassing lampshade, no longer sporting gruseome staples down his side, and no longer staggering around all doped up. so ... good stuff all around.
as i write this, he's curled up in his dog bed with his two stuffed ducks. pretty adorable stuff.
in a related story, once i get memory cards for our two new digital cameras, this blog may become much more photo-rich!
December 24, 2006
where are you going, where have you been? (PART THREE)
But wait -- there's more. Guess where I'm going in January. Glorious San Antonio, where this guy will outfit my shoulder with one of these. I'm very much looking forward to my new life as a bionic woman.
where are you going, where have you been? (PART TWO)
My brother and his wife decided to surprise Terry and I with a fantabulous Christmas present, the benefits of which I am enjoying as we speak (so to speak). Every year when our family rendezvous in Phoenix, TK and I stay with my parents at their "adult resort community" home, while Drew and Lisa stay here. This year, for kind and generous reasons that completely escape me, they have treated us to 4 nights at "Sanctuary" as well. We got here on Thursday and will check out tomorrow (Christmas) morning. It's pretty dreamy. It's been unseasonably cold here the last few days, but today it's sunny and warm and I'm blogging outside trying to adjust my eyes and skin to this strange phenomenon called the sun.
where are you going, where have you been? (PART ONE)
i know. it's been a LONG time since i blogged anything. hear me out -- i have good excuses.
about 5 weeks ago my sister called to tell me she'd been diagnosed with malignant melanom...a. for the uninitiated, that's the scary kind of skin cancer that kills people, as opposed to the two far less lethal kinds of skin cancer that you hear a fair bit more about.
a few weeks later, while waiting to have the melanoma removed and a lymph node biopsy conducted to see if the cancer had metastacized, her doctors found a 14-mm "nodule" in her left lung. so the good news just kept coming.
we were planning to spend christmas in the phoenix area anyway, since my parents as well as my sister and her family live there. when we got the news about the lung thing, i decided to come down early to be with her and my parents, help her out after surgery, and do what i could to help navigate the medical beauracracy. (as you may have heard, i have some amount of experience in that particular area. i also have experience figuring out how to do things with only one arm instead of two. this came in handy (ok, pun intended) since her melanoma was on top of her hand, which meant a skin graft on th eback of her hand and keeping the hand immobile for a few weeks.)
i'm happy to report that after several nail-biting weeks, all the test results have come back as good as we could have hoped for. the melanoma did not metastacize, they removed it all, and the thing in her lung is just a random thing in her lung (more common than you may have known). so, one huge collective sigh of relief later, a happy holiday is now being had by all.
December 04, 2006
about that mix....
oh yes, and it turns out that my friend brooke managed to have that baby before i managed to send her the mix CD. good thing i went for the mellower happy music; probably also good for chilling out at home with new baby....
December 03, 2006
tough day for truman
someone in our house spent the evening at pet emergency and is now wearing one of those "elizabethan collars" that are all the rage in the dog parks.
speaking of rage and dog parks, i'd like to thank the lady whose dog bit my dog earlier today. whoever you are, you owe me $487.44.
a musical challenge
perhaps you didn't know about my accomplished history as an amateur DJ on the world-famous WNMH, coming to you live from northfield, MA. in another life entirely, i cohosted such groundbreaking radio shows as, "this is not a hootenanny," "dumber than a BBQ," and "angry hippie music." so i still have a soft spot in my life for putting together mixes. it's very high fidelity.
well my very dear friends, brooke and anna, came up to visit us this summer with their husbands, jon and chris. at the time, brooke was about 4 months pregnant and mentioned in passing that she'd really like it if i would make her a mix CD to listen to when she goes into labor. a pretty daunting request, no? especially because i've never been in labor myself, so i don't know whether to go for the slightly loud and angry this-hurts-like-hell music, or the life-affirming-girl-friendly music.
well, like an excellent friend, i decided to put off actually completing a mix until, say, her baby was overdue. for all i know, she's in labor as i type this. or maybe she's already had the baby and just didn't tell me b/c i'm a bad friend.
in any event, and because i have an absurd amount of time-sensitive work to do, i decided to take a shot at the mix today. after lots of fun times with ipod/itunes ("your ancient ipod needs new softward; would you like to erase your ipod?"), here's what i've come up with. i'm still playing around with it; i figure i can change things until monday since i can't mail it then either. i decided to mostly go with the "life-affirming-girl-friendly" genre -- a little bit of rhythm here and there but mostly songs about life lessons, love and other good stuff:
1. Heartbeats (José González)
2. Ten Year Night (Lucy Kaplansky)
3. The Blessings (Dar Williams)
4. World Falls (Indigo Girls)
5. This is Home (Lucy Kaplansky)
6. Glacier Bay (Terry Kelly)
7. The Beauty Of The Rain (Dar Williams)
8. Call And Answer (Barenaked Ladies)
9. I'm On Fire (Bruce Springsteen)
10. Power Of Two (Indigo Girls)
11. Overkill (Acoustic Version) (Colin Hay)
12. River (Sarah McLachlan)
13. Babylon (David Gray)
14. After All (Dar Williams)
15. Sleeper (Eliza Gilkyson)
16. The Hudson (Dar Williams)
17. The Last Fare of the Day (Richard Shindell)
18. Say a Little Prayer (Shawn Colvin)
19. Somewhere Over The Rainbow/What A Wonderful World (Israel Kamakawiwo'ole)
so ... any thoughts, comments or suggestions?
December 02, 2006
two big slackers
truman and i skipped dog school today. now he'll never get into a good college. instead we laid low and tried to recover from an exhausting week.
TK is in girdwood this weekend with a group of our friends, who rented a cabin to spend a final weekend with our pal ashley before she leaves us for love and chicago. i'd really been looking forward to going with them, but wound up with an astonishing amount of work to do (5 briefs due in 5 days = not actually humanly possible) so had to beg off the trip and plan instead to spend the weekend holed up at my computer.
by friday afternoon, however, i was a bit of a wreck from various stressful work and family goings-on, so decided to just lay low today and do some fun relaxing stuff (ok, i had a massage and a facial!). i'll pay for it tomorrow with a long day of brief-writing, but i think it's going to be worth it. the shoulder feels much loved and i look a little less like the walking dead.
(CM says to the esthetician at the beauty room: "is this stuff going to get rid of the terrifyingly huge dark circles under my eyes?" beauty room girl replies: "no, but sleep will.")
what, suddenly everyone's got a medical degree....?
cheryl, terry and larry visit the alamo
this is the latest shoulder news: it looks like TK and I will be taking a trip to lovely san antonio, texas, sometime in the next 3 months for some form of shoulder replacement surgery. fun times to be had by all.
why san antonio, you ask? the only good thing about having a mysterious freakish disease is that you can convince really big name doctors to treat you. so we're going to TX to see the wizard -- the guy who literally wrote the book on shoulder surgery. he's reviewed most of my records, and now just needs to look at recent xrays to determine just how bad it is, which will in turn determine whether we can get away with something less invasive than a "total shoulder replacement."
either way, it's freaky in that it's a major surgery and also undeniably means burning a bridge or too, therapeutically speaking. then again, the current bridge doesn't seem to work very well, so it's hard to view this as potentially making things any worse than they already are. they say that you make the joint replacement decision when you really just can't go on the way you are (vis a vis pain and limitaions) any longer, and i think i'm pretty firmly there.
so while i'm acutely wary of making things worse in the long run, i'm also wary of losing my 30s to this crap. it's time, as my mom would say, to move on to the next activity. which seems to be a midwinter vacation to lovely san antonio.
oh, and possibly the best part about our little cross-country expedition is that my orthopedist here is interested enough in the special surgery this guy does that he's talking about scheduling his own trip to SA to coincide with my surgery. i hope we all get to go do some sightseeing, too.... ("And here we are with Dr Wickler at the Alamo....")