Prologue to writing again

Hi there. For those of you not on Facebook (*cough* Harry and Ed *cough*) you may have thought I dropped off the planet. At times I wondered if I had dropped off the planet. The cancer stuff wears on you, you know? For a long time all I had to do was just report on the latest cancer news and that counted for writing. But then we went to Tennessee and got pills and were sent home and then I stayed home while Rich went for follow ups and there just wasn't much to report other than "hey, we're taking pills and hoping for the best."

I kind of forgot how to write about anything but cancer. Which means I forgot how to write period lately. And over the last six weeks I've figured out that it makes me feel crappy. So bear with me as I knock the dust off my fingers.

I actually have several topics to cover but haven't figured out how to write them yet. (See earlier comment about forgetting how to put words into sentences. Me talk pretty one day.) They probably deserve their own posts so I won't get into them here. Let's do a little catch up.

Rich had his CT scan yesterday that was after six weeks of treatment. Everyone in TN called his results "rock solid" and they were all very pumped about it. I think that means things are going well. Rich spends a lot of time worrying that things are not going well and no one has considered it at all except for him, but that's kind of how he works, particularly about medical things. It's a charming quirk of his that is part of his Rich tapestry.

I am still taking a photo every day but I keep forgetting to post them to Flickr. One day I will sit down and load all my backlog of photos but the task seems daunting right now. I actually got pretty jazzed when I watched the video about the new iOS 7 for my phone because it has a way to group photos based on date and location and I totally need that. Photo organization is a point of anxiety for me these days.

Ian graduated from day care last week which makes no sense because he is still there all summer until he starts Pre-K on August 26. I got annoyed because the teacher we don't like (the one that told Ian he couldn't wear Batman fleece pants because they were PJs and that's only allowed on PJ day) told me that my son was the only child without a mother at the Mother's Day lunch last month. My own kid didn't seem to notice or care, but she was "worried" about it. I think my kid gets enough Mommy time so he will survive the occasional work conference I have. I missed graduation too, but Rich took pictures and Ian seemed more concerned about getting his cupcake than knowing I was there since Daddy and Nana and Granddad were in attendance. No need to bust out Cats in the Cradle or anything. The boy still sleeps in our bed.

Speaking of cats, the eldest cat Ms. Kitty has finally settled into a routine. She had started peeing on the rug downstairs and couldn't be trusted to roam free. After having to remove all 35 carpet tiles from the dining room and scrub them on the back deck, I declared this Not Cool and forced her to live in the bathroom. That seemed cruel, though, like solitary confinement in prison so I tried setting up the 4' dog gate with a 2' dog gate on top of it. My damn 17 year old, three-legged cat scaled the gates to sleep in the middle of the downstairs floor. A stroke of genius and a generous loan from Curtis and Kathy led to Ms. Kitty now living in a dog crate next to the loveseat downstairs. She has food and water and a litter box and is perfectly content. We let her out when we're home and bless her fuzzy little heart she goes back in the crate to pee in her litter box. I think she's just too old to share with the other cats, which I can get.

We finally replaced our SleepNumber mattress with a Tempurpedic knockoff and I am super pleased. The SleepNumber was wearing out and getting to be very frustrating. Rather than try to figure out how to bolster up the sides via complicated mechanics, we just replaced it. I considered lighting it on fire as a warning to other mattresses that might cross us or perhaps attach a wolf head to it and parade it through Ocean View, but figured I might be watching too much Game of Thrones and that we could just give away the pump and bladders while sending the rest to the landfill.

Last thing because it just came up ... I have a Windows machine at work and a Mac at home. I am fine with both and content with my multi-platform world. But I have got to figure out how to resolve the differences in keyboard shortcuts between a PC and Mac. Neither is better than the other, but they are so annoyingly different. My fingers don't know the difference. I started a sentence and wanted to erase it, but if you hit Shift+Home and then Backspace you delete EVERYTHING versus just the last line of text. That's a real heart-stopper. Thank God for Ctrl+Z (oh wait, Command+Z cause I'm on the Mac right now). Each time I hit Ctrl+Home and realize I have to hit Command+Up instead, it kills me with a tiny little knife. (And good gravy, if I hit Control+Up instead of Command+Up and suddenly I'm looking at multiple desktops? GAHGAHPWKCFNVMELDWI131AFWCW!!!)

So that's what's going on around here ...