Scattered Thoughts . . .

Sheila's radiation treatments are now behind us... by only days, but behind us nevertheless... and I am now scrambling to get ready for the holidays! My goal is to make the holidays as easy for Sheila as possible and, so far, things are going well in reaching this goal. We are having a few people over for Thanksgiving, quite a few people over for Christmas and a house guest from overseas for about a month between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It was well past time for a new, larger kitchen table so I had to get busy extending our table. I got a great deal on a piece of Birch butcher block (just a couple of hundred dollars)... I grabbed it instantly since Thanksgiving was only a week away... unfortunately, this meant that at this point I was committed to accomplishing another fair sized project before Thanksgiving. I jumped right into this project by building a big tent in our kitchen to contain most of the sawdust... We decided that we wanted one end of this table to be slig

The grandkids stayed with us over the past weekend and it was a nice break from all this fun cancer stuff. We haven't had much of an opportunity to spend time with them since the lake house early in the summer so it was nice to spend a whole weekend with them.  Shortly after our time at the lake house, the doctors found Sheila's cancer and our life instantly and drastically changed. We've been at the hospital every weekday getting worn down and then trying to catch up on sleep on the weekends. We both feel as though it has been months and months of grueling nothingness.  There has been absolutely no socializing since the cancer was found except for when Sheila would get an occasional visitor although we haven't had any visitors in the past few weeks. Actually, we've been a bit socially deprived so it was nice to have the weekend with the grandkids. I think we watched about eight Christmas movies over the course of the weekend. And, we played about a bajillion

At this point, Sheila is most of the way through the final homestretch in her radiation treatment and she's quite excited... and fatigued... and burned... but mostly  experiencing subdued excitement punctuated by occasional outbursts of excitement! So, to quickly update, at this point she's experiencing some relatively minor pain in the tissue of her right breast. The burned skin and itching has been  mostly   soothed through the use of various lotions (including prescription). On the positive side, the Radiation Oncologist was happy to see in today's visit that Sheila is not showing any signs of blistering and there are only tiny signs of some peeling. So that is good news. Sheila already went through some peeling when radiation treatment first started. She is now quite red at this point though. Well... some areas are a deep, bright red while other areas are showing what appears to be a deep tan.  Sheila needs to endure only two more radiation treatments... tomorrow

I managed to finish building that doorway trellis at our backdoor that I started designing and building a few days ago. This little last minute project was built using mostly scrap lumber that was taking up space in our shed but I have to say that all this scrap lumber looks better at our backdoor cut and assembled this way! Of course, this trellis could use some plant growth but that won't happen this time of year. Regardless, it is a nice addition to our home. Little by little, over the past few months, I've been adding a few architectural details around the house. These little details make a tremendous difference in the appearance of the house and I'm liking the way things are coming together. It is almost time to start decorating the outside of the house for Christmas. I was hoping to get a jump on that before the arrival of snow but it looks as though we'll be awaking to snow tomorrow morning. I'm sure we'll still get a few more days of unseasonably

Today, Sheila moved into her last phase of radiation treatment.  Well... Sheila thought this same thing 11 years ago (her  last phase) but here we are again.  Sheila is now in her Boost Phase of radiation treatment and she is pretty happy about that! This last phase is a "boost" of radiation to only the area of the tumor. Up until today, she had been getting radiation to the entire right side of her chest... from the lymph nodes under her armpit to the center of her chest. Now, she is getting one focused beam of radiation to just the area of her tumor for seven treatments. The good thing about this Boost Phase is that most of the tissue and skin that has been burned and irritated over the past 26 treatments will now be able to heal without additional radiation making this large area worse. Sheila is definitely happy about this news. The itching, burning and peeling was getting pretty rough for a bit. Now, these last seven radiation treatments will be focused to a r

Since I haven't been able to tackle any larger home renovation projects due to our daily visits to the hospital, I have decided to attempt to tackle a few smaller projects around the house. My theory is... as long as my health is stable enough to allow me to get some work accomplished, it doesn't matter what I do as long as I simply keep busy and do something. One such relatively small project was to design and build a timber trellis-type structure at our back door to the house.  I sketched out a few ideas a few days ago and Sheila liked the idea. We stopped at Lowes after leaving the hospital yesterday to pick up some lumber and galvanized lag bolts. This little project didn't require a whole lot of supplies since most of it is being built using scrap lumber from previous home renovations. The first thing I started with today was transposing my sketches to full-size cut lines on the lumber. Once I was happy with this transposed design, I got busy with my new jig

I was sifting through some of my photos from this past summer and came across a few worth writing about and sharing here. As I've written before, we have two new residents at Lake Groton disrupting life on the lake... a pair of Bald Eagles. I knew I wanted to capture a few decent photos of these birds in flight. Anyone can go to a zoo to shoot a photo of a Bald Eagle sitting on the limb of a tree so I wanted to test my photography skills by capturing a few decent photos of this pair of eagles in flight. This first one is a little bit unusual in that the Bald Eagle is in silhouette against a cloudy sky. The eagle is flying from the darkened clouds to the light and clearer sky. I like the light in this photo and I actually like that silhouette... This next shot is a photo of one of the Bald Eagles circling over my head while looking for some prey. All the wildlife on the lake becomes silent and goes into hiding whenever either of these two Bald Eagles is flying within a mil