It’s been a lot of years since my first Communion, sixty-plus is a pretty good guess. Growing up in the Catholic Church, your First Communion is a pretty big deal. For me, it was our whole second-grade class that marched in a procession from the school to the church, sat in the front of the church for High Mass, and then left with all your family that attended. Back at the house, there was a reception and a meal with…
Yesterday was Suzanne’s scheduled follow-up for the PATHway clinical trial that she has been involved with. Not sure if we would be traveling to Rush this often if she hadn’t been in the trial, but either way, it’s good to know just how everything is. On a cloudy, rainy, and dreary day, the tops of the Chicago skyscrapers wern’t visible. We arrived at Rush around 8:00 am and were out by 11:30 am. Except for the waiting, today’s appointments were…
Every spring, thousands of quilting enthusiasts make the pilgrimage to Paducah Kentucky for the American Quilters Society Annual Quilt Show. Almost a religious experience, women (and a few men) from around the world descend on this town for 4 days doubling its population from 26,000 to over 56,000. Paducah is the mecca of all things quilting, National Quilt Museum is located downtown, Handcock Fabrics is a huge quilt shop along the interstate, and there are a dozen or more locations…
We hear about this every Christmas, porch pirates. They follow UPS or FedEx trucks around and steal delivered items off the porches of unsuspecting people. Most of us can’t even imagine what drives these people to be so brazen with no conscience to steal like that in broad daylight. But what happens when your package isn’t there and there are no porch pirates? That’s the dilemma I have been dealing with this past week. A package we were expecting was…
Did you feel it the other day? There was a Paradigm Shift in the universe, well at least in my universe. Let me share when it happened. It was 12:04 pm on Friday, April 14th, 2023 and I was sitting in our kitchen. It was a nice spring day and I had been out working in the garden where I was finishing up building a raised strawberry bed. I came in, washed my hands, grabbed a glass of lemonade, and…
Growing up, the week leading to Easter was such a fun time. Mom would boil a dozen or more eggs and let me color them. We would line up five or six bowls with Paas egg dye, bend that little wire holder so as to not get any of the dye on my fingers, and see if I could two-tone an egg without overlapping the middle. On Easter morning, I would find my Easter basket (I still have it) on…
Since we are in the middle of March Madness, I thought I’d talk a little bit about Sports Fanatics. You know the person, the one that watches their team or any team play every game, listens to it on the radio or smartphone. The one that has to wear the correct sports gear and reads all the sports commentary they can find online. They also watch sports commentary shows and follow as many individual team players as they can find…
I’m always surprised when I hear Suzanne say “I’m on borrowed time”. We could be chatting in the car, watching the tube, or just out on the front porch swing when she makes that statement. Each time she says it, I hear a sense of mortality in her voice as well as gratitude about the fact that she is still here with me. So what does it mean when we say ‘Borrowed Time”? An online definition said it was to…
It’s hard to believe that it has been two years since Suzanne’s life-saving / altering surgery, and one year since she finished her clinical trial. For those of you who are new, Suzanne chose to participate in a clinical trial after her cancer surgery. The trial is called PATHway, used a drug called KYTRUDA and she will have follow-up appointments for one more year. This visit was her first to the new Rush Medical Center cancer facility on campus, the…
It was inevitable, figuring out how to take a big trip where all of Suzanne’s nourishment needed for two weeks had to be packed in suitcases. That’s what faced us for our winter trip we booked through Travel Discoveries II where we traveled on an eleven-day cruise through the Panama Canal and the southern Caribbean Sea with Norwegian Cruise Lines. Off to a rocky start, we made it through Chicago TSA unscathed but didn’t know the process in Panama. Then,…