Threshold

I think sometime last week marked the moment in 2011 when I passed the psychological threshold past which I am done with winter.  It happens every year.  Winter turns from exciting to a burden.  Feel like scraping frost off the car?  Waking up in the dark?  Worrying over clothing layers?  Thinking that you really do need to pull on the wind briefs or risk... well, consequences?  Yeah, me neither.  My mind has turned to dry trails in the mountains, bike wheels spinning on pavement, running with shorts and bare legs, mornings sitting on the porch, bathed in sunlight, drinking coffee and watching the thermometer start its steady climb to hot.  I know, that last one is a pipe dream in Anchorage even in the thick of summer.  Try sitting out on our porch in July and you'll find your coffee quickly cooling as you swat at mosquitoes thriving in the cool and steady shade.  Such are the affects of well treed lots, northern latitudes, and coastal moderation.  Maybe that is why C and I booked tickets to southern New Mexico, departing in a few months.  If our timing is right, we should have plenty of sunny and warm mornings.  If our timing is bad, we'll be sand blasted by spring winds.  Either way, there will be chile to eat, so we win.

It is interesting that I can pass this threshold while still enjoying all that winter brings.  Last weekend, C and I ran a great 10k loop on snowy single track, packed solid by fat bikers.  It included trails we probably wouldn't spend much time on in the summer, either because they turn to swamps or are closed to accommodate feeding bears.  Being February, the sun was out and high enough to make a difference.  Light poured through spruce and birch, branches bending under the weight of snow.  We've been skiing regularly, making the most of the groomed trails.  Indeed, I'll be sad to see the skiing go.  But then, it still being February, we've actually got a lot of winter left.  So those particular tears can go unshed for some time yet.

And speaking of skiing for awhile yet, anyone want to join our 24-hour ski race team?  (http://www.skan24.blogspot.com/)

Long time readers may remember that this blog started as something of an online chemotherapy journal.  I believe I last said I was going to do my best here to simply forget all about that particular chapter of my life.  Nevertheless, in case anyone is interested, and particularly in case anyone diagnosed with NHL or otherwise facing his or her own chemo regime finds these pages as a result of a well crafted Google search, I though I would go on and provide an update anyway.  We are about 3 1/2 months out from my last treatment.  That was on November 3, 2010.  It was probably the end of December before my system had purged and I started to feel like the drugs were no longer an anchor.  It was actually pretty nice to feel like I was just out of shape and not that I was being smothered with giant wool blankets, as was usually the case before.  I replaced my lost weight within a few weeks and have been getting stronger since.  Remember how I said C and I have been getting out for frequent skis?  Last December, I pretty much thought that was an impossibility and had written off the 2010/11 ski season entirely.  Other than right now, sitting to type this update, I no longer think about chemo at all and have in fact largely forgotten its impacts.  It is a good place to be.  One threshold I'm glad to leave behind.

So, picture of last spring's flowers in anticipation of this spring:

Hawaii (Not the Teaser: The Real Thing)

So if you just want to see pretty pictures of sand and surf, feel free to skip the words and scroll immediately to the images.  For the rest of you, I've got some business to dispense of first, and when I say business, I mean the business of promoting independently produced music from Switzerland.  Long time readers (hi Mom!) may remember that while I was in the depths of chemotherapy, a friend in France sent us what was described as a "pre-pre-production" copy of a CD his brother's band was working on.  It turns out that there may have been one too many pres attached to that descriptor.  We were just sent a copy of the full release, replete with paperback book printed in French with photos of, among other things, the unique instrumentation.  After about ten seconds of intense internet research, I discovered the band has a website.  In an effort to build an immense North American audience for La Puce Qui R'nifle, I am proud to be the self-proclaimed (and wholly unverified) first U.S. blogger to provide you, the reading public, with a link to that site:  http://www.lapuce.net/.

Much like the CD packaging itself, the website is all in French.  But by using a popular search engine interpreter tool, I can provide some of the following information to you.  For example, how does La Puce Qui R'nifle describe its own CD?  Thusly:  "The album of the chip?  It's 64 pages of crafts, surprises and happiness.  If you buy it, you'll almost need to come see us.  And that we know very well that it makes you think most of you healthy."  The website has previews of some tracks, although it seems possible that they will not work in all countries.  The band has this to say about it:  "By switching at the border between elegance (for us) and annoying (to you), some of the tracks on which you will click with your mouse will not be producing any music.  This is not the fault of your manicured mammal, do not hold it against him: only basely commercial.  If you want to listen with delight, buy our album which will be yours."  I was actually glad to read this, because I was about to rain unholy hell down upon my manicured mammal.  As near as I can tell, if you want to buy a copy you can e-mail the band (link provided on the website) and they will be happy to supply you directly.  The cost is 30 chf (which is about $30).  While this seems pretty clear to the non-French speaker, the translator does suggest you may be purchasing "Your slippers." You may want to verify that you are buying a CD and not paying for the rights to continue wearing your house shoes.  I also suspect that if you read French, it will all make more sense.


As alluded to in the last post, C and I took a five day trip to the North Shore of Oahu.  I had never really given that much thought to Hawaii, but it turns out it is easy to get to from Anchorage.  And in January, you are pretty much ready to go somewhere where the sun shines.  We flew into Honolulu, picked up a rental car, and drove up to a condo north of Haleiwa.  Honestly, the trip was pretty uneventful, and does not lend itself to interesting prose.  We went for some runs, we went for some walks, we did a little snorkeling, we ate pie.  And we saw a sad looking hispanic man, presumed to be from Mexico.  He was wearing the national uniform: blue jeans, long sleeve button shirt, work boots.  He was sitting in a beach park with a small radio, tape, or CD player that was blasting out banda tunes (a regional music from Sinaloa).  At his feet, a brown paper bag held two rapidly warming tall boys.  He stared out to sea.  On a beach that millions (or at least many thousands) pay good money to come and visit, he looked home sick and very much like he would have rather been many miles further east with friends and family.


We sought out wild life.  The final count included a few sea turtles (all out in the water), humpback whales (well off the coast, but breaching impressively even from a distance), one cockroach (small), one cockroach (large), chickens (feral), birds (white), reef fish (colorful), and a rat (dead).


And, being on the North Shore, we watched surfers ply the waters.  The surf was impressive.  My experience on the beach is pretty limited.  Growing up, I can remember one beach vacation to North Carolina, and a trip or two to the ocean in Los Angeles.  As an adult, there haven't been that many more trips to salt water.  The point being, I do not have much of a frame of reference for waves and surf.  But this stuff was big, it roared, and it pounded.  Given the chance, I suppose I would be happy to spend a year in Hawaii trying to learn how to safely play in it.


But now, to let the pictures do the talking:

  
This isn't that great a picture, but I include it now as a hair reference.  To anyone who is wondering if my hair has grown back out, it has--a little.  I spent most of the photographed hours of the trip with a hat on, so for hair this is about as good a picture as you'll get.  The picture was taken while out on a walk down the shore.

I wasn't there alone.  C agreed to come!  Another day, another walk.

When we weren't out walking or eating pie, we would sometimes sit in the sand and watch the sunset.  Here was a picture of us in the lovely low light of evening.  Of course, as you can tell by looking over C's shoulder, we weren't the only couple out at the end of the day:

It is not really clear whether we captured a moment of romance or if we should be providing this picture to the local police as evidence of broad shoulder aliens that have come to earth to engulf and subsume petite blondes.

Of course, you do not sit on the beach to watch the sunset without actually seeing a sunset, made all the more fun by the crashing surf.  And speaking of surf, the locals don't waste their time on their duffs admiring it.  They get out and play with it:

Not to be outdone, C and I did make our way out into the water too.  Here is C waiting for the next set to roll in:

And here I am, making it look easy:

Now that wave may not look as impressive as those shown further above, but a close look at my face shows unequivocally that these are hardcore conditions:

Yup, that face screams "epic"!  Or is it just the face of a desert raised kid who is trying not to drown in the equivalent of the kiddie pool?  Let's not over analyze it.

Hawaii (Teaser)

C and I took a long(+) weekend trip to the North Shore of Oahu, conveniently served by a non-stop flight from Anchorage.  Strangely, it is faster and easier to get to Hawaii than just about anywhere south of Seattle or Portland.  The red-eye deposited us back at ANC at 5:30 this morning with just enough time to brush snow and scrape ice off of the car, drive home, sleep for an hour, and head to work.  Suffice to say, we're not expecting much in the way of activity tonight.

This is just a teaser post, with two quick pictures.  Once I get a chance to separate the digital wheat from chaff, I suspect there will be a robust photo trip report.  In the meantime, enjoy a turtle and a sunset.

Seattle

I just got back from Seattle.  I was last  in the Emerald City in July for a consultation with the good doctors of the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.  C and I made the most of that trip, but who are we kidding?  We were seeking a second (third) opinion on treatment options; it wasn't exactly relaxation on a stick.  In comparison, last weekend was pure vacation.

I met W, a friend of now 20+ years.  We've kept in touch over the years, but hadn't spent any time together in an awful long time.  So, we agreed to put our lives on hold and split the difference, meeting halfway between our respective homes.  We pretty much stuck to the well trodden tourist path.  We poked into Seattle's alleyways, looking for rats and meals.

We sought out Seattle's famous rusty and dank plumbing.

An elevator operator regaled us with stories of a giant octopus, purportedly housed at the Seattle aquarium.  We can't be sure we actually ever found the aquarium.  It is a certainty we never found the octopus, and the fish we did see were frankly not doing so well in captivity.  I don't think the collection was worth the admission we paid the attendant (who, by the way, smelled like cheap whiskey and two weeks of hard living).

We spent long hours studying Sanborn insurance maps from the late 1880s.

We were mesmerized by the geometric symmetry that the city's building code has imposed on ALL structures within the city's historic core.

Like we used to do as kids, we stared into elevator shafts.

And, since Seattle is really a city of neighborhoods, we spent a full afternoon exploring the Pickle District, tasting our way through artisan crafted barrels of dills and bread and butters.

Of course, you can only taste so many pickles before your teeth start to float in brine and your attention turns with ferocity to base biological functions.  So, we also got to visit the city's public restrooms.

There is actually a funny (and true) story about public restrooms in Seattle.  For some reason, it starts in Amsterdam.  I was in Amsterdam for the first time in 1989 with another old friend and his dad.  Much like W and I did in Seattle, we spent our days in Amsterdam as tourists, and, after delighting in Amsterdam's own Pickle District, were in need of bathroom facilities.  Public restrooms in Amsterdam really ran the spectrum.  At one end were small tombstone shaped slabs of concrete tucked within a spiral of 6-foot tall sheet metal at the side of a canal that, quite literally, just gave you something to aim at.  I suspect these restrooms were more popular with the men than the women.   What they lacked in sanitation, however, they more than made up for in affordability.  At the other end of the spectrum were space aged yellow pods.  These cost a pretty guilder (this was pre-euro, mind you) to enter, but used the very height of bathroom sanitation technology to completely scrub each and every surface clean upon each exit.  A little behind the curve, Seattle choose to purchase and install a number of similar (but free) toilet pods throughout its downtown in the mid 2000s.  The city abandoned the project when the toilet pods were co-opted by prostitutes and junkies as temporary office space.

All of the above is well and good, and represents a typical itinerary for anyone visiting Seattle.  I mean, who among us hasn't spent an afternoon in the Pickle District?  Heck, any Lonely Planet Seattle since at least 1992 dedicates a number of column inches to pickle tasting (prior to 1992, the District hadn't yet felt the gentle touch of gentrification, and there was little there to draw a visitor).  The real surprise came in that we went to a professional football game, and a playoff game at that.  

Much like some people find religion, it turns out that W had found football in the years since high school.  Or maybe just returned to the flock after 20 years of sport free living.  He proposed the game, I was curious, and there were still tickets available less than 24 hours before kick off.  So we joined 67,000 new friends, learned the local call and response rituals, and thrilled at the production that is modern sport at its most commercial.  We had a blast, helped by the fact that the home team triumphed in a close game that became a high scoring upset over last year's Super Bowl champs.  Throughout the game, wave after wave of sound came pounding down from the upper sections of Qwest Field as the local fans demonstrated why they have the reputation as loudest in the NFL.  It was bruising but infectious.

P.S. - Anyone who wants to read up on the Seattle self-cleaning toilet experiment, here is a article from right after they were installed:  http://www.seattlepi.com/local/162784_toilets02.asp.  And here is an article about the end of the self-cleaning toilet era in Seattle:  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/us/17toilets.html.  Favorite quote from the later: “'I’m not going to lie: I used to smoke crack in there,' said one homeless woman, Veronyka Cordner, nodding toward the toilet behind Pike Place Market. 'But I won’t even go inside that thing now. It’s disgusting.'"     You know things have gotten bad when a space is no longer usable for smoking crack.

Shameless Plug

This is a throw away post, done for one purpose and one purpose only:  to increase my chances of winning a pair of minimalist running shoes.  The good curator of the Running and Rambling blog is giving away a pair, and by linking his review here, I get an extra shot and taking home the prize.  So I'm doing it.  My apologies for dragging the purity that is Cobrasinalaska into the dark realm of materialism!

http://www.runningandrambling.com/2010/12/vivobarefoot-neo-running-shoe-review.html

Now, back to your regularly scheduled day.

New words for a new year

I'll start the 2011 blogging year off right, with a timely picture of last night's fireworks and a punctual update.  Anyone following along has probably been scratching his or her head, wondering aloud to an empty room, "Is he done?  Did he get a clear bill of health and lose his Blogspot password all in one swoop?  Where are the words?  Where are the pictures?"  Indeed, I think I promised some weeks ago that I would provide further details on the remission, and I will get into that a bit below.  But first, a word of warning about the likely direction these posts will take.  I started this blog as a way of keeping disparate groups of friends and family up to date on the rigors of chemo, but that is a topic I am hoping to put to bed.  Time will tell how long it sleeps.  But because I had fun typing, I will likely continue to post on a(n) (ir)regular basis.  However, topics will likely skew heavily towards mundane reporting on trips C and I take, description in great detail of how my legs felt on a recent run, and the continuing inventorying of our fridge contents.  We’ll see if readership falls off a cliff.  Continue to check in at your own peril.

Life in Remission

I noted in the last post that the good Doctor declared my body cancer-free.  That turned into a good day, with a psychological load I did not know I was carrying lifted.  Of course, I described in the very first post that NHL is a chronic disease, so this isn’t the end of the road, and the next two years will still be filled with doctor appointments, diagnostic scanning, and multiple infusions of one drug (Rituxin).  But unless a future scan shows something irregular, the heavy lifting is over.  Rituxin should not have any side effects, and I intend on spending 2011 forgetting everything I ever learned about NHL.

So where does this leave us?  What did I learn?  How have I changed?  Everyone has probably read someone’s account of cancer (or other hardship) that wraps up neatly with the declaration that “I decided life is too short to waste on the unimportant things!”  The author then typically packs his bags and opens a surf school in the South Pacific, buys a herd of goats and moves to a farm up state, or starts a non-profit dedicated to helping the poor, hungry, and infirm.  I remember when I first started researching NHL, reading someone’s online account of chemo and recovery.  Her story included a leave of absence from a law firm and subsequent calls from her employer, gently inquiring, “When are you coming back to work.”  Of course, as anyone could predict from the outset, she had determined that “life is too short.”   I don’t remember if she invested in goats or started hand carving skis from organically grown bamboo, but suffice to say she did not return to her earlier life as a lawyer.

Unfortunately, I’m too short-sighted or unimaginative to take that left turn.  Did cancer teach me that I would rather be doing something other than lawyering every day?  No.  I knew that before this all started.  Given the choice, I would rather practice guitar, travel, read, exercise, cook, eat.  How about biking across the northern and southern tiers of the U.S.?  Comparing the mountain huts of the Alps to those in the Dolomites?  Apprenticing at a cheese shop?  Yea, any of those will do.  But cancer has taught me that I really need health insurance.  Cancer is expensive.  Until I figure out a way to hustle a living doing any of the above that can keep C and I in the good graces of a monthly insurance premium, it looks like I’ll  keep working.  What a drag.

Off hours

But the off hours will still be fun.  We have lots of ideas for 2011.  We’ll see what we make happen.  In the meantime, here are some pictures depicting cancer free living.

 

That distant figure in snowy landscape is C, preparing for a winter triathlon (run, bike, ski).  It was a gorgeous day out in the trails.  To any bike geeks, C is running Snow Cat rims we borrowed from Mr. T.  I rented a Pugsly for the day:

 

The fat tires add significant flotation and open up whole realms of winter biking that were previously shut tight.  If we had the space, I suspect C and I would add two to the existing bike collection.

Just another shot of C and her bike.

We also spent a day on skis at the local lift-served resort.  It was a gorgeous, clear, and cold day.  This is the only picture we got (of sis-in-law M, who joined us for the holidays) before the camera battery took a dive.

  

 

C and M, on a day after Christmas hike.  It was another pretty day.

Now, go forth and enjoy the new year.

Full Remission

No hiding the ball on this one.  The post title sums up the post contents.  We met with the oncologist today who said "best possible result."  The Scott and C household is cancer free.  Instead of writing a lengthy blog post on what this means, describing the burden that has been lifted, we went for a ski.  I'll follow up in the coming days.  Maybe tomorrow?  Go forth and sleep easy.