The Other Don Kelly

Remembering Sally A: Our friend Sally passed away early this year, and there was a memorial service for her Saturday at the Quaker Meeting house. She was an amazing woman, with a big personality and a sense of humor and a heart to match. There were many people there, friends and relatives, teaching colleagues and people she’d helped over the years, with many stories from her life and travels. It was nice to see how people cared, to bump into old friends and to hear the stories, but it was still a tough day.

Congratulations Holly & Chris! Our niece Holly got married on Sunday down in Glassboro. Rainy day, travel was tough (there & back) but the wedding was fun. Some pictures:

I guess I could have had a lot to say this past month, if I wanted to, but the inspiration didn’t come — I also didn’t want to blog about some things (birthdays, anniversaries) in the moment, as they might turn into a security risk. But now the tales can be told:

• I did another Road Scholar ride, the first of this year, and the second-to-last ever RS bike ride from Shawnee. This was actually one of the better ones.
• Happy Birthday to me! I hit the big Six-Oh this year.
• Happy Anniversary to us! Anne and I celebrated ten years of marriage this month.
• Welcome Home! We just got back from our final big trip out to Denver, where we helped Emmi & Kyle pack and move. Five prep days in Denver, then five days driving back here to their new home. We’re already on babysitter duty…

Now that we’re home, I’m easing my way back into the cello — Iris loves when Anne or I play music, by the way. The Native Paths project continues apace, and I just did a volunteer day (my first in weeks) at the D&L archives. And now I’m blogging again! It’s good to be back.

As a bonus , here’s what I wrote ten years ago, and what I wrote fifteen years ago.

Happy St Patrick’s Day!

I’m just hanging out while the furnace guy does some repair work (a little more than routine, but nothing major), waiting to see what the weather decides to be today — I woke up to some drizzly weather, but now the sun looks like it might come out. A soft day, as they might say in the Old Country…

I got in a decent towpath ride on Wednesday, once again killing multiple birds with one stone: I wanted to survey the route for the upcoming Road Scholar ride, maybe taking a few pictures along the way, and I also wanted to get in a D&L trail patrol ride.

Wednesday (like most days this week) was windy and a bit chilly, but the ride was pleasant and the trail surface was much more solid than I would have expected. I guess that with so little snow for the ground to absorb, it didn’t take much for the recent wind to dry things out. There weren’t all that many people on the trail, but I did see my old friend Kim H walking her dog, so we caught up for a bit before I continued on my way. My total distance was about 25 miles, and my total time, what with the wind and all the photography and socializing, was almost three hours.

I saw a few reportable issues on the ride, mostly garbage piles, so I documented them (with QField), and when I got home I tried uploading the incidents to my QGIS “trail reports” project before reporting them for real. (The trail patrol stuff is completely separate from and independent of the QGIS project, but hey I guess I just like doing things twice.) I thought that my recent network improvements would make the upload process smoother, and it probably would have but I use QField so seldom that I mostly just frustrated myself relearning what to do. Eventually I got it done, and also logged my trail patrol report.

Yesterday was another D&L day, volunteering at the Museum. I did some bike work and helped with moving some old exhibits into storage. Dinner was El Jefe take-out at Bonn Place, visiting with Anne’s friend Sarah. Today we’re going to see Chris Smither play at Godfrey Daniels, and then tonight is a St Patrick’s party in Jim Thorpe. Slainté!

I am currently reading three books:

Foster (by Claire Keegan), is about a young girl who is sent to live with another family. The book isn’t a long one (I’m about halfway through); it’s very well written, and a sweet story (so far), but there’s a growing feeling of foreboding, of another shoe about to fall… Anne recommended this to me after she read it. Interestingly, the story takes place in Wexford, Ireland, where some of my ancestors came from, and where we spent some time on our honeymoon.

Cloud Cuckoo Land (Anthony Doerr) is another recommendation from Anne. I just got it from the library last night on my tablet, so I’m only a few pages in but I’m already liking it.

The last book is a loan from Jeff. Evening in the Palace of Reason (James R. Gaines) is about the fateful meeting between Johann Sebastian Bach and Frederick The Great, the generational and cultural clashes represented by that meeting, and the resulting creation of A Musical Offering. It’s a great story, but the best part of this book is the background material: digressions, biographies, histories of musical theory, the Reformation…

I keep moving from one to the other, to the other. They’re all great.

Some other recent reads:

Still Life by Louise Penny, the first novel in her Inspector Gamache mystery series. Anne loves these books, and so do several of her friends and they’re always talking about them, so I thought I’d give the first one a try. The book was pretty good, and I can see why people like it, but I have to say I’m still not a fan of mysteries — especially here, where the author’s head fakes, misdirection, and general control of the information flow was a bit on the clumsy side. I’ll probably read the second one eventually (where the author may hit her stride a little better), but I’m making no promises about the entire series.

So I started seeing a dermatologist last spring, not long before our big Alberta trip. He gave me the once-over — I even got a biopsy — and recommended a new eczema medication called Adbry. It’s something you take by injection every two weeks, with an initial double dose which you have to redo if you mess up your dosage schedule, so I held off on the new medication until we got back.

It took about a month to kick in, but then it really started working — I have no idea of the how’s or why’s, but my life was like “eczema? what eczema?” This was the most effective eczema treatment I’d ever had, and one of the best things in my life.

Until it wasn’t.

Adbry has a known side effect, affecting about 8% of the people who take it, which causes them to get conjunctivitis (aka “pinkeye”), and I won that lottery: starting sometime in November my eyes started getting itchy, and irritated, and really red. (Again, I have no idea of the mechanism, but it was like all my eczema problems were taken from my skin and transferred to my eyeballs…) At first it wasn’t too bad, but then the constant watery eyes started to affect my vision, especially for things like reading, and the irritation made sunlight, or even bright lights, uncomfortable. I saw the dermatologist, and he referred me to my eye doctor. The eye doctor initially tried some milder treatments, which were OK but not 100% effective so he put me on steroid eye drops, and they seem to be doing the trick. I am now tapering off the drops, and going for weekly eye exams — steroids come with their own set of issues. Meantime, I discontinued the Adbry.

I had a problem, I took that stuff, now I have two problems… the eczema is kind of manifesting again, but it’s not all that bad yet, and the dermatologist may have another treatment recommendation for me when I seem him in a few weeks.