Chilling in January

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.

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.

25 tastings later..

The Vidon winery is owned by Vicki and Don (hence the name) who are good friends of Sara and Josh and whom we have met some 10 years earlier at Sara and Josh's wedding at the Mt Hood lodge. There are over 600 wineries in the Willamette Valley, but we only managed to do two more that afternoon.

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!