Musings on a Small Life

It's definitely a mixed bag of things today: First, my cousin had her breast reconstruction (after a 3-year wait, post-double mastectomy) on the 14th. She opted to have the construction done by taking her own tissue to rebuild her breasts. Unfortunately there have been problems with blood flow, I believe, and she had surgery the next day, and again on Sunday. She's a tough cookie, but she told my mom last night that if she had known what this would be like, and the pain level, etc., she wouldn't have done it. (Presumably she meant she'd have opted for implants.)  Second, my co-worker lost one of her two elderly cats on Monday, Family Day. He had not been overtly sick, was always the robust one, but Sunday he stopped eating, had difficulties and on Monday, when they took him to the emerg vet, it turned out he was in acute renal failure, and I think had other health issues. So they had to let him go. Poor Rocky.  This is the pic she sent me, when she emailed to...

Dad forwarded me this photo: It's our old house in Sunnybank, in Gaspé, being raised because of flooding in 2010. I don't know who took the pic, though see it was from early October this year. The house originally was built by Coleman Patterson early in the 20th century, burned down at one point and was rebuilt long before we ever lived there. I didn't even recognize it! When we owned the place, it was white with green shutters, had a very leaky roof and generally was falling to pieces, no one doing much in the way of repairs. You have to look in the background below, I couldn't find any scanned pics of just the house, though I'm sure I must have old prints somewhere. It took me a while to realize that the yellow house was the same one, as it was snapped from Elmer's field, which is off to the right when you're looking at the second pic. (And that's Polly, my first horse soulmate, Elmer's work horse.) Same glorious old maple tree, thou...