Chondrosarcoma – ah shit, bob's sick

This Past Week:
This past week has been another crazy week, but I guess you just have to laugh it off like a lot of things or they’ll drive you crazy. Actually, the week started off just fine. Work was good and I was moving ahead on my website projects on schedule and all was well. I was also developing some simple web forms and that was fine too.

On Tuesday we had done our second to the last radio show which was awesome … one of the best ever, lot’s of fun, lot’s of tunes and our guest was just the best. Ray L. who also reads this blog from time to time was our guest and he was just fabulous … and to be honest, I’d expect no less of him. He’s a pro at it and that makes all the difference when you’re doing a live show.

Wednesday was good day at work, Thursday started off well … well, until night that is .

Here’s the scoop … since our electrical fire a few weeks ago, we’d thought we gotten everything under control. New electronics have arrived and we’ve gotten them all situated and working, basically without a hitch. After a few weeks of this we finally thought “great, finally we’re back to where we were before any of this occurred”.

Well, it seems there are always some thing you just plain forget about. Overheads lights for one. We have several over-head fluorescent lights in our house that we seldom, if ever, use. You know, you don’t use every light in your house everyday. As a mater of fact, if you think about it, there are probably a few lights you almost never use. This was the case in our house.

Thursday evening, for one reason or another Sher had placed the overhead lights on, in the dining room … one of those lights we so rarely use.

About an hour or so later, we were in the office when suddenly we got a whiff of that unforgettable scent that had covered the house when we had the electrical fire a few weeks back.

It’s a smell I won’t forget for a long time to come … still fresh in my memory, visions of a house fire flashed through my mind and immediately the adrenaline started to pump through my system.

I made my way toward the dining room and sure enough, the closer I got, the stronger the scent got. Damn! I yelled out to Sher to call the fire department again, as a light film of smoke started to appear at the ceiling level. That heavy scented smoke that thick with the smell of electrical.

Here we go again right! Instant replay. We went down to the basement and shut-off the circuit breakers to that section of the house, leaving in the dark once again, found our way outside and waited.

Flash forward a bit …. After the fire department arrived and checked everything out, we discovered that many of our head lights had taken damage during the original electrical fire and we never realized it.

While no new damage was done, we now need to replaced all the over-head lights and get that damn smell out of the house. Of course I missed a day of work because I wanted to be there when our electrician arrived at seven in the morning and make sure everything got covered and checked this time.

So a lesson learned, if you have an electrical situation like this, make sure you check everything, lights, electronics, switched etc etc., before starting the process of repair. Now Sher will have to write to the insurance company again and start all over … more time spent, more time wasted.

In the end, all this will work out … it’s just the time and energy to make it all happen that’s the real loss here.

By the end of Friday, things were pretty much back to normal:
Over the weekend, did manage to do some fun stuff too. Saturday, Alberic and I got the tractor out and gave it a first run for the season, checked the oil, dusted it off and took a driving lesson. I should’ve included Sher in that lesson too … maybe this coming week. I think it’s going to take all of us to keep up with the yard work this year.

We also went down to the pool and went for a nice relaxing swim. It’d been a few weeks since I’d gone swimming and it sure felt good to get back in the water. One of the great things about swimming is that for me, it allows me almost totally pain-free movement, and that’s pretty rare these days … so it’s a super pleasure going.

Besides that, we wanted Alberic to stay in tune with swimming. Often over the winter months here in Vermont, kids seem to almost forget that they know how to swim …. This year, he’s really into it, and that’s great because in two or three weeks he’s off to Camp Keewaydin Environmental Education Center for a week with his school!

We also watched Avatar this week for the first time … and it was awesome to say the least. We all loved it and I’m sure we’ll be watching it again! Which is pretty rare for me, in general, I don’t watch movies more then once.

Crappy Music, Poor Commentary and Boring Topics:
This week will be our last live radio broadcast. Tuesday night at eight-thirty pm. The show will be getting passed on to a dear friend, but it’ll probably have a few weeks off in between. There’s a lot of equipment to move and set-up again, and a lot of hoops to jump through getting it working elsewhere … but it’ll be worth it.

I have really mixed emotions about it dropping it … but I have to. On one hand it’s a huge part of Sher and I’s social life sort of and we’ll miss that … a lot. Every Tuesday night we entertained guests, and they entertained us. On the other hand, it’s a lot for us to keep up with during this time and we just don’t have the time and energy to keep up with what we need to, to survive, let alone extra activities.

So, so be it for the time being. When I want to be involved with music again, I’ll play Beatles Rock Band or Guitar Hero with Alberic!

Now, if I could figure out a way to produce a health show on cancers, and other serious health issues of New Englanders, and do it in a way that had some humor in it … like the Click and Clack Brothers … I’d really reconsider.

I really want to do something with and for people, with not only my kind of cancer, but many serious life threatening conditions, and I am a firm believer that humor is a major healing energy. I know it’s hard to imagine that there’s any humor in having cancer … but there is, or at least there ought to be.

I mean honestly, how else can you look at it and survive? It’s not funny that we have cancer, but it can be funny at the way others look at it, or deal with it. I know there’s humor in there somewhere!

I don’t think getting guests and speakers would be a problem, and I’d think that finding sponsors for something like that wouldn’t be too hard (yeah right). Maybe something like an on-going aware-ness program. Think of all the guests having the experience, the doctors and health-care givers that deal with it on a constant basis, and all the groups of people fighting for, and raising money for these causes … you’d never run out of interesting guests.

Anyway, that’s not for now, not until the idea fully forms and I have some serious help.

In the meantime “Crappy Music, Poor Commentary and Boring Topics” will draw to close and we’ll remember the humor and good times that went with it.

I’ll leave you with this:
Missing Hearing Aid
Two elderly women were eating breakfast in a restaurant one morning.

Ethel noticed something funny about Mabel’s ear.

She said, “Mabel, did you know you’ve got a suppository in your left ear?”

“I have? A suppository?” She pulled it out and stared at it.

Then she said: “Ethel, I’m so glad you saw this thing. “Now I think I know where my hearing aid is.”