Hell’s Half Acre

When the kids are, one by one, dropping like flies from what looks to be the flu; when the 11yo who is normally solid as a rock, walks about the trailer in the dead of night delirious; when the 4yo who is normally bouncing off the walls with energy spends the entire day sleeping, do not, I repeat, DO NOT start reading the cancer blogs. There is one guy who was diagnosed really close to Dad with the same cancer and I’ve been reading him to compare his treatment to Dad’s. I’ve been reading Minerva for quite a while; she is a wonderful writer. She happens to be recently diagnosed with Breast Cancer. I don’t know how, but from one of her links, I ended up reading quite a few Neuroblastoma blogs; I think this one hooked me as the family had been travelling in an RV for 15 years and neither child had ever lived in a stick home. By the time Ellen fell into a sleep restful enough that I didn’t have to attend to her, I was deep into Dylan’s blog and it was 4:30am. I’ve been reading it off and on all day; basically, they were told to take their son home to die (Australia), the mom found a US surgeon and hospital and they’ve been fundraising ever since to keep Dylan on track (beating Neuroblastoma). If you’re looking for a cause, this is the one.

Jamie, on the health front, has responded dramatically to ProstaQ. I’ve been asking him and he’s been wishy washy in response, but after forgetting to take ProstaQ a couple times, the pain came back and he realized how many symptoms had dissapeared with the herbs. I don’t know how, but I’ve managed to avoid completely succumbing to the sickness de jour (wicked headache, fever, sore throat, hurting tummy and lethargy) but I think it might be due to the anti-sickness combination of the Staff of Life (garlic, coffee, garlic, schiraz, garlic, Talavera pottery, garlic, and just a teensy bit more garlic).

So, needless to say, our departure has been postponed. We had planned to leave Wednesday, but Jesse got quite sick. Last night Ellen dropped. The first couple days seem to be the hardest, symptom-wise, so we don’t want to be on the road then. We’ve been making good progress on watching each and every DVD we own and have had the wonderful opportunity to view the DVD on RV travel in Mexico by Roving Productions. We met Kevin and Jeanne in PaaMul last April and were really impressed by their project; even more so when viewing the completed project. This is really a great DVD for anyone interested in Mexico and especially for anyone interesting in RV’ing in Mexico. Volume 1 is about the Pacific Coast; they’re working on Volume 2 (colonial cities of the mainland) and then will do Volume 3 (Baja). Even though we’ve been to many of the places in their DVD’s, I can’t wait for the next one to come out so we can watch it.

I took some pictures of my newest trailer project. It really was nothing interesting; we just needed to figure out a bookshelf area. We are all avid readers and in a stick home had very very many bookshelves. In the trailer we’ve just been dumping them in storage containers but it is hard to enjoy them and they tend to get lost and forgotten that way. Here is a picture of what I figured out so far. We need a step-stool so the kids can get to the books, but it is the best thing I can think of. This is mostly for Jody, so the rest of you can just ignore.

Jamie and I are simply dying to get on the road and I’ve actually considered just putting the kids in the car sick or not, but that is just too cruel for words (though when I am simply desperate to GO it is attractive) so here we sit, waiting for all to be at the very least, well enough to sit in the car for 3 hours a day. We hope to head for Nogales and cross the border there.