Summer Travel Map

Monday, December 10, 2012

November 1-December 10: Doctors, Dentists and Vets


December 10, 2012
Cederholm Compound, Peoria, AZ

Wow!  It’s been a busy six weeks!  We’ve had all our doctor and dentist visits and everything is OK.  Geri had her 3.5-year MRI of her kidney, and everything is fine; she can go to annual checks at this point.  Her periodontist did find the beginnings of an abscess, but that was addressed quickly with antibiotics.

On the pet front, we had another scare with Maya Lynn.  She developed a small bump on her shoulder. And it looked like another mast cell tumor, so she went in for surgery and had it removed.  Pathology came back negative, so that was good news.  Unfortunately, it looks like the heavy doses of Prednisone that she got prior to surgery may have triggered a diabetic reaction, so we’re now giving her insulin injections twice a day.  She’s tolerating that well, thank goodness.

Other than that, things have begun to quiet down.  We’ve been eating and drinking well, and enjoying the wines in the “wine box” that have been aging nicely while we were away.  I’ve been working to get back into a routine of alternating 3-5 mile walks with 10-12 mile bike rides.

Speaking of bike rides, Geri got her Christmas present early.  She asked Santa for a small trailer that she can pull behind her bike for the pups to ride with her.  After some quick and painless assembly, she was off and touring the neighborhood.  It’s a hoot, and the dogs love it!

We did treat ourselves to a night out early this month.  I’d seen tickets for the Trans-Siberian Orchestra online and snapped up a pair.  Their rocking Christmas shows are quite stimulating!  We haven’t seen them in a few years (and don’t do a lot of concerts), so this was a nice change of pace for us.  Plus, the show was relatively close, at the hockey arena in Glendale about 4 miles from the house.

Geri got an additional early Christmas present this year, courtesy of eBay.  I was able to find a reasonably good deal on a used MacBook Air for her.  Since we’ll be able to upgrade our phones next month, moving her to an all-Apple environment will make things much simpler.  She’s had quite a time keeping her Windows-based Outlook, Android phone and iPad in sync, for example.  Or, not in sync, as the case may be.  Since she’s primarily a mail and browser user, the MacBook Air is perfect for her.



I’ve spent some time on the technology front as well, upgrading my iMac to 16gb of memory and migrating the two Windows-based programs I still use (Quicken for finances and Streets & Trips for travel planning) to run there using a “virtual machine”.  I tried Parallels but ended up getting VMware as the performance is much better.  It looks like our collection of Windows-based laptops will soon head for eBay!

And finally, we leveraged the Christmas spirit generated by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra show to get the holiday decorating done.  We don’t go overboard but do put up a tree and a few decorations inside, plus some lights outside.  This year's activities were a little complicated because last January we decided to toss or donate all the old lights that were getting old and starting to fail.  LED lights are the future, so that’s what we’re aiming for in terms of replacements.  Unfortunately, we didn’t take advantage of last year’s after-Christmas sales for stock up on said LED lights.  So, we’ve made several shopping trips trying to find lights we like.  I’m happy to say that we’re almost done with that process and hope to finish up at this year’s clearance sales; we have enough decorations in place for now.  So, as they say, “it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas”!


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