Day 59, Year 10: Happy Birthday to Jed
Date: Monday, December 8, 2014
Weather: Overcast and Windy; High Temp in the 50’s F, Low in the mid-30’s
Location: R Dock, Lightkeepers Marina, Little River, SC
Today is our son-in-law’s birthday. Happy birthday, Jed! He is forty-three today and too busy to celebrate. Heather’s public radio station is doing fund-raising and she was on the air in the late afternoon. Sam had a scout meeting and Jed had a Board of Health meeting. Hopefully things will slow down a bit by the weekend and they can have a proper celebration. In the meantime, we will be thinking happy birthday thoughts.
Mark and Lee worked all day on installing Sea Turtle’s new inverter, but the job is not yet complete. West Marine here is closed on Mondays, so they bought the wiring they needed at Lowe’s. It was not until near the end of the day when they were getting ready to hook things up that they realized that the 10 gauge wire they bought was not the right stuff. It was 10-gauge, but inside the outer coating was a solid copper wire. This is fine for common house wiring, but not for boats that are constantly on the move. Boats need 10-gauge stranded or braided wire. We’ll check in the morning to see if the local West Marine has what is needed, but if not, we know that the West Marine south of Myrtle Beach has it. Since we are near that area tomorrow to meet with Mark’s oncologist, I can go pick up the wiring while he is getting his treatment. Then it will be back to Lightkeepers to hopefully finish the installation of the inverter.
I spent my day doing a bit of this and a bit of that. I finished the last of the online Christmas shopping for our kids and grandkids, went to the PO to send a couple of packages, went to Staples to get new pages copied for our ship’s log book, and did a bit of food shopping. Late in the afternoon, Mark and I went to Patsy and Joe’s to package up some the photos we have been storing there for past ten years. We have five large plastic bins full of boxes and albums of photos plus other memorabilia. I was afraid to put these precious items in our storage unit as I thought they would get ruined, so Patsy offered to keep them when we left to sail around the world. Since then we have learned that the storage facility is safe and are now repackaging the photos so they can be sent in the mail to Massachusetts in case Patsy and Joe move before we get back in April. Little by little all of the jobs are getting done that need to be completed before we sail south from here the end of the month. We have only six more days before we fly to Puerto Rico. And when we return, we will have only three or four days to do the last minute provisioning. Then we sail away.
As I mentioned previously, tomorrow morning Mark meets with the oncologist here. She will review the results of last week’s scan and make recommendations for further treatments. Mark will also have a treatment tomorrow, the last until we get back from Puerto Rico. We will have some indication of whether or not the current treatment, panatumumab, has been working. But we might not have to the total picture until we hear from the oncologist at Mass General. The scan was sent to her and she is having it reviewed there as well. Since all previous scans have been done there, they will be able to make the comparisons from scan to scan that are so critical. At the same time, it will be interesting to get an evaluation from the oncologist here. Anticipation.
