Happy Easter

Tomorrow is Easter. Happy Easter everyone. How glorious today has been. In fact most of the week has been pretty great.I have been in New Hampshire enjoying the wonderful weather. Barbara has been at Fox Hill keeping the cats company. Things here are great:

• The computer problems described in the last blog have all been fixed.
• The ice is gone from the lake.
• Maple Sap is running - or at least it was earlier today.
• There is a herd of about 7 beautiful deer wandering outside in the yard eating our bushes. Or at least there was until I chased them away. Lovely creatures they are - especially when they are eating the neighbors' bushes instead of ours. 
• The sap boilers are running strong.I gathered about 30 gallons of sap today and I hope to boil that down to about 2 gallons so that I can fit it in the refrigerator until I get back to "finish" it. 

I had though that "sugaring" was done for the year after my previous visit to New Hampshire. But then we got a cold snap followed by warm weather and another "run" of sap, so I came back up. I did several batches this week.  

Mostly I have been feeling pretty good and my most recent numbers are the best they have been in quite a while. I do get really tired and some days I sleep a lot. I think I learned this from the cats. They are still the champs and I am trying to learn everything I can from them.   

One problem is that I sometimes get some pretty bad cramps in my legs and ankles at night. I can generally get up and "walk them off" in 5 minutes or so. The doctors say to drink Tonic Water. I have tried that and it does not seem to make any difference at all. Maybe as the weather warms up I will try adding some Gin to the Tonic. Maybe with some lime. Can't hurt.

The other thing that someone suggested is drinking pickle juice. Weird, huh?  So, I have been eating a lot of pickles and drinking the juice. That doesn't help either, but it turns out that I really enjoy the pickles, so I have been continuing with that treatment. 

I will be heading back to Fox Hill tomorrow morning to have Easter Dinner with Barbara and some friends, I am looking forward to that, but New Hampshire is so pretty that I hate to leave. 

The Sap Tapper

Some of you may have noticed that we have had a strange winter. This has confused the heck out of my maple trees. Usually we north country “sugarers” figure that Sugaring happens in March. This year the first big flow was in early February. I had not yet tapped my trees. After watching the weather, I came up to NH for what I figured would be the next flow. Caught enough of the end of that to make a gallon and a half of syrup. That was 2 weeks ago.

I am most excited to report that my vintage PassePartout (PPT) (“mini-tank”) worked beyond my wildest expectations. It drives over anything – snow, dirt or mud without the slightest hesitation. It gets me right next to the individual trees. It is not perfect. It still makes mostly right turns. Also, working brakes would be nice. Coming back to the garage one day, I came in a bit too quickly and barely got it stopped before knocking over the boiling table. I did nudge the not very solid table a bit, but it did not go over. 

You can see my boiling system in the image below. Today I ran all 5 boilers all day boilding down most of about 40 gallons of sap.

Last week being too cold for sap flow, I spent it at Fox Hill Village with Barbara and the cats. I came up to NH for a couple of days earlier this week. I got some sap but not as much as I expected Also, I noticed that the PPT was running a bit rough. I headed back on Tuesday for chemo on Wednesday.

Wednesday was looking quite promising and I could hardly wait to get back here to the sugarbush. Chemo went quite smoothly. My numbers are still holding steady. Everything happened on schedule and I was anxious to get onto the highway northbound.

In fact, I might have been too anxious. As soon as I walked in the door in Meredith, I realized that I had neglected to stop at the DF Pharmacy and pick up my Panobinostat – a drug provide by and necessary for my present clinical trial – not exactly available at my local pharmacy.

So, after leaving a message with the clinical study nurse asking if there was an alternative to 5 more housr of driving, I hopped back into the car and started back south to Dana Farber – not a happy driver. Fortunately, the nurse called me back a half hour later and said they could overnight the drugs, so I turned around yet again. This was still much better than going all the way to Boston.

As soon as I got back, cranked up the PPT and headed to the sugarbush. The PPT made it as far as the bottom of the farthest hill in the farthest reaches in the deepest woods of the sugarbush and then would not run. No way. So, I walked home, dejectedly as you might imagine.

Barbara, who is in NH this trip, offered to help. She drove my truck as close as she could get and I uncovered my little garden tractor, hitched the trailer to it and drove cross-country it to meet her. Together we managed to get close enough to the PPT to transfer the sap to the tractor, drive it up to the truck, and transfer the sap to the truck. We also managed to complete rest of the sap gathering. All without getting the tractor stuck – a minor miracle.  I am hoping for a gallon or so of syrup tomorrow.

So, clearly, yesterday did not go perfectly.

Also, did I mention that when I got up yesterday morning, my wireless keyboard at Fox Hill Village had stopped working? Then I got the NH, I turned my computer on and found that my beautiful 27” monitor that has been acting flaky finally bit the dust. And Barbara could not log onto her computer here.

Other than that, yesterday went pretty smoothly. But at least, I got some sap. I am hoping that a spark plug transplant cures the PPT and the computers can be fixed.

I will report progress on these and other issues when during the next update. 

Visiting Florida

It has been a while since the last blog update which I guess is good because it means that not much has changed. My numbers are up slightly, but not enough to concern anyone (except me a little). I am currently sitting in a chair at Dana-Farber getting ready for a wonderful injection of Velcade. Horray. What better time to do a blog update.

We just got back from a trip to Sunny Florida. Our friend, Anita, rented a house for a couple of months and invited us down to enjoy it with her. We wanted to get away from the horrible New England winter. The weather thing did not work out exactly as planned.

At 3:00 AM the first night we were there, our cell phones started to howl with a horrible alarm sound and yelled out at us that there was a tornado approaching and that we should take cover immediately. Where exactly were we supposed to go? I put my head under the pillow. (Hey - it always worked when I was a kid.) We went back to sleep and were much relieved the next morning when we woke up and realized that we were both still alive. Give me New England blizzards over tornados any day.

And Florida was not particularly warm - barely got above 70, but we had a nice time anyway, seeing all (or at least many of the sites). The house we were in had a beautiful pool that we did not go in because it was too cold.

Halfway through the trip, Barbara started to miss our kitties, so we had to go to "The Big Cat Habitat" which rescues large African animals like lions and tigers and then lets tourists look at them for a small fee. This place was totally cool, but the problem is that after seeing these giant lions and tigers, I have become a bit unsatisfied with our own puny little kitties. I want bigger ones. Not as big as the ones at the Big Cat Habitat - I am thinking of maybe 500 pounds or so. We are still negotiating. Barbara and I are trying to agree on who is going to clean the litter box.

Our other animal adventure was that Anita had been talking all week about doing the "Alligator Ride" and that sounded very interesting to me, so we headed to Myakka State Park. I was totally disappointed because the "Alligator Ride" turned out to be a boat ride where you see lots of alligators. You don't actually get to ride on any alligators.

But the real highlight of the trip was dinner visits with several dear old friends that we had (mostly) not seen in years. We all really enjoyed these visits. We had the most wonderful time seeing all of them again and catching up.

So that's the report. We hope that all is well with everyone and that the winter is being kind to you.

Cat Day

Greetings.

There is nothing really new to report on the Cancer Front. I continue to take chemo pills most days with weekly trips to Dana Farber for my shot of Velcade. I continue to tolerate the side effects reasonably well. My numbers are holding pretty steady, so there is nothing really new to report.

So I will mention the main thing that is going on with our lives. Saturday was Cat Day - the day we have been both looking forward to and dreading ever since we bought the apartment at Fox Hill Village. On Saturday, the cats moved to Westwood. We are now living in a "Cat House".

You might think moving cats is a relatively simple thing. You would be wrong. One of our cats (Puma) does not like to ride in the car. She expresses her displeasure by emptying herself - from both ends - within minutes after getting into the vehicle. This does not always smell really great. Both cats also yowl during the entire car ride.

We decided that the best way to get away from any noise and odor would be to put them in the back of the truck - which is covered. All the way back. Near the tail-gate. You might think that this would be a pretty fool-proof solution. Again, you would be wrong. Let's just say that our cats have strong personalities.

Barbara decided that it would be best to give the cats a sedative. I had to help. My job was to hold onto the cat while Barbara opened the cat's mouth and shoved a pill into its mouth. Our cats fight back when taking pills. I wore welding gloves. My wife is the bravest person I know. Seems to me like a good way to lose a finger or two.

So, with all this prep, the trip itself went relatively smoothly. We did one cleaning of the cat carrier before we even left the garage. Then about halfway, we could tell that there had been additional activity in the back. We turned on the fan to blow air into the front of the truck. This worked fairly well.

The cats made it to Fox Hill Village and seem to be adapting fairly well. When we got here, Puma was still partly under the sedative. It was funny to watch her stumbling around as if she had had a bit too much to drink. I got into trouble for laughing at this.

The cats seem to like it OK here except for one thing. No mice. At least not real ones. Barbara has of course provided them with a number of toy mice - including at least one really obnoxious one that squeaks every time the cats bat it around. But I can tell that the cats know it is fake and miss being able to chase real ones. So, know what I am going to do? Next week when I am in New Hampshire, I will live-trap a few mice and release them here at Fox Hill Village as a Christmas gift for the kitties. They are going to be so surprised and happy. I think Barbara will be surprised as well, so please don't mention it to her.

Barbara wants to spend most of the winter down here at Fox Hill. I too will spend a lot of time here, but I will also visit Meredith from time to time for Zoning Board meetings and to check up on the house. My brother and his family are planning to come up to New Hampshire for Christmas week and I will be in New Hampshire for that.

Meanwhile, when I pulled the truck into our parking place, I discovered that there was no place on the truck into which to plug the charging cable. Apparently, I will have to visit one of those places they refer to as "Gasoline Stations"? Do you know that they actually charge you for refueling at those places. Maybe we are getting spoiled?

I will close with a couple of links that you might want to check out.

The first is our annual newsletter. For faithful followers of this blog, there will be little in there that you have not seen other than a few nice photos. But here is the link if you want to follow it and have not gotten it some other way.

The second is a link to a video of the PassePartout for anyone who wants to see it in action. It is mercifully short - I promise. And here is the link to the PPT In Action Video if you want to see the YouTube video.

That's all for now. Have a great holiday season and much happiness in the new year.

Engine Problems

It has been a while since my last update. Not much new to report. My numbers continue to hold reasonably steady and I continue to tolerate the chemicals reasonably well. My feet are still numb, I still get cramps at night and I continue to user my share of Imodium. But none of these are major issues.  Last week, I did have a bad cold for a while. I ended up sleeping for most of several days, but I am all better now.

As I said, it has been quite a while since the last update and much of my time (while not sleeping off my cold) has been spent working with engines or vehicles with engines.

Let's start with the boat. We don't use it enough and the gas goes bad. At least that is why I think it would not start when I wanted to drive it over to the launch ramp to pull it out for the winter. Fortunately, our friend John was there to help me try to get it started. He was also first to notice when the boat caught on fire. We managed to blow out the fire after a few minutes and it only burned a little bit of hair from the top of my head. After having tried for a half hour to get the boat started, I was sorely tempted to just let it burn.

We had much better luck with Barbara's new car - which we are still getting used to. It is like driving around inside a computer. The problem is that it is all software driven and they sometimes update the software. Well, just as we were getting used to the old software, they updated us. This caused the dashboard to look completely different. For example, the speedometer went away.  It is sort of like going to your computer to find that it is suddenly running Windows 10, except that you are not using Windows to control a vehicle traveling at 70 mph.

This new version says that the car will drive itself. You know me. I love technology and I was dying to try it. (Poor choice of words?)  Does it work?? You bet your life it does. (Oops - more bad word choice. )

Actually, it does mostly work under the right conditions, the key word here being "mostly" and "right conditions". It works pretty well on a not too crowded interstate with road lines clearly visible. It slows down when you come up on another car and if you signal left, it will change lanes and go back to the set speed. Pretty cool. But you do have to really pay attention to what is happening and be ready to grab control back if you are coming up to a situation that you don't think the car will handle or if the car does something weird.It is also great in stop and go traffic. But still it takes a lot of courage to actually allow the car to drive - especially the first time you try it.

All this was a lot easier than the third vehicle I had to deal with. I purchased a slightly used, 45 year old PassePartout vintage snow machine.

Admittedly, this violated a bunch of my "rules to live by":

• Never by anything with a gasoline engine. 
• If you must buy something with an engine, make sure it is not a 2-cycle engine.
• If you absolutely must by something with a 2 cycle engine, make sure it is at lease a new 2 cycle engine - not 45 years old.
• And if you do buy something with an old 2 cycle engine, don't be so stupid as to not make sure it is running before you buy it 

I struggled for days trying to get that stupid thing running.I rebuilt the carburetor several times after carefully cleaning it each time. I did research and found old manuals on line. I came very close to taking a sledge hammer to it and smashing it to smithereens to see if that would help it start. Eventually, I took it to someone who got it running for a hundred bucks.

Which meant that it would go forward and backward, but it would not turn. Well, actually, it would rotate counterclockwise, but only if stopped and shifted into reverse. Attempts to turn while going forward caused it to jam to a stop - which was good because the brakes didn't work.

Eventually, I got it so that I can steer it and the machine is pretty cool even though  the brakes still don't work very well. I took it up into the woods and it drives over anything - as you would expect of a small tank. But there is one more problem. The exhaust seems to get vented into the cockpit and the cockpit seems specially designed to hold it there. However, all in all, it seems like it will be a lot of fun and I think it will work very well for gathering maple sap. Depending upon how long I can hold my breath to avoid breathing exhaust.

Yellowstone Adventure

It has been a while since my last posting, but even so, there is not all that much to report – at least from the Cancer Front. Today, I write this from Dana-Farber where I am starting cycle 22 for this regimen. You may recall that each cycle is 21 days, so that is 63 weeks. So far, my numbers are holding fairly steady – or possibly dropping slowly. That’s good.

Here is a photo of me at my last “infusion”. They are supposed to give me saline, but as you can see, I talked them into something a bit stronger.

In August, I went on a big adventure - at least for me. My brother Ron was taking his son Weston (aged 10) on an RV Camping trip to Yellowstone. He invited my brother Ken and me to join him for the second half of the week. My doctor told me that if I fly, I should arrange to sit near the front of the plane where there are fewer germs. So I paid for “Comfort Class”. It was nice because there was actually room for my legs. It was my first flight in over two years.

Yellowstone was a blast, though I did not take all the hikes that everyone else went on. The first day included a walk down into a canyon to get a better view of Yellowstone Falls. There were a lot of stairs, but I figured this would not be a problem since I have been regularly doing 12 flights at Dana Farber supposedly in order to raise my white blood count in order to "qualify" for treatment. I figured it would be the same thing. And it was – except for the fact that Yellowstone is at 8,500 feet. Altitude does matter. But I made it. Eventually.

It was a great trip and the four of us had a grand time with lots of “campfire time” and not too much snoring in the RV.

We did run into an interesting problem at the Mud Volcano. They have raised walkways with rails to prevent people from walking where they should not. Ken is quite a photographer, but dropped part of a lens off the ramp. There was no way we could reach it – not even with my simian arms. We were searching for a net or a hook or something, but then we realized that we had a perfectly good 10 year old that was not being used for anything. Ron simply lowered him down by his ankles until he could grab the lens part.

Our other bit of news is that Barbara and I bought an electric car for going back and forth between New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The car is totally amazing to drive and we love it. It was built by the same guy who builds the rockets that blow up. When we picked it up, we had to sit through a two hour orientation.  It is like learning to use “Windows 10”. It was expensive, but I did the calculations and it will pay for itself in fuel savings alone in under 108 years. I did not factor the likely cost of speeding tickets. 

25 years of Marital Bliss

Celebrating 25 years of marital bliss

Tuesday was our 25th Wedding Anniversary. We celebrated by inviting a few neighbors over for cocktails and hors d'oeuvres (which many of our guests kindly brought themselves). We set up a bar and had a grand time.

Barbara really wanted to have the celebration on the Granite Patio in front of our "Boat House" which in fact is not actually a boat-house, but that is another story. Barbara spent days getting it preped. She pressure washed the granite. She went into the boat-house with a pitchfork and a rake to do battle with the spiders. She raked down spider webs and cleaned spider poop. And then she started the real cleaning. I felt so bad for her slaving away down there that I seriously considered going down to help.

Of course it started to rain just before the party was getting underway, so we had to move the whole thing up to the big house.

But not for long. The rain eventually stopped and we forced everyone to grab their drinks and something from the serving table and head down to the water.

It was great. So great in fact that when it started to rain again, people toughed it out; it was only a light sprinkle anyway. We were all rewarded by a half hour "rainbow show". Spectacular. It was a great evening.

In proofreading this it occurred to me that a bad typist such as myself could easily get into serious trouble spouse-wise by exchanging two letters in the word "Marital" to make it "Martial". When will they have a spell checker that finds errors like this?

Visiting old friends

During the last week or so, we had the chance to get together with at least three sets of friends that we have barely seen over the last 20 to 35 years. I don't like to "name names" in the blog, but if you were one of these people, you know who you are and you should know that getting together with you was a real highlight.

The Boat

Our boat is in the water and running. You have no idea how unusual this is. You may recall that it did not run worth a darn last year. Because I had already replaced almost everything else in the engine, I decided that the problem was bad fuel. I worked for over a week trying various methods for getting the old fuel out. Eventually, I used a small hand pump which took me a few hours of pumping, but eventually emptied the tank. I then drove to the airport (in my truck - not in the boat) and bought eight gallons of hundred octane, ethanol free aviation fuel. I figured that if it wouldn't run on that, then it wouldn't run on anything. But it does - so far at least.  I am keeping my fingers crossed.

Bowling

Last week, I spent some quality time in the workshop making wooden bowls out of some of the ash tree that the utility wire guys had dropped on our property. I had one very deep chunk of wood out of which I made my most spectacular bowl yet. I made it with a sort of pedestal and I was very proud of this. I had spent several hours on it.

Within days, the bowl developed huge spits.  I should have known better than to have included the center of the tree. Fortunately, I had purchased some special epoxy stuff for dealing with cracks like this and I managed to repair the damage. Then the bowl split again - even worse than the first time. l guess I will wait a few months and then maybe try again. Meanwhile, I have learned a real lesson about what part of the tree to include in the bowl - especially while dealing with green wood.

The Garden(s)

I have two tiny garden parcels which I tend from time to time - one at Fox Hill Village and one in Meredith. Both are now producing modest harvests. We got some nice tomatoes from the one in Mass and a whole slew of yellow wax beans from the one in Meredith. When I returned from the garden this afternoon, Barbara asked, "Is that a zucchini in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?" Sadly, it was in fact a zucchini.

Managing the Cancer

I guess I should include a few words about the Cancer. But before that I want to share a thought that might be relevant to any readers who take a lot of pill, especially if you wear glasses. Don't let this happen to you.

Last week, I happened to notice a pill on my desk at Fox Hill. I figured that I must have dropped it at some point while taking part of my daily dose. As I was about to take it, I realized that it did not look quite right. There were four small holes in it. It turns out that it was actually a button that had popped off one of my shirts.

But back to the disease. I continue to take things one 21 day cycle at a time. You may recall that last cycle, the numbers had dropped a bit. This cycle, they were back up to where they had been the cycle before. Not as good as we had been hoping for, but it could have been worse. I choose to think of it as holding steady.

And the side-effects continue to be quite manageable. I have been somewhat tired lately. The peripheral neuropathy continues to increase slowly in my feet and seems now to be spreading to my ankles, but again this just feels weird without causing any real discomfort or difficulty. There is another issue which delicacy prevents me from discussing in detail other than to say that Imodium might be helping.

So that is for this report. We hope that all is well with all of you and that you are enjoying this glorious summer. Sure has been beautiful here at the lake, but the season is to darned short.