Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Glass Blowing and Art Pictures

Barbara is in Florida and I am here in Westwood on my own. I don't know why she would want to be in Florida when the snow here is so beautiful.

I am currently in the middle of chemo cycle 12. You would think I would be getting pretty good at this by now. It would be great if I could report that the numbers are rapidly heading down, but they are not. But they do seem to be holding fairly steady - possibly dropping a little, so I am satisfied with that.

I am feeling pretty good this week. During my last "break week" two weeks ago, I had a couple of days where I was very tired and all I wanted to do was to sleep. So I slept. No problem there. My feet are still pretty numb and possibly getting more so, but that is not really all that bothersome. There are occasional minor pains in my back which may or may not be caused by the disease. The doctor tells me that as long as the numbers are where they are, the disease should not be causing bone damage. Hopefully he is right.

I did manage to come up with one new symptom to make life more interesting. A couple weeks ago, while checking my pulse, I noticed that my heart seemed to be skipping beats. It might beat 2, 3 or 4 times and then skips a beat. For a while last week, it would beat once then skip once. Kinda freaks you out if you know what I mean. I was worried that it might start skipping more than one beat or stop all together, which could severely limit my range of activities.

So, Monday morning, I called me primary care doctor and suggested that I come to his office to try to catch some of these skips on an EKG. Of course, once I got there, the skipping mostly stopped, but we did manage to capture a few of the skips on the EKG. He told me that there were "premature" beats - not actual skips and that he was not overly concerned. But why would he be concerned; it wasn't his heart that was skipping. But even so, I felt better about this, so I am not going to worry about it.

On the way back from the doctor's office, I stopped at the glass blowing studio. I had signed up on GroupOn for a Glass Blowing Lesson which I attended on Saturday and I wanted to pick up the "Art" that "I" had created. I put the "I" in quotes because the "lesson" turned out to be mostly the instructor making a piece of glassware while I stood there and watched. Sometimes he let me put my hand on the long pipe while he manipulated it. So, it was not really the "hands on" lesson that I was expecting, but it was still interesting. "I" made a paper weight and a bowl. Here are some photos:



I also stopped at Ocean State Job Lots where I purchased two 30 gallon stock pots in anticipation of "Sugaring Season". Yes - it is coming to that time of year again. I am hoping to produce a lot more syrup than I did last year. This assumes that I can actually get to the maple trees. In case you hadn't noticed, there is two feet of snow on the ground and the woods don't typically get plowed. Last week I spent three hours up there on the tractor clearing snow and maybe got about half way to the trees. I actually managed to get the tractor stuck a couple of times. I am hoping to spend some more time up there once I get back to NH and maybe break through to the trees. Hopefully, I will have a positive report for the next blog update.

So that wraps up the report except for one thing. Art Pictures. After the last blog update, a few of our faithful readers requested pictures of the Art we had purchased for the apartment. So here are the photos.





That's All Folks

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