Thanks!

 I realized after my last posting that there is something I should have said to all of you, my faithful followers and readers. That is: THANKS! Many of you have written emails to me, texted me, sent letters and cards, and have left comments. All of these to encourage me and wish me well on this cancer journey. I don't know if it is fully over yet, but I can tell you that from the bottom of my heart, I am grateful for your kind words and affection. Thank you once more.

I know that in one of my prior posts, I shared an image of the "Get Well" balloon two dear cousins sent to me along with a bouquet when I had surgery to remove the tumor in February. That balloon stayed afloat well into June, although, like me, it grew more and more wrinkled. It held onto its helium with great tenacity. Then recently, the same cousins brought me another balloon to help celebrate my having reached the end of my chemotherapy regimen. Here are my two cheerful, smiling, mylar guys!

Soon, I'll have my first follow-up set of tests, and I'll meet with my oncologist to hear what she has to say about the results. In the meantime, we are at our Wisconsin lake home enjoying the weather, working on various projects, getting out on the water. reading, and relaxing. Some of our children and grandchildren have been able to come to spend time with us here. Yay!

Two of the more significant projects I finished were getting the hot tub back into operation and completing the disassembly of a rather large electric train layout I had created here. I had started replacing the hot tub electronics the last time we were here but discovered a bad heating unit, so I ordered one, got it installed about ten days ago, and we have been enjoying late evening dips in the tub ever since.

Since my youth, I had always wanted to build a significant railroad layout. I have a very nice collection of engines, rolling stock, and scenery items, and recent retirement years allowed me to finally tackle this idea. Involvement of computers and communications technologies have also found their way into model railroading, so that was quite fun as well. Here are a few glimpses of portions of my layout:

If these pics aren't enough, here is a video I took with my cell phone strapped to the front of one of my engines. Call me a nerd if you wish! I had a lot of fun with all of this.

Nevertheless, one soon realizes that more than half the fun is in the building. The grandkids and others always enjoyed seeing the layout, but it wasn't something one could do for hours--fifteen or twenty minutes of viewing was usually enough. I enjoyed operating the layout. I could keep four and sometimes more engines and their consists running concurrently, but even that is not something one does for hours at a time. So given all of this and realizing that it would be better for me to disassemble the layout rather than to leave it for my children or my spouse to deal with when I'm gone, I decided to tear it all down. On top of that, I decided that I'd like to have the garage back for easier boat storage and safer parking of cars when we are here. So that job is now done--most things are packed up and stored away; the tables have all been disassembled.

My daughter saw what follows and says I am weird. This is a piece of watermelon I was eating recently. I told her I like to save the best part until last. I also use a spoon rather than a fork. The spoon works better for carving out the area  below the good part. By the way, I also eat pizza and pie from the outside crust into the center. These methods may not be considered proper etiquette for polite company, but I'm usually not eating these kinds of things in formal settings. Come to think of it, I'm rarely in formal settings anymore! That's just fine.

One of the next projects is to harvest all of the apples from the two small trees I planted here at the lake several years ago. They did really well this year. The variety is call Frostbite, and the apples are small and tart but nice for applesauce and other baking. Kathie is going to guide me through making a Dutch apple pie in the next couple days. I'll eat it from the outside crust edge in towards the luscious middle. 😋