More Good News

Hi Everyone,

I hope and pray that everyone had a wonderful and worshipful Christmas. J and I were in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, taking care of J's brother. We attended a Christmas Eve service at a Presbyterian church there. I confess to being simultaneously seized with the giggles and with joy at the end of the service when we raised our candles and all joined in Haendel's Hallelujah chorus. The joy came from the sheer delight of that wondrous music; the giggles came from a powerful tiny operatic soprano who managed to drown the 150 others of us who were singing. Afterwards we decompressed for a few days in New Orleans in the Vieux Carre with our friends in ministry there. We are always well loved by them.

My blood counts continue to be stable. My white cell counts, though still high, have not gone up, and my red cell counts continue to be rock solid and normal. The oncologist is very puzzled. He tells me that he has never had a leukemia patient with such stable white blood cell counts in 35 years of practice, apparently they normally bounce all over the place. I have developed some swollen lymph nodes in my neck and arm pit, but they are not yet large enough to be "officially" swollen. So the disease is growing but at a slow slow pace. I have been demoted from 3 month visits to 6 month visits/3 month blood tests which is a wonderful development. So we know ourselves to be truly and deeply sustained by your love and your prayers. Thank you.

We are finally having our empty third floor worked on. The ramparts, mansard roof, and windows are being repaired. The brick tuckpointing is being repaired and all the third floor windows will be replaced. The window facing the backyard will be replaced with a door.We are very excited about all this. We also had 5 junk trees taken down in the backyard and we had the old sewage system replaced. They had to dig out so much contaminated earth that we have put in a giant mound of soil to replace it. We are told that it will take two years for the soil to sink down into the long hole. It looks like someone blew up our formerly lovely garden and replaced it with a giant slug and a collection of weeds. Since the house is our greatest investment/entrustment, we feel the need to keep it in good shape, and we decided to use a portion of J's termination package from work to get all the work done. So there was one blessing from that event.

This has been the "year of the varmint" in our house. The new roofs will be a great help in our ongoing battle with pigeons roosting up there and pecking through the rotten parts. We also bought a few hundred feet of anti pigeon wire to ward them off. Our neighbors suffered a fire this Summer and decided to take the opportunity to do some badly needed updates. They dug out the old cinder basement floor (by hand with a volunteer team of 25 men and buckets and wheelbarrows. The source of the big free earth slug in our backyard) and went down two feet in order to install a modern concrete floor and plumbing. This is wonderful, but it disturbed the old rat tunnels that wind around under our 150 year old neighborhood and the varmints decided that our basement would make a dandy new domicile. We finally had the rats exterminated by the early Fall when we noticed strange scratchy sounds in our bedroom ceiling. Could it be squirrels again? We thought that we had conquered those last Winter. Happily thinking that we had one squirrel up there, we set out traps. We caught one, then another, then another... To date we have caught five and are working on number 6. The cat, however, is dong its duty with the mice and we think that they are gone. Varmints! Everywhere!

On that note, I will close.