A Spork in the Road

I found a link to the website for one of my all-time favorite books about architecture and home planning: The Not So Big House.

I love this book (series of books, actually) for both aesthetic and environmental reasons. They are extraordinarily well written and well thought-out.

The basic premise is this: leaving everything else aside, the modern oversized American floorplan is badly designed and ends up feeling smaller than a well-designed smaller floorplan.

I highly recommend the website and books to anyone who’s thinking about reworking their current living spaces or buying/building a new home.

Forgot to take my meds this morning until after lunch.

This was good in that I did well all morning sans anti-nausea meds (despite Tuesday’s queasiness).

This was bad in that I will now probably be awake half the night from taking steroids so late in the day. Ah well. More hours to read my new Chaim Potok novel.

(What happened was, I took a rest after lunch, and thought, Gee, I feel awfully tired considering I took steroids this morning. Wait, did I take steroids this morning? Nope. I did not.)

I have my PET scan this coming Tuesday — my first PET scan since diagnosis.

My oncologist is confident that the scan will come back normal, in which case my final chemo infusion will be on March 31. Your prayers/good thoughts/white light/intercession of choice are all much appreciated.

Yesterday I slept through chemo, except for the Vinblastine push, whose sickening sweet smell kept me awake for those 3 minutes. I woke up for a bit near the end of chemo and drank some Powerade, which was red, and which I had a little trouble drinking because it reminded me of the red Adriamycin drug. (A fellow patient said one place she used to go for chemo had a tile pattern than included red tiles, and they had to change them because the folks on Adriamycin would get the dry heaves just looking at the red tiles.) Then I went to lunch, then went home and slept until 7:00pm. Then I got up for a while, feeling very queasy, and read and chatted, and moaned for a while, and went back to sleep around 9:00pm.

I got up this morning feeling much better, although, you know, not normal. But not miserable. Just a little fuzzy and short-attention-spanned.

And steroids can really make you grouchy.

Anyway, I’m resigned to another weekend of feeling more or less useless (although maybe if I juice and drink enough water and am not fighting a cold, I’ll at least feel better than I did last post-chemo weekend). Hopefully next week I won’t have a cold at all and I’ll feel human for a few days.

What’s really exciting is being able to see the day that would normally have begun a new chemo cycle but that I don’t have to go for chemo at all. The mere thought of that day fills me with light and joy!

I’ll keep y’all posted about the PET scan and pursuant doctor consultations.

I am one of those people who reads the dictionary as if it were a novel.

Some day, when I have more disposable income, I’m going to subscribe to the Oxford English Dictionary online.

This is a project fully suited to the web. Given the rate of expansion of the English language, it’s laughable to print an unabridged dictionary at all. It’s out of date before it comes off the press.

I finished Madame Bovary yesterday. (By Gustave Flaubert, sur bien. Originally published 1857. Translated by Geoffrey Wall. Penguin Classics edition.)

The gorgeous cover art for the book was perfectly chosen. The painting (The Woman in Blue by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot) beautifully fits my mental image of Emma Bovary.

As for the book itself, it was wonderful. I especially loved Flaubert’s wit and humor, as seen in passages like this:

She was irritated by the ritual ordinances; the arrogance of the polemical writings displeased her by their relentless carping at people she had never heard of… She persisted, though, and, when the volume fell from her hands, she thought herself seized with the finest Catholic melancholy that ever an ethereal soul could conceive of.

• Order a used copy of this book from Amazon…
• …or support the wonderful Powell’s