Back in Blog

Two months? Seriously? I left you for nearly two months? I had no idea it had been that long since I blogged. I would have said 3, maybe 4 weeks. It's funny to think how crucial this blog had been to me just a year or so ago as I used it first to update friends and family and then to help me process the entire breast cancer odyssey. Now it seems like the odyssey was a lifetime ago. I think most of the side effects of chemo are gone--my hair looks reasonably normal (see new photo...which I'll explain in a moment), my feet are back to almost their pre-chemo size, I can no longer blame weight gain on chemo (as much as I'd like to) and most importantly, I don't very often think about "my" breast cancer or worry about recurrence. Apparently I even forgot about the blog.

So what have I been doing? Well, many exciting things. Our work carries on at The Pink Ribbon Place and in October we'll be doing a city-wide "Tuesdays for Ta-tas" event where each Tuesday night in the month of October different restaurants will donate twenty percent of the proceeds from diners who bring the flier with them. Thanks to Mi Tortilla, El Torito, Ciao Bella, and Phood on Main (all in Riverside) for participating. We've also got another Professionals Panel discussion coming up in November and the good and great Dr. Karam will once again make the trek from LA. I was also interviewed by Inland Empire magazine for their October "breast cancer awareness" issue and a photographer came to shoot pics of me and Seamus (not the photo you're looking at). I'll let you know if I make the article (I kind of think the writer might not have liked me much. Imagine! ;-).

I've also been hard at work on The Dog Lived memoir, which I'm really, really happy about. I spent 9 days in Ocean Isle Beach, NC with fellow writer and friend Lori Lacefield, doing nothing but writing, reading and relaxing (which of course means wine; maybe the occasional rum & coke). At this point, I've got a pretty solid (I think!) draft of the proposal done and about half the actual memoir.  [Blog readers who are also writers---what's the current thinking on memoir proposals? Is the manuscript supposed to be, like a novel, completed before the proposal is shopped to agents? Or, is it, like other non-fiction where the proposal is shopped before the manuscript is completed? Everything I found seems to be contradictory. So, at this point, I'm plodding ahead writing both. It was immensely helpful to get the chapter outlines and sample chapter written.]  The trip was such a writing success we've scheduled a sequel. Lori and I, together with another writing friend Jane (we all met at the Maui Writers Conference...which just cannot be a bad thing) will be heading to Paso Robles for week in November. I'm much enjoying being "writer girl" instead of "cancer girl" or even "lawyer girl."

But I am still "former cancer girl" and "lawyer girl"--and that's what the new photo is about. I was pleased (also, shocked) to be named a 2010 "Woman of Achievement" by the Riverside County YWCA. The luncheon honoring the six women selected will be September 16th at the Riverside Convention Center. It's an honor to be selected but it also requires things like being videotaped (which they then show on a giant screen in front of hundreds of people) and press releases...with photos. So I had to get a new "head shot" since none of my other professionally done head shots look like me (long blonde straight hair is but a memory now). My friend Mike Easley of Vital Excess Designs did this photo (and then appropriately photo-shopped a few years off me! ;-)  ). Oh, and yes, I lightened the color of my hair. My hair is healthy enough I can do that now.

In other big news--I put my hair in a ponytail for the first time in a year and a half. It was a puny ponytail and hair started slipping out after only an hour or so, but it was a ponytail. It was 108 out and I was just headed in to the office yesterday (a Saturday) for a few hours...so I thought I'd see if I could do a ponytail. I was giddy with childish enthusiasm over my childlike hairdo. I've moved from toddler hair to kindergarten hair.

I'll be back with another post soon.
No, really. I will.

(Leave a comment please--then I'll know you're still out there too!)

And by the way--here's the photo Mike liked. I think it's a bit too "dreamy/ serious" but it's an option.