The lighter side of life – staying in touch with friends and family by celebrating the ordinary.
I had pepper plants. They even had peppers on them! But I don’t have pepper plants anymore.
Here’s the culprit.
Where did he come from? How did he get here? How did he know I had pepper plants? Do all gardens come with one of these bad boys just in case the gardener decides to plant peppers?
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I now have a backyard pool!
We actually ordered it MONTHS ago, but you know how everything is disrupted nowadays. It was supposed to arrive in 2-4 weeks. After 8 weeks I thought we should just cancel the order because not much summer was left, but John wanted to wait a little bit longer in case it showed up.
When I finally gave up and went to cancel the order, the company (in China) appeared to no longer exist! At that point we assumed we were not getting a pool. I was just about to file a complaint with Paypal, (which is how we paid for it) to see if we could get our money back, when out of the blue, it showed up!
Turns out it’s a smaller version than we had paid for, and the package did not include the cover and the filter we had paid for. So I’m still thinking I should contact Paypal. But I’m very grateful to have the pool.
Obviously it’s too small for real swimming, but I can do my post-surgery exercises (I never got physical therapy so I’m just making up my own post-surgery exercises). I also just float around. It definitely seems to help me feel better. It gives me some core exercise without being too difficult. It’s a gentler type of exercise than the floor exercises I have recently been trying to do.
We knew the water would be very cold at first, so in addition to water from the garden hose, John cleverly thought to pump the water from the hot tub into the pool.
Here’s John cleaning out the hot tub. We’re going to leave it empty for a couple of months and then get it filled back up for winter.
John’s like, come on in, the water is fine. And it was!
Happy me, in the pool!
The first few days we put a tarp on it, then we were able to buy a solar cover (it was supposed to come with one, but didn’t). We get a lot of wind which blows leaves and dirt in, and we don’t have a filter, so we need to keep it covered. All the reasonably priced filters are currently backordered, so we’re just going to wait and buy a filter next year, because we’ll be taking the pool down soon.
The solar cover is basically just a really big section of bubble wrap. It works too! The top few inches of water get quite hot. It also stays on in the wind (so far).
We’ve had the pool for a few days and I’ve used it every single day so far! Often 2-3 times per day, only getting out when the thunder starts in the afternoon.
Oh, hey, speaking of wind and thunder (it’s monsoon season in Albuquerque), my friend just sent me this:
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Scenario: Kristina emerges from a few months of chemo-fog and has a freak-out about the high mortality rate for her type of cancer (40% chance of it returning, 35% mortality in the next 5 years.) Kristina then starts obsessing about bucket list items. Which bucket list item do you think Kristina chose?
If you’re looking for the 5th option, “all of the above”, you could someday be right! I’m not ruling out any of those things. But for starters…what do you think?
Costa Rica vacation?
California retreat center?
Adorable puppy?
Yet another house?
Tune in soon for the answer!
To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com
Our dogs are getting too old to easily bound up the steps into the camper van, so John bought a step stool for them. He didn’t realize we were going to have to teach Kai to use it.
Awww, poor guy. I’m not going to bore you with all the videos, but Kai did that over and over. So John decided to use the van door to block Kai’s usual route, pushing him over to the step stool. Human Engineering (or dog engineering) at it’s finest.
Yay, it worked, John’s brilliant!
Or, er, John may be smart, but obviously Kai isn’t. He didn’t learn from his success and still can’t figure out how to get into the van. Here John is luring him with a kibble. Normally Kai would do anything for a bit of food.
He did it! But it seemed accidental. Did he learn anything? No. In this video he gives up and tries to go around to the back of the van. At least he’s starting to think outside the box, but unfortunately he can’t get up the back steps either.
Kai can do it if he eventually accidentally ends up with his front paws on the stool.
Another success! Has he finally learned?
Nope.
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I apparently confused a few of you, not knowing what I was referencing. It’s true I’m rarely snarky, and I also rarely reference current political events. I was just reacting to something our clown-in-chief said about Kamala Harris not necessarily being a citizen. In general I don’t pay attention to the problematic things he says.
For the most part I quietly, stoically, wait for this national nightmare to be over. We’re always going to have an element of misinformed crazies in our society, but our leaders, in my opinion, should not amplify that. Do we need a job description for the Presidency along the line of, “Do not say stupid shit”?
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I might not be a US Citizen! I had no idea! I was born in the same city as Kamala Harris, and so was my dad. In fact, I was born only a couple of years after Kamala.
I suppose it’s possible that Oakland became part of the US at some point between 1964 and 1966, in which case I would be a citizen and she wouldn’t be. But I don’t remember anything about that in the history books. My dad was born in Oakland many years before Kamala was – many, many years, right Dad? Lol! So obviously, if Kamala isn’t a citizen, he wouldn’t be a citizen either.
This is amazing news for our family. In fact, we still have family members living in Oakland. Border crossings? Walls? I don’t know, what does this mean for our family?
I wonder what country we are actually citizens of, if not the US? I hate to say it, but this could be very good news for me and my Dad and our cousins. I hope whatever country we actually belong to, we end up with a smart leader with integrity.
KAMALA FOR PRESIDENT!!!
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I figured out my dream! I had a dream about a wildcat a few nights ago and I’ve been obsessing about it ever since. I wrote about it and shared what I wrote during my cancer support writing group. I talked to various people about it, and I was considering calling my coach about it (I work with a coach occasionally, not regularly).
In the dream a friendly wildcat kept coming to my house. The cat was huge like a lion; low, long and sleek. She was reddish-brown on her back and beige on her belly. She had a friendly lion-like face and a long tail.
The wildcat would show up at my house to visit me, and I would take her back to the preserve where she belonged. She kept showing up at my house. I kept taking her back to the preserve.
Each trip to the preserve got increasingly difficult, snowy and steep. On the last trip, right at the end of the dream, my car slid off an insanely steep snowbank. It looked as if the cat and I would continue off the far side of the road and right off the cliff.
When the car came to a stop at the edge of the cliff, the wildcat stretched herself from the back seat and put her face into mine, and looked at me with intense love. I realized I loved the wildcat because she so obviously loved me. I didn’t want to keep making the increasingly treacherous journey to return her to the preserve. I just wanted to let her stay with me.
What does this dream mean? Presumably the lioness is a part of me that I keep pushing away out of a sense of duty. I kept taking the wildcat back to where I thought she belonged, even though it’s not what either of us want. But what exactly does she represent, and what would it mean to let her stay with me?
Wildcats often represent courage and power, and specifically this was a she-cat, a clearly female power. My cancer support group thought my dream was obvious – that I was repressing (taking to the preserve) my inner feminine courage. Ok, fine, maybe, but why would I be doing that? And in what way was I don’t that? And what, specifically, could I be doing differently instead? The symbolism may have seemed obvious, but the conclusions were not. There were no actionable implications.
Am I lacking in courage? Certainly there are risky things that I am deliberately choosing not to do. Like confronting past injustices. Or buying California real estate in the middle of a pandemic. Or doing much of anything in middle of the pandemic, for that matter.
But I don’t think that carting a wildcat off to a preserve represents some sort of Freudian repression of my female power, as neat and tidy of an answer as that would be (especially to a support group, lol).
The answer came to me as I stepped out of the shower and noticed a few blemishes (hives? mosquito bites?), which made me think of someone I know with cancer worse than mine. Last time I talked with my friend she had hives, and she was uncharacteristically upset about them, afraid they meant she was going to die soon.
I’ve been watching this friend go on and off chemo (like me, her body hasn’t been handling it well, except her chemo rounds are more powerful and more difficult than mine were). I’ve noticed when she’s on the chemo she’s teary and fearful. And when she’s off it she is incredibly outgoing and hilarious. Cutting-edge funny! The chemo changes her personality like night and day. And it was doing the same thing to me. It was the chemo causing the fear.
It’s a great disservice to patients that mental changes are not on the warning labels of a lot of the chemo products. My caring, but young and inexperienced doctor was shocked and baffled that the chemo was causing me significant mental issues. We were completely unprepared for it and had to research it ourselves – with help from a retired psychiatrist (a friend of mine), and another doctor (my sister).
I kept taking the rounds of chemo because it was the right thing to do – like continuing to make the trips delivering the wildcat to the preserve. Two weeks on chemo, one week off, two weeks on, one off. Each trip down chemo road banished my inner courage to a preserve. And the trips were getting more and more dangerous for both me and my wildcat. We were sliding in the snow, and nearly slid off a cliff.
Now my wildcat is back home, and hopefully she can stay with me for a long time. Until we both leave this earth together.
By the way, these pictures are all ours – John took them when he went on an amazing trip to Africa a couple of years ago. If you would like any of these at a better resolution (or any other pictures on my blog), just email me.
To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com
I have 24 videos of John trying to fly a kite. And that wasn’t remotely how many times he tried. He must have tried hundreds of times! There just wasn’t enough wind (ironically, given the amount of wind in this state).
Many of the videos look like this (snicker)
Quite a number look like this (snort)
And most look like this (sigh). You know a video is boring when the dog wandering around aimlessly is more interesting than the intended action. Watch out little doggie, or you’re going to get bonked by a not-flying kite! Rosie can be clueless sometimes.
The average length of time in the air was about 20 seconds. The best one went for an entire three and a half minutes, before it landed in the tree. Luckily he was able to get it out of the tree so we could have this same fun some other time!
By the time we had enough consistent wind to fly a kite, there was a thunderstorm building and we needed to hike back to camp. Thunderstorm wind wasn’t exactly the kind we were looking for. No need trying to reproduce Benjamin Franklin’s study results.
Meanwhile, on that same trip, we got lucky, the thunderstorms cleared, and we got a cloudless night to see the comet! (Yes, this trip was a few weeks ago, I’m behind on my posts again.) John took some good photos. I’m lucky he dragged me out to see it because I’ve never been much of a stargazer (nearsightedness at an early age will do that to you), and I probably wouldn’t have bothered going to see it if it wasn’t for him.
If you turn it upside down it looks like a space monster talking to you. Wear your mask, Space Monster!
To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com
We are very grateful to my mother-in-law who stepped up to care for our dogs for over a month when John and I went to Boston for my surgery. We had very little time to plan ahead, and we appreciate she could take them on such short notice.
This time we have more time to plan ahead – although our future is uncertain. My cancer could come back, and if so, I would be a lot sicker than last time. In anticipation of that possibility, we would like to try to do some traveling soon – while I know I still can. Either way – whether it’s cancer reoccurrence or bucket list fun stuff, we could use longish-term help with our dogs.
They are both old and very well-behaved. They just lay around all day. They don’t need walks if they have a yard. They’re friendly, cuddly and tend to do fine with other pets.
We’re looking for some sort of long-term pet-sitting arrangement or even adoption if you’re interested, with the caveat that this offer is only open to people we know or people known to them. We want to stay in contact with our pups; we feel like they are ultimately our responsibility. We are happy to offer a monthly payment as well as supply food and cover the cost of grooming (needed about every 6 weeks).
Here’s Kai in his natural habitat, chilling out on the couch (or your lap if you let him).
Rosie prefers to spend her lazy days sleeping on the floor.
She’s looking at me, like, “What? I was napping.”
If you’ve been feeling a little lonely lately, I have two sweet old pups for loan.
To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com
Our old, gnarly crabapple is going nuts this year. At least we think it’s a crabapple. It’s not like we planted it. We only bought the house last year.
John’s sure it’s a crabapple, it’s got little apples on it, right?
I’m a little more dubious, but they appear to likely be crabapples.
John was so sure that it is indeed a crabapple tree, that he decided to make crabapple pie. He picked a bunch of apples (we hope are apples).
He cut them up – which took awhile, they’re little things.
They’re tart! He added lots of sugar and a few other ingredients (like poison antidote in case it’s not crabapples?)
Made a pie crust from scratch.
He even glazed the pie crust. Wow, it looks so yummy!
Who’s brave enough to try a piece?
Tastes like rhubarb pie!
To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com