....so busy, in fact, that the week has gone by without my thinking very much about the blog, or what to write today! I've been really focused on the book manuscript, Facing Fear, trying to tie up the final revisions before I leave next Sunday for a week in Door County. Every day, I go through a chapter, trying to make the format uniform and--most tedious--converting the cryptic footnotes into some sort of coherent listing of sources that will appear at the end of the book. I've assigned myself a chapter a day, and today I finished the next-to-last piece. All that's left is the epilogue, the page of guidelines for confronting fear and anxiety (self-help condensed, is the way I think of that page), and the acknowledgments. And then printing out about 250 pages. Maybe I can do all that tomorrow afternoon; maybe it'll slop over to Wednesday. At any rate, I think I will be ready to take the manuscript to Kinko's on Thursday. And then I can turn my attention to getting ready for the poetry class (we call it Poetry Camp) that Robin Chapman and I teach at The Clearing in Door County.
What else have I been doing? Jed arrived Monday evening (a week ago), and Nazgol, his significant other, flew in from LA on Thursday night and left this afternoon. So I've been playing with them in the afternoons and evenings. Fortunately, I guess, the chemo I got on Thursday didn't include oxalyplatin, so I bounced back quickly, and was pretty much fine by Friday. We went walking in the UW Arboretum to see the glorious crab apples and lilacs, and on Satrurdy drove all over southwest Wisconsin, it seemed, on back roads--taking the Merrimac Ferry (free, cable-pulled across the Wisconsin River, one of my favorite parts of the state) to go to the International Crane Foundation and a nearby, sort of, natural area, before heading to a fine potluck celebration of a friend's 60th birthday. Yesterday, I went to a graduation party for Pasha Sternberg, who immigrated with his family from the USSR as a 5-year-old seventeen years ago. Amazing to see kids grow into fine young people, especially since I don't feel any older than I did in 1991.
And I've been busy planning trips for the summer-- to DC for fireworks on the 4th of July, and up to the Boundary Waters in August with both my sons and their girlfriends, a trip that I will combine with participation (I hope!) in a Dragon Boat regatta in Superior, Wisconsin. I've signed on with TeamSurvivor, a group of women cancer survivors who do all sorts of exercise, for their paddling sessions on Wednesday evenings. Can't wait to get out on the water, although it won't happen this week, when I have a meeting of another group, or next, when I'll be at Poetry Camp.
Speaking of next week-- I'm going to try an experiment, made possible recently by Blogger, the Google program that hosts thousands of blogs, including this one. I won't have my computer with me up north, but I will be able to write a blog post before I leave Madison, to be automatically posted next Monday. So you'll have something to read even though I'm far from cyberspace, solidly planted in the real world, amid the trillium and maybe even yellow lady slippers.
Occasional reflections on my journey through life without a voice, with digressions to keep friends, family, and interested others informed about my health. In June 2007, a tumor or tumors related to my metastatic stomach cancer began to squeeze the nerves that control the larynx and the diaphragm--affecting both my ability to breathe and to speak. But I still have plenty to say!
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