Category Archives: Around home

Well Shit! I Didn’t Expect That

Around home, Medical

I thought about the possibility of death, but that wasn’t what bothered me the most. It was the feeling of helplessness. I just couldn’t see myself lying in bed, not being able to help myself. That, to me, was worse than the fear of death. John Wayne after beating “The big C”.

I found out at the end of last week that I have cancer of the bladder. More accurately, I most likely have cancer. The conversation went something like this: Dr. Sean Berquist, “You have a tumor in your bladder, and it might be cancerous. Well, it most likely is cancer. Actually, for a person of your age with a history of smoking, I’ve never seen it not be cancer.” Steve, “Is there a chance it could be benign?” Dr. Sean Berquist, “If you were eight years old, I would say ‘Yes’, but not at your age.”

The good news, the great! news is that the tumor is pretty small and can most likely be removed by fishing a cystoscope up my dick into my bladder and, according to Dr. Berquist, “scooping out the tumor and treating the inside of the bladder with a chemotherapy solution”. It is a simple procedure and almost always successful. The operation is late next Wednesday afternoon.

I know I have had a lot of medical problems, but counterintuitively, between medical emergencies, I feel fine. As far as the bladder cancer goes, I’m very optimistic and pretty upbeat about this whole thing. Still, I feel like this post is too short and too blunt. On the other hand, I don’t want to pad it, so I’ll just leave it at that.

A Couple of Blooming Mammalarias

Around home, Cactus & Succulents

There are flowers that bloom in gardens
      Under a gardener’s care,
      And their lavish beauties charm me,
      As they flourish in luxury there. 
      There are flowers that blow in the meadows, 
      Kissed by the rain and the dew,
      In a riot of happy blooming,
      And I love their loveliness too.
But the flower that fills me with comfort,
      And makes Life’s meaning sweet,
      Is the flower that blooms in the desert,
      In the midst of sand and heat; 
      Whose roots draw strength and beauty,
      From a land forbidding and wild, 
      Whose face turns bravely skyward,
      Nor pines for lot more mild…To a Desert Flower by Hattie Greene Lockett, American writer, rancher, and clubwoman (whatever the hell a clubwoman is). 

Our results showed that from 4.5 million years ago, the arid regions of Mexico were the locations for abundant cacti speciation. From these lands, cacti have colonized most of the Mexican territories, the southern regions of the United States, as well as the Caribbean. Delil A. Chincoya, Salvador Arias, Felipe Vaca-Paniagua, Patricia Dávila, and Sofía Solórzano, Phylogenomics and Biogeography of the Mammilloid Clade Revealed an Intricate Evolutionary History Arose in the Mexican Plateau

Our garden is in full bloom, or, at least, as full a spring bloom as we are going to get this year. It got warm early, and everybody started growing, stretching, seeking the sun’s warmth, then it got cold, and everybody hunkered down, confused, including me. I left out several plants I had taken from the greenhouse where they had spent the winter, and they were especially unhappy. One, a Pachypodium – a very succulent member of the Oleander family – even committed harakiri.

Even with everything else blooming, like Hattie, the clubwoman from Arizona, I am most fascinated by the small cactuses in pots on a table on our deck.

Cactuses like the Paraodia, below, which grow at about 1,000 feet to 2,500 feet on the eastern slopes of the Andes in northwestern Argentina and southwestern Bolivia.

And Mammalarias, which grow primarily in Mexico but have spread to Central and Southwestern United States, to Colombia, and the Caribbean.

Lunar Eclipse 2022

Around home

Last night, we went up to Highway 35 – what we used to call Skyline when I was a kid – to watch the May 2022 Lunar Eclipse. The moon was supposed to rise at 8:04 but we didn’t see it until well after 8:30. Even before we went, I was wondering how they determine the moonrise time in a hilly area like Coastal California; it deems to me that, if we had moved two hundred yards to the right, the moon would have come up sooner. Whatever the method of measurement, the moon did rise and it was spectacular. Spectacular for Michele, for me, it was sort of a bust moonwise.

Everything but the feeble moon – almost dulled into invisibility by mist – was well worth driving up to Skyline for, however. When Michele – driving – and I first drove up to Skyline about an hour before the 8:04 moonrise, we both had the same overlook in mind but, when we got there, Michele plotted the exact moonrise direction only to find that we were in the exact wrong place. We ended up on a low ridge above the Monte Bello Open Space Preserve parking lot. The air was coolish and, unusual for the Skyline area, there was no wind. The sky put on a nice sunset which, of course, always comes with a full moonrise.

We had debated going to Twin Peaks or Corona Heights in San Francisco but the forecast was for fog and now, looking north to Mt. Diablo, we could see the fog filling the bay and signs of the wind picking up. Here, above the very improved Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District parking lot, it was calm as Michele patiently – and I, impatiently – waited for the moon to rise.