For sometime now we have been planning on visiting our daughter and her family in Basel Switzerland. We started planning it over a year ago. The trip was going to be a vacation, birthday celebration, and visit with her small family during the early holiday season in Switzerland when all the Christmas decorations are up and the cities in Switzerland, Germany and France have Christmas markets with lots of beautiful hand made items and yummy hot mulled wine you can sip as you stroll through the marketplace. 

We started looking into Europasses and train tickets for the area we would be visiting since I had set aside 3 weeks of vacation. Hey I earned it! Then in March or April we got the great news that Alicia and Michael were expecting their second baby that would be due around my birthday in December! Plus Alicia decided to come home during the summer for a few weeks to visit with Mickey. My vacation plans got put aside and we started thinking about just doing stuff with family. 

We visited Texas in May and stayed with family there, which was wonderful, got invited to my cousin's wedding in December and saw some dear friends who started a home church with their growing family. The visit was wonderful and we had nice time. Got to hang out with Don's Uncle Kellie (Buck) and his wife Debbie, see Nasa Space Museum and spend some time with my cousins on the gulf coast at their beach home, went boating, ate some wonderful shrimp meals as well as some excellent Tex Mex.... food is always at the center of our travels, it is basically how we decide what is good or not! 

I'm realizing as I write this, it is turning into a small volume - like a long Christmas letter, but I have had several people ask me how I'm doing and I basically haven't blogged much since last March... 

Back to May - we have mostly spent time recouping. There are days where I can go as normal and days when I hit a wall and everything comes to a stop so I can just rest. Sleep has no factor in this wall... sleeping well doesn't make it happen less nor does it increase it if I don't get any sleep. It is a nagging tiredness that just doesn't seem to abate, but does seem to lessen over time. So each week I would sense that my strength was better than the week before. 

My doctors started me on a pill called "arimidex" which in non-technical terms, strips the body of making the hormone estrogen. We need estrogen to have smooth skin, moist orifices and other things, not just for having babies. Our bodies make estrogen in areas besides the ovaries - but it decreases after menopause and since I had gone through menopause they felt arimidex or what is known as "aromatase inhibitors" are the group of post-breast cancer meds that are recommended for 5 (YEP FIVE) years everyday. Women who have not gone through menopause are usually put on a 5 year regimen of tamoxifen and switched to the aromatase inhibitor - that is if the type of breast cancer they had was estrogen positive, which mine was. 

As I have read more about breast cancer the striking things that I learned about it were that gaining 20 pounds after menopause is a common precursor - although I don't know that it "causes" but women who develop breast cancer after menopause are more likely to have gained a bunch of weight - which I did. Also they are doing studies where the longer you nurse you babies the less chance of developing breast cancer - but when they are talking about length of time they are talking 3-6 years not 6 - 12 months of nursing! Big difference. But really, knowing this doesn't account for our lifestyle, being raised on the farm, living in a city where there is a larger population and incidence of breast cancer than in other parts of the US, not enough to call it a cluster, but the numbers are alarming in the bay area. 

Enough of that, back to the reason I decided to write something more... 

I have continued my Feldenkrais practice, although only minimally - as my energy level was at an all time low, but attended the Advanced training of David Zemach-Bersin in February - helping with the sound/video, etc. and working with Dennis Leri & Carol Kress for the Summer Intensive. They made a very nice MP3 of the summer before which I hadn't attended because we were on a cruise, but in 2012 I got to go to it. They are planning another one this year. The good thing is the Feldenkrais conference is going to be in the bay area again this year, so maybe I will get to go to this one, will need to save some money for it.... 

Am planning on reviving my weekly Awareness through Movement (ATM) classes as soon as I get back from Europe. Need to start teaching again. I really have missed it. Plus it is a great motivator to get on the floor which is always a good thing in my case, as the aromatase inhibitor causes joint pain and fatigue. 

Okay, this is way to long for any good friend to read, let alone a perfect stranger, so I will stop on my journey of the past year for now, but there is definitely more to come. Will try to write a bit more every day to catch everyone up on the year of 2012 - January 2013... 

Blessings...