Pinterest Challenge

Ahhh Pinterest. How I love you. You provide inspiration, relaxation (time wasting) and a place to store ideas. I love perusing pins and pinning. As with all art, sometimes it is all about the process and not the product! Yet, other times I need to remember to stop the pinning and start the doing. Luckily,  Sycamore Stirrings reminded (and inspired) me last week with her Pinterest Challenge.

I've made a few things over the past few months - enough so that I created an "I Made This" board to keep up the doing and to keep me honest. It makes me feel good to move a pin every once in a while to this board! Now, thanks to Sycamore Stirrings, I can move a few more.

Last week I didn't do any crafts but I did try some new recipes. I made these vegan meatballs, this quinoa salad (trying to get more quinoa in our diet but the kid is not having it) and these green cake muffins (Monkey's friend loved them but Monkey not so much). Sometime in the near future I hope to make this homework holder (which I planned to make months ago - but maybe I'll make it before school starts next year!) and this wall art project (I bought the letter for it months ago). I refuse to beat myself up about it - but I hope I will continue chipping away at pins from time to time. I've even thought of hosting a "Pinterest Party" where friends can get together and bring a pin they'd like to start on. We can spread out on the dining table and get to work. If I ever get it off the ground I'll be sure to let you know!

Monkey, spaghetti and "meat" balls

PSA

I long for the days when PSA was just a random, non-threatening string of letters. An acronym that could have stood for anything and certainly had no bearing on my life. But ever since spring 2005 Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) has been anything but non-threatening.

You might be lucky and wondering, "What the heck is PSA?" Well, short story is that it's the stuff that prostates give off - and it's measurable. So if your number is rising it means that prostate cells are growing. And if it's rising they are growing fast. And generally, that means prostate cancer. In addition, if you've had your prostate removed - technically your PSA should be untraceable since you shouldn't have any prostate cells to produce PSA. So if you have a traceable PSA and it goes up over time - you've got prostate cells growing somewhere in your body. Sucks, right? So when you're diagnosed and have had treatment you go in every so often to find out your number. So that's PSA in a nutshell.

So in Mr. Monkey's case it's been rising the past few months (he's had his prostate removed, radiated and been treated with hormones) and so have the hours of my awake time. So I fill that time with other, less threatening acronyms - fb, dvr, sois (staring off into space). Although my favorite pastime is denial and avoidance. After all, it's how I deal with housework and other unwanted things. May as well use the same coping mechanism for cancer. But I did do some vacuuming today - so next week I will begin researching new treatment options for the next phase.

So wish us luck - and hopefully we'll have a new path mapped out soon (as well as a clean kitchen) but let's not get ahead of ourselves.