Friday, August 21, 2009

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Time and Relativity

Today is the fourth anniversary of our friend Ben's death at the age of seven. Definitely makes me feel the strange relativity of time, the loss still feels so immediate, and yet the journey from that time to this has taken so long. His family is in my heart today especially.

Saturday, July 25, 2009

Long Pause there

Sorry about that.

It was partly facebook - its so much easier to blurt something there, than actually composing things like sentences. And so much happened, it was daunting to catch up.

And then there was the fear of blowing the gaff on Eleanor... She's pregnant and didn't want the news all over the internet too soon!

Yes. We are going to be grand parents! Baby girl is due October 8. She and Jacob visited last month:







And Alex and Jessica bought a house in San Francisco! Also a huge, life changing event!


It's gorgeous!

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Friday, May 22, 2009

Awards Night - Half Moon Bay High School



Jacob went back to school, nearly full time yesterday, and last night he received two awards, for English and for History at the Half Moon Bay, High School Awards Night. He doesn't really have multiple heads.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Time travel

I had a fabulous trip to Los Angeles, the city of my youth, last weekend, starting with dinner with two of my oldest friends, Eric Stone and Susannah Gordon. I never did manage to get a picture of Eric, so here is one from his website:



I stayed with Suzy and the next day we went to the 40th reunion of our high school class - Oakwood 1969. Here we are getting ready for the party with two other girl friends, putting on our make up and talking about, you know, woman stuff:



I had lunch with Peter Bernstein, who was terrific. This is a photo by Michael Fox, not taken that day, but better than anything I have:



The reunion itself was a blast - I realized that I really like all these people, not just because we have all this history; they are smart and funny and full of good stories. See some pix (facebook folks - you've seen these already.)

But here's the weird time-warpy part. The reunion was at the home of Kim Selbert: a classmate, not just from high school, but also elementary school, and she is living in the same apartment complex my family lived in before I was five. I would be talking to someone, marveling at memories from high school, when suddenly the sight of the rounded edges of the concrete steps would transport me further back to riding my tricycle in that courtyard (or the identical one two buildings down).

Sunday, in another burst of synchronicity, I visited my cousins, only to discover it was Diane's birthday, and the day after her son, Austin's.


Both Diane and Linda, her mom, took pictures, which I hope to swap out for these. Note little Paige who is walking and talking and who absolutely adores her big brother - for him she smiles! I missed seeing the rest of the clan, but what a gift it was to see Alan, Linda, Diane, Austin and Paige.





And, joy - I got to see Chuck. Here he is in his natural habitat, surrounded by devices:

Saturday, April 25, 2009

What Happened (!!??!?)

Jacob's (and the rest of us) just got back from five days in the hospital at LPCH, for what is looking at this point to be more late effects of radiation.

He's home, on some new medication that has him totally zonked, so it's hard to say exactly how he is doing, but home is definitely a good thing!



The hospitalization was to rule out some other problem: first and most horribly, a return of his tumor, and then other increasingly unlikely explanations for his sudden decline. An MRI on tuesday ruled out a solid tumor. Unfortunately, his tremor had gotten so strong that they had to use massive general anesthesia to quiet it, and there was still motion blur on the spine series, but it was still pretty definitive.

An EKG ruled out some heart possibility that no one explained to me, and an EEG on wednesday was also normal.



Finally, yesterday, he had a lumbar puncture (spinal tap) and vials of his spinal fluid were sent winging off to labs in all directions. The ones they did at Packard were all normal. Very low tumor markers - which rules out distributed microscopic tumor.



So we are left with radiation effects. We"ll just going to have to wait and see how things go. Hopefully, once he gets used to the medication, he'll perk up.