Back from a vacation to Florida

My blogging has been getting more and more infrequent it seems. Mostly because there isn't a whole lot to report. All the exciting stuff happened months ago, and I would be perfectly fine if no more exciting things ever happened to me.

Emily and I spent the last eight or nine days in Florida visiting relatives. We rented a condo on (well, near) St. Augustine beach. My family had a condo in the same building for a few days overlapping as well. So on Saturday night we had a big family-family get together and a faux, belated wedding ceremony.

We spent the rest of the time just doing not much of anything and eating. I spent a total of about two hours on the beach. I really just don't like it all that much. It's really hot and the sun is beating down on you, and I dislike putting on lots of sunblock over and over again. Emily had a good time though. We went out at night once and watched a storm over the ocean which including much lightning. I like that. No sun.

It was excellent to see all of my nieces and nephews, and everyone in my family again as well. It would be great if we could make a habit of it but I just don't see it happening. Neither of us can plausibly get enough time off every year to take a week in Florida and do something else (and there is a huge list of things we want to do). Oh well. We also went to Gainesville for a day to see Dragon's Lair farm again (and Randal and Celia and all the pets). Later that night we caught up with Chelsea and Steve and ate dinner at Satchel's Pizza. Even though I grew up on the east side of Gainesville and remember Satchel's opening and thinking "what a weird place to put a crazy pizza place", I never manged to eat there until now. It was great. Emily took about a thousand photographs over the course of the trip. Sometime I'll put some highlights on here.

Today was a chemo day, though we were only at the infusion center for about an hour. All I received was an Avastin drip. This morning and evening I took my first dose of Xeloda. The pills aren't too big, but I get to take seven of them. It's still way more convenient than the alternative. It's still way too early to tell how I'll tolerate it. Right now I feel fine. I even went for a 15 mile bike ride this evening, which was nice. My feet are peeling, which is part of hand and foot syndrome. It's probably from all of the walking and sand I encountered in Florida. It doesn't hurt, but I can easily see how if it keeps up it could. I didn't know how I'd feel for the day, but it ended up being very good.

I got a call from my boss while I was on my bike ride about payroll for the week. My "vacation" is at the moment an unpaid one it seems. I suspected this was going to happen, and it did. "They" (work in the big sense) think I don't have any annual leave to take, which I don't according to the system. But my understanding of the sort of disability system I'm on is that out-of-band from that I can accumulate 40 hours of annual leave and then use it accordingly. I thought I coordinated it with the leave people, but apparently they don't think so. So it's entirely possible I took a one week unpaid vacation, but it was worth it. It would be nice if in the end I get paid though.

Oh and one more thing. This morning we bought tickets to see Thievery Corporation play in Baltimore. They don't have concerts all that often and I seem to miss the ones around here. But not this time! We got excellent seats (second row from the front, dead center) since we bought them about 30 seconds after they went on pre-sale. We almost got the first row, but they were sniped out from under us! They were expensive too, but we never go see concerts anyway so it's okay (way to rationalize!). The concert is the day after my birthday, so maybe it's a birthday present to myself.