November 30, 2012
Blogging Break
Ah, it was nice to have a month off from writing. Not that it's a big chore, but I've been doing it for over a decade. Some significant things happened and I'll highlight a few.
First and foremost, a PET scan was taken on Tuesday. Thursday we learned that it showed that the main malignancy is becoming resistant to the effects of Xeloda and starting to grow again. We drove down to Boston to visit the expert breast cancer specialists. We reviewed traditional chemotherapies and some approaches seeking FDA approval in phase 2 clinical trials. We have two promising new ones we're looking into. One is only useful if your tumors had certain bio-markers, so we signed the consent forms for them to be checked. Only about 30% of triple negative breast cancers have that bio-marker. Regardless of the approach taken, we have a handful of weeks off to recover from the effects of Xeloda before we start the new regimen.
Second, we got a third car in the family. We call her Pearl. Ironically my daily driver is a 2006 Jetta TDI with manual transmission. Pearl is a light tan 2006 Jetta with the 2.5l five cylinder gas engine and six speed automatic transmission. I had my mechanic look it over and its in good shape. Wednesday we had it brought it for some electrical work: left driver's side mirror turn signal and the interior dome light. And to help Claire with the evening frost at this time of year, we bought it a car cover she can put on for overnight.
Third, I upgraded my phone. About 2½ years ago I bought the HTC EVO 4G when I became available for pre-order. It was the first phone on Sprint to use Qualcomm's Scorpion 1GHz CPU and our Adreno 200 GPU which I had been working on for about three years. On November 9th Sprint shipped me their new hotness: the LG Optimus G. It is essentially the same as Google's new Nexus 4 (also manufactured by LG) but the Optimus also adds 4G LTE data connectivity. It features Qualcomm's new 1.5GHZ Krait CPUs in quad core, essentially double that of the Samsung Galaxy SIII, and features our newest GPU, the Adreno 320, completely overhauled architecturally from the 2xx series in every block. I've spent the last three years working on it.
Claire was sworn into the Milford chapter of the National Honor Society. We're proud of course. The main issue we've had is with the community service requirement. It seems to be pretty odd on what counts and doesn't. All the hours Claire spends volunteer teaching religious education, that doesn't count. The times she spends altar serving at Mass, again doesn't count. By most reasonable measures these are service within the community, but not according to to NHS guidelines.
Lastly I had a nice five day weekend with the family around Thanksgiving. I used my annual Employee Designated Holiday (EDH) on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving we went to the movies with the girls seeing "Breaking Dawn" while us guys saw "Wreck It Ralph". Celebration was just at the house with us seven. Claire and Timothy served that Thanksgiving morning Mass. I used the extra time off to catch up on some photo albums. You can see them in the Albums tab: November 22nd, October 13th, and June 20th. Some may be familiar from snapshots shared earlier. It's a collection of photos from Michelle's red Canon, my black Sony, and my Leica cameras. Someday I ought to comb through the things that have built up on camera phones.
Oh, and "one more thing". I started a beard after Claire was confirmed. I won't scare you with snapshots of that. At least not yet. A friend jokingly said she was reminded of Harrison Ford in The Fugitive.