Today marks a week that I’ve been off the chemotherapy drugs I’d been taking for four months, and I’m finally starting to feel more normal, almost back to my old self. I knew the chemo drugs were causing me fatigue (which is now thankfully almost completely gone), but I didn’t realize how much they were affecting my brain. As it slowly started to lift, I realized that I’d been living […]
Friday I took my camera out for the first time in awhile, and downloaded those pictures plus some others that had been in the camera for awhile. Here are a few for your viewing pleasure.
So many times during the past 3 months I’ve started to feel better — and then started to hope that I’d turned a corner — only to regress in a day or two or three to a bad place again. So I’m hesitant to report that things are going much better the last 10 days, and will likely continue that way for a while. A good example of the “You […]
Many cashiers these days simply don’t know how to deal with change, something that I could do as a 16-year old clerk back at the Witte Drug Store.
Some of you have noted that comments you make on the SSS Blog don’t show up on the site right away. That is, as they say, a feature, not a bug. I’ve set the site up to require all comments to be moderated (i.e., approved by me before they show up) in light of past experiences in which too many comments were posted by bots from web sites trying to […]
I’ve come to the day where I have to start the chemotherapy regime to treat my multiple myeloma. I’d be less than honest if I said that I wasn’t a bit scared about it, given the concoction of drugs I’ll be putting into my system. There are three main drugs, a steroid called dexamethasone (which I’ve taken before and is frankly the least concerning); a drug called Revlimid that is a relative […]
I received some good news from my oncologist today. The cytogenetic analysis of the cancer cells in my bone marrow came back with a “translocation” type that is generally considered to be associated with a good prognosis, which means that I’m likely going to be eligible for a stem cell transplant at the end of my chemo treatment, which gives me a chance to end up in a position afterwards […]
I’m an amateur photographer, not particularly gifted, but I enjoy taking pictures, especially of landscapes and urban architecture. For years I used Canon cameras and lenses, but when about two years ago I was interested in moving up to a “full frame” sensor from my existing “APS-C” system (see is here for an explanation), I decided to make a change given the lack of good reviews for the newer full-frame […]
A week or so ago I struggled up to the house site after a rain to see if there was any problem with runoff or erosion. There wasn’t. I walked around a bit and took some pictures. The saddest was this one of the address tiles above our front door. We had bought these at the big BHV store across from the Hotel de Ville in Paris. They were the […]
This little village of about 300 people has been around since the founding of a church on the site in the 800s. We had lunch at a tiny place (the building was constructed in the 1000s) and learned about a path that went out into the country, among terraced olive orchards between two high mountain ridges. Beautiful.