A week has passed since our last blog entry, and we are pleased to report that Eric’s mom continues to improve a little every day. She is in good spirits, her appetite is increasing, and she can do more and more things for herself with less/no help. The doctor said if she continues to improve, they will let her go home soon. Don’t get us wrong, she is still very sick. But now it looks like she will be fighting a long battle with cancer instead of a short one. We are all thrilled about that.

Chemotherapy has come a long, long way from what it was only 7 years ago when Christi’s mom had cancer. The chemo is more targeted, killing less healthy cells, and the anti-nausea drugs are fabulous. Eric’s mom is experiencing very few of the horrible side effects that Christi’s mom had to endure. Her type of cancer is also especially responsive to chemo.

Eric has spent every single day with his mom and every evening doing research on her type of cancer. He has found lots of good information and has talked to several doctors. Overall, Eric’s mom is getting very good care and the right treatment.

Christi has been taking care of life chores. Doing fun things like reading many months worth of mail, getting all the stuff together to file taxes for ourselves and her business, running errands, and attending to the zillion other responsibilities we have simply ignored over the last year. She also managed to get a sinus infection, which knocked her out of commission for a few days.

Before we left for our two year adventure, we were fast paced people with very, very busy lives. We were always on the go. It literally took us months to slow down once we left America. Slowing down was much harder than we thought it would be. Now that we have slowed down, it is difficult for us to go back to the fast paced life in America. We are worn out from doing too much in too short of a time frame. We are stressed out by the fact that every single day is busy with few breaks and little time to ourselves. We can’t believe we used to live at an even higher speed than this, and are grateful we have had a year of reprieve.

On that note, we want to let everyone know that we haven’t had any time or energy to call our friends. We are staying in Temecula, not San Diego, so we aren’t around to get together, anyway. Please do not be offended that you haven’t heard from us. We love and care about you all, we just have so much on our plate at the moment.

We are happy to report that Fafner made it to Port Ghalib a few days ago and e-mailed us to let us know Kosmos is fine. We e-mailed them back that we had some books to give them, noted the location of the books within the boat, and copied the marina manager with a request to loan Fafner the key. The marina manager gave Fafner the key. As soon as Geoff and Karen stepped aboard, two security guards were immediately there, demanding that they get away from the boat immediately. Geoff and Karen explained the situation. The guards radioed the manager and got an OK to let them in. The guards watched to make sure that they only took the books, left right away, and handed over the key. It is a big relief to know that the security guards are really watching the boat for us. Phew.