hummingbird wars

Hannah at her preschool with a light box

toad lilies

dahlias

took Maya to the apple orchard on my running route. In the fall, I can smell the doughnuts for a half mile

lots of sunflowers

they had two pits of corn kernels

from two years ago in Sutton's Bay

For a few weeks before migrating, the hummingbirds try to fatten up as much as possible. But they become even more territorial chasing the others away from the feeders, which seems like a waste of energy as they will chase them some distance. Other birds of a feather aren't willing to share too but usually they will just nip at each other, not chase.

Still unpleasantly hot and humid. Even worse, we've had a bumper crop of wasps this year making sitting outside unpleasant. We have traps but they barely make a dent in the population. They make life miserable for  the hummingbirds too but we do have plenty of hummingbird friendly flowers for them.

We will leave for the southwest next week. Still a few annoying things to take care of first.

I went to another cancer survivor cooking class this week: subject being pasta veggie salads. Avoiding white flour products has been a mainstay of my diet program so I had to bend the rules a bit. They were at least healthy and low fat. We each tell a bit of our cancer story though some of us don't know how to make a long story short. There was no stopping this one woman from going on to the tiniest minutiae of her past 2 days, none of it had anything to do with cancer. But I did learn something from a new person who had the same diagnosis as I did, same stage and subtype. They have now added an additional chemo. The good news is that it's oral; bad news is that one can get some sort of hand and foot disease resulting in the erasing of your fingerprints.  I immediately looked this up. I can't see much of an advantage. They do use it for various types of cancer but obtain the best results from TNBC (what I had). They compared a group with it and without it who all free of metastatic disease at diagnosis but were in varying stages. Over 5 years: 70 % survival of non-Xeloda dosed patients; 76% survival for the dosed.  Too late for me now.

Drug prices keep going up, which was a topic of those still in treatment. My friend just started a new immunosuppressant  that costs $12K a month. As she can no longer work, she can't pay for it. The drug company will supply it but it took lots of paperwork.

Another trip to look forward to biking in Holland and Belgium this spring