California Here I Come

For many years, I stayed home with the kids while Rene traveled for work. We always looked forward to the time when I could go on some of his trips with him. Well, that opportunity finally came last week. He had meetings in Napa, California and we decided that I'd go with him. Our trip can be divided into three parts:

Napa: We flew into Sacramento on Monday. Since we had nothing to do for a couple of hours, we drove up to the foothills to Coloma, where gold was discovered. It's really pretty there and we enjoyed it.

We then drove a couple of hours to Napa. The hotel we stayed at was very nice, but Napa itself was pretty unimpressive. It has a cute old downtown, but then we've LIVED in cute places before. There are grapevines, but they sit side by side with Wal-Mart, or the industrial park or whatever, like a corn field would here. While Rene was in meetings on Tuesday, I met a friend from Sacramento for lunch and we had such a good time taking about just about everything.
Redwood forests: On Thursday, we left bright and early and drove north to see the Redwoods. On the drive, we saw some pretty impressive crops. We saw rice fields, almond and olive trees, and of course, the ubiqitous grapvines. (I guess that's what happens when you're married to a farmer for 31 years. Crops become an important topic of conversation.) We also saw a bobcat, elk and turkeys (woohoo). We stopped for lunch in Garberville, California, where we ate at an all-organic restaurant with a bunch of aging hippies and surfer dudes. The Redwoods themselves are very impressive--we're glad we made the effort. At one point, we left the beaten path to drive through a redwood forest on this little teeny road and you would have been proud of me. We followed this road up the mountainside, over the top and down to a pretty valley. I'll write more about that in a later post. This winding little road took us right to the Pacific Ocean, up over more mountains and down into Eureka, where we spent the night. This little side trip was about 75 miles, but took us FOUR hours to drive. That's how winding and steep it was.

The next day, we headed back over the mountains and south to Sacramento. On the way, we were told to watch out for these falling pinecones. They are big and pointy and weighed about 5 lbs apiece! I guess if one fell on your car, you'd know it. We visited a really cute old adobe home where the only governor of the Republic of California lived. We also stopped at a place the processes and sells olives and tasted some of the varieties. We finished the day by flying out of Sacramento to Salt Lake.

Saturday morning, Rene, Janet, Sarah and Casie (and a few hundred other people) ran in the Cougar 5K. We enjoyed spending the day together and topped it off with the BYU-TCU game. It was great to see the girls and we're happy that they're doing well.

Sunday, we went to Sacrament meeting with Rene's brother Blair, then hopped on the plane and came home. It was a fun, fun trip, but I was glad to get home.

Some things I learned from this trip:

I don't really like drippy morning fog, but otherwise, the weather in California is great.

Our ancestors were remarkable people. (More about that later.)

Man's creations are nothing compared with the beautiful world God created for us.

Our children have been blessed and are doing well.

I still don't enjoy flying.

Disclaimer: This post has thoughtful and insightful stuff.

We really had a good summer, full of wonderful things. I enjoyed having Joanna and Janet home. Our trip to Memphis was great; we're glad we could be part of significant family events and it was so, so fun to see Joseph, Tracy and Afton. It is great to have Ben, Shannon and Macey close enough to see on a regular basis. We are so thankful for the safe arrival of sweet Lauren and the amazing and wonderful news that Joseph and Tracy's family will add another child in January. The family reunion was outstanding and it's always a sweet experience to be with family. It was a thrill to welcome Sarah home at the end of the summer. We enjoyed all kinds of fun events this summer and as we move into fall and winter, it makes us happy to see our kids' lives moving forward in righteous and fulfilling ways.

Yet, as is always true in life, there have been challenges for all of us this summer. Whether it's the day-to-day challenges of taking care of a newborn, being pregnant or searching for a job, each of us has had need of faith and patience. My recent surgery was an occasion for me to exercise faith and look forward with hope toward the future. I'm not always really good at doing that, so I'm so grateful for all the prayers and the fasting and the warm and fuzzy thoughts that have come my way over the past four months. I love and appreciate you all so much! And Janet, now you have something to include in your next talk on fasting.

So here's the whole long story of my recent thyroid surgery.

At the end of June, I went to the doctor for a checkup. About a week before that, I had noticed a lump in the right side of my throat. Having had siblings with thyroid issues, I assumed that it was something with my thyroid. So, at the doctor's office, she said that it was enlarged and that I would need to have an ultrasound. So that took place about a week and a half later. To my surprise, I not only had one thyroid nodule, I had six of them of various sizes on both sides of my thyroid. Officially, I was diagnosed with a "multinodular goiter." I thought goiters only happened in parts of the world where people didn't get enough iodine. But I learned that the word goiter refers to any swelling of the thyroid. I was sent to a surgeon who does most of the thyroid surgeries in town for further consultation.

I learned some surprising things at the surgeon's. He told me that 50% of women age 50 or older have thyroid nodules, even if they are not aware of it. And the vast majority of them are benign. To determine if mine were benign or not, I needed to go have the "most worrisome" two of the nodules biopsied. They wouldn't do both of them at once, so that took two more weeks. Then the surgeon insisted on sending them to Mayo, since it can be very hard to determine when the cell sample is so small. That took two more weeks. Well, it turned out that the one on the left was clearly benign. The large one, the one I had felt on the right, turned out to be a kind that cannot be determined without being able to thoroughly examine it and see if it is invading the thyroid or just pushing thyroid tissue aside. So, I needed surgery. (And by the way, I was seeing a surgeon. I would have been kind of surprised had he NOT said I needed surgery.)

With all the things we had going on and with Rene's busy work travel schedule, the soonest I could fit a surgery in was three weeks. When I called to schedule it, it turns out that the surgeon was out of town for two weeks then. So it was scheduled for Tuesday, Oct. 13.

Despite all my worries, the surgery itself went very well. I'm not a fan of anesthesia, but I really didn't experience any after effects. The official result on the nodule was "benign, consistent with Hashimoto's thyroiditis." So pending anything further on the final report from the pathologist, everything is good here.

I'll admit that I worried some, but for the most part, I was able to forget about it for long periods of time. The Sunday and Monday before the surgery were the most tense.

Here are pictures of what my throat looked like the day after surgery and what it looks like now, with the big gauze pad off. I think it looks pretty good, but the scar really has been one of the least of my worries.

Wedding Ring Blues

Yesterday, I had a partial thyroidectomy. Everything is going well and I'll blog about the actual experience later, but I wanted to tell you about one of the most stressful parts of the surgery. No, it wasn't the uncertainty of exactly what the surgeon was going to find or do, or the rigors of the anesthesia,which I hate. No, one thing that stressed me a LOT was the fact that I had to take off my wedding ring. I don't mean that it was some of kind of emotional event to take off the ring I've worn for 31 years. No, I mean that the act of actually physically getting that ring off was stressful. I can't even remember the last time I took it off. It was probably about 22 years ago when I had some minor surgery. Five years ago, for our 25th anniversary, Rene got me a diamond ring. I wanted to wear it on my ring finger, but couldn't get the original plain gold wedding band off even then. Once I got it almost halfway up on my knuckle, but it was turning my finger purple and making it swell, so I gave it up. Well, now it had to come off. I tried everything I had heard of, including Windex and Becky's dental floss trick. All I got out of all that was a very red and swollen finger. Finally, I decided I'd have to have it cut off.

Well, I found out that the emergency room at the hospital charges $80 to cut it off, and a jeweler costs about $20 if you then pay them to fix it afterwards. Well, the ring does have some sentimental value, but we only paid $35 for it 31 years ago!

So here's what I did. I went to Menard's and I bought a skinny little file. I came home and poked some toothpicks under my ring to steady it and to provide some space between the ring and my finger for protection. And then I proceeded to saw my ring apart. It worked like a charm and only took about 12 minutes of filing. I think it is fixable if I ever get around to taking it in to a jeweler to resize it. I think the hangup in getting it off isn't fat fingers, although I freely admit I weigh much more than I did 31 years ago. I think the reason I couldn't get it off is all this flabby, wrinkly old person loose skin! It's a good thing that I had to take it off, too, because the groove on my finger still hasn't gone away and it's been over two days!

Bibliomania

My sister Emily says that they have a problem with shoes. We have the same problem to a degree, but a greater problem in our house is books. Despite our best efforts, we have so many books! Every good librarian knows that one needs to "weed" the collection, so this week, I did some of that. When we moved from Mount Vernon, we got rid of at least half of our books, but for every one we get rid of, two (or even three!) seem to take its place. A quick reading just now of the top shelf of the bookcase in our upstairs hallway includes these titles: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 41 Stories by O. Henry, Papa's Daughter, National Geographic's Great Britain, Favorite Christian Poems, Hello, Cosmo! (required reading to be part of the family), Jane Eyre, three of the Ender series, The Metamorphosis, Little Women, Feeding and Improvement of Farm Animals, My Antonia, Agatha Christie: Five Complete Novels, and The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963. Obviously, we're a bunch of pretty eclectic readers. The books we have around here have come to us in several ways.

1. Dad used to send or bring us boxes of books that Northern had weeded from its library and he thoughtfully picked up for us. There are some classics in this group, including the infamous Dam book and Janet's favorite, Here Comes the Bus!

Her ownership of this book is proclaimed this way:

It looks like her name was written by either Emily or me, but she obviously wrote the rest herself.

2. When the kids would bring home flyers from the Scholastic Book Club, they were usually allowed to buy one. When they were in Middle School, they had book fairs in the fall and spring and sometimes the kids bought books there. There are lots of picture books from that era, but also some interesting chapter books, including Dogs Don't Tell Jokes, People Do and A Day No Pigs Would Die.

3. This leads to another category--books people had to read for school. This is a pretty mixed bunch. There are some great books like The Weirdo by Theodore Taylor or The Chosen by Chaim Potok. There are lots of so-called classics that people had to read but would probably never choose to read on their own, like the aforementioned The Metamorphosis, or Their Eyes Were Watching God, or my least favorite of all time, The Lord of the Flies. This category even includes some college textbooks that the bookstore wouldn't buy back, but they're too good or too potentially useful to throw away.

4. Some of us have our own collections of titles. I have most of Georgette Heyer's books and a lot of Ngaio Marsh mysteries. Rene used to have an almost complete collection of Louis L'Amour, but he sold them when we moved. We also have the Twilight series, the Harry Potter series and the series by Scott Westfield that includes the Uglies, the Pretties, etc. That brings up a tangential question. Why do so many popular authors of today write such darn long books?

5. We also have quite a collection of reference books which includes a bunch of Spanish dictionaries and this little gem that Emily used for Power of the Pen:

It is touchingly inscribed "Hi Emily, Good luck at POP. We're Superior", "Hi Emily, Good Luck, Eat Cheesecake factories snake!" and "Good Luck! Sarah Tomita "Haras". I have actually used this book on occasion. We used to have a World Book Encyclopedia and, I swear, the kids would take volumes of it to bed with them as a little pre-slumber reading.

All this does not even take into account our Church books (two bookcases), Rene's work reference library, piano books, maps, family history tomes, and so on. Looks like we won't run out of something to read in the near future!

Olympics

I see from the news that the Olympics were awarded to Rio, not to Chicago. Darn! If Chicago got them, they were going to have the mountain biking venue near Madison. Teehee...it's FLAT around Madison!