Odds and Ends

Me on Monday - Well Tuesday

Waving hi to Sian of From High in the Sky and all the others following her Me on Monday meme.

I'm a day late with this but as they say better late than never. Somehow I just couldn't get with it yesterday.

It was a weekend of going through the treasure trove of old photos that John's brother sent up to us after going through their mother's pictures and wishing there was someone we could ask who some of these people were. There was blog reading and commenting to be sure, the usual household stuff (laundry, dishes, cooking, cleaning) going through books to see what we can put out in the recycle - we could garage sale them next year (too late this year) but John can't stand the work of having  a garage sale and then have people basically want whatever for free - says it's just not worth it so we recycle or donate. Our favourite chicken casserole was made and enjoyed on 2 nights. A lot of thinking that I need to get back to that sweater I've been knitting. Wondering when this deck is going to be finished (a lot of progress was made yesterday),

signing up for this winter's snow removal (they say the winter won't be bad but we'll take our chances and sign with our snow removal contractor just in case). There was a lot of facebook game playing by both of us as we just didn't feel like going out in the not so nice weather - it's nice when you don't have to.

What am I looking forward to this week? Well I was hoping to say seeing the deck finished but that's not going to happen this week - it's been a crew of 1 the past couple of days and today he had to leave at noon (after getting here at 10:30) for traffic court and tomorrow promises to be a stormy day with the after affects of Hurricane Patricia dumping on us - they're forecasting 40-50mm of rain and high winds. Hopefully they/he will be able to get back to the deck on Thursday. Aside from that trying out a new pork tenderloin recipe tonight and using the stormy day to make a batch of "vegetarian" (I have it in quotes because with John it has to have at least 1/2 lb of beef in it) lasagna.

I hope everyone has a great week.

8 Thoughts on What's Happening in My World

Following along on Kenlie's "What's Happening in Your World?" post on her blog   from earlier this week.

1) What's the title of the last book you read?  It's a long title - "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing" by Marie Kondo. I'd heard so much about it and needing to declutter thought I'd give it a try. It's an interesting read - some of the stuff there is no way I'm doing (like talking to my clothes and thanking them) but some of it makes sense. We'll see how it goes putting her thoughts into action. I haven't quite decided on what to read next - maybe Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love" that I've had in my to be read pile for quite awhile now.

2) What's the last thing you cooked at home? Well that's easy - last night's supper - Asparagus, Mushroom and Goat Cheese Frittatta.

3) What is your favourite thing about fall? The colours! I could do without the temperature changes though but then we wouldn't have those brilliant colours.

4) Share one thing that challenged you at some point over the past week. What challenged me - hmmm, well apart from the usual what will I make for dinner I'd have to say trying to keep my cool when noticing the damage that some of the workmen did - knocking the cable box off of the side of the house, crushing part of the NEW eavestrough downspout. I know it was accidental but really could they not have been more careful. At least I took precautions for my peony plant and it didn't get damaged (so far).

5) List 3 hobbies that you actively pursue or want to pursue. Knitting - although I need to make more time for it and finish up those 2 projects that are on the go. Scrapbooking - again I need to make more time for it, finish up projects that are on the go and get started on new ones. There is so much I want to scrapbook - trips, family, family history, etc., etc.. Geneology - I'm having marvelous luck with it thanks to Ancestry and if you'd read posts earlier even found a sister John didn't know he had that he has now become quite close too. Have also found numerous cousins and found 2 first cousins that we'd lost track of back in the 1970's.

6) Have you started Christmas shopping yet? In one short word - yes! I've arranged for subscription renewals for our Great Nephew & 2 of our Great Nieces - the other one is too young. I know what I'm getting John or should I say we know what we are getting each other - a new big screen tv for the family room that will be installed on the wall. So that just leaves my sister and her DH.

7) Share 3 things about the person you last spoke to today. Ok, he's my husband John. He has been known to bake doughnuts (but not for a long time). He has food issues - spiciness, MSG, lactose are verboten. It's not that he doesn't like them - he just can't have them.

8) Do you remember your dreams? Usually I don't but lately I've had some that really stuck in my mind and made me not want to go back to sleep in case the same one started back up.

Kenlie had a couple of other questions that I didn't include - both of which didn't concern me as I'm not American.

If you'd like to participate head on over to Kenlie's blog and see what she and others had to say.

 

It's Been Awhile

Things got rather hectic around here the past couple of weeks and blog writing slipped on by - it's done that a lot this year.  Hopefully though all the medical stuff is done with and life can get back to normal.

Back in July my surgeon sent me for another ultrasound to check on 3 anomalies that were found at the same time as the cancer back in March.  She wanted to see if they were still there or had changed at all.  Yes they were still there but no changes were noticed.  After a discussion of what should be done or not done about them I took her suggestion to remove them and not have the worry of them becoming cancerous what with my history.   That was scheduled for this past Monday.  In the meantime I chipped a wisdom tooth (don't know why I said a as there is/was only one and it was decided it should come out. So there I was this past Monday having 2 surgeries in one. 

My General Surgeon agreed to let my Dental Surgeon take 15 minutes of her OR time and take the wisdom tooth out once she had removed the anomalies instead of me having to go through 2 different surgeries.  Both went great and my Surgeon was "thrilled" to see her first tooth extraction - guess it's a surgeon thing!  She couldn't resist telling me all about it yesterday when she came into my room before discharging me. 

When I woke up in the recovery room there was a little gift for me from the tooth fairy (my General Surgeon - she's the Mum of 3 young children and thought the tooth fairy should pay me a visit) of a loonie (that's a Canadian $1. coin - it has a Loon on it - hence the nickname Loonie) in a Hospital specimen jar with a little princess sticker on the top.  Bet she's going to love it when her 3 little girls(3, 3 and 1) start needing visits from the tooth fairy.

Now as for how I'm feeling - ugh, I'd forgotten how painful wisdom tooth extractions can be so here I sit doped up on Tylenol 3s.  For some reason it's worse today than yesterday but then most of yesterday I had an IV going which probably had some painkiller in it too.   Not feeling anything from her part of the surgery (knock on wood) and as she said "I knew any pain from what I did would be overshadowed by the tooth extraction pain".  

The good news - she got all of the anomalies (they were very tiny and there was the possibility of some of them being partially missed) and now we wait for the pathology report.  So glad I have such a great couple of surgeons!

Now with tomorrow starting Breast Cancer Awareness month I'd like to ask everyone to please get their mammograms done!  It's only because I went for my annual one that we found my cancer and caught it when it was only a Stage One.  Ok, I'll get off my bandwagon now.

 

A Bit of This A Bit of That

I'm finally feeling like I'm back to normal - boy that was a long stretch!  As a result I've doing a lot of stuff this week.  Today I'm even going to be doing some gardening - ok it's only planting some flowers in pots but it is gardening right? 

My knitting project was coming along great until this week.  Those who knit will no what I mean when I say I had frog (rip out) all that I had done on the right front - it just didn't look right and I had no idea why so - start it over was the only way that I'd be satisfied.  Hopefully that starting over will be today or tomorrow.

The Trip/Vacations Project Life Project is coming along great - I've finished all of the 1970 & 1980 trips and did it in 28 pages - there are 2 other pages but the are the first page and the second page where I summarize all the trips - picture below. 

Not a great picture - I still haven't figured out how to the PL pages done properly or maybe I'm having a senior moment today.

It's mainly been a photo album with the odd bit of journaling, some of it on the pictures.  There are some pages where there are journaling cards and PL cards in there.  Trying to do more of that.  I actually went back & changed some pages to include PL cards. 

I'll be putting a note in the inside cover that more can be found for each of the trips in the main non-PL albums - they have a lot of jounaling in them.  This (these as it's going to end up being 2 albums) is just a few highlights from each trip.  The reason why 2 albums - well like I said just from 1978 to 1989 is 28 pages and some of those years there were no trips.  I'm trying to keep the trips to 4 pages each or less but once I get to the more involved trips - like London and the Baltic Cruise in 2008 or last year's trip of a lifetime to Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia and a 35 day cruise around New Zealand & Australia I know it's going to need more pages.

Speaking of trips, were in a bit of a mess with our favourite cruise line right now and hoping it all gets worked out the way we want.   When we finished our cruise in February we had 7 future cruises booked.  One (this August) had to be cancelled because of my health.  That left 2 this winter (back to back) 2 next fall (b2b) and 2 the following winter (b2b).  Late last month while taking it easy I decided to see if it would be possible to upgrade our room for the 2 next fall (Pacific Coast and through the Panama Canal) - much to my surprise they didn't even exist on the cruise line's website any more.  ACK!  I was quickly on the phone or maybe it was e-mail to our travel agent to see what she could find out.  Finally yesterday we got sort of an answer via http://www.cruisecritic.com - not our TA (travel agent) or the cruise line.  They've evidently chartered it out for about a week and as a result about 6 or 7 cruises got dropped or re-arranged.  What was a back to back now has a 5 day gap in between (the charter) which just won't do so we're going to have to figure out what we want to do  - thinking maybe just give up on the Panama Canal and try for the following year but they evidently did the same thing this year so .... we're left wondering.  What we're thinking of doing instead if they'll let us take all the perks we got when we booked is take a British Isles cruise sort of like what we had to cancel this August except it's not as good (meaning it's got fewer stops that we're interested in).  Ah, decisions, decisions.   Hopefully we'll know more later today as we did get an e-mail from our TA saying she hoped to know more later today.  Ok, way more than you wanted to know.  Note:  I'm finishing this up on the following day and we still haven't heard a word from either!

 

 

Two Weeks Later

Well I'm definitely not doing good at keeping up with my blogging this year like I had hoped I would and reading and commenting are practically as bad.

I've been keeping busy with organizing photos, working on the special trips/vacations album (that is until the printer & the photo paper decided to not agree with each other) and medical appointments. 

Last week I had 3 Dr's appointments - 2 Oncologist ones (radiation and what they call medical but is really chemo and hormone) and a followup one with the surgeon.   Got some great news and some not so great.  First the great - I will not be getting chemotherapy! The medical oncologist says that nothing warrants me having it but I will be taking 5 years of hormone therapy - oh great more hot flashes.  :)   The radiation oncologist says that I only need 16 sessions of that instead of the 20 that the surgeon thought.  16 is the least amount they give - so that was good news too.   You should see all the reading material they gave me.   We were there basically all morning and came away with 3 more appointments - 1 in September to see how the hormone therapy is coming along, 1 for radiation mapping (on June 8) and 1 for a class on what to expect (that's tomorrow afternoon)

Two days later it was the surgeon's appointment where she has decided that as a precaution for the right side she'll have another ultrasound done and if the lumps there have not disappeared she'll do another lumpectomy probably in August.  That was the not so great news but that's ok as it will ensure they will not turn into cancer.   John told his sister the other day that our summer will be taken up with Dr appointments instead of the trip we had planned on going on.

Speaking of trips - the one (actually 2 as it's a b2b) that we had booked for fall of 2016 all of a sudden doesn't exist on the cruise line's website.  Hmmmm - not liking that.  Our travel agent is on it and trying to find out why - so far nothing.

I'm still not driving - that's going to happen later this week - I'll let John drive to the Cancer Clinic tomorrow though as the parking garage is horrendous and its very difficult to fit my vehicle in the narrow spaces.  :) 

Me on Monday

Waiving at Sian of From High in the Sky.

It's been a much better weekend and Monday than last week when I was looking forward (?) to surgery on the Monday - Not!  This weekend was one of resting, healing, taking it easy, working on my special project of a PL (might have to be 2) album of all our vacations/trips (more about that in a bit), breathing exercises (there was evidently breathing issues during surgery), walking and answering a lot of phone calls from family and friends - why even my little 4 year old Great Niece (Miss K) gave me a call along with my sister's help and had a super chat with a friend I met when we were both in nursing school (both of us left) 49 years ago.

As for the special project, it just involves going through my 4 albums of negatives (on album #2 now) and picking out the vacation/trip ones, scanning them, picking out the pictures I want to use and then fixing them (removing scratches etc.) so no heavy lifting or anything like that.   I'm just hitting the highlights and even then with only the trips from 1978 to 1980 done I've got 10 pages done.  Some trips are 1 page, some 2 and some 4.  Going to put in a note at the front that if more pictures and details are wanted to go to the album/book for that specific trip or something of that nature.

I'm using the Project Life Travel (A) Album from Michaels which reminds me I better ask John to take me down to Michaels one day soon (not allowed to drive for a bit more) and see if I can get another one - 32+ years of vacations and trips is going to add up.

I've had a lot of laughs looking at some of the pictures - between the hairstyles, glass styles and clothes it is funny.   How about this picture from our 1981 trip to Yosemite National Park?   I don't remember having shorts that looked like that and as I said to my sister-in-law - proof that at one point I was thin.  :)

Notice even then I had a camera hanging around my neck - that one was a Minolta 201 that I loved, my one and only Minolta, everything since has been Canon.

This week I'm looking forward to the steri strips coming off tomorrow, continuing to heal, really getting into Cathy Zielske's new class "Digi Basics" (I put it on hold until the surgery was over with), working on the project, more walking (although today that might have to be indoors) and hopefully getting a phonecall from my surgeon with good news (she said she would call as soon as she knew anything).  Today I've already been out (yeah!!!! out for a ride in the car) to the Dr (nothing related to the surgery but she did take a look at it and said it looked good) and a stop at Staples (office/computer supply store) for some more 4x6 photo paper - I do hope John's photo printer holds out - it's making the weirdest sounds whenever it pulls another piece of paper into the feeder.  Maybe we should have looked at new printers.  :)

Why don't you drop in on Sian's blog (From High in the Sky) and see what she's been up to?

 

 

Back In Time for More Cold

Towards the end of January (the 29th) we headed down to Ft Lauderdale for a few days before our B2B (back to back) cruises in the Western & Eastern Caribbean - more about them later.  Now you would think being away for close to a month that the weather might have improved - NOT!  We came back on the 23rd to some of the coldest temperatures in years and a February that was the coldest ever on record.  Maybe we have to rethink these winter vacations and stay away longer.  :)

Since we got back it's been the usual post vacation stuff - laundry, going through a month's worth of mail plus throw in taxes.  In the midst of all this I've been trying to catch up on my blog reading and making a terrible job at that - I'm afraid if I just start today that I will have missed something important so excuse me if you get some terribly out of date comments.

Since we've been home we've hardly had any snow but we did have wonderful freezing rain that just coated the snow in the yards, the driveways and sidewalks.  Thankfully everything else - like roads were spared.  It made for some really nice views.

Sadly it doesn't really show up in this picture I took of our backyard from the dining room window.  All that snow is coated with a very thin layer of ice which really shone in the sunlight.

It seems my planning and schedule for the next few days at least has been thrown into the basket - late last week I had my annual mammogram and today was told there was something they want to look at closer so now I'll be off for an ultrasound early Wednesday morning and we will see what is what.  So to take my mind off of things I'm cleaning up and organizing the computer room in between reading blogs.

Very, Very Slowly Catching Up

I just wanted to pop in here and explain where I've been the past few weeks.  Due to some nagging minor medical issues among other things my time on here has been severly restricted in the past few weeks.   I've been slowly reading through the blogs that I love following and commenting where I can but I'm only up to the first weekend in August.  I hope you won't be dismayed by very late comments and replies. 

I'm still waiting for one more result from a test that was done earlier this week but so far so good in the other results.   The one we're waiting on is a CT scan of my head to do with the vision problems I had awhile ago.   We're not expecting anything from it (saying that with crossed fingers & toes) though as my Dr just wanted to rule things out and really believes it was all migraine related.   The back is slowly responding to physio treatments thanks and I'm finding this chair the most comfortable one in the house.  It sure seems things have come in threes this summer - the eyes, the back and the tooth.  Hopefully that is it!

I have been able lately to get some more pictures from the hunt done and hope to share them when Rinda does her linky next week.   One thing I keep forgetting to do is to get a picture of me with something to do with my scrapbooking (probably my cardstock stash).

I'm off to do some more blog reading before doing another set of exercises.  Boy fitting them in 4 or 5 times a day can really be a chore but so far I've able to get at least 4 sets of them done each day.

Before I go I'll share with you a picture I took yesterday morning at 7:30 on my way to Weight Watchers.  I was surprised to see the moon still up and looking rather large and pulled over for a few seconds to get a picture of it.  It didn't turn out that great but I thought I better get moving.  Maybe I can improve on it with PSE.

I'm thinking I need that new camera now.  :)

 

One of Those Weeks and a Layout

I'm sure we've all had one of those weeks when it seems nothing goes right.  It started out ok with a long weekend but then Tuesday hit.

I decided I was going to install my new USB hub because I just needed more USB ports on the laptop (we haven't used the old and I do mean old desktop in years but even it only has 4 usb ports and what with 2 external HD's, a printer, a scanner, a wireless mouse, a fan to cool down the laptop and my fitbit I clearly needed more ports).   Monday I had backed up everything from the laptop & the 2 500GB external HD on to my new 2TB external HD and that took all day!  I felt confident there would be no issues but once I had the new hub installed all of a sudden the laptop was not recognizing my 2 500GB EHDs - one of which has all my digital supplies on it.  Ok great I didn't lose them but I didn't realize that Picasa where I have them organized could no longer access that HD (of course) and I lost all the organized files - the kind where if I wanted a red paper for instance I just went in there and keyed in red + paper and bingo there they all were.   Ugh!  Ok, so that was problem #1.   Moving on to Tuesday afternoon I went for my mammogram and bone density tests and as soon as I got off that hard slab of a bone density table I knew I'd goofed up my back.  Wonderful!

Wednesday morning I woke up and I couldn't move because of my back.  By late in the day I was moving around very slowly and painfully but at least I was up and able to reheat some dinner - no cooking that night.   My plans for catching up on my blog reading clearly went out the window.

Thursday things were a little bit better and I now had an appointment with the physiotherapist booked for Monday morning.  Then the Dr's office called about my mammogram - seems it needs to be redone (not uncommon with me).  I was beginning to think what else but decided that was my 3 things and I better not start on another set of 3.  :) 

Friday morning things were back to being not great but I did get out for the first time since Tuesday to get a referral from the Dr for the physiotherapist so my insurance and the government will pay for that.  I even managed to get some grocery shopping done.

Today the back is definitely improved but still not great (I'm beginning to think John is right when he says "getting old is the pits").  It's been good enough for me to sit here and get a layout done for my BPC class that I'm taking of Ali Edwards - Hello Story.   This one is for week 4 (we're on 5 and I've missed 3 so hopefully I can get it done later today).   The subject was time and Ali had lots of ideas and suggestions but I went off on a slightly different tact than what she was suggesting and wrote about one of my Grandma's - the one I never got to know.   I must say I'm not really taken with the paper choice I made (I need to go back through all those supplies and get them reorganized again so I can find what I want) but I do like my journalihng and that is the purpose of the class.

The clockfaces are from Katie Pertiet at Designerdigitals.com.   The fonts are Honey Script Light and Garamond.   

I've hardly got any pictures of my Grandma B - only about 4 I guess and this is the best one.  The rest all need a lot of work.  I have to figure out how to fix all those cracks, stains and tears in them.

 

Snow Day!

Contrary to popular belief we do not get snow like this very often.  I can't even remember the last time although the radio station says it was in 2008.  They actually closed the schools down in our area yesterday - that never happened when I was in school.  :)

They started issuing warnings of a major dump of snow for Friday early in the week and the warnings got more dire as the time went on to the point that on Thursday John decided he was booking Friday off.

It didn't look like much if anything when I got up at 4:30 (John's usual workday wakeup time).  In fact it didn't look any different than the night before but that all changed within 70 minutes.   As the day went on it definitely looked like staying home was a great idea.   The highways and ramps were a mess, as soon as the plows cleared them they needed it again.   Of course it wasn't helped with people who insist on driving in the winter without winter tires and forget about hills.  Judging by the tracks on our street, it looked like most of our neighbours decided it was a good day to stay home.

The wind didn't help matters.

Even our mailbox on our covered porch was getting snow on it's roof.
It was a good thing we hadn't planned on using the barbecue for dinner.
The front porch and walkway were definitely not the best way out of the house.
Wonder what these will look like after all that heavy snow on them.

This is why we have a snowblower - who wants to shovel a foot of snow.

He spent 90 minutes out there doing the driveway, the sidewalk (all the way down to the mailboxes) and the front walkway.
What it looked like at 7 this morning. 

Today you wouldn't know we'd had such a large dump of snow just yesterday with all the troubles it caused on the roads and highways.  All the highways and major road are cleared and even our little street has been plowed (thankfully they did the other side first so they got the big windrow at the end of their driveways).

We definitely didn't get anywhere near as much as the Maritime Provinces and New England are getting today but it was definitely more than enough for us.  I hate to even think what it must be like there.