things we always do

Very long, because we always do so many things...  

Hike to the Punch Bowl at Beebe Woods

It's really a walk in the woods.  We often talk about wearing swimsuits and using those rope swings to jump into the Punch Bowl, but we haven't done it yet.  We usually content ourselves looking for wildlife.  This year we rewarded with not only tadpoles and a frog (only one, sadly), but also a catfish.

The Traditional Bench Photo, Ninth(!!!) Anniversary edition

Frog

Big fat tadpole, well-camouflaged

Laconic catfish.

It was a hot day but cool enough in the shade in the woods.   When we came back to the car I wandered around the restored grounds taking pictures of Highfield Hall to show my mother.  They have done tremendous work restoring the old mansion and grounds.

The magnificent sunken garden between the hall and the theater

Spectacular view of the restored Highfield Hall and its beautifully landscaped grounds from the entirely new parking lot below it.

Chapoquoit Beach

We are not "beach day" people any more, if we ever really were.  Now we putter around in the morning and early afternoon, doing what needs to be done, and head to the beach for a few hours at the end of the day.  There were times when this was tremendously frustrating to me, but I got over it.

Timing the camera to the jump is always tricky.

 We only made to the beach a handful of times this year, but the sand was soft and white and the water was gorgeously clear -- cool the first few times, wonderfully warm after that.  No jellyfish, very little seaweed, and few bugs.

The only time all year we got ice cream from the Ice Cream Man!

The kids took themselves off to Bayside several times but I did not join them. Usually that was after dinner and I was working on my Spanish or just hanging out with Mom.

Ice Cream

I lost count of how many times we went out for ice cream.  It was kind of ridiculous, but in a good way.  Dairy Queen had coffee soft serve "for a limited time", and it was delicious, so we kept going back.  I think we went at least 4 times, maybe 5.  That doesn't sound like that much but when you factor in that we also went to Smitty's (2x), Ghelfi's (2x), and Ben and Bill's Chocolate Emporium, you can see that we were practically going out for ice cream every other day on the Cape.  The trend continued in CT, when my mother-in-law took the kids down to Bloom Hill for ice cream at least 3 times in the one week we were there! 

Strange things happening @DQ

Woods Hole, with and without bikes

Before DH came, my sister-in-law and I took all the kids down to Woods Hole for a day.  We had lunch at Pie in the Sky as usual, and then we went on the Ocean Quest discovery cruise.  More on that later, since it's not something we always do.  Pie in the Sky remains awesome, and we didn't mind going back there with DH when we biked down with him one day.

The big tree just across the street from Pie in the Sky

Feasts and Parties

Both my family and DH's family enjoy eating, perhaps too much.  Summer and just being there is enough of an excuse for us to throw together feasts and parties whenever we can.  Our first feast -- lobster and steak, with corn on the cob -- was to celebrate the arrival of my Louisiana brother and his family.  Two days later we had Mom's 85th birthday party,with something like 43 people in attendance, all immediate family: children, grand-children, and great-grandchildren.  What an awesome day.

Awesome 85 Cake

Cake-baking (and decorating!) Sister and Mom

On the 'regular' days we had only minor feasting of ribs or burgers on the grill.  I believe I made at least three blueberry cakes, but only one peach pie.  It took forever for the peaches to come in this year.

Three weeks after my Mom's party we had a birthday party for the guys in the family who are turning 50 and 60.  We called it "The Old Man" party, and it was a slightly smaller version of Mom's, but still quite awesome, even though the soon-to-be-50 guy got called into work.  (All of the party decorations were carefully stored away so they can be used on me next year.  I have mixed feelings about that!)

My Mom's newest great-grandbaby

They may be 60 but they can still handle those knives!

DD practices photo-bombing.  Yes, the lobsters are bigger than the bottle of wine.The platter in front is waiting for the corn on the cob.  The pie was awesome.

Our last feast was perhaps the best for us, because it wasn't a crazy day.  Just us, my Mom and my sister, three lobsters totaling 13 pounds, corn on the cob, lobster bisque, baked stuffed quahogs, and peach pie.  These were the first lobsters we had bought at Falmouth Fish Market because Green Pond didn't have any of the big guys.  We were very, very pleased with them.  (We probably could have done with just two, because we had nearly an entire lobster left over.  It did not go to waste, it made great lobster salad the next day.) 

Talcott Mountain I: Concert

We heard an evening of Elton John music this year.  It was delightful.  The kids enjoy the picnicking more than the music, but that's OK.  We brought bottles of wine from our trip to Mystic and enjoyed sipping and singing along.

DS2 grew four inches in the last year.  He's not little anymore.

 

Pre-concert entertainment with smart phone photos.

Talcott Mountain II: Hiking to the Heublein Tower

DS1 suggested this on our last full day in CT.  It was humid but the shade of the mountain made it bearable.  The heat and lack of rain really stressed the plants in CT, in contrast to how lush and gorgeous everything looked on the Cape.  Still, we had a great hike, with one nifty new find.

The catch-basin where we often find big frogs was more like a mud puddle, but there were dozens of these tiny, well-hidden tree frogs.

At the top of the moutain, a cardinal posed perfectly framed by the window in the shell of the field stone house.

One of my favorite views of the Tower.

Sneaky!

Mystic

A porch, a swing, a beautiful view. 

The kids stay with their Nana and Papa, and DH and I take off.  On the way down we stopped at Bishops for a quick sandwich and a tasting of their fruit wines.  Their raspberry dessert wine is outstanding.  We stay every year at the Mermaid Inn. It's charming.  Mystic is charming, and although we've talked about going somewhere else, nothing else seems as appealing. 

towards Mystic Seaport

The S&P Oyster House.  We dined outside here for the first time ever.  Their calamari is the best I have ever had.

Amazing icon of St. Michael, winner of the painting prize at the annual art show.

Bowling

It was very hot and humid in CT, draining us of all ambition.  DS1 worked on his math course and I worked on my Spanish and all the kids slept very late every day.  DH did some research and tracked down a go-cart place and bowling alley, and we had a blast.  The go-kart track was a well-designed figure 8 with curves and hills that were just sharp and steep enough.  Afterwards, we went and bowled a game of duckpins at a bowling alley so old-school that you had to manually remove the dead wood (not allowed in duckpins) and reset after your frame.  We played by time, not by game, so after the first game when we still had more time, DH and I bowled another (he eviscerated me) while the kids played the arcade games.  DS2 was thrilled with his inflatable tie-dye guitar.


We bowled again in Falmouth, too, at Ryan (formerly Leary) Family Amusements near Town Hall.  It's easier on everyone because the system is completely automated. DS2 found his stride and clobbered us all. If there were candlepins around anywhere, we would probably bowl more often, but tenpin is just not as much fun to me.

Travel
Something jinxed us this year.  On my way out with the kids we had a medical emergency on board and were diverted to St. Louis, where we had brutal turbulence.  Kudos to SouthWest Airlines, though, because if I were having a heart attack on a plane, I would want them to land it to get me to a hospital, too.  Anyway, we arrived hours late.


DH flew in on July 4th and had weather delays of two hours.

All of us flew back last Thursday, where we had both weather delays and a medical emergency (when a bloody nose results in blood also flowing from the eye, well, yes, you should get that guy off the plane.) Instead of landing at 9:30PM we landed at 2AM or thereabouts.

This little guy kept us company in Phoenix before our first flight out.

In the midst of all that we marveled that it hadn't happened to us before.  We've really been very lucky.  The kids were all old enough to deal with it well, and it really wasn't a problem.  We go into "travel mode" and just stay there until we're home.

And now we are home, and glad to be here.

compare, contrast

I had my second follow-up ultrasound today, of my neck.  The experience could not have been more different from last Friday's pelvic ultrasound.  On the positive side, I wasn't exhausted from only three hours of sleep and a long day of travel the day before. I was only the tiniest bit uncomfortable during the exam but that's because frankly I'm not very comfortable anywhere these days.

The pelvic u/s was mercifully short, whereas today's seemed to go on a while.  I've had longer ones, but I've had much shorter neck ultrasounds, too.  There was the usual clicking and typing and beeping as images were recorded.  The technician spent about ten times longer on the right side than on the left.

Of course I know what it means that she spent so much longer (10 minutes versus 1 minute) on the right: there was something to look at there.   This is still just a suspicion, of course, but my anxiety increased when the tech asked, "When is the last time you had a CT of your neck?" 

That is not what a thyroid cancer patient wants to hear. 

I told her I had had a PET/CT scan in February or March (can't remember exactly when, now. Sheesh.)  "Did they see anything?" 

Again, with the questions I don't want to hear.  Response: No, not in my neck.  They biopsied one of those nodes on the right side, too, and it was negative.

Of course, the tech can't say anything at all at this point and probably shouldn't even have said what she did, so she just said, "OK." 

And then I went home, and now I'm waiting until my appointment with Dr. B on Monday afternoon to find out what, if anything, is going on.  I should hear the results of my pelvic u/s with any luck on Wednesday.

I am not good at waiting.  My RA is still flaring along with my gastroparesis.   I was very unpleasant to the receptionist at my rheumatologist's office today (I did apologize, but still feel guilty about it), because she was insisting I had to be treated like a new patient and thus would have to go on a waiting list to get an appointment. The compromise was she would check with the doctor to see if a 15 minute appointment would be OK; I will call tomorrow to see what the outcome is.  While all this is going on I keep thinking I need to get into a regular exercise routine because it would probably help tremendously but everything hurts and I feel pukey and who wants to work out feeling like this?  Not me.

I just want to feel better by the time school starts.  I'm not even letting myself imagine teaching while feeling like this.  I'll be better by then.  

landscape projects

The only place I do any gardening or landscaping work is at my mother's house.  My siblings do the heavy lifting of the fall raking (really, spring raking: the oaks hang onto their leaves until the new leaves push them off), so that by the time I arrive in June, there's very little clean up to do... relatively.  It's all relative, here.

(Apologies for the festival of bad photographs that follows.)

B.B. (before blogging)

The Side Yard, victim of both neglect and incidental destruction
when the neighbor's backyard septic system was rebuilt.

The side yard is a complete mess right now, but I'm including this to show that there is some evidence of the very first yard-tinkering I was allowed to do: about 20 years ago, I transplanted some day lilies from the woodsy backyard of my house in Natick, and that single orange bloom is evidence that some of them are still alive.  There's quite a lot of good stuff in that little jungle, including honeysuckly, azalea, and bleeding heart, not to mention the little hydrangea my middle sister planted at about the same time.  The soil here is extremely poor and the water situation is dire (as in, the plants here only get wet when it rains, and the soil doesn't hold onto it at all), so it's kind of amazing any of this is still alive.  There's also a teeny tiny Japanese red maple that you can't see, that I'm hoping will someday take off.  It's up to 8 leaves this year, so that's an improvement.  This is on deck for next year.

Ongoing

Center flower bed, where it's shady all the time and water is an iffy proposition.

Those little snakes of ivy climbing the tree represent a major victory.  The irises are filling in nicely, too.  I didn't do much weeding of this bed this year because it wasn't that bad, which means next year it will be horrific, or maybe not.  The good plants and the mulch seem to be keeping them down.  It was nice to see the friendly little purple vinca flowers, all 3 or 4 of them, among the ivy.
  
I .

Bare but not neglected, at least.

I took Mom to Mass on her birthday and then we drove by Dad's grave. In that moment, it didn't seem too overgrown, so one evening I grabbed my gloves and few plastic grocery bags to go and thin out the irises around it.  When I got there, I realized I had greatly underestimated how overgrown it was. My older sister had put in irises soon after the headstone went up.  I don't know anything about irises in general, but these particular irises multiply like crazy.  One of my brothers thinned them out aggressively about 5 years ago, and those are the irises at the house now.   But five years of unrestrained growth led to such a thicket you could see only the middle "ON" of "O'CONNELL".   It took me about 6 hours to dig up everything (no point in leaving anything there to overgrow again) and add back topsoil and mulch.

Mom wants to just leave it with the mulch for now, but I have a contact who can put in seasonal flowers and maintain it for us.  Contacting her is another thing on my constantly expanding to-do list.

II.

What do you do with leftover irises?  Plant them, of course.

I ended up with two huge lawn-and-leaf bags of plantable stems with roots and bulbs, so I put in a bed of irises along the driveway.  By the time this photo was taken, the transplants had succumbed to the heat, but in June and early July they looked great.  My brother assures me they'll come back next year -- these things refuse to die.  It rained the entire day I put this bed in.  Most of the time it was just a light drizzle, but over the course of the day it progressed to a steady, soaking rain.  It was warm and there were only one or two cloudbursts, so I just kept at it.  The wetter it was, the easier it was to plant, anyway. 

III.

Backyard, where chaos is only a season or two away.

See that line of rocks?  There's another row of irises in front of it -- mostly bulbs went in there.  Behind it, I put in 10 rose bushes that I picked up for the amazingly awesome price of 2 for $3 at the Christmas Tree Shop.  The roses may or may not make it, but $15 for 10 rose bushes was irresistable to me.   This was a multi-day project, too, as first I had to clear out all the grapevines and wood plants that were taking over the yard.  The good thing about the vines, etc, is that they hid the leaf pile, but they had enroached a good 4 feet and were going for an all-out invasion.   The two evergreens to the left were so entwined with grape vines that their growth was being affected, so I freed them up, and then I decided to take back the yard.  Then I had all those iris bulbs left over so I put them in, and then I happened upon the rose bushes while I was looking for flipflops for DS2.  The way I see it, those rose bushes were meant to go in, because if I hadn't already cleaned out the space, and if DS2 hadn't lost his flipflops, I wouldn't have seen the amazingly cheap rosebushes or had a place to put them.

IV.

Time spent planting new stuff > time spent trying to kill old stuff, this year.  Win!

I don't blame my Mom for putting in those yucca plants years ago.  It's not her fault I have an irrational hatred for them.(In Massachusetts. Out here in AZ, they don't bother me at all.) They are a non-native species and they're impossible to kill, but I feel as if I am making some progress in eradicating them.  The first year I put in the hydrangeas, I simply dug out all the roots (some of them as thick as arm) and thought that would be it.  That was before I knew how pernicious yucca is.  In the following years I tried digging out the new plants and spraying the roots with Roundup, but that didn't seem to have any effect.  I only started getting results after finding the definitive yucca eradication advice page, How to Kill a Yucca Plant.  By the time I read the site, I had already dug up and chopped off dozens of plants, since every time you dig one up, it seems to send up at least three more.  I used the chop off the tips, submerge them in Roundup routine a couple of years, but it leaves a lot behind to clean up, and I'm never there to do it.  So the past two or three years I've used a modified version which works well with smaller plants:  pour boiling water over them to remove their waxy coating, soak them with Roundup, and wrap them in plastic.  The benefit of this method is that you don't have to wait until the plants are a foot tall to do it -- you can go right at the little ones.  I won't know how effective it was until next year, of course.

My mother thinks I work too hard, especially since I'm supposedly on vacation while I'm attacking all these plantings.  I tell her it's therapeutic and she laughs.  The fact is, I love flowers and I have always wanted the house to have hydrangeas, day lilies, roses, and ivy I see around many other homes there.  Since I'm the one that wants it, I'm the one who is doing it... little by little.

LIFO

That's an accounting acronym for inventory management: last in, first out.  It's one of the few things that has stuck with me from the one and only accounting course I took back in college.

But this post is LIFO because it's about events, not stuff.  On our first day home I had stacked up a few appointments, including bloodwork (only two sticks!) and my pelvic ultrasound.  While I obviously won't have the actual results from either test for a week or two, I was very encouraged by the brevity of the ultrasound.  The technician didn't see any reason to prolong the exam, which in any reasonable universe can be construed to mean that there wasn't anything to see or measure.

*relief*

Vacation is over even though work hasn't started.  There are so many tasks to accomplish to get everyone ready for the new school year, and I'm steadily ticking them off my mental lists.  My plan is to recap the summer over a series of posts arranged not chronologically but by project or event.  This summer was quite different but still wonderful, and I am back in that odd place where I am happy to be home but missing nearly everything about the Cape dearly.

 

The Punch Bowl, a kettle pond at Beebe Woods

¡Hola!

Yes, I did title this post in the cheesiest possible way.

I finally installed my Rosetta Stone Totale Spanish (Latin America) Christmas gift -- over two hours to install all 5 language levels!  -- and have worked through Unit 1, Lesson 4 - Core lesson. 

It's awesome.

Best part: there is zero translation.  It's all image-and-audio based.  You look at pictures, you hear words, you say words (or sounds).  If you're typing anything, it's in the new language.  This is, of course, brilliant, from a business model perspective because they can use the same Spanish (Latin America) software to teach anyone who wants to learn, regardless of their native language.  But it's also brilliant from a language acquisition perspective, a topic I know quite a bit about thanks to the state-mandated SEI training I needed for my teaching certificate.

The games (for review) are fun and range from simple (the one where you click on the picture matching the phrase you just heard) to maddening (the one where you try to get Bingo by clicking on words on a Bingo card that you hear in the native speaker's story.)  The native speakers do not speak with exaggerated slowness, and great deal of time is spent on ear training, as in  Wait, what did I just hear?  Fortunately you can (almost) always click on a button to hear a phrase repeated.

The voice recognition software is awesome, too.  It kept dinging me for saying "nosostros" when I should have been saying "nosotros" with no "s" before the "t".  It's a very subtle difference, but it wouldn't let me continue until I figured it out and got it right.  There is a really good balance of just repeating what the native speaker said and having to generate your own responses, too.

So far so good.  The program spirals back periodically to review older, already mastered material so it doesn't fall out of your brain, the same way you would, in real life, continue to use those first simple words and phrases day to day. 

High point so far: I managed to roll an "r" once yesterday. I hope if I keep practicing, I'll really be able to speak Spanish properly, not just comprehensibly.

Lord of the Flies

I started it on the flight out and finished it today. It's a little thing, but it does not go quickly. Golding's prose demands thinking about.

Somehow I managed to get through all my formal schooling without ever having read it. I knew of it, and knew the plot outline as well. And now having read it, I can see why it's on reading lists.

In contrast, DH and I saw Prometheus last weekend, and it was a crashing (literally) pretentious bore.  Its attempts to tackle primal questions (Who are we?  Why are we here?) were so awkward and obvious and predictable.  Lord of the Flies asks many of the same questions but with elegance and power.  Both works have scenes of terror, suspense, and violence, and both deal with isolated populations coming to grips with human nature, but that's where the similarities end.

100 years from now, we'll still be reading Golding, and no one will even remember Prometheus.

"I have a knife."

On the last day of school, I brought eight huge seedless watermelons to share with all my students and co-workers. How does that work? This:

Pampered Chef's Nylon Knife. Mine is pink.

is how you slice watermelon on a school campus. It's plastic, and you would have to try very, very hard to injure a person with it. I didn't let anyone else even touch it and kept it in closely guarded custody.

I didn't know whether to be amused or exasperated by the 7th-grader who insisted that I could not slice watermelon with a plastic knife, notwithstanding that I had already sliced up four or five that day before having that conversation with her. A lot of junior high kids struggle with the intersection of reality and their concept of it.

coasting, now

School is out!  Thursday was my last day with students, and it drifted by with endless streams of students in my bare classroom, come to have watermelon and listen to music and hang out.  Friday I spent less than two hours finishing up, packing my desk and labeling my furniture -- and then spent another couple of hours wrestling with slow computers and OpenOffice, running some simple analysis of my students' AIMS scores.  (Short answer: better than last year [yay!] and reasonably well correlated to my benchmark test [yay!].)

It took a while for it to really sink in, but by yesterday evening I was practically giddy.

Today? Planning this last week at home, cramming as many home cleanup and improvement projects as possible into these few shorts days, working around the already-scheduled appointments. 

Monday I'm going for the CA-125 blood test, which is screening for ovarian cancer.  It's not definitive in and of itself, but it will provide some information as to what's going on with me.  I've already scheduled a follow-up ultrasound on that cyst for July, and I will do my best not to think about it until then.

strawberry almond cake

It's the end of a long, busy week, and the refrigerator was nearly empty this morning, except for that container of strawberries I bought last weekend, which no one had touched. The milk was nearly gone, we had about a half-cup of sugar, so how could I make a strawberry version of our summer favorite blueberry cake? I've never really forgotten any of my Make It Low Carb routines, mainly because I still use a lot of them. So, with some tweaking:

Strawberry Almond Cake
with vanilla and nutmeg

Wash and drain the stawberries. Hull and quarter them.
Drizzle them with about a tablespoon of sugar-free vanilla syrup. (I use Torani or DaVinci)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line 9x13 pan with aluminum foil for easy cleanup. Spray the bottom and sides of the pan with no-stick cooking spray.

In a medium bowl, combine:
1 C all purpose flour (I use King Arthur)
1 C almond meal (I use Trader Joe's)
1/2 C sugar
1/2 C granulated Splenda
1/2 C Z-sweet (erythritol sweetener)
2/3 C shortening (I use Spectrum Organics)

Work these together until they look like crumbs. The fastest way to do this is with clean, dry fingers. The almond meal and the soft organic shortening work to make this a little sticky, but just scrape as much off your fingers as you can.

Reserve 3/4 C of the crumb mixture to sprinkle over the top.

To the remaining crumbs in the bowl, add:
1 scant tsp salt
3 tsp baking powder
about 1/4 tsp fresh grated nutmeg -- you don't want to taste the nutmeg, you just want it to enhance the other flavors

Stir all to combine well, then add:
1 C almond milk (unsweetened, unflavored)
2 eggs, beaten
Stir well to combine, making sure there are no clumps of dry ingredients. Pour into the prepared pan and spread the batter evenly.

Sprinkle with about 1+1/2 cup of the sliced, macerated strawberries.
Sprinkle the reserved crumbs over the top.
Lightly dust fresh grated nutmeg over the entire cake.

Bake at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes, until the top is golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

The strawberries were not the best ever, but they tasted awesome in this cake. The combination of the strawberries and almonds with the hints of vanilla and nutmeg was even better than I expected. Also even better than I expected is the texture, which is moist but not too heavy, perfect for a quick bread (which this is, notwithstanding that it's called cake).

It made a nice breakfast with coffee. It came out of the oven about five hours ago...there's about a quarter of it left. I doubt it will last till tomorrow.

clearly ambiguous

I received the ultrasound report in the mail today. Unfortunately, I was right to doubt the receptionist's cheerful "It's completely normal!" summary... but I don't think I'm headed for surgery, either. (whew!)

The report itself is a paragon of brevity. However, the concision with which the radiologist expressed his findings leads to some confusion on my part. For example, nearly all of the radiological literature (I'm great at reading this stuff, since ultrasound is one of the main tools for diagnosing thyroid cancer issues) clearly distinguishes between functional cysts and others. So the finding of a "small complex cyst with thickened wall and mural nodularity" is not entirely consistent with the impression, "Small complex cyst of the right ovary... likely reflects a small functional cyst".

That was the first impression, concluding with, "consider followup as indicated."

The second impression was that there were small follicles on the left ovary, with interval resolution of a left-sided ovarian cyst. So there was something going on there at some point, but what "interval" are we talking about here, the one since the last u/s report (November 2010)? Who knows.

At this point, I'll wait for my doctor to get back to his office (Tuesday), and call and ask how they want to follow up on this. I'm thinking -- hoping -- all he'll say is I need to go for another ultrasound in a bit. I can handle that.

In the meantime, the large amount of web pages discussing ovarian cysts are consistent in mentioning the very, very low occurrences of malignancy, so that's encouraging, too, even though thickened walls and mural nodules are flags that this particular cyst should be monitored.

run around

It feels like I spent the entire weekend shopping with DD in preparation for the graduation recital this evening. Saturday was a bust, but Sunday was very successful, and she looked beautiful tonight. The boys were also quite handsome, notwithstanding their new haircuts. DS1's is too short, and DS2... well, there was a slight mishap with the trimmer. It will grow in.

Earlier today, DS2 had his fifth grade commencement ceremony. I left work at 1PM to get there on time, and it was delightful to leave. No one wanted to do anything today, and I fear that will be the case from now until the very last day, so I am essentially babysitting. It's not fun. Perhaps tomorrow will go better.

In between the commencement and the recital, we were home for about an hour. Since there was no call from the doctor about the ultrasound, I called the office. The receptionist told me that the doctor and his wife, the NP, are both out all week... but then she looked for the ultrasound report and told me that it was completely normal. I was nonplussed. First of all, that she would just give me a result over the phone like that without the doctor's say so -- but perhaps he had already seen the report and OK'd it. I don't know. Second, that the u/s showed absolutely nothing, because there is definitely something going on, and if it's not with the ovary, then what is it? That internal ultrasound took forever, and the tech was definitely measuring something. Normal ultrasounds are over in like 30 seconds. Usually.

I wondered if she read the correct report, so I asked her to mail me a copy. She said that she would be happy to, so I'll see it in a few days if she actually does put it in the mail. Maybe she was looking at the report from 2005 that said exactly the same thing: nothing.

It's good news, in the sense that it's not bad news, but it's still frustrating to feel so peaked and have no answer as to what's going on, and therefore no end in sight.

I flew threw the first two volumes (books) of Game of Thrones, but I'm resisting getting the next one until school is out. I would much rather be in Winterfell than in reality right now, but I simply have too much to get done before I can indulge like that.

breathe through it

Had the ultrasound on Wednesday without major discomfort. To be precise, I had two ultrasounds, the abdominal and the internal -- the first was quick with a few photos, the second interminably long with many, many photos. The tech took a million pictures with the Doppler on.  I am not encouraged.

I think:Please don't let this be cancer. I don't want to have surgery this summer. And I think, Well, even if it is, it must be small -- I just had that PET/CT scan in mid-March and it didn't show anything of significance.  (It did show a small metabolic focus in the left pelvis, chalked up to "physiologic (aka normal) activity in the ovary". Ha!) And then I try and think of other things that could cause this level of of ongoing pain and discomfort and general things-not-working-right , and there's really  not much.  More prolapse?  Fibromyalgia flare?  Seems like I'm reaching.  An ovarian cyst is the best fit, but what kind of cyst?  I just keep hoping it will go away, like all the others have.  Most functional cysts have resolved before they hit the 6 week mark, and this one hasn't.

In the meantime, I've gained about 5 pounds at the worst possible time, but it doesn't matter what I eat or don't eat because 3 solid weeks of very faithful dieting netted me a zero pound weight loss.  Whatever it is that's going on, I'm not going to drop those 5 pounds (now up to 10) that I had wanted to, before summer and bathing suit weather.  Too bad. 

Kids start their last week of school Monday, and Monday is DS2's 5th grade commencement and the graduation recital for all 3 in the evening.  From there, it's all downhill for them.  Me, I have to make it through June 1 to be well and truly done.

I hope for news on Monday -- if I don't hear anything, I'll call on Tuesday.  The waiting really is the hardest part, I turn into a big ball of tension and forget to breathe.  So I try to remember that, and not take my stresses out on everyone around me.  Inhale, exhale... inhale, exhale...

there goes another month...

I had hoped that after all my testing was over and I finally had my answer that I would have some kind of peace. It turns out that whatever relief I got from the resolution of the medical situation was replaced with other stresses, so it was all a wash.

Kids are fine, husband is fine, house is fine. School oscillates between being deeply satisfying and unbelievably frustrating. I'm struggling with lesson plans that work beautifully with two classes and fail utterly with two others. I don't get it. I remind myself of the Chinese proverb defining insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting something different to happen. Me, I hope that when I do the same thing -- teach a particular lesson -- I get the same results, or at least something similar. No luck.

I remain at a loss for how to deal with certain students. "I didn't know you wanted us to learn this, I thought we just had to take the notes," one student said to me today. Of course the entire purpose of taking the notes is to help the students learn, and I have -- innumerable times -- explicitly told them that, just as I have explained why I ask them to do each particular task or assignment. Everything I ask them to do is to help them learn, but at this point, I'm left with no alternative but to assume they are being willfully oppositional. Of course that's exhausting, and sad -- they don't trust me, or care enough to try, and that's very hard to deal with.

In among all this foolishness is an ovarian cyst I have been dealing with since Easter. I hope it resolves soon. Standard medical advice says to wait 4 weeks before contacting the doctor. I really don't want to deal with yet another round of medical testing.

Tomorrow is May, and the whirlwind begins in earnest: a concert with DD, Feed My Starving Children, the last debate tournament of year, ASP testing for the kids, graduation recital, awards dinners, finals, etc and so forth, straight through to Memorial Day. I don't finish school until June 1st... only one more month.

Many plans have been made for the summer, very few for beyond that. We'll see.

yay!

The scan was clean. (Some close to me are saying "of course," but you know, I try not to count on that.) My next follow-up will be my usual 6 month ultrasound & bloodwork, both painless (mostly) and inexpensive. I can get that done in July before the new school year starts up.

How wonderful to be able to make plans now!

scenarios

If the scan was clean, then whatever is making my tumor marker rise is too small to see by conventional methods, so no treatment is indicated now. I'll be subjected to "watchful waiting" for the foreseeable future to keep track of my numbers. The relief I feel at not needing treatment will be offset by my annoyance at having to go through all this hassle and expense only to end up with essentially no data.

If the scan showed one or two small spots, then the situation is slightly more complicated: I could go for treatment or I could stick with watchful waiting, perhaps tweaking my medication so my TSH is even more suppressed. I will feel some relief at knowing the current state of my disease progression. This will be offset by my anxiety over the sure knowledge that my cancer is back again, which in turn will/may be balanced by the fact that it took over 6 years to show up again. This particular see-saw doesn't stop there, though, because, you know, Dr. Clayman promised he got it all, and I believed him.

If the scan shows enough disease progression to require treatment, I will get the treatment, of course. It will most likely be surgery, unless it's in an inoperable place, which would be weird, and would then probably need some kind of external beam radiation. Ick. Sometimes I'm afraid that my undiagnosable headaches from a couple of years ago (which never went away, I just know how to manage them) are actually from metastases, but that's really unlikely.

Options 1 and 2 have me planning my summer vacation Tuesday evening. I'm looking forward to that. Option 3 is not exactly unthinkable, and it really does help that I've been through a neck dissection before, but I don't have any feeling about this one way or the other. I just don't know.

My general response to this situation is: I don't have time for this. Can't you see I'm working here? I'd like to continue to do that, OK? OK.

fake

Today at the end of my prep hour (in which I - for once - did actual lesson planning) I noticed that my endocrinologist's office had called. In the vastness of my classroom, I rarely hear my cell phone vibrating.

I tried to call back but got funneled through to voice mail and gave up, only to find that they had left me a message. I felt distinctly uneasy -- why are they calling me today, my appointment's not until Tuesday, they wouldn't be reminding me so soon, so there must be some news...

No such luck. The message was a simple appointment reminder. Still don't know whether I'm coming or going.

[It's not that I don't work during my prep hour, it's just that lesson planning is usually my Sunday evening activity. Prep hour is usually for cleaning, assembling or putting away lab supplies, grading, updating the gradebook, or writing tests.]

unhome

Ninja dishwasher -- so quiet you don't know it's there

So last weekend DH says, "Let's get a new dishwasher." This wasn't totally out of left field since we'd had to prop the old one closed so it would run. Still, I was surprised, because the broomstick wasn't that much of a pain to deal with. We went to the Sears Appliance Center down the street and bought a dishwasher. (We tried Spencer's first, but they were closed, and we were impatient.)

It was installed yesterday in between doctor's appointments and A/C maintenance and making Boston Creme pie for Pi Day.

Not pretty, but tasty: yellow cake, pastry creme filling, and dark chocolate ganache

We bought a new refrigerator, too, simply because the old one was 16 years old and that in itself was something of a miracle. Better to plan the switch than have to deal with it on an emergency basis. The new fridge was just delivered, a half-hour early. While normally one appreciates a delivery coming early, I was in no way prepared for it: my dentist appointment ran late. What I'd hoped would be a thoughtful process of sorting, storing, and disposing was instead a rush job of getting everything out of the old unit so it could be moved out of the way.

It wasn't that bad in the alcove, but it still took some effort to get it clean.

It's huge, but it doesn't take over the kitchen.

I basically threw everything into the new fridge. We'll sort it out later. I'm exhausted.

Between the dishwasher and refrigerator, that doesn't feel like my kitchen. I know I'll get used to it, but right now I can't help thinking if all this expense and fuss was worth it.

PET/CT

... scan this morning. It took, as scheduled, about 2 hours from start to finish. The first thing the tech did was to check my blood sugar (95, fasting) to make sure that the radioactive sugar tracer would get picked up by anything hungry. Second was finding a vein (always a joy), and finally going with one on the back of my hand in which to inject said tracer. The tech brought in a little lead-lined box (looking exactly like a fashionable little clutch, if it weren't for the radiation hazard symbols on it), and took from it a lead-encased hypodermic -- for her protection, not mine, since of course she injected me with the stuff. It was a very small amount of material, but I still had that odd, cold-veined feeling from it.

After that? Resting for an hour to let the tracer work its way through my system, while I worked on a vanilla-flavored barium contrast shake. It's a good thing I was fasting, there is no way I could've drunk that shake if I had had anything in my stomach already. As it was, it wasn't easy drinking the whole thing, even though the texture was much improved since the last time I had to drink something like that.

So, tucked up in a warm blanket, I mostly napped in the recliner for that hour, and then I was brought into the scanner. As usual, it features an incredibly narrow plank which slides in and out of the "doughnut" which is the actual scanner. This is where I screwed up, because I didn't relax my arms enough while the tech was adjusting the velcro straps that are supposed to support them during the scan. I think I just wanted to get it over with, and I wasn't really thinking about whether the straps were supporting my arms or I was.

Holding your arms at your sides for 40 minutes isn't fun, and I ended up with a headache because the cradle for my head, while lined with some type of thick fabric, was still really hard underneath. It doesn't help that I'm in a minor flare and everything hurts now anyway.

I cycled through the stages of "wow, this really hurts, and I really need to move my arms" to "relax, relax, don't screw it up or they'll have to start all over" to "OK, I can do this" at least three times, and had come back around to the "don't screw it up" point again when it was finally over.

The tech says my doctor will have results in 24 hours, 48 at the latest, but my appointment with my endocrinologist is set for March 27 and I don't expect to hear anything before then. (sigh)

I was put off today by a couple of people who know about this situation and just brushed it off as if it were nothing. I don't want to be fussed over, but I would like some acknowledgement that this situation -- waiting for test results, not knowing whether I'm coming or going -- wears on a person. Well, it wears on me.

That wraps up day two of a spring break that is full of appointments and deliveries, and will finish up with a speech and debate tournament. This is the kind of vacation that you need a vacation from.

low

We did some shopping over the weekend.

Young Chang Y-131 52" upright, aka "a real piano"

Sounds phenomenal, and plays like a concert grand. It's to be delivered Friday, and we are all very excited for its arrival. The old Reed Music Co. console has been dead for a while, and I just didn't want to admit it. I only realized how bad it was when I started practicing a new piece, and now I feel rather bad about having the kids play on such a wretched piano for so long.

Still, I'm feeling beset from all sides. There are no new catastrophes to deal with, and I'm matter-of-fact about my follow up tests, now. I just don't like how any happy news only "sticks" for a moment or two and then I'm right back down in the pit. I'm not sure what's going to get me out, although a clean PET/CT scan would probably do it.

Retail therapy is usually a lot more effective.

next...

After three rounds of telephone tag, my endocrinologist's nurse/manager finally called me at a time when I could answer my phone. (The messages we were leaving for each other would have been hilarious if they had not been so frustrating.) The conversation was brief; the nurse manager is refreshingly direct. It's all well and good that the biopsy came back negative, but given that my tumor marker is increasing, the endo wants me to have a PET scan.

That is quite a reasonable course of action, and it aligns perfectly with the ATA guidelines for this situation.

I've never had a PET scan, but it doesn't sound much different from other scans I've had. I tend to doze off during whole body scans, since they are silent and take about 45 minutes. I'm quite happy to hear that this scan will not involve the horrible banging and clicking and buzzing of an MRI.

Scheduling this will be interesting. DS1 will be having two different oral surgeries in the next month or so, plus we've got two more debate tournaments, DS2's field hockey tournament, and spring break coming up as well.

DS1's surgery and the State tournament make extended travel that week impossible, but I'd love to get away for just a day or two. I just have to figure out how to do that.

status quo

Finally spoke to the doctor today. The results were good, in that they didn't find any evidence of thyroid cancer in the samples they took. However, as always, the pathologist did that CYA routine where he noted that the conclusion is only valid for the materials that were extracted and that we can't be sure there isn't something going on in all the stuff that was left behind. To be really really sure there's nothing going on, you have to do a surgical excision.

The ENT thinks that's overkill, and I agree, but given my rising tumor marker (Tg), we are leaving it up to my endocrinologist to make the call as to what tests to do next.

So I still don't know what's going on, but I'm so used to it by now it doesn't make a difference.

I stayed late after school today so I could go with the high school science club to the open house at Microchip, part of the Arizona SciTech Festival. It was a great event, and the kids had a fantastic time seeing all of the cool technology and how it's applied.

It was a wonderful tonic for me, too, as I have been struggling so much with my students. So many of them just don't want to be there or put in any effort at all that it is disheartening. It was a joy to be around students this evening who were engaged and interesting and polite and fun to be with.

missed message

I clung to my cellphone all afternoon so I wouldn't miss the doctor's call with my biopsy results. Of course, that's what happened anyway, when I set my phone down at the music studio this evening (kids' piano and voice lessons) and didn't hear it buzzing when he called. I did not expect him to call at 6:24PM.

I can call him back tomorrow after 1:30PM, he said, "to discuss the next steps, given the biopsy results," which of course he did not divulge.

(bangs head against wall)

There are three possible outcomes of any FNA. Positive, they found cancer cells. Negative, they didn't find cancer cells. Indeterminate, they didn't find much of anything and are unwilling to say anything about what they did find.

Pretty much the only difference that would come from one result versus another is the type of tests that are ordered as the next step. If it's negative or indeterminate, it might be OK to put off further testing until the summer. If it's positive, that may be reason enough to try to move things along more quickly.

Tomorrow I'll find out what I should already know by now, but really, one more day isn't going to make that big a difference.

back in the real world...

Yeah, expecting to hear results after a mere 48 hours was a pipe dream. I still haven't heard anything.

On the other hand, I spent all weekend cooking and eating, as DS2 turned 11 and had a sleepover party, necessitating brownies, cupcakes, and fresh-squeezed orange juice, among other things.

My neck hurts less than it did last week, but still isn't "right", and I have a headache most days which Tylenol helps but doesn't eliminate.

I go long stretches without thinking about the cancer situation, mostly because I have that "beating my head against a brick wall" feeling regarding my teaching. The class average for my seventh graders on our last quiz was 8/20, and I fear that my eighth graders will do just as poorly on the quiz they are having this week. In one review session this morning, I said something like, "The last question is something we talked about during the lab last week." One student -- a pretty good student, too -- replied, "But that was on Thursday, I don't remember anything from that far back!" The lack of continuity and opportunities for repetition over time in the block schedule is killing me.

In spite of that, I know I'm a better teacher this year. It's such a shame it won't be reflected in any of my students' standardized test grades.

group

An hour goes by fast when you're talking to, with, and about other people's problems. It went by so quickly today that I didn't get a chance to mention my biopsy, and no one noticed the faint bruising or swelling under my jawline.

I did get a chance to talk to my co-facilitator to let her know what's going on. She has her own distractions to deal with. We left it at keeping each other posted if we hear any news, especially if it means we won't be able to make the group. There's not much else we can do at this point.

that was easy

Well, as easy as could be expected.

I had a very kind and competent ultrasound technician and an equally kind and experienced radiologist for my FNA biopsy today.

As these things go, that was the best so far. The doctor used an absolutely tiny needle to administer the anesthetic, so it burned much less than it has in the past. He made four passes at the lymph node, and the sensations of the needle hitting the node and then drawing out its contents were painful in a way that is hard to describe if you haven't experienced it. It just 1) feels weird and 2) hurts to have someone poking around your innards, no matter that said innards are fairly close to your skin. But today the pain was bearable, maybe because I've been through it before and knew what to expect, or maybe because I have so much residual nerve damage in my neck from previous surgeries that I literally couldn't feel it as much as I have before.

Whatever the resaon, it wasn't nearly as painful or exhausting as it has been in the past. I'm left with a slight bruise but it's in a location that most people are not likely to notice.

The doctor made a point of showing me the node-with-needle image on the ultrasound, so I could see how well he was able to target it (very well). I asked him if I could see how vascularized it was, and he was very obliging, and had the tech image the node and turn on the Doppler, and then freeze the image so I could turn my head to see it. There were 4 tiny red specks around the perimeter, and no signs of calcification. I would have preferred only one tiny red speck, but the 4 tiny specks were not so bad. If there's anything going on in there, it's just getting started.

The tech told me that my ENT would have results "within 48 hours," which approaches miraculous. After that, I have no idea.

habituated

It took a little more than a week for the shock to wear off. Now I can go entire consecutive hours without thinking about the fact that I have a recurrence (of indeterminate size) and that I am having a biopsy tomorrow.

Then I remember.

It's surprising how future-focused day-to-day life is. With school, it's planning the next lesson, and the lessons for the next day and the days after that, all the way out to spring break. With my family, it's figuring out who has to do what, when, and who needs a ride where, and all that.

What we'd like to be doing, what I would be usually doing at this time of year, is planning our spring break activities and starting to look at flights back east for the summer. That's where my mind goes when I forget, and then I remember.

next step

I'm scheduled for a biopsy on Wednesday.

I've said it before and I hope I never have to say it again, but a day that includes the decision to jab needles in my neck is not a good day. There is no way around that.

My ENT assured me, several times, that even though I have a recurrence, it won't kill me. Of course he didn't use those words, since he has both tact and charm, but that's what he meant. Me, I can be as blunt as I want in my blog.

grrrrr

Saw the endo today. My tumor marker is up, and I have small, but persistent, lymph nodes near my right submandibular salivary gland.

More tests coming, and we'll have to see what they find. In reviewing my labs, I see that even my suppressed Tg (that would be the tumor marker) has been slowly creeping up over the past 4 years or so, from undetectable to .1 something to .2 something to now .32, so there's definitely something going on, even if it's not very big.

I'm meeting with my ENT on Thursday and we'll consult on whether it should be a PET scan, a PET/CT, a CT with contrast, or an MRI that could best visualize whatever is going on. The endo's going with the radiologist (who read the ultrasound report),and recommending a PET scan. I don't think I've ever had one. First time for everything, I suppose.

I never ever ever want to go under the knife again, but it's probably somewhere in my future. Perhaps I can push it off a ways...

boom!

Something loud shook the house at about quarter to 11. DD came down asking about it; it shook her loft bed, which is literally bolted to the walls. We went out to look around in the yard and didn't see anything, but it didn't take long for the sirens to start.

Something exploded, a few blocks south of us. We have a view of the smoke and flames from our upstairs window. We think it's one of the small houses in the residential neighborhood there, but we don't know for sure. Lots of speculation: meth lab? gas leak? What else could there be?

@11:15. Now DH is tuned in to the fire department's radio on our new Roku box, and we hear the address. It's a house not a half mile from here, directly south. From the size of the glow, it was not a small fire, and I can hear more sirens coming in now. People died there, surely. Neighbors most likely died, too, if we felt the explosion a half a mile away.

The older two kids are concerned -- what if it's a gas leak? I've already reassured them and sent them back to bed.

It's unsettling, to be sure. It's remarkable how safe you can feel in a place until suddenly, you don't.

follow up

I had my post-thyroid ultrasound on Monday morning, ridiculously early for a day off from work. Today, the message from Dr. O's office was waiting when I got home from school: Your ultrasound results are in. The doctor would like to see you.

This is the part where I spin my wheels trying to remember what I saw and to figure out what it means. I saw a highly vascularized blob of something, but that could have been my carotid or jugular for all I know. Dr. O could just want to see me to make sure the problems I was having in the late fall, mostly due to flaring gastroparesis, have resolved.

I like the sound of that much better than any other reason to be of interest to the doctor.

wolf, hedgehog, raccoon

Linneaus' pet raccoon, Sjupp...

Oddly enough, this weekend feels like we're finally on vacation. Last week was project work week: SLE (lupus), hedgehogs, and Linneaus. We all know a lot more about each of them, now.

...and here are the hedgehogs - European on the left, Four-toed (African) on the right, in their natural habitats

constructive forces

Reddish, rusty cinder cone dislodged from the top of Sunset Crater sometime late in its last eruption.


It's all a matter of perspective. Sometimes tearing down and building up are happening at the same time.

passed

The time is gone when any of my children will spontaneously give me a hug or kiss, so I give them both to make up for it.

instead

Sunset at Little America, Flagstaff

Somehow all of December passed without a word written here, so again, I resort to an omnibus sort of post, trying to cram all sorts of things in just so they aren't forgotten altogether.

School-wise, second semester coasted to a close after the science fair. My students objected vehemently to getting back to "regular" work, but we managed to get back into some sort of rhythm. I'm working on integrating more video into my lessons as I find more ways to use my projector. Now I just have to remember to retrieve my speakers from the colleague who borrowed them for last days before winter break...

My students were particularly aggrieved that I made them take their second benchmark in the days just before break (which explains why I was willing to loan out those speakers). One reason for that timing: I had my Thyrogen trial in the week before Christmas, and I had to drive up to Phoenix four days out of five -- Monday and Tuesday for injections, Wednesday for dosing, and Friday for the scan. Happily, the scan was negative, but I won't find out my blood work results until the end of January.

After taking a year (or more) off, I've run the whole gauntlet of cancer tests again, getting the all-clear from my dermatologist and my GYN. One test result still pending, though: the BT Test, a new blood test from breast cancer.

In the run-up to Christmas, I remembered how medical issues used to dominate my life. I won't really relax until all the tests are in and I'm clear, but obviously I'm happy about the results so far.

Back at the beginning of December, I took off a day of work to travel with DS1's speech and debate team to the Winter Trophy tournament. It was an exhausting and intense experience, but such a joy to spend so much time with this group of amazing students and dedicated staff and parents. We drove out early Friday morning and returned very late Saturday (or early Sunday morning, depending on how you want to look at it.) Trips like this are like vacations from reality. None of my usual responsibilities weighed on me, because I was completely consumed with a new one: judging. I love the mental workouts these tournaments put me through.

After Winter Trophy, things shifted into high gear, as all the kids had their piano recital, the older two had Fine Arts night, and DS2 had a concert. I took DD and a couple of her school friends up to the Wildlife World Zoo to meet one of their hedgehogs. There was a lot of shopping, some baking, and we even managed to do a Christmas card this year.

DD tolerates this process...barely.

Christmas itself seemed uncharacteristically easy. It was lovely having so many days off to prepare before the holiday itself. I spent most of Christmas in the kitchen, simply because I didn't feel like doing all the cooking the day before, and we had no other plans. I brined the turkey the same way, and paid attention to Thanksgiving's lessons, and dinner was terrific. I admit, I still bailed on making my own rolls: Trader Joe's crescent rolls were much better than the store bought rolls from T-day. DD helped me make an apple pie (at DH's request) and our Christmas Tree cake (blueberry, this year).

After days of lounging around, we booked a room in Flagstaff so we could get some sledding in. We checked the forecast and knew it would be warm, but we didn't realize how warm it really would be, nor did we know how that would affect the snow cover. Wing Mountain trucked in tons of snow but simply gets too much sun to keep it on the slopes, and since we were too lazy to get up at a decent hour, all that was left by the time we got there was slush. Still, the kids and I had a a half-dozen runs or so apiece before we bailed: mud and slush and wandering toddlers combined to take the fun out of it.

Still, Flagstaff wasn't a total loss. After dinner we visited Lowell Observatory and looked back into the earliest days of the universe, as well as the moon, the Pleiades, and Jupiter and four of its moons. The next day we visited Sunset Crater and the Wupatki National Monument, and I was in heaven. It was a perfect geek get-away.

Sunset Crater

Lone tree clinging to the cinder-covered slope at Sunset Crater

at Wupatki National Monument (the fill-in flash on my camera was wholly inadequate to the requirements, here)

What did the kids like the best? My guess: playing in the snow at Sunset Crater.

Off-trail entertainment

lessons

Things I learned this week -- from my 2nd science fair, and from Thanksgiving -- that I'm writing down so I won't forget.

Science Fair first, since it was something of a debacle. I had one class hour (20 students) in which only one student turned in a project. I'm still struggling with how much responsibility for that lies with me; this page details the entire process. What usually happens is that the students screw around until the last minute and then come up with something, but with this particular group of students, that did not happen. Astoundingly, only one other group turned in a project on Wednesday. What are the other ones waiting for? The majority of them had their data and their reports drafted -- all they needed to do was type them up and make a display board. I don't get it.

Next time (if there is a next time):
* submit the facility request form (now that I know it exists) for the gym when the schedule is set
* find out the schedule for benchmark testing for language arts and math, since they either take over the computer lab or screw up the schedule, or both
* find out the schedule for standardized testing for high school, because it screws up the schedule for junior high even though no junior high students are testing
* make the all the projects due at the beginning of school on the first day of the science fair so the judges have more time
* review the rubrics with the judges to smooth out the extremes (everything was great! everything was a mess!)

Things that worked well: requiring complete typed rough drafts from the students was very helpful to the groups that did them. Making the students evaluate at least five other student presentations worked well and forced the students to look at other projects in more depth. The timing -- Thanksgiving week -- seems insane but is actually awesome, because the students know it's a short week and don't want to do anything, anyway, and then there's the four day weekend to plow through all the grading.

Wednesday was a full day at school, but even with breaking down the science fair, I still got home around 4PM, which gave me plenty of time to cook.

Thanksgiving was a vastly more pleasant experience.

* Brine for an already-injected frozen, then defrosted turkey: 2/3 cup kosher salt, 2/3 cup sugar, 1 gallon of water; 12-14 hour brining time for a very large bird.

* Cutting up the turkey before brining and roasting it is awesome. I roasted the back (for soup) while the pies were baking on Wednesday. On Thursday, I sliced carrots, celery, and onion very thinly and scattered the pieces over (double, heavy-duty, lots of extra at the edges) foil-lined sheet pans. The whole breast and one wing fit on one pan, the legs, thighs, and other wing on another. I brushed the pieces with melted butter and gave them a little salt, then roasted at 400 for about 2 hours. (These were pieces from a 22-pound bird). I checked them periodically and added chicken stock to the pans if the vegetables where charring. The meat came out perfect, and made excellent drippings for gravy that were easy to handle -- I just picked up the foil and poured off the liquid. Clean up was a snap, too.

* The cranberry apricot pecan relish needs a lot more ginger than I thought it does.

* Gingersnaps make an awesome crust for a pumpkin pie.

* Microwave cooking a full pot of green beans takes longer than microwaving a few servings.

* Store bought rolls may be easy but the home made ones are so much better. I just need to suck it up and make my own.

* Peeling and cubing the squash before cooking it is a lot easier to deal with than cooking the whole squash and trying to get the edible parts separated from the peel.

* The pies won't overcook if you don't overfill them.

* Check and make sure there's still molasses in the cupboard before starting to bake.

* When making meringue, the instructions that say "add sugar gradually" are not kidding.

* Making cranberry sauce on the stove top, and letting it cook for (at least) 10 minutes, as the recipe dictates, works a lot better than using the microwave.

a day off

So many times I would've typed "a day, off" -- but not today.

Today was a day to count blessings, so I did.

no more jack-o-lanterns

This is the first year in all the years we've lived in this house, I think -- 13 years -- that we haven't carved pumpkins. It was always my job to rustle up some candles from somewhere so I could light them and put them in the pumpkins out front. And then I had to remember to go out later, much later than the last trick-or-treaters, to blow out the candles and bring in the pumpkins, before they got smashed in the street. This year no one in the house wanted to do it, so we didn't.

DS1 opted out this year, knowing he'll be able to share his younger siblings' candy. DD and DS2 are wearing sensible footwear (as opposed to the pre-teen in stiletto heels who just left the door) and will probably be out with DH for another hour, hauling back more candy than they will even want to eat.

While at home things seem less stressed than usual, I'm dreading the rest of this week at school. Children on an all-candy diet don't listen or learn well. Best not to think of that, and enjoy watching Alice's excitement with each new group of children at the door.

She's very patient, and only occasionally
tries to fish a lollipop out of the candy bowl.

pilfering trifles

Today I discovered the latest in an ongoing series of minor thefts from my classroom: the toy cars I'd bought last year for the 8th graders to use in our physics unit. So far this year, I've "lost"

- Basher Science: Rocks and Minerals: A Gem of a Read

- FOR BIG MISTAKES ERASER

- a set of 4 fine-tipped dry erase markers... one at a time... from my desk

- a lovely brain coral specimen that was given to me by a student

- a gallon-size ziploc bag of more than two dozen Sharpies and other permanent markers

- 18 Matchbox cars

The bag of Sharpies was in one of my desk drawers, all the way in the back, behind a divider. The Matchbox cars were in a plastic lunchbox from Disneyland, in a closed cabinet by my desk.

Somehow, I made it through the school year last year without losing these things (well, not the dry erase markers).

Every time this happens, I get upset. It's not the money. I have these things so that my students can use them, and so they are just stealing from themselves. It makes me very sad.

I need to figure out how to let this kind of thing go, but I'm not there yet.

Q2

Tomorrow begins the second quarter of school, already... fall break was just a week but seemed like more.

DD & I flew into Boston for a quick trip out to see how Mom is recovering. In a word: splendidly.

Mom with one brother & his family

We were very lucky to hit the end of Indian Summer. There's something glorious about swimming in the Atlantic in October, when the water is tolerably cool and incredibly clear. We walked clear to the tip of Chapaquoit, with crowds of sandpipers fleeing before us.

Non-plussed, they'd just scurry a few feet away and wait for us to catch up to them.

We packed a lot into a few days: beach, shopping, cupcakes, Woods Hole... best of course was seeing family, including my newest grand-nephew.



Then home again, for piano lessons and assorted appointments and two days of a debate tournament. That left just today for getting ready for the week to come. Second quarter -- I'm taking a deep breath now because I won't be able to get another until Thanksgiving.

round peg, square hole

I cleaned up some graffiti in a girls' bathroom at work today, and now it seems as if I may catch flak for it.

The question keeps arising: what am I doing there?

Only two more days of classes until fall break, and a quick trip out to see Mom, who is nicely recovering from all her procedures. Yay!

being a philosopher...

... I have a problem for every solution.

That's one of the quotes I heard -- the topic for an Impromptu speech -- at the speech & debate festival I attended with DS1 today. It was a long day, but very satisfying in many ways. I don't get too much intellectual stimulation during my normal routine. Today I remembered how I felt as a college freshman, surrounded by other people who weren't ashamed of the fact that they were smart, or beyond smart. When I got out of school and started working, it took a while for the expectation of brilliance to wear off. I ran into all sorts of problems, usually minor, because I wasn't taking into account the fact that not everyone thinks the way I do.

I still get hassled by my students when I throw some unusual (for them) vocabulary their way (I think everyone should know, for example, what wretched means). They don't see the point, and when I try to explain to them that limited vocabulary means a limited ability to think, the majority of them don't see that as a downside.

So all of this... intellectual stimulation is setting of a cycle of introspection regarding where I am now and whether or not it is the kind of place I really should be in. I am feeling very square-peg-in-a-round-hole after today, because at the festival, I felt as if I belonged. At my school, I belong only because I've carved out a space for myself and everyone else just has to accept the fact that I'm there. I acutely feel how different I am from everyone else, both faculty and staff.

Not that anything is changing. This is just me spinning my wheels again, finding the problems where they don't exist.

Speaking of: Mom's pace maker was implanted without any incidents, and she is back home again. Her case for valve replacement as part of the clinical trial goes before the review board this week, and her doctor is hoping to schedule her for the procedure before the end of the month. She sounds good but tired, and I have been distracted and disturbed all week by being so far away. Talking on the phone doesn't help that much, and even though I know she would tell me to stay home and take care of my family and my work, I still want to be there, with her.

My u/s report came back OK, I guess. The lymph nodes they saw on the left are gone, replaced by lymph nodes on the right. The catch in my throat when I swallow appears to be the result of scar tissue. I'll ask the ENT about that when I see him in a couple of weeks.

So, it's good. I have to stop thinking past the good to the potential bads lurking behind it.

today & tomorrow

It's the sixth week of school, and some days are heaven and some are... more like today. Today was one of those days when, in a less-than-ideal situation, you find yourself making less-than-ideal choices. And having started down that path, I found myself pushed along it, prevented from taking another by all of the other people around me. Specifically, in dealing with a particularly needy student, all of the other students piling in didn't help, and in those moments, the sense of everything slipping away was quite real.

The reality is, a student who won't work, won't hush, and won't leave the classroom when told to do so leaves me very few choices, and waiting for the dean of students to arrive to escort the student out still leaves my class ground to a halt. There has to be a better way, I just haven't figured it out yet.

Part of what made today difficult was waiting for news about my mom, who was scheduled for a pace maker. And then later un-scheduled, or re-scheduled, as the OR was booked for an emergency, or something. All of this is happening hundreds of miles and 3 times zones away. I feel like an amputee waiting for nerve sensations that literally can't happen.

Tomorrow I'm handing off one of my classes for an appointment with my endocrinologist to get the results of my September 1st ultrasound. I have been vaguely unsettled since then, probably for no good reason, but -- I've had a lot of these ultrasounds. I couldn't see the screen, so I have no idea what the tech was seeing. But I do know what the little tapping noises + beep means: measuring something,and taking an image. The tech measured a lot and took a lot of images. Of what, again, I don't know, but I do know that there was roughly twice as much measuring and beeping as last time. Maybe that's just a personal preference thing with the technicians (although I wouldn't think so.) I see what I'm doing here, which is making myself crazy, and I'm trying not to do that. There's no reason to think I have a recurrence.

I'm going to stick with that thought, at least until tomorrow morning when I find out that there is no recurrence, and that Mom's pace maker is in and she's fine, and we're all as all right as we can be.

here lies the difficulty

I'm finally on antibiotics to rid myself of nasty little sinus infection, but that's not the problem. And I'm on a regular dose of NSAIDS to help calm the (likely) tendonitis in my shoulder, but that's not the problem, either.

The real problem is this sense of wanting, needing, to be in two places at once. Of having way too much time on my hands while at the same having way too much to do.

I haven't figured out how write here, either. There are things I could say when I wasn't working and my children were a lot younger and I could afford, frankly, to sound a bit off. When one is recovering from cancer, people tend to make allowances if you're overly emotional from time to time. But as I continue my fairly convincing impersonation of a healthy person, that sort of thing doesn't fly anymore.

On Talcott Mountain, experimenting with the camera's self-timer

Anyway, summer's almost over and I haven't written a word (here or anywhere else) about last year, or this year's vacations, or anything. I hope to, when I figure out how.

"Everything happened so fast"

I think it's funny that's it's summer again and there's still a post from last summer on the main page. At this time last year I was dealing with intractable headaches and getting my kids ready for summer school. I was still working on my teacher certification courses but in employment limbo. The only thing I knew for sure was that all three kids would be on the same school campus again in the fall, and that freed up the possibility of me working again during the school year.

We took our usual long summer vacation back East.

I got a job teaching 7th and 8th grade general science.

The kids started at their new school.

I switched to Rio Salado's Teacher In Residence program so I could finish my courses without having to do practicums and student teaching in another classroom.

DH's business partner was lost in a freak diving accident.

Mom went on a two-week cruise which was lovely until she came down with some kind of intestinal bug. She spent the last four or five days unable to eat or drink and ended up getting IV fluids. Then she basically didn't eat or drink for several more days and ended up needing two (3?) emergency surgeries for severe dehydration.

At Christmas, we visited with Mom at my brother's in New Orleans for a week, and then spent all the rest of our time off working diligently on all three kids' projects: DS1 built a scale model of a medieval castle, DD did a science project with dry ice, and DS2 did a research report on the Temple of Caesar.

I finished my last class for my teacher certification program.

I survived my first science fair. My RE students all made their sacraments. DS1, DD, and DS2 completed their next levels of the Arizona Study Program and made purple belt with black stripe in karate.

I had my final classroom observations for my teacher certification program.

In the last full week of May, the kids played brilliantly in their graduation recital, DS2 had a chorus concert, my 8th grade students graduated, and DS1 graduated.

School has been out now, for me, a week -- for the kids, that will be tomorrow. I picked up my Institutional Recommendation from Rio and now have my provisional teaching certificate. (That's what the Dept of Ed calls the full certificate the first two years you hold it.) I have a contract to teach next year.

Mom's home, and while she recovered from the effects of the emergency surgery well, she is still not very strong. We're heading out soon to spend the summer with her.

That is, of course, the bare bones. DH took over getting the kids their breakfasts and lunches during the school week, although often DS2 and I made a huge batch of pancakes on Sunday to get them through a big chunk of the week. Grocery shopping became a shared task, too, as DH did errands on the weekend while I was busy with school work. There were a lot of things that happened every week: lesson planning, grading, talking to parents, teaching RE, checking my own kids' homework, piano lessons, karate. More sporadically, thyroid cancer support, although that is really tapering off as more and more people look to social networking sites for their support needs.

It feels as if all this happened to someone else.

4 weeks to go

It's May, suddenly -- and I'm just about through with my first year teaching full-time. I would have to write a book about it to avoid understatement, but I'll settle for more blog posts over the summer when I have time. Extraordinary amounts of time were consumed by lesson planning and grading and things I hadn't even imagined I'd have to do, like moving furniture (don't ask).

I'm really, really looking forward to a true summer off -- from teaching and from my own classes, too. Two more observations and a bit of writing and I'm done! Took me long enough, hmmm?