The best recuperation!

For those that never have had a situation like mine, I hope to goodness you never have to.... but I do know there are some who read this blog who ARE going through it and for all of you, if you ever get an opportunity like I have to disappear for awhile and forget your troubles back home...TAKE IT!

I am doing the right things like chemo and radiation and surgery and positive attitude etc.... but I am SO relaxed here that I really am beginning to feel that THIS might be the most effective part of my healing process for beating cancer! Not only am I having a wonderful time, I am having the opportunity to get to know my inlaws even better than before and it has been GREAT! I know a lot of people who would shudder at spending 5 weeks with their inlaws - I am not one of them. I am one of the lucky few with fabulous inlaws which I have always said even before they bought a place in Desert Hot Springs and invited me down... LOL

Switching topics, even though I am on hiatus from working until my entire process is complete and the brain starts shifting back into 'the real world' where one has to start believing that the cancer is history and hence you gotta move back to the world of working & earning your keep, I do have work on my mind from time to time. Like today, for example, when we took a 'windmill tour' of a windpower farm.

The Palm Springs area lies between two mountain ranges that make a kind of funnel from the ocean near LA toward the inland. THe hot air of the desert heats up the land causing the hot air to rise and then a draft is created which sucks the marine air from the ocean and because of the mountains, the wind travels the path of least resistance between those mountains and through the valley. And that is why there are a gazillion wind turbines in this area.

Since I work in Crown lands, and one of the types of uses for Crown land that has started to get really popular in the last few years, is the use of windpower. OK - the applications for these at my work are a bit of pain in the buttocular region, especially because the process is newish and we aren't fully experts yet (or should I say weren't when I left - perhaps they are now). So obviously this topic interests people for a variety of reasons since our bus was full and none of the others work for FCBC.... but I was especially interested because of work. It was FASCINATING. Before I go recommending everyone to take the tour, I should explain that it is about 90 minutes long - is mostly a bus tour in which the bus is poorly air conditioned, and the guide spoke a mile a minute spewing hundreds of interesting facts that were boggling our minds. So perhaps this tour isn't for EVERYone, but if the windmill producing electricity thing piques your interest, THEN I would say that you should take the tour. If you're not really interested in them to begin with, then you probably won't enjoy it.

But I feel like I know a lot more about windpower now than I ever learned dealing with applications for Crown land that want to develop wind farms! (the tour is a mere $25 - perhap I should approach my workplace about financing trips to Palm Springs for 'training'.... HA HA HA)

On another note, I told someone the other day that I feel as though my 'chemo brain' is improving as I don't seem to be forgetting as much.... OR... it has progressed so far now that I don't even notice what I'm forgetting..... either way - it's an improvement!

There is a guy here and he takes care of his mother who has dementia. They live near the pool area and he is usually with her, but sometimes he arrives alone at the pool for waterball. Yesterday, during the game, someone said something about the 'flag'. I didn't know what they were talking about but this guy leaped out of the pool and someone said he was going to look for his mom. So when I walked by his place, I realized that he has rigged a system where there is a rolled up flag sticking up which he can see from the pool. When he leaves the house with his mom still there, he closes the door and rolls up the flag. If she opens the door, the flag unrolls and he knows that his mom is 'on the loose'. Quite ingenious! And everyone in the park knows the drill so they will let him know right away if the flag is out and he didn't notice first....

Oh yah - on Saturday night, we took the aerial tram up the side of a mountain and had dinner at a swank restaurant at the top. It's a gondola type thing - yes- it's a little scary - but I managed to do it without crying (unlike the ride at Disneyland) and also without freaking out (unlike the ferris wheel at California Adventure). I asked the tram driver how the tram was affected by the earthquake several weeks ago. Turns out he was ON the tram during the earthquake and he didn't feel a thing. He found out about the earthquake via radio from other workers on the ground. But they shut the thing down for about 1.5 hours while they inspected all the towers and lines and important things that keep it running. Of course, I didn't remember about the earthquake until I was already on the gondola.... I wonder if I would have agreed to go on if I'd remembered first. It would NOT be pretty to be in the gondola when 'the big one' hits. Which everyone is talking a LOT about these days down here.....

Lots of tangents in this post. My mind is going everywhere! Alas, I'll sign off so as not to bore anyone. (or should I say bore anyone further)

TA TA