A day at Dana Farber

It was today I was due for my CATT scan at Dana Farber.  If you have been following this blog for the past two years you will know I started being treated there for NH Lymphoma.

The good news is today's scan and blood test came up negative.  Negative in this case is good.

After each visit, when I get this news, it feels like a temporary reprieve from the Governor. You exhale and drop your shoulders.  It will take another three months for the shoulders to ride up again and the breath to shorten.

There is no complaint here.  Two years ago I was getting my affairs in order.  It's a good thing I've lasted this long because I  haven't finished.

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The New Year (Scots and Klingons)

Hogmanay is what Scots call the First Day.  And Quaaltagh means First Step.

We Scots are generally a very superstitious people. (How else can we explain...?)

It is on this day we concentrate more superstitions than apply to the rest of the year.

I grew up in a house full of ginger topped Scots.  We were forbidden by all others of our own nationality from being the first person to cross their threshold after midnight on New Years eve.

They wanted a tall dark haired man with blue eyes.  It made me feel slightly rejected.  Now that my hair is entirely white, I'll have to  research if that ban still applies.

Knowing how long we Scots remember things, I am sure it still does.

Happy New Year!

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Boxing Day

For our traditional Boxing Day Chinese dinner we all went to China Rose in Brunswick, ME. 

The last time we were there in late Summer the food had gone from mediocre to barely edible. We stopped going.

When we read in the local paper it was under new management we thought we'd give it another go.

We're sorry we did.  This time the food was not even edible.  When I tore apart a conglomerate of chicken slices in black bean sauce I found the meat inside to be raw.

When I pointed this out to the waitress she laughed and took the dish away.  Leaving soon after I told the management. 

They said "raw chicken!" &  laughed some more.  In the middle of this conversation a woman came in to warn of the icy conditions in the parking lot.

He laughed again and said "No much I can do about it. "

Then I told him he just lost business from 2 regular customers. 

He frowned that.

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Things change by remaining the same.

Nine years ago I met a man who I thought held a certain position.  It took me three years to discover that he didn't.  As of today, he now does.  Amazing what can happen if you wait around long enough!

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Does Scibefire for Opera work?

If you're reading this on Belltowernews.com, it does.  This is a much underused blogging tool I made great use of when Chrome was my primary browser.

Now that I've started up a new laptop and, in an attempt to keep things simple, I am using opera for browsing, reading and all my email, it's good to know It can be used now to also write to the blog, a habit I would like to more than I have been of late. 

A caution here:  I just went to my Picasa online photos and was very surprised to find a copy of picture I took with my EVO.  I thought I sent the picture, which was of a document, to Evernote only.  It surprised me to no end to find it sitting there all nice and exposed in my Picasa Gallery.  The good news is it was in my not public, but how not public these files are is anybody's guess.  I need to check settings on the phone and with Evernote to see that this doesn't happen again.  Taking pictures of information for later use is too convenient for me not give it up.

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Talk about taking a long time!  It was my intention to make the simple modification to the template of this blog that put back up in the style we preferred.  We took a minute away from our Thanksgiving dinner, between the pile and the pie, to bring up the template and fix it.

Now I wish all of you a very happy and fulsome Thanksgiving.  Don't get trampled tomorrow.

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This was a surprise.  Because I edit most of my posts outside of the online blogger interface and ignore most of my emails, the sudden, at least for me, change in the layout of this blogs page came as a bit of a shock.  I know I backed up the old template somewhere, perhaps not on this computer, perhaps somewhere in the cloud, but somewhere.  I will find it and try and reload it.  If not, I will consider two things, moving this blog to one of our servers, where most of the other Famous Grazing Blogs reside, or just trudging on and hope for a better design.

Because this blog has been sitting here for so long, it was started in May of 2004, the early days of blogging, it makes little sense to pull it from Blogger.

Standby.

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Another One Down!

The anxiety waiting for the tests results at Dana Farber is alien to me.

More potent was the discovery of the extended anxiety from my family.  As a 'moment' approaches I tend to deal with it then. I was convinced early in life not to dwell on things over which we have no control.

But these tests every 90 days can feel like waiting to hear if the Governor called.  When the doctor comes into the examining room and says. "It all looks good." the weight is lifted and you feel your digestive track restarting.

Then she says, "See you in three months."

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The Quick Reference Code For This Blog.

I used the QR Generator mentioned in our twitter account to create this Quick Reference (QR) code.  It links from here to Belltowernews.com.

Now that I have it, how do I use it?  I am thinking of making this my default user photo when signing up for the million or so sites that allow an avatar.

It should probably go somewhere on Belltowernews.com as well.  Let me think about it.

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Sitting in a railway station...

I knew Malika vicariously in NYC in 1970.  I've known her personally, meeting again in San Francisco, since the early 80's. 

Now I am sitting in Union Station near the State Capitol in Providence waiting for her train to arrive from Virginia.

We don't have much time.  She and her daughter are going south from here to be with family while I will be going north to be with mine.

But,  we'll always have the Cheesecake Factory a block away from the train station.

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Just a short comment in support of the people of Vermont.  We lived in the town of Charlotte in 1993-94.  The biggest weather burden was the blizzards.  Our house overlooked Lake Champlain.  I can honestly say, hurricanes were the last thing on our mind.

They happened off the ocean.  Vermont is inland with no thoughts of the ocean.  It's neighbor, New Hampshire, has Portsmouth, a good harbor, but the only real harbor we ever saw in Vermont was at the end of Ferry Road.

This was a left hook from nature that no one could expect.  My sympathies to all who lost their loved ones, their livelihoods and their beloved covered bridges.
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Only 1200? It seems like more...

The new Blogger interface tells me we have blogged 1200 + times since Belltowernews.com opened.  It seemed more than that, but I am most likely combining all of the other shouts made to the now bottomless social media.

The editors here have a combined Twitter count of over 5000.

Had Twitter never appeared, many of those comments would've landed here.  Facebook & Google Plus are also now taking a lot of our expressive output.

The tweets are brought up in the sidebar of this blog, and the blog entries, at least the gist of them, make it our the @sgtret Twitter account.  I know there's a way to ling the Google + account as well, but, at least while it is still in beta, we will keep that account off of the radar.
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Sitting Here With 4 Screens...

On this sultry Summer night after a heavy rain, I'm sitting in my cave with floor fan on high.  There are two laptops running different pieces of work.  The home laptop has an additional two screens.  Combined with the other; there are now four screens in front of me.

So,  what am I doing?

Reading a Jim Butcher short story in the collection entitled Urban Fantasy on my HTC Evo as it rests on its kickstand.  It starts with a story by Jim Butcher, which after reading his latest Harry Dresden book, Ghost Story,  I am apt to buy anything written by him.

His illustrated novel, Welcome to the Jungle, is very tempting, but $15.00 for what is essentially a high class comic book goes against the grain of someone who remembers getting a comic book, soda and candy bar for a quarter.

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Clear!

One year, four to go.

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Blood Work Done.

Now we wait an hour before CT.
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Dana Farber tomorrow morning

Three months can zip by when you'd rather it drag like Summer twixt 1st and 2nd grade.

This is a full body scan. Though the lymphoma manifested itself in my neck, because of the nature of the nasty, it can crop up again anywhere in the lymph system.

I need to drink some awful stuff on the way there to expedite my getting into the machine.  My doctor won't be there but her very-very competent NP will be.

I have extreme faith in these people.  They are no nonsense - tell it like it is.  My favorite.

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The New Blogger Editing Page Didn't Work.

It worked in Rye Cake but wouldn't let me edit Belltowernews.com.  And, when in Chrome 12, every time I hit the shift key and a letter, if that letter is the same as the first letter in any of the Chrome add-ons, it brings that features screen up.

Very odd.
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Lost Four Dogs in One Year

Though we have only a cat now, in our extended family at the beginning of this year there were four dogs. A Belgian shepherd, a golden lab and two standard poodles.

This morning the last of the them, a joyous standard poodle called Cirq, had to be taken to the vet and put down.  She belonged to my wife's mother and son's grand-mother.

Now our cat is the last pet in the extended New England family.

He's called Booger.

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Civilization on Hold

If I step back for a moment and look at the state of the world, it's looking oh so uncivilized. The thing is it probably is much more so than it was 50 years ago.

Our ever widening ability to catch a glimpse in real time of it all, instead of through the filtered delay of weekly or even monthly magazines, is what's making it seem so wild.

If The Queen spit out of the window of the Royal Carriage as it crossed the Thames I'd hear about inside the hour followed soom by the opinions of everyone for river ecologists to organizers of the spit championship.
There would too, I guarantee, be footage of the act on YouTube.

To escape all this, we will be on the coast of Maine for the holiday weekend..
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Really, I Was Just Sitting There

With no apparent aggravating activity my middle back suddenly screamed OUCH in the worst way.  As a person with a lot of experience with pain, I must say this was an 8 on the ten scale.  

I live daily between a 4 and 6, so when the meter tilts into the red, I respond quickly.

As quickly as I could, I sprang into action, using the methods I've learned over the years that help, each in a small way but when combined usually knock me back to the manageable 5 or 6.  Getting there, getting there...

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