Crisp and Cold Wintry Day

It is crisp and cold here today.  I took a picture of the frost this morning...you can see it on the trees, grass, and the top of the gazebo.  (I don't know if you can see it or not in this picture, but those flowers that were magically growing out there in the boxes...yeah, they're dead now.)

The sun is just rising in this picture.  It isn't quite over the treetops yet.  In the distance you can even see some of our mountains.  There are others about 20 miles northeast from us.  (Hey, Tom...aren't you proud of me?  I used directional words like 'north' and 'east' properly in a sentence.  I hope anyway...lol.  One of my personal deficiencies is the inability to find my way out of a paper bag with only one hole in it.  Yeah for a GPS!!!!)  These mountains aren't as good as TN mountains but they are still pretty to look at.

It was funny...I took this picture for the blog today and not 10 minutes later, Tom sends me an email and talks about it being cold this morning but that he liked it this way.  We think so much alike.  It has been wet and cold here lately and we don't like that kind of weather.  This feels like Christmas is really on the way.

As I've talked about on the blog before, I have a Boeing Wellness Health 'person' that calls me and discusses ways to relieve stress (meditation was one of their suggestions...I tried it and told them..."Yeah, good luck with that...I can hardly sit still for 5 minutes, what else have you got?").  They hooked me up with a cancer nurse who answers all my questions pertaining to what I am going through right now.  

So, she called me yesterday and we discussed 'Cancer stuff'.  I almost didn't answer the phone because I wasn't in the mood nor did I think she could provide me with any info that I hadn't already researched and figured out but, actually, she was a wealth of information.  She had a good analagy for why chemo seems to hit me harder each time I get another dose.  She said it was like I started out taking chemo with an empty sack.  Then with each dose, 10 lbs of weights are added to the sack.  So, now I am up to 50 lbs of weights that I have to drag around with me.  She also said it takes about 6 months (on average) to recover from chemo.  So, by next July I should be feeling like my old self.  Hope, hope, hope...there is always hope that keeps me going.  8-)

I asked her about the 'smelling weird stuff' problem I have.  I smell chemo everywhere I go, all over the house, and my sense of smell is so heightened that I can't even stand my husband's cleaning solution for his electric razor.  (This currently resides in the garage because it was so nauseating...sorry, honey.)  She explained that not only have I lost all the hair on my head but also in my nose, which filtered out smells, so now I am getting them full force.  I had never thought about losing the hair in my nose...good grief, I never even thought about having hair in my nose before.  That also explains the increased allergies since chemo to some degree probably. 

Anyway, we talked about other stuff too but suffice it to say that she was just a wealth of information.

My cousin Andrea is going to send me some aloe plants.  I didn't even know she was reading the blog and poof, yesterday she posted that she has an entire yard full of aloe.  She lives out west and I don't know if it grows wild or if she just grows it because she likes the plant.  God is always preparing ways to meet needs, isn't he?  I am so blessed in so many ways that I can't even count.  (Thanks, Andrea for helping out!)

Hope everyone is having a great day!