Shit.

I just found out one of my dear, dear friends has colon cancer. Some of you have met her before and know how much i owe her. She saved me from myself time and time again. Here is her story:


Dear Friends,



I’m sorry to email you all together like this, but you can see that you are part of a select group, unlike the massive story emails I usually send around at random. This too is a story email, but of a vastly different sort than I usually send. Yes, it is a tale of adventure, and it is full of news and other Kit updates. The adventure is scary and interesting and entirely unlike any other I have ever found, but I didn’t go looking for this one. The news is shocking and not all bad. In fact, the news, relatively speaking, is all good. I’ve prattled on for long enough now, I’m sorry. I don’t really know how to share this news, so I may as well just spit (or type) it out…



I have colon cancer. I’m sorry to blindside you, but there’s really no good way to share this news. I didn’t mean to keep this from you, but didn’t really know how to tell you, and then I began treatment before I could really get my head straight enough to tell the story, and then once I was in treatment, I couldn’t stay awake for long enough to write it. These are excuses. The truth is I dreaded writing this email.



The details in a nutshell are: I WILL LIVE. There is no doubt about this oh so important detail. My prognosis is excellent, partly due to my very good health (cancer aside), and partly due to the fact that on average I’m half, or less, the age of the people in cancer treatment. Lucky me. I am in treatment at Boston Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. I have a team of extraordinary doctors whom I trust completely. I was diagnosed in the first week of October (I’m sorry to remain silent for so long, I truly am…), and began appointments in Boston by Halloween. I have completed 6 weeks of radiation treatment and chemotherapy, and now I am nearing the end of my 6 week break for recovery, and I have surgery one week from today, February 16th.



The details out of the nutshell are: I have been diagnosed with a condition called FAP (familial adenomatous polyposis). The fun part of the story is that this is supposed to be an inherited genetic mutation, but since I always do things that are unexpected, I get to be the one to establish the family history of colon cancer. Bonus! I was kind of sick all this summer, but never thought anything of it, since I’ve never been sick before, ever. I lost about 10 lbs. during the month of June, but still didn’t worry. Those of you who know the story of The Hotdog Lady and my ongoing battles to remain in business realize why I attributed my weight loss to the stress I was under all summer in the midst of the chaos of small town politics and bureaucracy. It was July before I even noticed that something was wrong with me, and that my stomach’s reaction to food was abnormal. It was late August before I decided to pay a visit to my brother’s doctor (I didn’t even have my own…), and mid-September before I was able to get an appointment with the gastroenterologist he referred me to. That lovely and compassionate man looked at me for 10 minutes, charged me $130.00 and told me to come back for a follow-up in the middle of November. On Thursday, October 6th I ended up in the Emergency Room after an episode of lots of blood coming from somewhere that it’s not supposed to. I was admitted and had a colonoscopy done the following morning, after being reassured by another gastroenterologist (this one actually WAS lovely and compassionate) that it was better to know what was wrong with me after I asked if I should be nervous about what he would find, since it certainly wouldn’t be cancer.



I woke up after the colonoscopy to find my 2 nurses and my gastroenterologist, Dr. Flavin, on the verge of tears as they told me that they had found hundreds of polyps and two masses that they’d biopsied because they were nearly definitely cancer. Wow. Dr. Flavin kept me in the hospital through the following day for additional tests and scans, and I returned home on Saturday afternoon and found my perspective of my world as I knew it changed.



I spent the rest of the weekend studying online, and found just enough information to make me dangerous in a doctor’s office, but not enough to reassure me, yet. Dr. Flavin was fantastic. Before I left the hospital he promised me he wouldn’t drop the ball, and he never has. He went to work immediately to get me the information I so desperately craved, and also to find a doctor who was capable of treating me. Before the week was finished, he has the positive results of my biopsies in hand, confirming my worst fears, and had also made progress with my insurance company to make sure that I would be treated in Boston instead of in Portland, Maine like they preferred. If I have learned anything at all in this process, I’ve learned that if you’re unlucky enough to be diagnosed with cancer, just be certain that you’re lucky enough to be within driving distance of Boston. It’s the most wonderful thing, driving into Boston and feeling all the medical brains crackling all around you, just waiting for a chance to fix you.



Dr. Flavin wrote letters. He faxed letters. He made phone calls, and by the beginning of the following week had confirmed that I would be treated at Boston Medical Center, the teaching hospital for Boston University, my insurance would cover it completely, and that my surgeon would be Dr. James Becker, the Surgeon-in-Chief of BMC who just happened to specialize in colon cancer.



Dr. Becker is a wonderful man and I trust him entirely. My first appointment with him was on Halloween, go figure, and I never doubted for one second that I was in the best possible place for my treatment. My comfort was also bolstered by his resident, Dr. Kelly Tyler, who gave me her cell phone number when I left the exam room and told me to call her with any questions, and then proceeded to call me every day for the first week and ask what questions I had thought of. She has since rotated out of Dr. Becker’s office, but has told me that she will come back for my surgery, and that makes me happy.



I have two tumors, double fun, and thankfully only 2 lymph nodes involved, and so far, no further spread. I began radiation therapy on November 14 (happy birthday Daniel) and chemotherapy on November 16 (happy birthday Kit). The radiation was a total of 28 treatments, 5 days a week. It’s a funny thing, the word RADIATION sounds like this big scary intimidating word, and yes both the machine and table were very intimidating, but the treatment itself was very anti-climactic. My treatments took about 30 seconds per day, but it took about 10 minutes to get me all lined up properly on the table. My radiation therapists were phenomenal…It takes extraordinary people to make radiation so much better than it so easily could be, and in fact to actually make you look forward to radiation, and they succeeded. I love them all. My chemotherapy was surprisingly and similarly simple too. I now have a portacath (port) in my chest, which is really just a titanium and silicone funnel for drugs so my veins don’t freak out with too many needles. It’s the size of a bottle cap under my skin. Because I have a port, my oncologist was able to send me home with a nifty little pump contraption full of chemo that would provide a slow and steady drip through a tube and needle into my port so that I wouldn’t have to sit in the oncology clinic for hours. By taking the pump home with me (I carried over my shoulder it just like a little purse) I was able to minimize the side effects of the chemo itself. I didn’t lose my hair. I carried the pump for 5 ½ days, and then had 1 ½ days totally free and disconnected. It was a long, long, long six weeks. I slept a lot. I ate very little. I finished my radiation treatment on December 23rd and I finished my chemo on December 24th (the best Christmas present I could have wished for!).



After I finished my first phase (out of a total of 3, hopefully), I earned a 6 week break to recover, and let the radiation and chemo residuals continue to battle the alien in my belly. I slept through the first week, and then decided to take advantage of my only opportunity to leave New England this year and I had a wonderful 2 week trip to California with my sister Dinah, our nearly sister Tana, and my oldest friend, Daniel. Dinah moved out to Los Angeles just before Thanksgiving, and came home for Christmas, and then we all served as couriers to help her move her belongings west. We took a 5 day trip by train from Boston to Chicago to Denver to San Francisco to Los Angeles that was total bliss. We moved a vast amount of stuff, each of us being allowed to check 100 lbs. of luggage, and crossed 3 mountain ranges in the heart of winter. What fun! We arrived in Los Angeles and spent the next week being warm, loving our flip-flops and pilfering every Goodwill we could find in search of furniture for Dinah’s fantastic studio apartment in Hollywood. If the rental car agents could only have seen the strange loads we transported in their compact cars! Another perk of the trip was that I could forget that I was supposed to be sick, and I felt better than I had in months.



I returned home 3 weeks ago and have been immersed in the hospital world ever since. I am constantly being scanned and scoped and tested and sampled in preparation for my upcoming surgery. They can’t tell for sure how my tumors have responded to the radiation and chemo, but they know that they have responded, so that’s good news. I kept holding onto the vision during my first phase that if my treatment was making me feel so crummy, just think about how those god****ed tumors must feel!!!



My surgery will be a complete ileostomy. In real words, that means they will be removing my entire colon. In olden days, that would mean that I would have an ostomy bag for life, but modern medicine being the amazing thing that it is, that is not necessarily my only option. Dr. Becker pioneered a new type of reconstructive surgery called a J-pouch that allows bowels to function in a completely normal capacity even when missing the entire colon, and until this innovation, the only possibility for colon cancer survivors was a colostomy bag. Now, thanks to Dr. Becker and others, many survivors have the option for reconstructive surgery after a colostomy or ileostomy, and hopefully I will be among those candidates. My lower tumor is low enough that he won’t know until he is doing my surgery if I am a candidate for a J-pouch, but he has told me that there is every reason to hope for one, and I take comfort in that. In fact, though, either option is fine with me, as long as it allows me to continue to live and breathe and travel and write and swim, and both options give me all of those luxuries.



I just read back through this story and I’m shocked at how long it’s become. I’m sorry to have been out of touch for so long, and now you know why, or sort of...and if you’re reading this email, then you know me well enough to understand how I disappear under rocks from time to time and need to be coaxed back out again…



I hope this finds you all well, and I love you all.



Fondly,

Kit

Ahh. These were the days.

The Modern Mullet

Luke Skywalker and I have the same hair cut.
The funny thing is that when i found this picture the URL said
"mullet madness"

Oh dear... what have I done?

Tagged

Tagged by Seeks So here it goes.

FOUR JOBS I'VE HAD
1998-Assistant Manager of a Bed and Breakfast in Sedona,AZ
1999-Admin Assistant by day and Techie Crew by night for a Repertory Theatre in Portsmouth, NH
2002-Manager of a Web Hosting Company in Rockville, MD
2003-Events Coordinator for the Adult and Master's degree programs for Prescott College in Prescott, AZ

FOUR MOVIES I CAN WATCH OVER AND OVER
Rushmore-and all movies by said director including (Life Aquatic, Royal Tenenbaums)
Last of the Mohicans- I still cry when I see Alice jump
Lilo and Stitch- because it's really, really funny.
The Princess and the Warrior-german, really good.

FOUR PLACES I HAVE LIVED
250yr old log cabin in the middle of protected watershed in the last bit of rural Maryland between Baltimore and NY.
Sedona, AZ- first place I moved after I left home at seventeen. It was beautiful and waaaay too expensive for me so shortly thereafter i ended up moving to the less expensive and less beautiful but not far away town of Cottonwood.
Portsmouth, NH- After about a year in Sedona I left with my restored '78 F250 and drove east stopping in Boulder and the like for fun. Then somehow in the next 5 months I ended up in Portsmouth, NH living in a subsidized house with at one point 5 men and me.
Prescott, AZ-I moved to Prescott to go to school. I lived in the best apartment in a building that was built in 1909 and very crooked. I had all sorts of Rock climbing in my back yard, adventure, adventure, adventure. I think perhaps those were the golden days.


FOUR TV SHOWS I LOVE TO WATCH
I only have three because I don't really watch TV and the episodes i do see are all on video.
-Six Feet Under- if you haven't seen it, you should. Really awesome and sometimes really messed up.
-Scrubs-very funny. I love internal dialog, even if it is cheesy.
-Dharma and Greg- It's not on the air any more. This is my embarassing fetish. It's really funny... i know i'm a dork.


FOUR PLACES I HAVE VACATIONED
-Russia-St. Petersburg and Moscow
-Scottland/England-London, Inverness, Edinburgh, Bath, Stonehenge, Drumnadrochit, Lochness, Ullapool.
-Alaska-Juneau, Sitka, the Yukon(i know, Canada), Anak Tuvuk Pass(inside the Arctic Circle, Brooks Range), Prince William Sound, Fairbanks, Anchorage, and much, much more.
-Telluride, CO-when i was 18 my boyfriend's dad was rich and took us skiing for a week in Telluride.


FOUR OF MY FAVORITE DISHES
-Longanesa with Rice and Eggs-it's a filipino sausage, really good, very fattening.
-Ben's Thai Curry-we made a deal that if he cooked me one good meal he would be allowed kitchen priveledges (up to this point he wasn't allowed to cook in MY kitchen, i'm a little OCD). So he made me an amazing curry, now it's all I crave but he hasn't made it since. :(
-My father's Venison Tenderloin with onions, mushrooms, and potatoes from the garden-oh my, i'm drooling
-Grits, eggs, venison sausage- good fat country breakfast
(oh and because i looooove food i can't leave it at 4 things) Mexican anything!!!

FOUR SITES I VISIT DAILY
Craigs List-Because i'm furniture shopping for our new house
Hotmail- checkin' e-mail
My own blog-I'm so egotistical
Santegroup.org-that's my work website, i use it to get to databases, e-mail, etc.

FOUR PLACES I'D RATHER BE RIGHT NOW
Anywhere
home with Ben
Playing in the snow (which doesn't seem to exist)
in my office (I forgot my keys to my office and am waiting for someone to let me in... i might be waiting for a while).

Tagging Becky, Heidi, Rowen, and Jesse

Craziness

As always things have picked up and I envy past Libby's boredom. It's been an interesting few days at work as the network has been down since last friday and very little can be done without it.

February has come in like gang busters. This weekend is a Welcome Home Girl party at my Aunt Mary's house for my cousin Rachel who has just returned from a year in Africa doing AIDS and HIV education and intervention. It's wonderful to have her home.

Next weekend is the Mid-winter Ball

Weekend after that my sister comes home for a visit

Weekend after that Ben and I move into our new place and My folks leave for Costa Rica

And Weekend after that it's March. Where does the time go??

Meanwhile i'm plugging away.

And in response to Becky's question: no, it's the last little white house going south on York Rd.

All About My House

In response to Heidi, here's all about the house we'll be living in by March.

It's a small (and i mean very small for a house) two bedroom, one bathroom house. It's pretty old and built as a company house for some company I can't remember the name of. My father's Godmother (she's dead now) used to own those houses and sold them sometime in the seventies i think. Now a couple from Canton, MD own them and have fully are in the process of restoring them. There are four of them all in a row (but not row houses, they're not attached). They are on York Rd in Parkton, MD about fifteen minutes south of Pennsylvania (for those of you who don't know York Rd is a major road that runs north/south and goes from PA down into Baltimore.

You park on the side of the road and you walk down two little stairs and across a couple feet of sunken brick and you're on my front porch. There's a window to either side of the door. You open the front door and you're in the living/dining room. To the right the room is slightly longer to the left it's smaller with a bay window that looks out into the space between the two houses. The floors are hardwood and the ceilings aren't too low. Directly across from the front entrance is a hallway that takes you back to the kitchen and bathroom. As you saunter down the hallway (it's narrow and only four feet long, max) to the right is a narrow stairway leading down to the basement. Just before you enter the kitchen there's a door on the left that is the bathroom, complete with old claw foot bathtub and free hanging sink. The kitchen is tiny but perfect the refridgerator is the the kid brother of your average sized refridgerator. The cabinets above the sink are just slightly too high for me to reach. The counters are just a little too tall but not bad. There's a window that looks down into the back yard behind the sink. As you turn to the right and about face there is a stairwell leading up. You mount the carpeted stairs (I don't know why they're carpeted the rest of the house is hardwood, but whatever, i'm not complaining, i fall down the stairs alot and could use the padding), you notice that above you the stairway abruptly ends on an impossibly tiny landing and you can go either left or right. My friend, you are standing outside the bedrooms. To the left will be our bedroom because that's the sunny side of the house, to the right is the guest bedroom. The bedrooms have attic ceilings so that as you reach the halfway point as you stroll to the other side of the room to look out the windows you may (if you're normal sized) have to duck. The windows you'll notice are the equivalent to the refridgerator, tiny little things that don't have enough room to stand up between the floor and the ceiling. It's really quite cute if you're not six feet tall (which, thankfully neither of us are).

What about the basement you ask? Well after you're finished exploring our enchanting upstairs you bowl yourself down the stairs careful not to crash on the last few stairs and fall headlong into the tiny little refridgerator (you don't want to hurt it, it's smaller than you are), you make yourway back to the decending stairs. Once you've successfully arrived in the basement you will look around and notice that it is an unfinished drafty kind of basement with tile flooring. There is a backdoor that leads to stairs that lead into the backyard, which is small but quaint and beyond it there are woods and wisteria jungles and a small creek. We have neighbors on one side that are good friends of my family and have two small (or at least i remember them being small) children. On the other side there is a big red barn but i don't know who that belongs to.

So... Come spring we'll need visitors. We have a guest room, no more sleeping in the living room on the floor, now you'll be sleeping in the guest room, on the floor.

Home Sweet Home

WE HAVE A PLACE TO LIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YEEEEEE-HAAAAAAAA

Good Morning:

My morning:

Ben gets up at 5:30 (as per usual). I wake briefly and peek at him dressing in the dark. Then I drift back into a drowsy sleep ocasionally waking to hear the sounds of everyone getting ready to go to work (everyone leaves earlier than I do so I have an extra 30-40minutes in the morning than they do).
My father (known to wake up singing completely off-key songs he doesn't know the words to, loud enough to wake the neighbors, of which we have none) for some reason, decided that he was british this morning and everything was said in a Cockney/Baltimore Hillbilly accent. Every couple of moments i would be yanked out of a peaceful dose to hear, "By-gum, I 'elieve 'e draynk the lest o' te Coffee."
At 6:15 Ben comes back upstairs to give me goodbye kisses. Every morning he wakes me up for real by saying goodbye. He kisses me and tells me to be safe and that he'll see me tonight. I ususally respond with either a smart ass remark or tell him to be safe also.
"You be safe out there driving" he says.
This morning I opt for the smart ass remark. "No I don't think I will," I yawn at him. "I still have a couple guard rails I have to take out on Perry Hall Blvd."
"Seriously, there's snow out there."
"Yeah right," i say. This is a common joke of ours. Whenever i want to distract him from something I say, "LOOK! Snow!"
"No Really."
"Uh-Huh. I love you. Have a good day."
He stands and shrugs and blows me a kiss and walks out.
Twenty minutes later I wake up and dress and go down stairs and what's outside the window??? SNOW!!!!!!!!
Okay. So not too exciting for most of you, but I love snow, psychotically love it. And for the last three years I have been pretty deprived of a proper winter. Granted, Prescott does have more of a winter than say Phoenix does but, it's still nothing like a good solid snowy, crappy-weather-out-the-hoo-haa, kind of winter.
It's not much, less than an inch... can't even make a proper snowball... But it will do.

Another Glorious Weekend

It was another glorious weekend of NOT-January weather. Warm and sunny.

On Saturday Ben and I went to his Dad's house and hung out with him and Ben's brother, Casey. (Yes his brother and my sister are both named Casey.)All of our stuff is in Rex's (my father-in-law)basement and we had to grab our various Tax, receipt, write-off files seeing as how tax season is rearing it's oh-so-ugly head.

Ben's Brother is a bit of a nut and going through that stage in his life that most of us have gone through, The "I'm not sure where i'm going or what i'm doing but i'm pretty sure that I am the center of the universe" stage. I sympathize, but that doesn't keep him from driving me completely batty. He gets so "poor me" and i can't really handle it so I yell at him and punch him in the chest. Which, oddly enough, causes him to laugh. Oh well.

So then Ben and I left (with a bunch of tax files and the deposit money from our old rental company that had arrived at Rex's earlier in the week) and proceeded to drive around looking for that perfect house, which continues to elude us. After a couple hours of that, we were more than ready to go home and curl up with popcorn and a bad movie (Red Sonia, for those fellow bad movie lovers).

Sunday was not much more exciting. We spent the majority of the day splitting firewood, sitting around on the woodpile, and doing Sudoku puzzles. I am thoroughly addicted to those things.

And now it's Monday morning and I'm at work, where there's nothing to do but day dream.

Every part of me misses Prescott.

New E-mail

So here's the skinny, I work for a place that is High Security so i cannot access Hotmail and by the time i get home i don't really want to.

SOOO e-mail me at work! ejones@santegroup.org. Careful what you send though. You don't want to get me fired.

Today does not feel like it's going to end.... grrrrr.

Weekday Update

Hello all three of my avid and completely dedicated readers.

I have started my new job. It's great. After a month of living out of my truck and duffel bags it's nice to have somewhere to go where i can be as anal-retentive as i'd like(Feed my OCD).

Due to my uncanny inability to estimate how much time it will take me to arrive at work each morning I am sparatic in my arrival but often between two hours and five minutes early. Traffic being the inconsistent beast that it is.

Nonetheless, everyone is very nice, if a bit burned out on what they do.

Ben and I put in another rental application for another house (Kirstin, it's the one on the other end of the four white houses we looked at).

So this time next month (as it won't be ready for a month)Ben and I (fingers crossed) will be moving into the first house we will have ever lived in and not shared with other people.

Big Epiphany for the week: I quit my job as the manager of a webhosting business to go to school. $64,000 and three years later I return to the job market and am awarded by making the same amount of money, and doing the same things that i did before.
Upside: Being an administrative assistant is WAY easier than college ever was.

I miss you all. I promise to call soon. I'm sorry I'm such a dud when it comes to making phone calls (Heidi).

-me

Sorry for the Delay

Hullo all. I'm sorry it's taken me so long to update. You know how it is, (insert a few excuses here that are all valid but none of which could not have been overcome with a little bit of effort on my part.)

And now for the news:
there is none.
I'm living at Mom and Dad's. Ben works for Dad (they're framing an addition at a friend's farm). I work in the city for the Baltimore City Crisis Response Center in White Marsh. It's a commute. We're still trying to come up with a living-situation-game-plan. We're thinking of renting something for a year or so until we can get the Little House (the pine cabin in the hollow where i grew up) in liveable condition. We're even considering putting plumbing and electricity in it (All thems modern conveniences, whew!) However, we're still deliberating about a great many things. We're taking our time, figuring things out... feeling crazy... Do we buy an ugly house we don't want to live in, Do we buy property and build, Do we rebuild the Little House, Do we rent while we re-build or build or do we continue to stay here... So many questions, and for once Money is not the most significant deciding matter.

Ben and I spent yesterday splitting firewood. It was really really nice. The weather was perfect, cold and windy but not too cold and so clear. We had a tea party on the big stumps of wood and I felt like we were the mice and toads of childrens' books sitting down to a formal tea on toadstools.

A few things occurred to me yesterday that i thought might be fun to share:
1. Even though Ben can split over twice as fast as i can, it would still take him an extra four hours of work to split what we did together, by himself.
2. Splitting wood is a full body work out (boy am i sore).
3. By the time we called it quits I was too tired to over think, stress out, freak out or otherwise lose my shit.
4. If it came down to it, I think Ben and I would be happy living in a fort in the woodpile. Who needs a house?

a request

Hey everyone.
I have a request.
If anyone has any extra love, patience, peace of mind, or strength could you send it my way? I feel like i'm losing my mind.

My Day.

I had a weird class where I think i yelled at too many people for being naieve (yeah. Look who's talking.)

Then I had to run errands during which i encountered a complete bitch and threatened to set her on fire and ranted that the entire world was against me and if she had had the week i am having she'd kill herself... right... it's only monday.

Then I burst into tears while smoking a cigarette outside the art building
Then i burst into tears again in my mentor/advisor's office

Then i wrestled with a copy machine for forty minutes which almost sent me into a complete hissy fit, tears and all.

Then i went to baccalaureate practice where i read what i'm reading for friday and everyone else almost burst into tears.

Then I came home to a huffy husband.

Then i wrote three of the four short papers that are due by wednesday in 45 minutes.

Now i'm going to watch three episodes of Six Feet Under and relax before someone bursts into tears.

This Week in the Life of Libby

Monday:
8:00-10:20 Homework
10:30-12:45 Class
1:00- Drop by Ben's Shop
1:30- Format Manuscript to go to Printers
1:30- Drop stuff at DAV
2:00- Meeting with Kenny
3:00- 6:00 Baccalaureate Practice
6:00 Homework

Tuesday:
8:00- Homework
9:00- Drop stuff off at Printers and pick up Cartridge for printer at home
9:30- Write big paper for LSD
11:00- Continue Packing
12:30- Write all speeches and practice them
2:00- Pick up Podium, PA, Mic and Mic stand
2:30- Meet with Kenny to practice Baccalaureate speech
3:30-5:45- Class
6:00-10:00 Set up at Sam Hill for Senior Show/Reading

Wednesday:
8:00- Final Portfolio stuff together for LSD
10:30-12:45- Class (LSD) at Dinner Bell
1:00-Pick up CSA order and take to Heidi's
? Continue Packing and Cleaning Apartment
Laundry

Thursday:
7:30am- drop off truck at Mechanics
8:00-10:00am- Costco shopping with K for stuff for Senior Show/Reading
1:00pm- Pick up Mom and Dad from Shuttle get some lunch
2:45-5:00- drop off Mom and Dad at home and go to YC Performing for Bacc. Practice
Go to lunch with them and hang out until it's time to get ready for Show/Reading
5:30- Be at Sam Hill for prep and audience arrival
6:30-7:00 Go pick up Mom and Dad and bring them to Sam Hill
8:00pm My Reading... *panic*

Friday:
Hang out with folks.
practice Baccalaureate speech
Be at YC Perform. Arts Hall at 3:00pm
4:00pm Baccalaureate presentations start. *gulp*

Saturday:
Hang out, sleep in.
Pack stuff.
I probably have to be at the Elks by noonish or something.
3:30pm Graduation begins at the Elks Theater.

Mason and Corbin

just came back from steve and sarah's house. She just had Mason on Monday. Three day old baby...

I spent the whole morning with them hanging out and goofing off.

Now i'm gunna spend all afternoon poking holes in the condoms.

Goodbye Linda.

I learned to ride horses at her house when i was about eight. I fell off once. Sprained an ankle and landed in mud. She cleaned me up. Dressed my wounds. She held the horse by the bridle while i rode it around in circles getting my courage back together.

I was hoping to see her again before she left us. But i suppose Leah was waiting for her.

Ahh Too-s-dae

On Saturday Mike gave us a going away party. It was fantastic. All our good friends were there, a couple of my professors, the guys Ben works with. It was a great saturday night. Fully of conversation, food, friends, and yes, beer. Mike is such a sweet heart. Biggest heart i've seen on a human in a while. Yeah Mike! Now we just have to figure out a way to convince you to move to Maryland.

One week from today I will probably be covered in hives and panicking my brains out.
Next week is the senior show/reading, baccalaureate, and graduation. I haven't worked on a speech/presentation for any of them.

We got the trucks all checked out and fixed up. I got new brakes (whoo hoo!) and have been stopping all over town. It cost us over twice as much as rent. Sigh. (digs imaginary dagger from heart and chucks it over shoulder with a devil-may-care attitude).

As i continue to slowly, slowly pack up the apartment and toss out the junk that has made this place home for the last three years, it occurs to me what a pack rat i can be. It also occurs to me that we don't really have anything nice. This includes my wardrobe. All my pants have holes in them and most of them have paint on them. All my shirts have grease and/or pit stains. Damn me and my refusal to use anti-perspirant.

I think that this weekend i'm going to have a packing/yard sale party and invite all my friends over to help me junk stuff. Then maybe i won't feel so panicked next week.

Mom and Dad will be arriving on the 15th in the afternoon. It will be great to see them. I worry that i will be too busy to really hang out though. I'm sure it will be fine.

thirteen days until this is all over with. and two more tacked to that until we leave behind this cute little desert christmas town...

http://www.poundy.com/foxnews.html