While going through and cleaning up my Circus of Brass and Bone notes, I found this partial travelogue, from my visit back to see my parents right after they returned to the States. Yes, at times I do just type whatever into whichever document happens to be open on my laptop. Usually, these snippets get properly relocated a bit sooner than this, ( Read more... )

Phil may no longer be feverish, but he's been having severe arthritic pain and swelling in his joints since the fever went away, and it isn't getting better. It's bad enough that he can't do some things and he's being woken up in the middle of the night by the pain when the painkiller wears off. This is Not Good. Husband is broken, and that is ( Read more... )

(Oh, and Mom says, "I read your friends/readers comments on your blog and am grateful for their interest and support." She is getting treated with Taxitol on Monday, which I believe is the second-round treatment. I think one of the deciding factors was being able to start treatment immediately instead of delaying it for a week ( Read more... )

Tonight Mom gets to make the decision: second-line chemo, or an experimental trial ( Read more... )

Sunday, much miscellaneous writingy stuff was finished. Aside from that, it was the usual (except no church, because Phil was still sick ( Read more... )

Since some of you are kind enough to ask--my mother's doing relatively well. As she puts it, she's "not going to die in the immediate future." Her tumor blood marker has stopped dropping at the same rate, though it's not down to what it should be yet. Because of that and the serious side effects from the hardcore intra-peritoneal chemo, her doctor' ( Read more... )

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Just finished getting out the last of my Christmas cards! Don't bother to check your calendar; it's still February. But losing a chunk of time to sickness around the holidays left me drastically behind on, well, life.

With no further ado, I present...The Staffin Wiebe 2010 Christmas Letter!


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From my mother-in-law's kitchen, a pretty tasty Thanksgiving stuffing recipe that is cooked in the slow cooker. (Yes, I am finally going through the monstrous stack of accumulated papers and stuff that's been building up for the last two months ( Read more... )

It's been a rough week or so, thanks to Thanksgiving travel and in-laws and fighting off a bug and no-work-hours stress and the associated other stresses. And unfortunately, when I don't have the oomph to boss myself into productivity, avoidance is my number-one stress response! So I've been extremely unproductive, too.

The next episode of The ( Read more... )