I say yes, you say no, OR People are Strange

I'm off to the markets today - can't wait. I hope my fish guy has more than last time. Also got to get bananas and avocados as the fruit shop didn't have any worth buying yesterday. I won't forget my fudge either. Steve's off to golf and I think I'll leave before him so I get there before all of the fish is gone.

Seeing it's cooler, the plan is to chop my hedge by about 2 feet in height - I've neglected it. Lucky it's not a big hedge just about 6 feet long. 

We had a pair of Cardinal's that thought our school was where they wanted to be. It was so funny they kept pecking at the window in the first grade pod for about a week. The kids really got a laugh out of them!  Can't understand what would be so appealing about a school filled with noisy kids!

Congrats Bren.

I got the good letter about my mammogram yesterday. It was only two days after the annual smashing. I think they fast track those with a history of bc.

My son took us to some of his old haunts in Grand Rapids. After walking ten blocks we got to the pastry shop, which had closed an hour earlier. Then on the way back to the car he suggested we stop at two other cute little shops both of which were also closed for the day. DH was muttering dark things. I did get some artisanal pasta from a cute little shop. We will have parsley and sweet onion ones tonight and spinach and artichoke ones another night.

Daisy is adorable.

Happy dance for Rosemary's 'good' letter! 

Went and looked closer at our damaged tree and another big limb is split and will probably go down the next time we get a good wind storm.  It's going to have to be cut down.  Drat ... it is really a pretty tree.  

Spring in DC is truly beautiful, yucky as the summer is. I marvelled at the revolution of color in the gorgeous courtyard of my building today. Every day a different color will emerge, then disappear, only to be replaced by something even more stunning.

Filed taxes - yey! (In a manner of speaking) I bet the Wabbit and Barbara --early birds that you both are-- filed theirs ages ago! I'm happy to have done it before April.

susie158 is understand living in the sub tropics! It's not even 11 and already hot. DH is working in the yard again today getting some trees cut that were hurt in storms and have never really recovered. I guess fruit trees when hurt revert to their old trees before grafting. We haven't had any fruit from them in the last few years so down they go! Anyway he's cutting and I'm dragging to the wood pile!

Dropping in for a nanosecond because I have been melting all day from looking at this adorability - by the way, the dye is non toxic and harmless to the chicks:

Drat - it won't print by itself. You'll havwe to read the article. I am very pro animal rights and chicks should not be purchased and discarded jusrt because they are sweet - but oh, how, how sweet they look here!

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/02/us/dyeing-easter-chicks-raises-concerns.html

Awwwww look at those tiny fluffy adorable balls of fluffy adorableness!  I kind of can't stand to see it though, because I wonder 1) how did they dye them and did it hurt them? 2) what happens to the peeps in a few weeks? and 3) how food people treat chickens.  

That's it.  I'm eating only peas from now on.

Snakes don't bother me.  Stupid people do.

Scootaloo, Proudly Going Wisconsin on Everybody's Ass Since 2011 

See above.

I'm getting that petition started.  Want to sign? 

I saw that, Ang and Scoot. I am constantly reminded of Ron White's saying when I go there. It also makes the case for Darwinism.



Here are some interesting facts from my own family. Not posting them anywhere else but here, but they are relevant elsewhere.



My sister, who died on Valentine's Day from metastatic breast cancer (ILC mets to the abdomen, to be specific), was dx in early 2009 with Stage IIIb breast cancer. The cancer contained IDC, ILC, DCIS and LCIS. 7 of 9 nodes were hot. She had an immediate mastectomy (emergency mx, as a matter of fact). She had 4 rounds of a/c and 4 rounds of taxol, and a course of radiation. Because of the chemo and rads, she attained NED. She immediately began taking arimidex and although it aggravated her pre-existing arthritis, she never considered stopping it.



She was closely monitored and remained NED until November 2011, when a supposed case of pneumonia (she was a smoker and found herself unable to quit) turned out to be pleural effusions -- and the discovered ILC mets to her abdominal wall, her omentum, and in sheets covering her intestines. She began Abraxane immediately the mets were confirmed, and they retreated a bit and became stable.



What ultimately killed here was a confluence of bad luck, poor health with pre-existing comorbidities, poor hygiene at the rehab facility (she contracted c-diff which led to the removal of her colon which led to kidney failure), and her tumor load. She would have done every dose of chemo again (she worked full-time throughout and she was not young -- she was 66 at Dx, 69 when she died) and more had it offered her more chances of survival. She was unimpressed with alt therapies and angry at snakeoil salespeople who peddled them to gravely ill people. Conventional medicine gave her 3 more years with her family, and had she not had such a bad confluence of events and conditions, she might have had more.



Those are the facts of my sister's dx, treatment and death with ILC mets.



L

I guess "going Wisconsin" means really nasty things to some people. Like getting cheesed if you're lactose intolerant, or someone tipping a cow in your yard. What else could it mean? Any other creative ideas?

Righteousness and ridiculousness hath no timeline, SuzyQ !

happy libby - sympathy to you...so, so hard to watch this take so many loved ones...

I too "went" to that thread - but didn't post....have learned not to...really, will post in the "Complimentary" if I think somethinig might be useful, but not there...this disease is hard enough - without taking on folks who criticize a funny tag line, jeeez.....

I have visions now of the cutest guinea pig coming at me with aerosal cheese...rushin' to get my gluten free crackers....

Nah, Scoot ... Just say "Mess with me and I'll go Wisconsin on you." To me, "going Wisconsin" means standing up for what is right against those who are controlled by outside interests who want to profit from divisiveness and who want to suppress dissenting points of view so they can remain in control. You know, like the governor of Wisconsin and outside interests trying to profit from what Walker is doing in Wisconsin. And people are standing up against it. That's what it means to me, anyway.



;-). (can't use icons on iPad)



L



P.S. Thanks, Sunflowers. I miss my sister all the time, and it disturbed me to see someone with a dx like my sister's (in Ohio, no less, where my sister lived) contemplating what amounts to me to be slow and unpleasant suicide. Chemo worked for my sister. It didn't "save" her in the way that it kept her NED, but there are other factors that affect that and everyone has other factors. It is terrible that someone would throw away possibly years of good life out of fear.