Sunday, July 26, 2009

Memories and Family News


I realized last week that I may not actually remember seeing the first time that man walked on the moon. As my brother said, I remember remembering it, but that's not quite the same thing. The memory I have in my head is of a different house than we lived in during July of 1969, so I've likely mixed up a later moon walk with the first one.

A few weeks ago, Dale and I swapped some emails trying to piece together time lines of memories from our childhood. I have a slight advantage in getting things straight by being one year and three months ahead in age. Having that discussion fresh in my mind is what made it suddenly clear that I had the first moon walk memory in the wrong house.

Walter Cronkite's voice is present in my memories of the Apollo program.

This month has been challenging for what's left of my family now that our parents are gone. Dale was diagnosed with follicular lymphoma in the same month that his girl friend of fourteen years, Jana, was diagnosed with heart failure.

Jana ended up in the rehab unit of a nursing home, hopefully for a temporary stint, while they work out what she may or may not be able to do now that she can't take many of the drugs she used to take for her rheumatoid arthritis. Jana's condition was critical for a couple of the days that she was in the hospital, so her current situation is much improved if still surrounded by a lot of uncertainty.

Dale's cancer is slow-growing, not aggressive, and very treatable. He's to undergo a battery of tests in the next week or so to determine the extent of the disease. Then, there will be a decision-making process about treatment with one of the options being "watchful waiting." The other options are a variety of chemotherapy regimens -- all of which are much less damaging than what I went through in 1985. With modern chemo, many people get a treatment in the morning and go to work in the afternoon, often missing very little work. The worst side effect is often fatigue.

Everyone involved is hopeful and in good spirits, most of the time, now that we seem to have turned the corner from what felt like an acute situation a couple of weeks ago to long term issues.
Collage credits: Everything from Phuong Ton's Veiled Moonlight kit except the earth which is from Tangie Baxter's Chronicles of Imagination, Chapter 3.

Saturday, July 25, 2009

Lee Farm Tour

The Family Harvest CSA, our source for our weekly box of produce, consists of two farms. We visited one of them today, Lee Farm near Truxton, Missouri.

Rick got a kick out of figuring out how this old planter worked, with the help of Rusty Lee, our host, and a neighbor farmer.



One of the workers is an intern who is doing experiments with cut flowers on the farm. Those rows were all blooming and pretty in late July.



We got a preview of the eggplant that we'll be getting in our box in the next week or two.


More photos on my flickr page.

Thursday, July 23, 2009

The Garden 7-16-2009

I'm late getting these up. I was mostly playing with reflections when we went to the Garden last week.

Here is a canna and it's reflection.





This is a waterlily with part of one of Chihuly's sculptures reflected.




And here's a bit of the Japanese Garden with reflection.




More photos on my flickr page.

Monday, July 13, 2009

Garden with company

We took Rick's nephew, Philip, and his friend, Gabbi, to the Garden today. It felt more social to not pull out the macro lens and start leaning over flowers, so I used my camera to take pictures of them.



This was an experiment in using the reflector. It's especially apparent on Philip's face that we were able to eliminate some of the shadows.



And, this is a crop of the previous photo which I quite like. Note to self: remember to zoom the zoom lens!


Monday, July 6, 2009

At the Garden, July 6, 2009

I had lots of fun playing with waterlily reflections



...and bumblebees



...and a colorful flower called sagittaria



Many more photos on my flickr page.