The local newspaper up in the Washington state town where my sister and her family live did an article on my niece and the fund-raiser set up by the school that her sister Haley attends. A blood-cancer charity has also set up a web page about Katie, and they are having a Poker Tournament fund-raiser for her.

Happy Father’s Day! Happy Summer Solstice! And…

Geoffrey and I got married today. Still mind-boggled by it. Details soon, but for now I must collapse…sooo exhausted. It was a pretty amazing day, all told.

Less than a week until the wedding, eep! Here’s my list of stuff still to get done:

• Buy a new bra (and probably shoes)
• Get some speakers for my iPod
• Dye my hair (I may be 40 but I refuse to be gray!) & get it trimmed
• Buy the sparkling cider & grape juice
• Finish getting the ceremony written
• Order the corsages for the moms & boutonniere for Geoffrey’s dad
• Check the site for logistical surprises & do a brief walk-through
• Finish sewing the dresses!

It may seem like there’s a lot left to do, but actually most of the preparations are already finished. We have a dinner at Geoffrey’s parents house on Saturday night (eve of the wedding), so all this has to be done by late Saturday afternoon. I am hugely glad that I took these vacation days to prepare, or we would be completely FUBAR.

And my sixpence arrived in the mail today!!! It’s gorgeous, and the lady who took my order was so incredibly nice. When I called to order, she asked if I had a special year in mind, and I said no (they stopped making them 2 years before my birth year, which was the only year which popped to mind). Then she suggested one that’s a century old, to commemorate the year of the wedding, and I thought that was brilliant! So I have a 1909 King Edward VII sixpence for my shoe!

So tonight Geoffrey & I will do a bit of wedding-preparation shopping. Normally I hate all shopping unless it’s for books, but I promised myself a bra from Vicky’s, and I don’t mind shopping there too much. Except for all the ridiculous pink decor.

Oh hey, look — I’m 40. Weird, it doesn’t feel any different from 39.

In family news, my niece is off the ventilator and out of intensive care. She’s still having problems breathing, but the doctors said that is normal when someone is on the ventilator for a long time. I guess she has to cough up all the crap that built up while she couldn’t cough. They finally got a PICC line in, and that way they don’t have to stick her with so many needles. Things look good, except that she’s been running a fever, and doesn’t have much of an immune system at the moment, so they’re watching that very closely. The only visitors she’s allowed to have are her parents & sisters.

In wedding preparation news, my sewing machine decided to go on the fritz last night when I was halfway done making the first bridesmaid dress. I’ve had the damned thing for TEN YEARS and it’s never given me problems. NEVER. So, of course, this gets blamed on Murphy’s Law. I’m going to fiddle with it a bit more, and if that doesn’t help, it’ll be time to locate a repair shop that won’t charge me more than the blasted machine is worth.

Lyse keeps telling me to relax, that I’m on vacation. I’m not, really. I don’t have to go to work, but it’s not exactly a vacation — or, at the most, it’s a working vacation. I’m not even going to think about all the stuff we have yet to finish for the wedding preparations. Gah.

Friday night, my sister took her 4-year-old, my niece Katie, to an urgent care clinic because she didn’t think the family doctor’s diagnosis of a respiratory infection a few days earlier was correct. My niece had developed some scary swelling in her face and upper chest, and said she couldn’t breathe if she was laying down, so my sister spent all of Thursday night in a chair with her daughter sitting in her lap so she could sleep.

Katie stopped breathing at the urgent care clinic. Luckily it was directly across the street from an emergency room, and they rushed her over there and got her resuscitated. Then she stopped breathing again. They brought her back again, and life-flighted her to the children’s hospital in Tacoma. By the time they got her there, her breathing was so poor that they decided to intubate her.

But Katie’s a fighter, and she fought so hard that 5 adults couldn’t hold her still enough to be intubated before they finally gave up and sedated her first. They did an MRI and found that she has an enlarged heart, as well as a cancerous mass around her heart, which apparently had been depressing her lungs enough to cause the breathing problems. The doctors told my sister they’d never seen a mass in that location so large in a child that size. Finally, they ran blood tests which returned an initial diagnosis of leukemia, and started her on chemotherapy.

Saturday they did a bone marrow test to further refine the diagnosis, and it confirmed the earlier tests. They decided to keep her sedated, in a medically-induced coma, until she no longer needs to be intubated. They continued the chemo, which started improving her blood counts immediately, but not anywhere near close enough to be hopeful. By Sunday night, the doctors told my sister that Katie had to have radiation or there was little chance she’d survive another day, but that the dosage necessary to improve the situation left Katie at very high risk of future cancer. Of course my sister told them to do whatever was necessary to save her.

She’s still in the coma, still intubated, and there’s a good chance she’ll be in the hospital for a month or so for the initial treatments, with a likelihood that she’ll have to have upwards of 2 years of chemotherapy. They’ll take her off the ventilator (and the sedation) as soon as her blood oxygen improves. At this point, they’re not even 100% certain that she hasn’t suffered some impact from oxygen deprivation on Friday night. The only hopeful sign is that today when they changed the IV lines (and so the sedation was slightly lifted), my sister was talking to her and squeezing Katie’s hand, and Katie squeezed back.

At this point, we just don’t know anything more. Every good sign seems to be countered with a bad sign. I asked if they’d given my sister any long-term prognosis, and they haven’t. My sister and my mom are the kind of people who wouldn’t want to know, anyway, unless they could hear that there’s a 100% chance of everything turning out just fine. And of course there’s not a 100% chance.

My sister has two other daughters, who are 10 and 19. The eldest just got married and is expecting a baby in November. Luckily she’s being a real trouper and taking charge of her 10-year-old sister at home while their mom stays at the hospital with the youngest. Both grandmothers are in the area, helping with meals and laundry and such. There’s really nothing I can do to help, except to pray, which I’m doing.

It will be a very long time before Katie is out of danger. At this point, we don’t even know how certain it is that she’ll reach her fifth birthday, which is in 7 weeks. Hopefully she’s enough of a fighter.

Geoffrey found out more today about being in the Navy’s Delayed Entry Program, and we discovered his basic training starts on April 10th (not in June) of next year. Because I’ve been married before, we have to get a certified copy of the divorce decree (first husband) and death certificate (second husband) so the military can have proof that I’m not a bigamist. (They don’t need to know about my other boyfriend. *grin*)

Poor Geoffrey, he’s not even allowed to talk to females during the 8-week boot camp, unless they’re instructors who have spoken to him in the course of training. That will be rough for him, considering that he’s never been all that impressed by the company of his own gender. Between now & then, he’ll be attending weekly training & PT sessions. They already gave him his first official Navy shirt — it says “United States Navy Health Care Team.” Oh crap, we’re both officially in the health care business now. (All we need is to get Lyse a job with the VA Hospital, and we’ll have a trifecta!)

Totally unrelated, I looked my name up on Google (for the first time ever…scary!), and found something I had completely forgotten about from 15 years ago: I got published in the Dear Abby column. I wasn’t asking for advice, mind you, I was giving it. (I’m sure that will shock and amaze those who know me.) If I’d looked a bit harder, I’m sure I could have found the Letters to the Editor that I wrote to various newspapers that also were published in the early 90’s. Not like I was opinionated or anything. *smirk*

I’m continuing to be woefully unprepared for the wedding; reserving the park and making/mailing the invitations are the only things we’ve accomplished thus far. We don’t have a ceremony hammered out. We haven’t ordered the cake, or figured out what other refreshments we’ll have. I don’t even know for certain what I’m wearing yet — or if I’m going to buy it or make it. Good thing I have several days of vacation immediately prior, so I can frantically catch up on everything and turn into a total stress puppy. Hey, I do work well under pressure.

Hell, the only thing keeping me from completely freaking the high holy fuck out is the thought that on June 22nd, I can collapse in whimpers. Also visualizing a certain book cover helps.

My beloved Geoffrey has gone and done it but good this time. He’s officially signed up to become a member of the US Navy Reserve. Based on his college transcripts and the fact that his ASVAB score was for the highest score that the recruiter had ever personally seen, he’s going in at the rank of E-3.

He ships out for basic training on June 1, 2010. When he’s done with that, they’ll be sending him to “A” school. When he’s done with that, they’ll be sending him to “C” school. All total, he’ll be in 40 weeks of training (as I understand it, for most of that he’ll be in San Diego). All that training will turn him into a corpsman, which I guess is sort of like a physician’s assistant or uber-EMT (embedded with a Marine platoon, so effectively he’ll be a combat medic).

Looking forward, I can see the advantages — when we need a critter doctored, well, that training should stand him in good stead. *grin*

I was a Navy brat. Now I get to be a Navy wife. At least he gets to keep his long hair until he ships out for basic…and he’s already promised me that I will do the cutting (not something I look forward to, but I’ll be damned if I let some stranger do it, and the hair get tossed into a trashcan!).

It’s been a month since I’ve blogged?! Oh crap. Hey, I’ve been busy.

For about 3 months prior to my grandmother’s 80th birthday (the first weekend of May), I’ve been cross-stitching a gift for her. And not cross-stitching from a pattern, mind you, but an original design I put together myself. (NEVER do that! The math alone — and I say this as a person who likes math — was aggravating to the nth degree. Ohmigawd, what a huge pain.) I finished it a whopping 15 hours before the start of her birthday party, only to discover that the frame I’d purchased for it was broken upon removing it from the packaging. Since it was 11-freaking-pm, I had no choice but to dash back to the store as soon as it opened the morning of the party and exchange the frame. Then I remembered why I hadn’t done cross-stitch in years (about 10 years, actually…) — framing that stuff is a stone bitch. (This was, most unfortunately, before I discovered a nifty product called “peel & stick mounting board,” which I will use for my next needlepoint project.)

Anyway, here’s the finished product, which is approximately 11″x13″ (forgive the lousy pic, it was taken in a hurry under less-than-ideal conditions):

All I can say is 18-count Aida fabric can BITE ME. That’s 18 itty-bitty cross-stitches per inch of fabric! Only certifiably crazy people use anything smaller than 14-count. (Thank the gods I didn’t try 22-count. I tremble in fear just thinking about it.)

In other craft-related news, there are 6 (SIX, gah!) projects that I have partly finished, and 2 more in the works that I really need to get started on as soon as possible (which means “after the wedding”). The partly-finished include an afghan for Anxiety, an open-work tunic-style sweater for Angst, a cap-sleeved summer pullover for myself, an artsy wall decoration that I keep forgetting to finish up, and some other stuff I’m keeping under wraps for the time being.

And now for something completely TMI…

My mother visited yesterday (it was her birthday), and we talked a bit about my & Geoffrey’s plans to get married. At one point in the conversation, she said, “So this is going to change your ‘other’ relationships?” (She’s known for over a decade that I’m polyamorous.)

I laughed. And explained to her that Geoffrey and I have no intention of ever becoming monogamous. In fact, if we have our way, we’ll eventually be adding to our relationship rather than closing it off! (Ideally we’d like to have Geoffrey’s girlfriend Tam become part of our family and household, should the opportunity arise. We already have firm plans to combine households with Lyse in a few years, and while she’s not romantically involved with either of us, it will still be a lifetime family commitment.)

If I was fertile (which I’m not) and we wanted to have a child (which we don’t), there might be some merit to at least temporary monogamy for Geoffrey and me. But I can’t think of any other reason why it would be beneficial to our relationship to close it off. Sure, we had some serious conflicts involving polyamory during our first few years together, but we got those worked out and our relationship has only become better and stronger for it. The current stability of our relationship has lasted years longer than our prior conflicts and difficulties over ‘other’ relationships — and we both earned our current stability through serious effort, putting our commitment as a top priority, and developing more than a little personal growth.

Most importantly, I have a profoundly deep faith and belief that Geoffrey and I will be together forever, and that nothing (and nobody!) can come between us. So we won’t be including vows of emotional or sexual fidelity in our wedding. “Forsaking all others” does NOT sound like a loving sentiment to us!

Non-monogamy isn’t for everyone, not by far! But monogamy isn’t for everyone, either, and certainly not for us.

After my weekend — which featured moving a couple of couches for Lyse, doing tons of laundry & dishes, and hellacious migraines that Would. Not. Stop. — I didn’t expect to have a very pleasant Monday.

Surprise, surprise. It was a pleasant Monday, strangely enough. *knock wood*

I have a hovering suspicion that part of the reason why is that I refused to let aggravations get to me. Yesterday I announced to myself that this was going to be a really good week, because: 1) I’m not working up at Exile Island, 2) I have a 3-day weekend at the end of it, 3) I’m going to see my Number One Internet Fanboy on Friday night, come hell or high water, and 4) Battlestar Galactica comes back in only 4 more days! YAY!

So starting off my Monday with the mindset that it’s going to be a good week may have, just possibly, inclined me to ignore that which normally riles my temper up something terrible. Not that I’m going to start a gratitude journal or anything like that. Besides, I’m too busy procrastinating writing my life story for my descendants. (BTW, did you know that you can type an ISBN into most booksellers’ sites search engines, and the book you want will pop right up? Neat, huh?)

Now Lyse is demanding I go spend time with her. But she’s making homemade meatloaf & mac-n-cheese from scratch (I don’t have to cook!!!), so I shall. *grin*