Wednesday February 6 2008

Ol' Blue Eyes

9x12 Oil Painting

by Lynn Thomas

Yesterday went really fine. All our roads out this way were more snowpacked than they have been so I drove more slowly until I got to the highway. We met at Stanley Junction, where I parked Joe's truck, about 9 a.m. and Deanne drove me up to Jackson. The roads were good and she zipped right along. We got up there before 10 a.m. I bought a new battery for my SUV. Then we went on over to the hospital and they put me right into the chair to start the treatment. It went quickly using the new port, my blood tests were good. They took blood for the monthly tumor marker which I'll find out the results next time. We ordered our lunch from the hospital grill and ate while the chemo was dripping and were done about 1 p.m.

Next week Deanne will take me again as she has an appointment too. The week after that I will get the CT scans done there in Jackson instead of having to go down to Salt Lake on the 22nd. How I was dreading that trip and thinking of skipping it until spring.... if ever. Paige called the Huntsman Clinic and they said it was fine to have the scans at Jackson. Then the week after that Dr. Ward, the Huntsman doctor will be up here and I will visit with him about the scans. I may know more answers after that.

It was a really nice weather day compared to the day before. Sunny all day long, with some wind coming up and blowing the snow across the road in the afternoon. In fact I asked Deanne if it would be a bad thing to complain about the bright glare. I took a bunch of photos out the window, since I wasn't driving. I wanted to use some today, but after many tries can't get the computer to download them. Several of my programs just aren't there after the repairs at Best Buy, could be possibly they couldn't reload them since I had the discs. I don't know but its still frustrating.

Anyway on the way home we stopped at the small market at Hoback Junction and did our shopping. They had a little bit of almost everything and have a very nice produce section and no crowds or long lines at the checkout. It was a little more expensive, but that was fine. We got $.20 off every gallon of gas with my receipt and filled up Deanne's car.

Got home about 4 p.m. Put the groceries away, and because I had some old apples in the fruit drawer that needed to be used and some ready pie crusts, I made an apple pie and got it right into the oven. That's the first time I've felt like doing something like that after going to chemo. We had some leftovers to warm up for dinner. I was tired as usual, and soon got into bed early for me. But before midnight, was back up for three or four hours before I could fall back asleep. I had the usual headache, not much nausea this time, perhaps more of a stomach ache than other times, but by 10 a.m. this morning I was up and feeling pretty good. In fact cleaned the kitchen and living room, mopped the floors and washed Raven's stinky bed and some throw rugs.

It started snowing in the night and we got another few inches, but was a little warmer. The visibility was not good again this morning. Joe went to town to get his hearing test and ordered a pair of hearing aids. They will be here in two weeks. We are both hoping for this to be successful. He stayed in town for lunch, Mexican food he said. When he came home he cleaned the still very hot ashes out of the wood stove, and I cleaned the living room again. I won't go into the whole story but he burned up a bath towel trying to keep the smoke in the ash bucket and burned a few small spots in the hardwood floor.

It turned off sunny about 10:30 this morning and was pretty nice out. Perhaps 30 minutes before Joe came home a ground blizzard came up. It didn't last long but did move some more snow. Then it clouded right back up and has been lightly snowing again. We have more snow now than for 8 or 10 years.

Debbie called and said the four of the 5 or 6 paintings she took back to Vegas for the Rotary Auction Curtis was working on sold last weekend, and a couple of them were large. I was really pleased to get that news. That was very effortless on my part, and I am thankful to them for making that possible. They are all doing fine. She is getting some new living room furniture and Justin is going to be able to use the old furniture at his place. They took a trip to Lake Arrowhead and Big Bear where the forest service showed them how different organizations are helping to do a big variety of things to improve the forests there. They were put up at the Lake Arrowhead Resort and that sounded nice. I think it is the Rotary or maybe their ATV club that is thinking of starting some of those programs in the mountains west of Vegas.

My cousin Maryanne called this evening from Bakersfield and we had a nice visit. It was good to hear from her. She may come to visit in May, and I promised her to have the family photos she lent me scanned by the time she gets here and give them back to her then.

I worked more on my photo files this afternoon, as I like to do that when I just feel like sitting. I got all the photo files in this computer backed up on the external drive and was glad to get that done. Too many duplicates makes it a mess though. A few days ago I backed up the blog and hope I got it where the whole thing really is saved properly, also on the external drive. I put it in two different formats, one that connects to the internet, and one onto Word which has all the photos and text for the year. There are more difficult (for me) ways to save it but I think this will work until perhaps I can learn what they are talking about on how to do it differently. I just don't totally trust Blogspot not to crash some day and loose the whole thing and it's way too much work to loose it. I've read that other people think the same thing, and that is where I read how they suggest to back it up - the instructions I don't understand - so I did it my own way. (BTW I hope I get most of the spelling right these days since their spell check hasn't been working for a while.) On February 19 I will have been blogging for one year.