Talking puzzles

This was one of my finds last week: a puzzle that rewards one with animal sounds as one correctly places the piece. What sound does a goldfish make? Bubble sounds. Maya is becoming faster and faster at it. Aside from her speech difficulties, poor fine motor skills are also a problem.

Amount spent on puzzle? 50 cents at the local school book sale. I bought a few silent wooden puzzles too along with some kid and adult books. A new pile for my middle of the night reading.

When my kids were little, the main talking toy was the Say and Spell.  It was a big plastic clock-like toy with about 12 pictures. On one of them were animals. If you set the dial to a given animal and pulled the string, you'd hear a crackly animal noise. Now almost everything has little computer chips in it. Almost all toys now talk and sing.

When I was a kid, there was Chatty Cathy. Pull a string and she either said Mama or I love you. Never had one.

What Maya's favorite toy now is a bubble gun purchased at the five dollar store (inflation). We've since bought a gallon of bubble solution so she won't run out.

It has been cool and sunny all week. No excuse not to run and bike. Between the two, I've managed to move this ancient body more than 90 miles this week.

My kids' houses

Old photo of Josh"s  new house. It is finished except for trees

Shanna's house that she hopes to close on in 2 weeks. Maybe they will put sod down today. The neighborhood is supposed to be turn of the19th century houses with modern updates inside. I found a wicker set that would have been so cute on the porch but my vision was not shared.

Josh is now down to one house. At the closing today, he was asked where his wife was.
He said he didn't have one. All the paperwork had his ex-wife's name all over it. How they knew of her existence, who knows though I suspect the real estate agent messed up. Josh was not married when he bought the house and never added her name to the deed when they were married 18 months later.. It was not an issue in the divorce, although by some weird dowager right's law, Julia was entitled to half the house (and half the debt). He had to leave the closing to run to the court house to get a copy of his divorce decree. Then they wouldn't accept it because it wasn't certified. Finally they said they would accept it if he paid them more money, which he refused to do. It wasn't his mistake. Why didn't they send the papers over earlier?
His realtor ended up paying the extra money, which it was probably his fault anyway.

So a relief to him to sell the house at a lesser loss than he thought. And we get our bridge loan money back.

I was so crabby yesterday. Besides wasting time dealing with Verizon and Apple and then having to type my contacts in myself, Naomi got a letter from the State Treasury saying she owed $1000 of sales tax on the car whose title we signed over to her. Usually this is paid, if needed, when you apply for a new title. As we charged her, $0 for the car, the tax should be $0. If it is a transfer between relatives, then no tax is owed. Fine they said, but we have to prove our relationship. So lots of digging around and copying documents.

Another why I hate Siri story. My friend used her to navigate to our other friend's farm the other night. True, the farm is a half mile down a private road but it does have a mailbox on a main road. Siri had her take the freeway 4 miles past the correct exit, get off and then told her to get on the freeway in the opposite direction. Then it told her to turn into a rest stop and that she had arrived at her destination. WTF? She ended up calling me. I am better than Siri at least.

But for all my ranting against Apple, Verizon and the State Treasury, it occurred to me what a whiner I was. I was watching Maya while Naomi helped Josh with last minute packing (her solution to saving gas now that it is the highest priced in the country due to some BS, is to drive our cars). The neighbors are honorary grandparents and had a three year old themselves in tow. They had bought a dollar store kite and took the little boy to the park to fly it. Maya and I came too. Although there wasn't much wind, he was able to get it airborne while running down the hill. A cheap thrill. Maya was amused. The man has stage 4 prostate cancer. He will get on a clinical trial that will work for a while and then it doesn't. They are fresh out of clinical trials for him so he will go back on traditional chemo, which he hates. As it is Taxol, he was asking me what he can or can not do on it. He enjoys his walks. If he can't do them... I said I walked every day. I would have ran but the Red Devil had made me anemic. But the big worry, will it work? Will they find another clinical trial that will? This makes my petty concerns....well petty.

Never get an iPhone!!!!!

Hate it! Hate it!

This evil device has erased all my contacts because I unloaded pictures to a computer that was not synched with iTunes. Was I warned that this will happen?No

Apple is Evil!!!!!!!!

Update: I was on the phone for an hour with Verizon who tried to get me my contacts back. Nice and patient as he was, he didn't know anything. He had me install some back-up assistant which sends a code that had a dash in it. Is there a dash on the keyboard? NO!!!!! Then it turns out I had to memorize a 6 digit number that flashes on the screen for a second. Nice system. But still..no contacts.

Verizon has some blame in this in that they didn't warn us that all could be lost if I didn't put things on iCloud. Naomi has broken numerous phones but Verizon has always had her contacts. I didn't break this phone though I feel like it. Never again will I buy another Apple product.

I finally found my old phone missing a charger, chip and a battery. Not sure why Steve removed this stuff but eventually he came up with everything. After we charged the phone up, I could see that all the contacts were still in the phone. We took it to the Verizon store but they would not do it for free. The Apple Store tried to do it but didn't know how as my old phone was not their product. Shame on Apple and Shame on Verizon for poor customer service.

Blame the mama, part infinity

Four years ago I found myself impatiently waiting for radiation. If you were more than ten minutes late, your appointment was cancelled. If they are late, well, that's just too bad. Usually I sat with other breast cancer patients but on this particular day, I was alone with a man about my age. He shared that he had throat  cancer.
Do you want to know how I got it?

Uh....

My mother gave it to me. She had HPV was I was born and I got infected coming out.

I had never heard of such a thing. If I were a defense attorney for the mama, I would have asked if there wasn't some more likely activity that he engaged in that would have exposed him to HPV more recently? But maybe Mama's vijayjay was as close as he got to a woman (or a man). I did look this up as soon as I returned home. That HPV could cause throat cancer in men (mainly: it causes cervical cancer in women) was a relatively new finding discovered at UM no less. It is allegedly one of the fastest growing segments of new cancer cases. On the positive side for these men, it is much less fatal than the type believed to be caused by smoking and drinking.

Flash forward to yesterday. I am drinking my coffee while doing my killer sudoku half listening to the Today Show. One of the anchors piped up in disgust that Michael Douglas told an interviewer that he got his throat cancer by having oral sex with an HPV infected woman.

Everybody knows that he got it because he's a hard drinker and heavy smoker.

Silly, silly woman. (where is Ann Curry? I liked her better). I really hate it when people try to blame people for their cancer. Before saying this,she should have consulted a medical person. It is relatively easy to tell if throat cancer is caused by HPV or not. Even if he hadn't had a test, the fact he has recovered from Stage 4 cancer is a clue that it is different from the smoker's throat cancer. Now where he got the HPV is another story..Would she have been less disgusted if he said he got it while being born? As it turned out, he back-pedaled saying he wasn't for sure when he became infected especially since his ex-wife was furious that this implied she had HPV. At any rate, he didn't know he was exposing himself to throat cancer while engaging  in this activity so as a public service, he was warning others. So what is the chance that this activity will lead to throat cancer? 15,000 new cases in men between 50-65 are popping up per year. I don't have any statistics on how many of these men did this but I am guessing that this is a low risk activity.

Now with that new vaccine, perhaps 30 years later, the rates will go down. Or even faster, if boys start getting vaccinated too.

Down on the farm

My friend has 3 free range hens that are good for 2-3 brown eggs a day. They are locked up at night

View from back deck 

A nice night to sip margaritas while looking at wild life

We had our Mom's night last night. The babies will be turning 34 this summer. Among we 5 moms, we have 10 kids and 7 grand kids with 2 more on the way. A nice night for sharing and eating wonderful shrimp-crab enchiladas. The wild blueberry clafouti went caflooty. I had used Julia Childs' recipe for cherry clafouti, the traditional kind, thinking substituting blueberries wouldn't change things too much and I also used a deeper pan. this thing took forever to bake. The top was mushy, the bottom burnt. I was quite embarrassed. It tasted all right though and it wasn't like we had a lack of food there or wine or other drinks.

Nice and cool here. My hip is still a bit sore but after 5 minutes of running, I don't notice it anymore.

Orange-Gold Sparkly Nails

My nails

Lake that I stopped at this morning on my bike ride. I did my first biathlon here, swimming a mile (harder than I thought as I am blind without glasses) and then running a 5K X-country (much easier)

The other day I treated myself to a deluxe mani-pedi, the kind in which they massage your legs for almost an hour and put all these hot towels, hot stones, different masks and scrubs, etc on your feet and legs. Alas I picked a color that I believe is too dark for my toes but I do like my fingers. Over the regular polish, she put a gold glitter glaze. Wish I had asked her to put this on my toes too.

I didn't get manicures while I was working. Even though I always wore gloves, somehow acetone would leach into them. I would put polish on my toenails to cover up various running injuries. Chemo, especially Taxol, is especially hard on nails. Some people lose most of their nails during treatment. I lost a few toe nails and some of my fingernails separated from the nail bed. They were covered with Mees' lines, 4 white stripes for each cycle and some brown stain that looked like I got coffee on them. But now, my nails are all better.

Sundays are the best day for a long bike ride. Alas, I awoke to strong winds. I kept putting off going out there, lazy as I am, but the winds were increasing. Fortunately they were only straight-on head winds for a brief period and by some miracle, I had more tailwinds than headwinds as there was a switch in my favor. It also looked like it would rain, as it has been for the past week. But when I was on some dirt roads that wound through the woods, the sun came out. This is inconvenient as it is hard to tell shadows from pot-holes with bright sun.

 I stopped for water and a stretch by the lake pictured above. A man came by me with a trash container that he was emptying into the lake. Hmmmm. Turns out he was relocating a snapping turtle roughly the size of the one I rescued earlier this week. He lives on a pond with ducks and geese. The turtles eat the ducklings upsetting his kids. He said this was the 4th turtle this week he relocated. They were found digging holes in his yard to lay eggs but he thinks he got them before the egg laying. He loves the ducks but hates the geese. He has trained his dog to chase the geese away but to leave the ducks, quite a trick.

Mom's group tonight, on a Sunday. Our schedules conflict so much these days, it was the only time we all could make it. I am bringing dessert. Wild blueberry clafouti anyone?

Neighbors in life; neighbors in death

My grandfather and his first wife are buried in the nicest cemetery in Ann Arbor, near the Arb with lots of trees and hills. He bought a marker for his second wife, which is on the same plot, but she chose to be buried in Quebec. I did not remove the marker.

Recently his former neighbor, whose husband is buried in a nearby plot, noticed that the second wife's date of death is not engraved on the marker and apparently thinks it should be even though the plot has no body. She has my address and has contacted me on other occasions but not this time. She instead, contacted the executor of the estate, who in turn told me that I should do this. I control and pay for these plots. What I will do with them, I am not sure.

But I am annoyed at the nosy neighbor.