Updates and Progress and To-Dos

It took us from 1995-2001 to build our Pine Island home.
Some of it was home-sawn lumber.  It was a mixture of
hiring some folks and doing a great deal ourselves.
Of course, it is not done yet, but we like it very much.
Right now this end, the south, is in need of new siding.
I put big sheets of exterior plywood type siding on it
originally -- cheap, but not very good with the
weather.  Trying to figure out what to replace it with
that will "do me out."

Today Margo get's her "port" put in.  That is an under-the-skin tube that goes into a  vein and each week when  she goes in for chemo, they will poke a small needle through the skin into this port and infuse the drugs.  This is being done right now as an outpatient surgery at the hospital.  Then we have a few educational sessions later this
morning.

Tuesday at 8:15 is her first chemo.  We will know how she reacts the rest of this week.  Depending on that, we will decide whether we stay down here in Pine Island or travel back and forth to the cabin each week for the next 12 in phase 1 of chemo.  Margo has not had any issues with discomfort or pain or anything yet--as they come with the
treatments.  She seems to be handling it quite well.   It is good to have Scott helping support her with a dozen or more Mayo visits in the past week, as I can't always function well enough to help much, and sometimes can't see past my own problems.

She got a special recliner from the local Amish store.  It is has a motor to tip it back and forth and she likes it a lot.  It has one problem, it is a small size and I can't fit into it comfortably!   We are enjoying the 40 inch TV very much.  Last night we watched 3 commercial  free 1950s Alfred Hitchcock Presents through netflix online.  Really quite a good program--as I have forgotten most of the episodes by now.

We went to the Goodhue county fair yesterday at nearby Zumbrota.  It was a nice rural fair with lots of big tractors, veggies, 4-H and even an old school house on the fair grounds!  It is right across from the Zumbrota stockyards/sales barn where you can go and bid on a cutter/canner walking wounded cow and get it pretty darn cheap.  Then you bring it home, fatten it up and get some milk, and butcher it for your winter meat supply.  We are right next to a lot of farm fields, so probably could graze it on the soy bean field and blame it on the deer.  Saw a nice buck here the other day--we have a 5 acre woods right in the middle of farm fields so they sleep on ours and eat on the neighbors.  I have a friend who hunts here each fall--might join him this year.  Have to put a scope on a shotgun as that is all we can use down here for hunting.  I haven't hunted for 7 years now, so probably have forgotten how.

While Margo has her appts this morning, I had some too.  I had a bone scan and blood tests to get a base level as I go into long term prednisone use, which is supposed to thin the bones and push me into diabetes if things go normally.  So far, my blood sugar testing with a diabetic diet have kept me OK.  The prednisone hasn't worked yet to slow down my immune system enough to relieve the MG, however, the doctor says it can take as long as 6 months for this to happen, and if I take more than 60mg a day, I might have even more side effects that
I do now.  I still can't do much of anything physical, and count it a good day when I can walk around without going into hard breathing spell.  Good time to catch up with some of the computer stuff I have been putting off.   I support 3 local history websites that need some updating, do two newsletters, and am helping a couple people with books as well as have 5 of my own at different stages of progress.  I take enough medicine to see normally and type OK, so that makes things good.

Anyway, we are doing OK.  Scott is chauffeuring us around for now The 91 olds is in the shop for a new harmonic crankshaft balancer today--the rubber went out on this and the motor rattled something fierce at idle.

I am going to check with a neighbor who has a wheel for a WD with a tire on it he doesn't want--a spare, and mine down here has the back tires severely cracked and one won't even stay up --can see tube through several places.  Need to get the tire to stay up so I can root around the woods with the loader if I get the urge!

The project this week has been to get rid of a lot of old electronic equipment I had squirreled away in the basement and garage.  With the recycle store in SCF taking most of this stuff along with Frieberg's Gone Green in Frederic, I can  haul most of the stuff and get rid of it for free or even get paid for it.  I took apart a few old pcs and
stripped them down to save the power supplies, memory, drives, and cards to prepare the rest for recycling.  Scott replaced all the smoke detectors (10 years old).  We had about 10 of them all wired together in the house from when I built it--and they were starting to moan that they were getting old and needed replacing.    They all go to the recycle store too.

Hope to see you sometime soon.