how I spent my morning

Sprucing up the flower beds I replanted last year -- raking out the leaves and dealing with the volunteers.

I think I tweaked my neck, though. Ow. And it was feeling so much better, too.

finally!

The forecast was for scattered thunderstorms, highs in the low 70s.

The reality was a clear blue sky and 75 degrees by 10AM.

A beach day!

On the plus side: blue sky, warm temps

On the minus side: no waves, freezing water. It hasn't been sunny enough for it to warm up much at all.

Solution? Dig a hole.

DD's project, brothers helping out

The boys quickly got bored.

For once, peace between them

DD did not, and achieved her goal of digging down to the water she knew she would hit eventually.

Success!

I filled it in before we left.

wild things

We woke late to a light, steady rain. Nobody felt like hustling to do anything; breakfast was late, and lunch was, too. But just before 2PM the clouds parted and we saw blue sky. With the temperature hovering in that sweet spot between too cold and too warm, we headed south to the Zooquarium.

We've been going there for ages, and the kids are really too old for it now, but still, DD wanted to go. The boys did not mind. I reminded her several times that we might not get to see the hedgehog, and indeed, when we arrived, we saw that the African wildlife show had been at 10 this morning.

Fortunately for us, one of the workers there has her own very friendly hedgehog, and she brought her out for us to see. We had an extended semi-private hedgehog visit, and she was very sweet and so comfortable around people that Beth, her keeper, told us that Malaika simply won't roll up into a ball or do that adorable little sneeze-bark, she's just too friendly.

Malaika, a small, prickly angel

After our hedgehog visit, we went through the aquarium and the zoo proper. In the cool weather, all the animals were up and about, even one of the raccoons, and they are always sleeping. We saw the live animal demonstration of the great horned owl, and learned interesting things like their feathers are shaped so they can swoop down silently on their prey, and they can lift three times their weight. I was surprised to hear that Maestro, fully grown and about 8 years old, only weighs about 4 pounds. He looks a lot bigger than that, but I have to remember it's mostly feathers.

Maestro, the great horned owl

Off-exhibit, we saw several wild rabbits venturing under the fence to nibble on the greens along the zoo paths. I'm sure they feel very safe there. This baby rabbit is hands down the cutest wild thing I've ever seen.

Fearless baby bunny, enjoying clover

As for these three, they enjoyed themselves, yes, and got completely silly on the train. When they were younger, they could play on it without irony, but today they were just being goofy.

Exuberance

A little bit wild sometimes, yes, but wonderful.

back to the garden

Friday was "new tv day". Mom's television died early last week and my best efforts to find the magic "screen" control were to no avail, so Friday was spent getting the new set. After a ridiculous amount of waiting around, we abandoned the local Wal-Mart (really the only option in Falmouth proper) for the Best Buy down in Hyannis, where I ended up getting a 42-inch Panasonic, based on two main criteria: it was a decent price for the feature set (1080p, 3 HDMI inputs, etc), and it fit in the car. (The price has gone up since we bought it! Weird.)

Friday evening, my brother set it up, and Saturday morning, we got the old behemoth into the car and took it down to what used to be the dump but is now called something like the Waste Management Facility. Even with a bigger screen, the living room seems bigger because the new tv is so much less massive. The picture is gorgeous, too.

The rest of Saturday was odd, the kids weren't in the mood to do anything, and we alternated clouds and sun all day. The temperature barely hit 70. By two o'clock I'd had it with the perpetual video games, and forced them all out to the beach. The two younger ones swam, DS1 could not have been less interested, and only went out because I made him. It pains me to see him turning into a disaffected teen already. At least the younger ones had fun.

Making castles with "silly sand"

Sunday morning I had fun photoshopping the new tv onto the fireplace. (I just used the old Paint application.) My father, God rest his soul, always said that someday he'd get a tv to hang on the fireplace, well before flat screens ever existed. My mother has always detested the idea, so this is the closest we'll ever come to liberating the living room from the encumbrances of the television stand:

Quick-and-Dirty Photoshop puts "Wheel of Fortune" on the TV, and the TV on the fireplace.

Sunday afternoon my sister and her younger grandson visited, and we went back to Spohr Gardens. It was a good day for the gardens, cool with occasional sun breaking through the clouds. The kids didn't mind too much being chased out of the house again:

And they're off!

Perhaps some day I will look back on these 60-degree days wistfully, as I melt in Arizona's 100-degree-plus weather. Today is not one of those days.

Inviting, isn't it?

blue sky

Almost forgot what it looked like. Here, the Old Mill at the Heritage Gardens.

We finally saw some sun this afternoon. I dragged the kids out to The Heritage Museums and Gardens, a quick half-hour drive away in Sandwich.

Wandering around the labrynth

It was gorgeous, but we really needed bug repellant; the mosquitos interfered greatly with our enjoyment of the beautiful gardens. We spent most of our time wandering the many trails, but finally headed indoors to escape the bugs.

I love the really tall trees.

Continuing this summer's tradition of taking advantage of things we've already paid for, admission was free because we are members of the Desert Botanical Garden, another lovely (and usually bug-free) place to spend a sunny day.

meds, etc

I saw Dr. C, my TMD/headache doctor just before we left AZ. He was interested to hear that the neck issues I had been having were caused by cervical radiculitis, and when he heard that I'd been taking ibuprofen to keep the head and neck pain under control, he recommended a therapeutic dose of 600 mg, three times a day. I checked it out with Dr. S, my spine doctor, who OK'd it, and I've been on it ever since. It helps tremendously with the neck pain, which has subsided considerably.

It also has helped alleviate almost all my Sjogren's symptoms... and the gastroparesis, too. I haven't taken any Domperidone in over a week, and while I do have the occasional feeling of queasiness, it's nothing that I want to medicate. Taking Domperidone at this point is a guarantee of the return of "rapid transit" issues. While this is not conclusive proof that the gastroparesis is auto-immune (it could just be coincidence that I'm recovering at the same time I'm taking the anti-inflammatory), it is really nice to be able to stop taking a prescription, even though I have started taking another medicine.

I was going to say that surprisingly, my rheumatoid arthritis has been very quiet this trip, in spite of the cold and damp -- but then I remembered that 600 mg of ibuprofen three times a day, and surely that's helping. Last year I took Aleve all summer just to survive. Ibuprofen works better and it doesn't mess up my blood sugar, but I think that long-term it's going to wreck something else, so when we get home I need to give my rheumatologist a call and see what she says.

Meanwhile, the neck: I have a back-of-the-skull headache right now and I don't know why. The neck itself rarely hurts, what usually bothers me is my left shoulder muscles, and I don't know why that should be, either. I feel best on days I don't spend sitting in front of the computer. Driving for hours isn't so great, either, and I did two hours today, broken up into 4 half-hour chunks. I use my neck pillow while driving and it helps tremendously.

I'm pretty good about doing my physical therapy for my neck. Most of the exercises and stretches are easy and I do them at least once a day. One is killer and I try to do it at least once a day but sometimes I don't. I think I am making progress, but I am using Biofreeze a couple of times a day on my tense shoulder and neck muscles, and that helps, too.

My neurological symptoms have abated significantly. I no longer have the dead/numb/tingling feeling in my right shoulder or arm, or along my right side. I am conscious of right-side weakness from time to time, but I don't know if that will ever change given my surgery. My neck still feels numb and today my right ear was hot for about 15 minutes after one of the drives (that's a strange, annoying feeling), which is the worst neuro symptom I've had since we arrived. In general, I think things are going pretty well.

Noting something that's probably nothing, but I want to have the reference: about 2 inches below my collar bone, there is a lump just to the left of my sternum. On the right side, there is nothing. At first I thought it was just muscle tissue overlaying the ribs, but since it's absent on the right, I think it's weird. It's a little tender if I push on it, whereas is if I poke the (non-lumpy) right side, it feels just fine. I don't know what the heck it is and again (I tell myself) it's probably nothing, but I noticed it and I wanted to record it here so I remember to ask my endo about it when I see her in August. (Why the endo? Because I had metastases to my upper chest, that's why. Of course they got it all, but still.)

Last -- my last refill prescription for Cytomel came in as generic. It's only 10 mcg a day, I figure it's not going to kill me, and it's much less expensive than the branded Cytomel. Besides, I need a new prescription, which I will get ... when I see the endo in August.

mini get-away

We took a vacation from our vacation.

Our first destination, Boston's Museum of Science

Tuesday morning, not as early as I would have liked, we hit the road for Boston, to visit The Museum of Science. It originally opened in 1972, and my Mom joined as soon as possible -- maybe even before it opened. We met my sister and her grandson there, and four hours flew by. We saw the show in the Theater of Electricity, with the largest air-insulated Van de Graaff generators ever:



My (grand? great?)nephew was thrilled to be picked as a volunteer in the show and did a fine job at demonstrating how strong magnetic force can be. We also saw a live animal talk about scorpions (which are both arthropods and arachnids), and wandered through several of the exhibit halls. The Collections room held an abundance of beautiful objects.



We ended our day at the museum with the IMAX movie, Mystic India, which was both interesting and beautiful in subject matter and presentation.

After the museum, we headed north in horrific rush-hour traffic to our hotel with its indoor waterpark. The kids enjoyed it, although they may have enjoyed their room service supper and breakfast more. Overall impression of the waterpark: fun, but also very noisy, humid, and a bit stuffy. We escaped to the outdoor jacuzzi where it was considerably quieter and the air, though cold, was much fresher. It was odd being at a water park with no sun shining down! The park itself is well-laid out with four huge water slides (the stairs up, and pool where you land, are both inside, the slides themselves are outside), plus two smaller slides and many tiny ones, plus various water jets, play pools, and a tubing river surrounding the central area. It wasn't too crowded and the kids enjoyed finally being able to play in some water.

Our wristbands were good until 3PM but we cleared out about 2-ish, and headed back to the Museum. It was my idea; we spent so much time at the shows on Tuesday that there were huge chunks of the museum we didn't get to see. We spent another two hours there today, and got to see a lot more, although ideally you would visit often for an hour or two, and only visit one or two galleries during that time to really see everything. There is just so much there to see and do, it's a bit overwhelming.

Of course we stayed too late, and got stuck in traffic, again.

Speed Limit 45? I wish!

I was so bored in the stop-and-go traffic I started taking pictures in the tunnel. Beauty can be found where we least expect it. We stopped for dinner and a new tank of gas on the way back to Mom's, and finally got here about 9:30PM. Next time, I'll know better: hang out and have dinner in Boston and wait for the traffic to dissipate (about 7PM, I'd say), and end up getting back earlier.

The kids amazed me today by reading nearly non-stop all the time we were in the car. It made for a very quiet, pleasant ride, even with the horrible traffic and gloomy weather. Tomorrow's forecast contains the word "sun", so here's hoping.

jinxed?

You gotta have faith.

It's raining. It rained all day, and it will be raining for the foreseeable future. So, there goes the rationale for being here during summer vacation, as opposed to being at home -- here, supposedly, we can go to the beach. It's fun, it's outdoors, it's free... it's cold, windy, and enveloped in fog, even when it's not being pelted by rain.

So, we're trying to make the best of it, but it seems like things are breaking down all around us. Mom's television died yesterday -- some research showed that Sony Trinitrons with no video but everything else OK can be fixed by a simple tweak, once you get the back off. So I got the back off (no small feat) but can't find the two screws that are supposed to be there to adjust the video.

DS1 wanted to watch a DVD, and with the TV out, he popped it into Mom's iMac, which promptly starting grinding, and now will not eject it. I tried restarting, I even tried the firmware option (fun), but no dice: lots of noises, none of them good, but still no DVD.

Heating up the pizza for dinner this evening, I burned the first batch under the broiler. My mother's oven is so different from mine, I should have known better, but I got distracted making plans for tomorrow and Wednesday, when hopefully I will have something more cheerful to report.

DD's unorthodox, winning style -- she plays off the bumpers masterfully.

This afternoon, we went bowling, then out for hot chocolate (Mexican mocha for me) at Coffee Obsession, then we went to check out Old Silver Beach in the rain. I would post pictures but the final glitch in today's parade of things-not-working is Blogger won't upload my photos, even after I cleared my cache and cookies and whatnot. This seems to happen from time to time and eventually it works out. Update: It works! I had to quit Firefox and restart it, and then everything was fine. Yay!

Old Silver Beach... deserted, with good reason.

My neck is bothering me after all the driving yesterday and the continued high humidity; I suppose bowling didn't help. It doesn't help that I've felt chilled most of the day, either. I am not cut out for this damp New England weather any more. But the plans for the next couple of days include a brief sojourn to a much warmer place; here's hoping it's worth the effort and expense.

thoughts on the day

I had lots of reminders of my father today. This morning at Mass we met a friend of my mother's; she didn't recognize me as my mother's daughter so much as she recognized my brother as my mother's son -- "I look more like my father," I said, and it's true.

Later, I noticed the word "Dad" prominently labeling the really nice wooden hanger on which my blouse had hung, warning acquisitive children to back off Dad's suit hanger. Funny how those good hangers would migrate without the label.

My sister had a graduation party for her youngest daughter, recent graduate of Boston Latin, and she has photos all over her house -- and there was Dad, of course. Oh, how proud he would have been of his granddaughter! I can well imagine it.

I miss him. The happy graduation-party day was tinged with sadness. The relentless weather is getting to me, I'm sure: would I be feeling sad if I'd seen blue sky for longer than 5 minutes in the past week? Maybe. Probably. Yes - it's when we're (almost) all together that I miss him the most.