Well…Connies surgery went pretty well…the surgeon got all of the affected area and then did some reshaping of her right breast to take care of the hole left behind. She was in a little pain on Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning but has pretty much quit taking Tylenol as of Saturday morning. She’s tender and sore if she moves too much but no real pain at this point. What she does have is a huge bruise…makes the image of the one I posted from the biopsy look small…and it’s basically black/purple. She’s also going to have a scar across the lower outside but like the one on the other side from 40ish years ago it will not be all that noticeable. Swelling is down some today as well…but she still looks like an E cup or maybe D cup on that side.

The remnants went off to the pathologist and she’s got an appointment after Labor Day with the surgeon to follow up and also the radiation guy that week. Nothing with the oncologist yet as he’s waiting on the path report I guess.

So…overall pretty good news and both the surgeon and the radiation guy as well as the oncologist said that stage zero encapsulated calcified cancer cells are 98% curable so we’ll just have to wait and see on that.

She’s a bit emotional about “not being pretty naked” anymore…but Neil told her not to worry about it and wait until the swelling and bruising goes away. She’s really more emotional about the fact that she cares about how it looks than how it looks in and of itself. She had told herself that she didn’t really care about looks in the outcome but discovered when she took the bandage off the first time how swollen and bruised it is and that she actually cares about how it looks. But she’s agreed with the wait and see attitude, especially as it’s looking a lot better today than it was on Thursday when she saw it for the first time. Plus…the lady surgeon only does breast surgery and she told Neil that she had done some reshaping so it would look nice but that it would look not so nice in the interim. 

Other than that…not much new here. It’s been raining almost every day and we’re just taking things easy until she feels better. Neil’s doing his usual cooking thing and feeding her well…and we went out to Longhorn Steak House for Date Night yesterday which perked up her a lot.

This image from the local news rag almost perfectly encapsulates the weather in SW FL in the summertime. It was offered as the weekly meme…but it’s more of a simple truism than just a meme. Neil left to go biking yesterday morning and it was not raining and partly overcast. Shortly after he passed Del Prado Boulevard headed south about 3 miles from home it started sprinkling and by the time he got to one of his bailout routes at Playa del Sol…it was raining pretty steadily so he bailed out and headed back home. By the time he got back to Del Prado it was raining hard and stayed that way all the way home. Connie was tracking him on Find My and opened the garage door so he could come in hot as they say. He pulled off his wet bike shoes and jersey and sat down in the beach chair in the garage for his normal cooldown…and with 7 or 8 minutes of his return it had stopped raining and the sun as shining brightly. Go figure.

On the Botswana image processing front…he’s got over 50,000 images from the trip…shooting at 20 and 30 frames per second in anticipation of the kingfisher taking off or the hippo yawning builds up a lot of them. But he’s using a new processing technique with a multi button mouse to more quickly cull through them…I’ll give you a brief discussion on that later on but not today.

Although not a wildlife image…here’s a photo the other truck took of Luann, Lin, and Neil out in the bush at the bush camp. Our leader Steve is in the front left seat and these are right seat driver vehicles since…Botswana and Namibia were British colonies and well, the Brits drive on the wrong side of the road and from the wrong side of the car. These are special constructed vehicles based on a Toyota Land Cruiser pickup that gets an entire new body…at least from the used to be cab back. With 3 people in each truck plus the driver and Steve or Rose depending on the drive…clients have easy access to both sides of the vehicle for shots. And since we all use telephoto lenses…we tend to stay farther from the animals which both accommodates the lens reach and reduces the looking down on the critter angle…plus we sometimes hang the camera over the side holding the lens foot and the rear screen to focus and frame the shot to get more eye level shots. Your typical (and much cheaper) tourist safari is mostly a bunch of iPhone shooters and the drivers tend to get far too close to dangerous game because of iPhone lens reach and because their tips are better when people can go back and tell their friends they were within 10 feet of the lions. People like that are more interested in impressing people than in taking actually decent photos…and in both the boat and truck drives we noticed plenty of that sort of guide doing things that were just stupid and dangerous.

I’ll go into more detail about the places we stayed and what we ate later…but in short the places were fantastic and the food even better. We ate a lot of lamb and a lot of kudu which is an antelope in between the size of a bull elk and a moose…and they were all tasty. They asked us the first day about any dietary requirements and we had one fellow (coincidentally from the Fort Myers area) who tries to be gluten free and they went out of their way to have at least 2 or 3 gluten free dishes at every meal for him…and special gluten free cookies in the rooms in addition to the regular ones that Neil was eating. Wine and cocktails were included and they fed us far, far too much…but a photo workshop is generally a luxury trip so that’s to be expected I guess.

His team Alabama opens their season next Saturday against Florida State then has a cupcake, Wisconsin, and a bye before the SEC season opens against Georgia…and the SEC announced this week that starting in 2026 teams will play a 9 game league schedule instead of the current 8. Each team will have 3 preserved rivalry games every year…Alabama’s will be Auburn, LSU, and Tennessee…and will rotate the other teams so they play everyone in the league every 2 years and have a home and home with every team over 4 years. With the expanded playoffs…strength of schedule becomes an important factor so with 9 league games and at least one power 5 conference game every year that will reduce the cupcakes to 2 per season.

Cyas.