Along for the Ride

A while back I was cleaning out files on my computer.  I came across several images chronicling my hair loss and regrowth.  I posted them back-to-back with the hope of seeing the "whole journey".  Man, what a journey that was. I had always loved my hair.  It was thick and had flickers of red in the sunlight.  Growing up, it was one thing that people commented on about my physical appearance, and I would venture to say that it was my one source of vanity. 5/26/06 - Wedding Day When my hair first started coming out, I was in the hospital.  It had gotten thinner soon after I had started medication, but to someone like me, who had thick, thick, thick hair, it wasn't that big of a deal.  My doctors said that it was "unlikely" that I would lose my hair entirely.   Enter Telogen Effluvium. When I was hospitalized in the summer of 2011 with several serious infections (including cryptococcal meningitis), I began daily doses of the "scary" drug A...

Shortly after buying our home, Mike and I started our homesteading tasks.  We borrowed equipment from my parents and spent Saturday afternoons mowing our yard.  I even bought beer for the occasion so we could proudly stand amidst the freshly cut lawn, drink a cold one, and admire our handy work.   On a trip to Borders, I had visited the home care section and purchased a (quite pricey) Martha Stewart book called the Homekeeping Handbook .  It was the pre-Pinterest resource, and I was thrilled to read it from cover to cover, learning how to make my own dish soap, plant and grow veggies, make a welcome basket for the guest room, and properly host a dinner party.  Those 752 pages were my ticket to becoming the best version of myself - a Bree Van de Kamp version of hospitality.   Well, it got old.  It got old really quickly.  I found myself spending all of my precious weekend days trying to clean, run errands, prepare meals, help mow, ...

Shortly after Mike and I got married, we started hunting for a house.  The plan was simple...  find "the perfect" home in our price range, close to work, modest, spacious enough for possible kids, big enough to not outgrow anytime soon, small enough to be manageable, and preferably new.  The hunt was hard.  Every weekend, week after week was spent searching, searching, searching for the perfect location, builder, and home.  Finally, the stars and planets aligned, and we put a deposit down on a new build in McKinney.  It had all that we had hoped for and more. I once said that the true test of a marriage was putting together something - like a grill (which we tackled the week after we got married) - without ripping each other's hair out.  Boy was I wrong.  That was small beans.  But to a newlywed, it was the first time that Mike and I had ever really "gotten cross" with each other, so I thought it was a test.  At that point, though, w...

A friend of mine recently posted a link on Facebook of a series of photos of tattoos with book quotes and illustrations.  She asked her friends what quote they would get tattooed on themselves if given the chance. When I was in college, I felt the need to let out a little bit of my inner “bad” girl by getting a tattoo on my lower back.  Many of my friends and sorority sisters were getting tattoos of dragons, fairies, and anchors with yellow roses in tribute to our sorority.  I pondered the idea for well over a year, eventually deciding that I definitely wanted to get some ink.  My family had always been relatively conservative, but not unreasonably so.  I was most concerned about my father’s reaction, so I “greased the wheels” a little by introducing the idea to my mom first.  She seemed cool with it, saying that it was my body and all that.  I took that as a green light. One weekend night, my friends and I loaded up my Integra and made t...

I've never been very good at journaling.  Every year, I make the attempt to start again, and I write religiously for a few days or weeks before falling off the wagon again.  I thought blogging might be different, but hey - it's still journaling.  Thankfully, my health has stabilized, so I'm not having to post continual updates anymore summarizing all of my crazy doctor visits.  That's a great problem to have! Earlier this week, I finally got a chance to check in with a periodontist about this "overgrown gum tissue" that I've had for about 6 months.  After going through my medical history (helloooo.... that took almost an hour), she took one look and said it was most likely a granuloma caused by my Wegener's.  After numbing me up really well, she grabbed her scalpel and removed the extra tissue, packed it up, and sent it off to Baylor for a pathology report.  She kept telling me how excited they would be to get tissue from a WG patient.  Ha! ...

Today is my great aunt Agnes's 95th birthday.  I've been thinking about her all day, and I was digging around in my computer earlier when I came across this piece of writing I did during college.  So many of my childhood memories involve her and my uncle Carroll.  I left this piece in its original form, so while I was definitely a young writer, I really enjoyed rereading it.  I hope you do as well... Here's to you, Aunt Agnes: The World of Aunt Agnes’ House The humid Arkansas air crawled around my body, covering my skin in sticky moistness.  My parents had sent me to stay with my great aunt Agnes for a week.  The memory of my father in his shirt and tie walking quickly through a busy airport while carrying my little Snoopy suitcase was still fresh in my mind.  I looked down from my position, perched on a strong limb high in a magnolia tree.  The neighborhood was calm, with a few distant shouts of children.  As the wind w...

Wow! It's been a long time since I've written. It's been a busy summer so far. I taught elementary creative writing at the summer institute for gifted students (SIGS) this year. It was definitely a challenge because I'm not used to working with such little kids! I've been doing a lot of curriculum writing and keeping busy with tasks around the house too. It's amazing how much got put on the back burner over during the last year or so. It feels good to go room-by-room, checking off "to-dos" on the list. I've been thinking a lot lately about the journey I've traveled this year.  Last night - the 4th of July - we met up with our neighbors and had a good meal and conversation.  After dinner we walked down to the end of the street to watch fireworks.  They set them off just down the about a tenth of a mile away, so it's a perk of living in our neighborhood.  Close enough to enjoy without parking headaches, but far enough away to not h...