roses is finally eating regularly -- it's been rather a battle. we've decided to discontinue chemo, and concentrate on quality of life for the rest of it.

i'm going to take her by the local vet for a feel of her lymph nodes. i've spent so much time feeling her throat that i'm no longer sure what's what in there :/

been spending the morning listening to the moving truck taking away the stuff of two roommates. goodbye, e and j; enjoy your condo -- you'll be missed!

our household will have room for one potential new person (or not, we have quota at this point regardless).

still working on the garden -- difficult-to-please roommate has been difficult (he also just had a death in the family, very hard on him) and am trying to work out solutions that please everyone, no mean task.

0. going to do an "email round recording" -- elf my elf's idea! i'll record one singing through of a round (my arrangement of "jenny kiss'd me") and email it to interested parties, who can then make recordings of themselves singing over it, and i'll track the results together for a completed product. any readers interested? (solarbird i am looking at JOO....)

1. successfully did a hip key (several times!) off the ground at silks! my progress is weird, some things are very easy for me, other things that seem easy for other people take me forever. quantity time is what i give it.

2. more brain work! i always dig that. found the perfect citation for current contract today. it's from 1998, and if i get ambitious (and feel like being expensive) i will track down everything that's cited that since, and very likely learn quite a lot.

3. more travel plans! diggin' that too.

4. not sure if i have a riding lesson tomorrow or not, but planning to see the ponykins no matter what.

one of my riding students, who gets some kiatsu from me now and again, requested a lesson specifically in that art for herself and her partner. we worked on arms mostly, and a little on posture, those being the issues that promptly presented themselves.

i really enjoy teaching kiatsu. it's easy, it works, and it's so very good for people to be in less pain.

there's a possibility i might move my aikido dojo from its current fairly difficult and distant location to a quite local one this summer -- if i do i will certainly make kiatsu part of the regular practice, as it was in my first serious dojo.

board games

i used to play monopoly and scrabble as a kid; loved them both. won the checkers tournament in junior high school. never did learn how to play chess. learned go quite a few years ago and found it fascinating, but never got to play very much -- i'd do that again, though.

One really good idea, or one really bad idea

(don't) hang around with people who make you feel like shit.

hoof care

i've made exactly one contribution to hoof care, i think, which is in the management of canker. i don't debride or use drying agents or stall rest. i pack in black bloodroot salve, cover it with saran wrap, tape over, and put on a light disposable hoof boot; change daily.

stjarni's first canker took several months to resolve, the last took about ten days. much relief!

Autumn

my favorite season in the northwet, for the mushroom hunting. my favorite on the east coast for the foliage. my favorite in iceland for the long dark dawns.

memes

i like 'em :) y'all readers, feel free to play this one!

motivation

mine is mostly sporadic and slow but very persistent, punctuated by periods of a week or a year here and there of obsessive work. it's very hard for other people to motivate me to anything; i'm either into something or i'm not -- my interest can sometimes be piqued, but i don't seem to respond to either threats or bribes.

the ocean

two of the niftiest weeks of my life were spent on a catamaran in the sea of cortez with half a dozen neuroscientists, learning to snorkel, getting stung by minute jellyfish, diving among rays and sea lions and bioluminescent microorganisms. but the beaches in new hampshire are too cold-water for me; they're okay to look at but i feel ripped off. perhaps i need a drysuit :)

comment to play...!

first four strawberries today! for teh yum :)

i also spent a lot of time weeding, mostly for the aesthetic sake of my roommate mike, who likes a trimmed look to the yard. (i personally prefer the urban meadow aesthetic.) he's recently bereaved and out of town. i bet he thinks i did an insufficiently tidy job, too.

the dog is doing pretty well on a new anti-nausea med and four small meals of easy-digesting dog food a day. huzzah!

we seem to have had a power surge or something while i was gone, and most everyone on our net suffered somehow. my server required a new disk, followed by goodness-knows-what (new cd? new mobo?) that ended up with me just sticking it into the corpse of another box. i believe things are mostly restored now, though i also think i lost about fourteen hours' worth of mail and logs; i can live with that.

should be doing stuff now, but tired, so not so much.

it sucks to need to be the sysadmin when you are in fact well out of town :/

dog received fluids and more kinds of anti-nausea meds, passed all kinds of scary tests with flying colors, and should be home now with elf my elf.

i am in a supremely comfortable room in a foreign country with waket.

it's all good.

the dog isn't doing awful, but she hasn't been staying comfortable either, with coming-and-going nausea and i think stomach pain? elf my elf and waket and i took her to the vet tonight, where she was okay for basic tests (electrolytes &c) but is staying for more tests, painkillers, and food and fluids. i just don't think she's had a completely restful night since the last chemo :/

i'm traveling soon, so this is scary.