So…I need to get everything up to date. Sorry about the delay but it’s been a considerably busy 6 weeks.

My only excuses for not posting are (a) it’s been busy and (b) Neil hasn’t provided me any photographs to share.

So…here’s a brief list of what’s happened since early June.

The biggest thing is that after Connie had her biopsy of the right breast she was diagnosed with DCIS…that’s Ductal Carcinoma in Situ. She’s at stage zero and ductal means it’s in a milk duct and in Situ means it hasn’t spread. The cells are calcified and it’s about a 1 cm section of one milk duct. As a result…we’ve had a wave of appointments…Neil went along on all of them to serve as a second less affected set of ears. Surgeon, oncologist, and radiation oncologist we’ve all completed along with an MRI of both breasts to make sure there are no other issues…and there aren’t, no mass, no other regions other than the single duct. She also had genetic testing and none of the bad genes exist in her so that’s also good news. While cancer is never good…this is pretty much a home run if you have to have breast cancer as the docs all agree. She’s scheduled for surgery (same day) Aug 19 and once the post surgery pathology report she may need therapy. The surgeon and oncologist talked about putting her on a 5 year does of hormone reducing drug…but the radiation oncologist suggested that if things happen as we think they will that’s probably overkill and it does have some significant side effects. She’s researched a bit and is not going to do the drug unless something changes…too many eye, heart, and liver issues for essentially no gain in cure rate.

She had just about the biggest bruise Neil has ever seen after the biopsy…he took a photo and after cropping out all of the important parts she OK’ed him posting it here. I’ll put it way at the end in case you just don’t want to see it.

Neil’s scheduled to depart for Botswana for 2 weeks in 10 days and one thing we were concerned about was whether any surgery would impact that…if it did then we would just have cancelled and absorbed the $15,000 loss for the trip. However…the earliest her surgery could have been scheduled was about when he would have returned and the docs concurred that a delay of a week would have zero effect so her surgery is scheduled as noted above. However…Neil’s been busily doing pre trip preps along with the myriad of doctor appointments and tests and that’s another contribution to the busy schedule.

We also had Bryan, Jen, and Alex here for a week for their vacation…Alex is still a bit picky on food but not as much as a year ago. We had to buy a new air mattress…our one from the Fairfax VA house renovation in 2001 bit the dust so we needed a new one. And Bryan let us know that the guest toilet flapper valve was a gonzo and it was filling and refilling a lot…so we had to get a plumber in to fix that once they left.

In the neighborhood…the HoA management is being turned over from the developer to a homeowner elected board…and there’s been a lot of ongoing controversy over that. Mostly it’s due to the people on the transition committee and the HoA lawyer being incompetent idiots who didn’t bother reading the rules on how to run a board election under both the FL state law and the HoA bylaws.

Add in the bourhaha over the merger of our Elks Lodge with several others…but politics engaged there and the proposal was voted down by 1 vote despite there being no alternative than to merge. So…we’ll probably transfer our member ship to the Punta Gorda lodge by the end of the year.

We signed up for our annual Sarasota Symphony Orchestra season ticket renewals and have also signed up for both the Fort Myers Community Association concert series and the second season of the Florida Symphony series…it took a bit of figuring out what conflicted between those and with her Mastersingers concerts.

Speaking of Mastersingers…the new director decided to have everybody audition…again…(well, only the ones he hadn’t already auditioned last year. She was concerned that it was a thinly disguised attempt to get rid of old people as the new director has added mostly young people in the past year. So…she was sweating it big time but she had her audition and made the cut so she will remain an Alto 1 which makes her happy. However…between her concerts and the 3 mentioned above we will have a pretty packed classical music schedule from the fall through the spring…but hey, it is what it is and none of us are complaining.

Neil needed a knee x-ray…on our routine visit a week or so back Dr. Rodriguez found some possible fluid behind his right knee. It doesn’t hurt and is causing him no issues whatsoever at this point…but he had an x-ray this past week and has a consult with the ortho guy this week to see what the deal is. 

So he’s headed off to Botswana in a week or so…she’s staying home. And since it’s hurricane season here in FL…she needs lots of into on power, water, and assorted hurricane preparations. He’s written her a WHIM (Wife Hurricane Instruction Manual) with all the details on a whole passle of things that need to happen, had her review it, and answered a bunch of questions she had…he still needs to train her on operating the generator to keep the freezer and fridge cold but that’s on the schedule. He’s got anti malaria medication in hand and is collecting all the things needed to charge batteries, watches, laptop, iPad, and iPhone along with the same checklist of stuff he needed for Tanzania last year. None of that is hard and all the stuff is pretty much on hand…but there’s still a lot of checking, gathering, and all that that needs to happen.

And…we’ve even got some computer network upgrades in progress. Our laser printer which is going on 15 years old has started printing really faintly and after a bit of research it needs both a new drum and a new toner cartridge…which total to about $130. So he decided that it was better off just buying a new Brother laser printer for $170 so he decided that it made more sense to upgrade to a printer currently on sale. The new printer needs he needs to reconfigure the local network settings on the router…and that exacerbated another issue. Several years ago…Netgear who built the Orbi Router mesh combo we have issued a software that essentially bricked the ability to connect to the router and reconfigure it. Netgear’s solution is to nuke the router to factory defaults and load the new software (which is now 2+ years old) and start from scratch. Given a couple of factors…the fact that Netgear would rather sell us a new router than fix the old one…and that we now have some devices that work on WiFi 7 instead of of the older WiFi 6 or 6E…he’s going to get a pair of US built Ubiquity routers, establish a mesh, and reconfigure the local network at the house. He’s tested the new printer to verify that it’s not DOA but on return from Botswana will have to deal with both processing the 30,000 or so photos he brings back but also with buying and setting up the new wifi devices, the new printer, and processing photos.

So…as you can see…despite not posting here…we’ve really been pretty darned busy.

Interesting things found on the net.

And that’s the only one I’ve got for you.

So…I’m gonna do my usual Cyas in the next paragraph…but if you’re really interested in how big a bruise from a breast biopsy is…scroll down a bit and I can tell you

Cyas.

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Ok, here it is. For scale…Connie is a C cup and the right side is about a half inch from showing nipple (which she vetoed and he agrees). This is the outside of the right one and the actual biopsy incision is under the tape…but as you can see this bruise is probably 3 by 3 inches. And…don’t worry…Connie approved both the cropping of this image and with posting it here. After all…I talk mostly these days about our everyday life and it is what it is.