Today or tomorrow, the surgeon said, we should get the pathology results from the surgery. I thought the oncologist said it would take longer than a week, but maybe she said it would take longer than a week to get started with the next phase of treatment ( Read more... )

My mother was right. VIlna (Vilnius to you) was in fact in Poland at the time that my grandparents emigrated. Which means that it was officially Wilnow. Historical atlases put it in Russia.  I realize that both could be true, but if my mother was right about that, maybe she was right about the story of my grandmother and the Cossacks?

No writing done yesterday: I went to the center and moved boxes and furniture and then I was in too much pain. But this morning I am better. I only wrote 1300 words, which barely puts me at 50K, but that's all right, because I figured out how to accomplish a lot of things in those words. Those new characters that interloped on Saturday are ( Read more... )

Nah, I didn't write again yesterday. But today is 23K and I accomplished backstory and acquired some more damned characters. A little more Cinderella stuff going on. Do I need so much talk about how Yanek doesn't ever have the appropriate clothing? I can cut it later. The ponies trot onstage again, briefly ( Read more... )

I've written about this before, but I feel that the story bears repeating. Here is a version of my letter ( Read more... )

Tomorrow I get my students back, and their babies.  Rumor has it I will have two new babies -- possibly more later?  I looked at the class list with the teacher of recford but she has an ELD (English language development, pullout support for second-language learners, what we have instead of bilingual education nowadays thanks to the Texan influence ( Read more... )

This will show my age:
one of my favorite songs ever is Bert Jansch's "Bright New Year," which I thought of all the time with respect to my own mother. Here it is covered by a young man who gets it okay.

Bert Jansch - The Bright New Year ( Read more... )

So yesterday my brother in law brought a day laborer ( a nice man named Casimiro who I could not convince to come to the bathroom or to take a drink or anything). They cleaned up my back yard and pruned the feathers off my fruit trees ( Read more... )

We're getting estimates on the roof and the painting. The brothers-in-law are making sure I don't space out on basic maintenance of the house as it is my ace in the hole. So John came down and held my hand while I called people ( Read more... )

So yesterday was the m,emorial. I thought I couldn't do it. I thought that it would be one long awkward moment while we thought of things to say. We did okay. I was able to speak, and sometimes when I can speak in front of people, I do really okay, and I did ( Read more... )