by Judy Handley | May 2, 2016 | Sailing Logs Year 11 |
Day 193, Year 11: Beth and Bob Lux Visit
Date: Monday, May 2, 2016
Weather: Rain All Day, High 50 degrees F
Location: At Home in Evergreen Preserve, Lowell, MA
This afternoon, Concord Yacht Club friends, Bob and Beth Lux, stopped by to visit. We had hoped to be able to take a walk on some of the wonderful forest paths behind the condo, but the rain was incessant, so we stayed inside. It didn’t rain hard, but it did drizzle all day long. This made it the perfect day to sit inside and visit with friends. Bob and Beth sailed around the world in the 1980’s and we had fun comparing the difference between the time when they sailed around and when we did. It definitely took greater navigational skills before the days of the GPS and electronic navigation software, both of which made a circumnavigation for Mark and I much easier. Bob and Beth sailed to Bermuda last summer and Beth was seasick all the way there and all the way back. And she sailed all the way around the world like that. Mark was particularly sympathetic now the he is experiencing nausea big time. Beth said she usually gets over the seasickness after three days into a passage, but that’s a long time. Don’t think I could have done it if I were prone to seasickness. Bob and Beth are thinking about selling their boat, but they will take it to Maine this summer and think about it some more. It is a very hard decision to sell a boat on which you have shared so many wonderful experiences. It feels like selling your best friend. As you know, we have made that decision and are hoping the waterfront apartment will help keep us in touch with the water.
by Judy Handley | May 1, 2016 | Sailing Logs Year 11 |
Day 192, Year 11: Soccer Sunday
Date: Sunday, May 1, 2016
Weather: Overcast with Sporadic Showers, High in the 50’s F
Location: At Home in Evergreen Preserve, Lowell, MA
Heather called this morning and invited us to come watch Sam’s soccer game in Taunton this afternoon. From here, Taunton is a little more than half way to the Cape and we jumped at the chance to get out of the condo and go see Sam play soccer and visit with all of the other Goldstones. It was an ugly day, overcast with sporadic showers, but the smiles and energy of Goldpebbles brought sunshine into our lives. Mark even conjured up the energy to play a little soccer with Ollie. So it was a good outing.
Tomorrow Bob and Beth Lux are coming to visit in the afternoon. Bob and Beth are Concord Yacht Club friends and the last time we saw them was in Quissett Harbor last fall. They kept their sailboat at Quissett for the last part of the summer and fall. We enjoyed visiting with them on the water and I know we will enjoy our land visit tomorrow.
And lastly, happy first day of May!
by Judy Handley | Apr 30, 2016 | Sailing Logs Year 11 |
Day 191, Year 11: You Are What You Eat
Date: Saturday, April 30, 2016
Weather: Partly Sunny, High in the 60’s F
Location: At Home in Evergreen Preserve, Lowell, MA
I seem to spend a lot of time these days watching and listening to various web-based programs about the food we eat. Recently we watched the Total Wellness Summit hosted by Food Matters (FMTV) and today we started listening to a series of interviews called The Food Revolution. Both of these series bring forward research that indicates that eating more plants and less meat is the healthy way to go. Of today’s interviews, I found the information from Dr. Michael Greger the most interesting. He is the author of a popular book entitled, “How Not To Die”—not quite a threat, but almost! His recommended ‘daily dozen’ things to eat or drink includes lots of vegetables (especially veggies in the cruciferous family that includes broccoli, kale, and cabbage), dark leafy green veggies, beans, berries, other fruits, nuts, flax seeds, specific spices like turmeric, whole grains, and water. Add exercise to that and you have Greger’s winning combination. I am impressed that these web programs are challenging the current ‘standard’ American diet with loads of scientific research that shows that what you eat really matters. And when I am not watching or listening to these programs, I seem to spend almost all of my time shopping for food and preparing food. I am convinced that ‘you are what you eat’ and that the quality of the food you buy and prepare really matters. Okay, that’s my soap box pitch for tonight, and since my entire day revolved about food in one way or another, that just about wraps it up for today.
I’ll just add a little update on how Mark is doing. He has stopped taking nausea medications around the clock, but he is finding that he still needs to take something just before he takes his chemo pills at 10 am. If he does not, he can make it through the afternoon with the help of the diffuser with peppermint oil, but he really can’t eat as much as he needs to. So for now he takes one pill for nausea and that seems to do it for the 24 hour period. We still don’t have a complete handle on this as he never seems to have two days in row that are the same. But things are MUCH better than they were when he started this trial. So day by day, we are making progress.
by Judy Handley | Apr 29, 2016 | Sailing Logs Year 11 |
Day 190, Year 11: Canning Magic
Date: Friday, April 29, 2016
Weather: Mostly Sunny, High in the 50’s F
Location: At Home in Evergreen Preserve, Lowell, MA
Bet you didn’t know you can ‘can’ magic. But I am here to tell you that you can. At the end of today, I ended up with 19 pints of magic in the form of Magic Mineral Chicken and Veggie Broth. Nineteen pints seems like a lot, but we use at least one pint every day and sometimes four or more. So I have to keep making and canning it in hopes of keeping Mark feeling good while in chemotherapy. I never in my life thought I would be so convinced that bone broth is REALLY so very good for you, but I am. With it, Mark’s blood counts seem to remain stable. Without it, things start to drop. He drinks a cup every morning just like I drink my coffee. But I think I’m going to start drinking the bone broth with him. It has glycosaminoglycans, both glucosamine and chondroitin, which so many of us take in a pill form to keep our joints ‘greased’. Bone broth is also good for your skin, for your gut, and it reduces your need for meat and protein. All in all, bone broth made from organic chicken or beef bones with lots of organic veggies added to mix is a dynamite addition to the diet. Our grandmothers made bone broth as a matter of course, but somewhere along the line, the art was lost. But it has been revived big time in this household.
by Judy Handley | Apr 28, 2016 | Sailing Logs Year 11 |
Day 189, Year 11: Shopping, Cooking, Planning
Date: Thursday, April 28, 2016
Weather: Sunny, High in the 60’s F
Location: At Home in Evergreen Preserve, Lowell, MA
Today was spent shopping, cooking, and planning. We first went food shopping to get the ingredients needed to make chicken and vegetable Magic Mineral Broth. That job is done and tomorrow I will can it. Making the chicken broth requires roasting an organic chicken first, so I did that and we had it for dinner. I also made almond muffins. Boy, they are yummy.
In between cooking, we talked through our options for packing up Windbird. Mark talked to Lee and Lee really thinks everything can be packed up without us having to come there. We are going to proceed on that premise for now and I will spend a little time each day sending written directions for what is located in the various storage areas on the boat and what we want, what should stay on the boat, and what can be thrown out or given away. When we went food shopping we stopped by a U-Haul dealer to check out the sizes of the trailers and the kind of hitch that can be used. Lee thinks we are going to need the largest trailer which is 5 feet by 12 feet. We’ll run that my Heather and Jon tomorrow to see if they are willing to transport something that large. But the great news is that little by little, we are planning and making decisions that will get all of our belongings from there to here. Tomorrow will be more of the same, hopefully with a little more time for walking and reading.
by Judy Handley | Apr 27, 2016 | Sailing Logs Year 11 |
Day 188, Year 11: Overwhelmed with Kindness
Date: Wednesday, April 27, 2016
Weather: Beautiful Day, Still Cool, High in the 50’s F
Location: At Home in Evergreen Preserve, Lowell, MA
Yesterday’s log was entitled ‘Thanks and Praises for Friends’ and today we have even more thanks and praises. We are absolutely overwhelmed with the generosity of our friends. This morning while I was reading an email from Lynda offering to continue to help packing up the rest of our belongings on Windbird, we got an email from Heather and Jon Turgeon. They were offering to stop in Little River on their way home from Florida to Vermont and haul our things north for us. Mark and I have spent days trying to figure out how to get all of our belongings from South Carolina to Cape Cod and we just have not been able to come up with a way to do it in the six day window we have between Mark’s treatments. The offer from Heather and Jon felt like a miracle in the making. How could we be so lucky?
You might ask, who are Heather and Jon? The answer to that question takes us back to 2003 when we moved aboard Windbird in Shipyard Quarters Marina in Boston. Actually Shipyard is in Charlestown, across the harbor from Boston proper. I had insisted that we live aboard for a year or two before heading around the world. I wanted to find out if I really could live on a sailboat, so we put everything we owned in storage and moved aboard. It was July and before the end of the month we had met most of the other couples that were living aboard. There were Dick and Claire who lived on their trawler four days a week and on Fridays drove back to their home in North Falmouth on the Cape. Dick was the head of OR at Mass General and had to be at work very early in the morning. So instead of making the pain staking commute from the Cape to Boston, he and Claire, formerly sailors, bought a trawler and lived aboard part-time. Years later it was Dick that got us connected to Mass General when Mark was diagnosed with cancer. We will be forever grateful for his connections and his insistence on getting us connected. Dick and Claire were about our age, but then there was the younger crowd. We met Kevin and Claire who arrived at Shipyard about the same time as we did. Claire was a graduate student at Harvard Medical and she and Kevin bought and moved aboard Merganser to avoid paying the outrageous costs of renting an apartment in Boston. We became friends forever. Kevin is THE Kevin who flew to West Palm Beach in February at a moment’s notice to help us get Windbird to South Carolina. And then there was Heather and Jon who lived aboard Evergreen, their immaculately kept Toshiba. Heather was a research nurse at Mass General and Jon worked in the computer world. When we met them, they had already taken a year’s sabbatical to explore the Caribbean and were hoping to sail around the world one day. Currently they are fulfilling that dream. Recently they had Evergreen shipped from Thailand to Greece and they are home for a short visit with family before returning to the Med and eventually sailing home to New England. Lucky for us, they are in Florida right now visiting with Jon’s parents and during the second week of May they will be driving back to Vermont. Heather said in her email this morning that she read in our log that we might need help getting things from South Carolina to here and she and Jon were offering to haul things in their SUV or haul things in a U-Haul trailer for us. Totally unbelievable.
After getting that email, I started checking the costs of a trailer rental and the possibility of flights to and from Myrtle Beach so we can be there to help. It is all possible, but the hang up is Mark’s situation right now. One day he is fine; the next he is nauseous and weak. I could leave him here alone and fly down to do the packing, but he would feel better going with me. But it is really not something he should be doing right now. When we stay home so he can rest, eat victuals I conjure up for him every couple of hours, and use the infuser with peppermint oil to fight off nausea, he is fine. But when we go out, like we did yesterday to have lunch with friends, or like we did today when we had to go to the hospital for his infusion, he has bouts of nausea and can’t eat as he should. So here’s our dilemma. Should we just stay here and let Lee and Lynda and other friends pack up everything we own on Windbird or we should we fly down for two days and help with the process. Or should I leave Mark here alone and go down to do the packing. My sense of guilt tells me I have to go. But then I talk to Lee and Lynda and Lee convinces me that I really don’t need to do this. They will somehow get everything packed and put into a U-Haul trailer and then Heather and Jon will come pick it up and head north. Just like magic.
Whatever we decide, it is just inconceivable to Mark and to me that friends are willing to do so much for us. We have sailing connections with all these friends, so maybe sailors are just generous people. Or maybe we have just been blessed with wonderful friends. Whatever, we are overwhelmed and grateful with the generous offers of help.
