After all the excitement and visits in December, January is
definitely a slow month for the retirees. I imagine that all the eager beavers
who are still dependent on work to make an income do not share this sentiment,
and are probably looking for ways to make some extra money after an expensive
December month. We geezers can just sit back and watch our bank accounts fill
up effortlessly. J.
Well, not entirely, we went to the social security office to apply for Bonnie’s
social security benefits and that was a couple hours of strenuous work.
The weather in Oregon added to the slowness. We have not
seen much rain and the entire state is experiencing a severe drought. The first
forest fires have started and the ski resorts were unable to open some lifts
due to lack of snow. Even so, for most of the month we have not seen
temperatures much above 40 degrees F (5 C) and often have foggy mornings. Lung disease
does not agree with that kind of weather and we stayed indoors a lot of the
time. The advantage is that we did not catch colds or flu bugs.
The chemotherapy which I had last week is starting to
become routine: first the basic health checks (they are still excellent) blood
tests (also good considering the medicines that destroy the immune system) and then
a couple hours for the infusion. The
next day I went back to the hospital for a shot to boost production of white
blood cells. The chemo has side effects; in particular that it makes you itch
like crazy, but it also has advantages: I only need to shave every four days
and I save on haircuts. I am not completely bald, like some people, but hair is
thinning out and the mustache now resembles the first facial hair experiment
by an adolescent male.
The Swagger Wagon Wine tour was definitely the high point of the month.
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| The Swagger Wagon |
As
a Christmas present, Sara and Josh organized a wine tour and the four of us
took the Swagger Wagon (Toyota Mini Van), for some wine tasting in the Chehalem Mountains. We started out with lunch in Newberg and then headed to the Vidon winery for a private tasting.
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| 25 tastings later.. |
The wineries serve small quantities for tasting, but it adds up after three wineries with nine different wines each and we ended the tour in even higher spirits than when we started. Sara was
nice enough to refrain from drinking and dropped us off at home after the
event, together with some wines we bought to refill the cellar after the family
finally did some serious damage to the contents of that cellar over the holiday
period.
We are starting to long for warmer weather and decided to
join Sara, Josh and grandkids in Maui for a week. This will be the second week
in February. There were still seats open on some flights and we will be
traveling way, way back in some middle seats on Hawaiian airlines, which had
the shortest flights. It will require some painful adjusting to travel without
perks and having to pay for a suitcase (OUCH!).This will be three weeks after the
chemo and hopefully the immune system has recovered sufficiently not to catch
the bugs of the three hundred people on that flight but I am nevertheless considering
the Japanese face mask way of traveling.
The next CT scan will be immediately following our return
from Maui and will give us an update whether the cancer is still in check.
Meanwhile it has been nine months since the start of the treatment and there is
some satisfaction in knowing that the exit takes longer than the gestation
period needed to put me on this earth. Probably a lot longer!
