Scattered Thoughts . . .

We've had a busy but nice Thanksgiving weekend!  First, since Sheila's cancer is foremost in our minds, let me start by writing a little bit about how Sheila is feeling. She is still getting fatigued rather easily but, overall and considering what she has been through over the past four months, she is feeling quite well. Actually, while I was making a wreath for our front door, yesterday Sheila went for a short jog/walk! Jogging quickly proved to still be a bit painful for her so she did more walking than jogging but she has been getting back into her normal routine little by little.  Sheila didn't need to do much this weekend but she wanted to be as engaged as possible, when possible and to feel as useful as possible, when possible. When she was fatigued, she sat down and relaxed. I'm fairly certain that if you ask her about the weekend, she'd say it was a really nice weekend rather than a brutally tiring weekend. Simply having the time and energy to socialize

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