Peeking into the rock

The oncologist said my hair "might fall out, maybe probably, but can't be predicted." The nurses said my hair would fall out and recommended getting it cut very short in advance of the time--which they predicted would be a couple of days to a week after the second infusion. Also, the printed materials suggested the same thing. And when I asked my friends and family, not if I should cut my hair short, but whether I ought to do it as soon as I could arrange it or closer to when I expected it to happen, the consensus was to do it earlier rather than later, and shorter rather than less short.

So that is what I did. My wonderful daughter Emma came over as soon as we could arrange it and buzzed my hair. With electric clippers! It was really amusing! She took before and after pictures of me and they are good ones. I looked pretty cute in them both! I think the short hair makes me look even more Jewish than ever. In my mind I think that is a neutral value. I mean, it's good enough to look Jewish, but it's also good enough to look like other things too. She also brought me some very nlce headscarves to borrow until my hair grows in again. So I have been practing with the headscarves now and then to get a feel for how I like them. Apparently simple heascarves are the best, for me. Just tied in the back, or the ends brought round, twisted & tied in front, or held on with a hair tie. They all work.

Since my hair was already thin on top ("female pattern baldness" but not as severe as that sounds) I started sunscreening my scalp when I remembered. I'm supposed to be more sensitive to sun rays now, so I have appropriated K's 30 spf sunscreen he used when he worked for the post office and doesn't use any more.

Anyway, this morning--two days after the second infusion--when I was rubbing on the sunscreen, my hands came away all fuzzy and my first thought was not how alarming it was but how cool it was. This is rather indicative of how things are going in general. I credit the extensive preparation that the cancer team has given me and also the word CURATIVE right on my papers and also the fact that my side effects have been so mild and manageable. It's turned the whole thing from a dark and frightening journey into an adventure, rife with inconvenience but also full of discovery and meeting new and interesting people. I think I'm a little disappointing to my friends and family who want to jump in and help me but the main thing I ever want from anybody is to go on a dogwalk with me. I mean, I think they feel in their heart of hearts I probably need more than this, but they're too polite to insist that I must be wrong about my self-assessment.

I got followed on twitter by a cancer quackery bot, so I blocked them and made a general tweet that I would do the same for any more quacks. Some actress showed up on NPR promoting her book about how she made her husband refuse "conventional" treatment for advanced bladder and prostate cancer and treated him herself with nutrion and stuff. I don't know how the thing came out because I was offended and I turned it off so I wouldn't be yelling at the radio.

Well, I was going to write a food post too, but now I have to pee and take a nap. Then I'm going to get the cardoons, the mignonette, the clematis, and the purple flower that Ellie gave me into the ground, or die trying. I've had them all too long.

Phenological observations: it is jam season now. I made strawberry jam from the giant berries that came in the grey bears bag last week. I prefer smaller strawberries with no white in the middle, but they are hard to come by these days because marketing decisions. My sister-in-law is making apricot jam this weekend because her tree recovered from the drought this year and produced a lot of fruit. The yellow plum tree around the corner has started dropping plums so as soon as I can get myself organized I'll make yellow plum jam. My coreopsis and love-in-a-mist and some other flowers I can't think of now are blooming freely. The sweet peas that were in too much sun are completely down, but Robin my co-mother-in-law brought me a bouquet of deep purple, very fragrantr sweet peas and orange Peruvian lilies, a very dramatic combination.

And now I have to go because I am totally falling asleep and in danger of pissing my pants.

One last thing: you needn't say "fuck cancer" on my behalf. It does nothing for me.

I told myself that I would return to not-Poland in March, and I have, armed with the realization that there are several stories in there and I need tell only one or two of them in any particular volume.

Also: this morning I pitched an idea to a website for a "personal essay," which I think is a pretty likely subject. I am going to try to do more of those.

Truffle update: she had her 2nd followup visit Monday and the vet said her sutures look very good, and she could go back to eating normal food. But even though her appetite has returned in full glory, Truffle is amazingly picky just now, and will not eat any form of commercial dog food: for this reason, Dr. Hoban said "Go to the drive through and get her a plain hamburger with nothing on it but the bun." And so I did. And then I stopped at the grocery store for ground beef and potatoes, which she also recommended, and while I was there I got her fried chicken thighs (she has lost a lot of weight over the last year and a couple-few pounds the last week or two, and I think her refusal to eat anything but boiled chicken breast has given her a diet that is too lean, so that's why). Of course I fed those to her in little pieces to avoid bones and globs of fat. When we got home she explained to me that she was still quite hungry and no, boiled chicken breast was no longer very interesting, couldn't she have more more more of the rich stuff? With some trepidation I cooked her some of the beef and potatoes and she inhaled it and went to sleep, making the air around us quite fragrant.

Needless to say, I'm not indulging her to that degree every day. Particulary since I spent a half hour yeasterday cleaning up the evidence that it was too much. She got tuna and potato for last night's dinner and this morning's breakfast largely because yesterday she found my stash of cooked beef and potato when I was cleaning the refrigerator so there was nothing ready (the rest of the beef was frozen because I thought I had made enough to last for a bit). I would have let her have no supper because she had eaten so much but her argument that she was verrrrry hungry and neeeeded mooore fooood was quite compelling. This morning she appears to have decided that tuna is not delicious enough, or that she is not hungry enough.

Of course it is in my mind that when an animal is ready to die they generally stop eating but this is clearly not that. She'll still come running for a liver treat and she represents quite effectively that she is hungry: she's just picky.  She's always had her opinions about food, this is just more defined.

Lest you think I do nothing but dog stuff, I'm also working on the garden. I have hired a friend (Zack's ex actually) to help me with the stuff that requires more leg stability than I currently have (because we all know how well "I'll do that after I recover from surgery" works out), like pruning and so forth, and while she's here, I weed and plant and so on. I planted kale and radishes last week, and this week I planted some irises that somebody was giving away a while ago. I don't know what kind they are but I have rarely met an iris I didn't like. When I asked the person what kind of iris they were she said "They're real!" and also that they were blue and brown (by which I think she means maroon, but we'll see). I asked her if the petals looked like they had caterpillars on them and she didn't know what I was talking about. The leaves are kind of short and stocky for irises, and the corms are big and stout. So altogether it's a mystery.

Phenological observations: the Satsuma plum tree is in full bloom and the top half of it has leaves burst out but not completely unfurled. The Italian prune has buds only, but it is yet an infant.

A few days ago I made a cake of lemons, walnut flour and poppy seeds. I may not do the poppy seed part again: I have so much trouble getting them out of my teeth. I cut the cake into witsy-bitsy pieces, which is enjoyable, but now I am finding that my favorite way to eat them is with heavy cream poured on them. Not frosting: not sweetened whipped cream: just plain, unsweetened heavy cream.

Last night's musical discovery is "Lemonade Joe" (Limonadovy Joe), a Czech movie from 1964 which is an affectionate parody of the American Western. Cinematically it is interesting in the way it tints the film to match the content of the scene (mostly yellow--for sunshine, I think--and red for when the barmaid sings, and blue for when the bad guys gather) and the way that it uses deep focus and active cameras at the same time to set up Breughel-esque busy crowd scenes in the saloon and on the street. But musically! I'm actually shocked I have never run into that soundtrack before. Whoever wrote the music had a much more than passing familiarity with the standards of American popular and folk music, and also really, really loved every note of it. There would be just enough of a familiar tune to get your expectations in gear, and the next notes and chords would be totally unexpected and completely, perfectly right.  The exceptions would be the songs sung by the missionary girl: they sound sort of, well, Czech, to me. To add to the hilarity, the title character sings in word-salad English.

Oh, I should add: I owe this discovery to Kip Williams, who tweeted a mention of it in context of discovering that the movie has its own TV Tropes page. In the interest of public service, I am not linking to that: if you have a block of time you can sacrifice to TV Tropes, you can search it yourself.

Alas, the streaming version I was able to find has subtitles in Greek. I believe you can find subtitles in Russian and German also, and Kip has it in English. He says the dialog is priceless, and I believe I will soon discover that for myself. But I can attest to the fact that the movie makes quite as much sense as it needs to if you don't understand the dialog (I got "please," "thank you," "one,two, three," and a few other words. Yay for studying Czech inconsistently off and on for five years!)

It's a week and a half since Truffle had an abcessed tooth and two tumors removed. Today she is lively, happy, willing to venture out in the wet, and you'd never know she'd been through that, or that she had arthritis.

I betcha if it was me I'd still be complaining.

Also, you know how I said it was raining when I woke up? It's not still raining, but's it's still wet, and the forecast shows chance of showers nearly every day this week. It's not enough to break the drought, but every drop counts.

(normally it would be raining two days out of five or something for the last two months).

And I did a bad thing today. Yesterday I finished a four-day process of making candied orange peels and I had syrup left that had dripped off the orange peels. I coated walnuts with it and cooked them in butter and . . . ate them.

Also yesterday I saw poppy plants that were bigger than two fists together already.

And I went and watched adorable children dancing Greek dances, but that deserves its own post.

When people gather at this time of year, somebody will surely mention that they saw a whale recently. It spouted and everything. The really lucky ones were out on a boat and saw a whole bunch of them.

Also, suddenly, everybody is either an expert on persimmons or wants to become one and which ones can you eat now, anyway? (The flat kind which is less astringent, the pointy kind has to wait until it is dead soft)

And suddenly, too, everybody wants to know what they can do with all these pumpkins everywhere (you can ask me, I've been eating them all along).

The hillsides in some places have a little color to alleviate the endless gold: bright red leaves on the poison oak. The air quality is different, so that people keep asking when it's going to rain (the answer is, not yet. Some more fires have to happen first).

But the thing I noticed this morning -- the thing that makes walking down the street a different experience, and can make a person feel transported into a better, more beautiful world -- the Monarch butterflies are back for the winter.