The Chemo Countdown Continues – 14 days

Yesterday turned out to be easier than I had expected. My AFI (Actual Feeling Index) was a 4.5, the same as the day before. I believe this is the result of low expectations and taking it very ease. Other than one short one hour outing, I haven’t left the house for anything other than hospital/doctor’s visits in about 2 weeks. I spent the day watching TV, reading the Sunday NY Times, and sleeping. Lots of good articles this week in the Sunday NYT: the issues with withdrawing from Iraq (from the Iraq people’s viewpoint), a soldier’s ultimate death due to depression and mistakes by our law enforcement agencies, and how some of the nation’s top colleges are helping the disadvantaged get degrees from their institutions. The paper does a phenomenal job with research and writing.

Speaking of the NYT, if you haven’t seen the movie Wordplay, it is worth seeing, even if you don’t do crossword puzzles. It got a 7.6 rating on IMDb (Internet Movie Database – www.imdb.com). My brother sent it to me and I passed it onto my sister in March. I don’t do cross word puzzles, but have always been impressed with those that can. After seeing the movie, I’m still impressed with those that can, but even more impressed with the people in the movie.

My success for the day was figuring out how to stop an annoying pop up reminder on my computer for renewing the McAfee software security suite. It took me about a month to figure it out, but I think it is gone. I had contacted McAfee a few times, but they never responded and were less than useful. I’m down to one bug on my new laptop with the MS Vista operating system. There is a fix out there from Microsoft, but it is manual, is not specific to their new Vista operating system, takes about 15 steps (some of which are complicated), and requires one to update the computer’s registry files. The instructions warn that the computer may have to be rebuilt if not done properly. The bug takes a minute to workaround each time I reboot the computer, so at this point, I’ll wait for an automated update.

I hope everyone has a good day off of work today, Memorial Day. We should take at least a little time to remember our soldiers. I think I’ll just take it ease today.