Wow, I haven’t posted in a while. Happily it’s because we’ve been busy doing fun stuff in between work stuff. We spent a great long weekend in Ventura/Oxnard last weekend at a beach house. We spent one day hiking on Santa Cruz Island. What an amazing and beautiful place – we’d never been to the Channel Islands before. We want to go back and kayak to the sea caves. We also got in some running, biking, kayaking, and watched our friends do a triathlon – oh and ate lots of really good food and drank some excellent wine. Our friend Bev came with us to watch the tri, and I think both she and Chuck were infected by the tri bug.

This weekend we started things off with a race on July 4 (the Palisades/Will Rogers 5K & 10K). I did the 10K and Chuck did the 5K. Then we watched the Queen Mary fireworks show from a penthouse suite in a new high rise condo tower in Long Beach. Fun! The high rise view actually made the fireworks seem kind of weak – we were so high above them that they appeared rather small – a funny side effect! Yesterday  I continued my triathlon training and did another long swim along Bayshore Beach, while Chuck kayaked alongside me to make sure I stayed on course and didn’t drown. We’re really enjoying living by the beach these days. it may sound stupid, but in all the years we’ve lived in Long Beach, this is the first time we’ve really taken advantage of being so close to the water! Chuck has decided that I need coaching on my swimming stroke so is planning on taking me to the Belmont Plaza Pool for some training.

In an update on health issues, we got the results of our skin cancer biopsies. My mole is a-okay. Chuck’s thing was a basal cell and had to be removed, which happened last week. He’ll have a two-inch scar on his lower back from it. As the dermatologist said, he can tell people it’s a knife wound – a much more exciting story than skin cancer. Chuck continues to bounce back from chemo. His energy level is back to pretty much normal, and now he is attacking the 20 pounds he gained while on Prednisone. His hair has come back – it’s a little greyer now than before chemo and he has decided to keep it shorter now. He really enjoyed the low maintenance of baldness but his hair grows too fast and would require too much shaving to keep it completely bald now, so the short look is the next best thing. In fact, he’s taken to cutting it himself with his beard trimmer. His next PET scan is scheduled for July 20, and we’ll have the results July 27, when he will have his first follow-up immunotherapy (Rituxan) infusiuon. I admit to feeling a bit nervous about this. It feels like the real beginning of the rest of our lives. From here on out, we must learn to live with these periodic checks, and then live with the waiting for the results of those checks. In between them, life goes on and we don’t think much about it (especially now that the chemo treatments have ended and the tough physical side effects are just memories). But this is now part of our lives, part of that new reality that my sister told us about months ago.

Pics of Oxnard/Ventura/Santa Cruz Island are here, pics of July 4 are here.