Life of Wry

T’was a lovely day for a walk a bit north of town. This is some private property where Carrie likes to take Shasta the dog, so she can run around leashless, chasing turkeys and whatever else tries to elude her (the dog that is).

To get there, you drive up Rd 102, turn on maybe 26A, maybe catch a bit of 102B, and since there’s no sign posted that warns you to stay out, you just park and wander. You’ll pass a whole lotta pistachios, a just cleaned up tomato field, another where sunflowers bloomed this past summer, a bunch of oak, a dried up slough, lots of poison oak (very red and visible right now!)… and other things. Kinda fun to be out there. I liked it.

~~

To note: I was a bit nervous walking out in the fields under a bright fall sun, as I’d applied my first dose of efudex this morning — day one of a 21-day course — and knew I had to be 100% protected from UV rays. (Efudex is that topical cream that kills would-be skin cancers and is something fair-skinned people like me who’ve spent too much time in the sun are advised to consider using every couple years.) Since it’s essential that you avoid sun when using efudex, I had a thick layer of sunscreen, a broad-brimmed hat AND carried an umbrella. Well, this evening, after doing the math and realizing that day 21 lands on Thanksgiving (really? I hadn’t figured that out when I decided to start the treatment today?!), I decided to suspend the whole thing and restart the treatment on December 26. I just can’t have my face all red and cracked and flaking and oozing and hurting as I prepare a Thanksgiving dinner for visiting family and friends. I’d be uncomfortable, they’d be grossed out. It took looking at the photos from 2014 — the last time I did an efudex treatment — to convince me I’d made a huge mistake in starting today. So I stopped. Yay. Just wanted to remember that.