Seasonal musings

This time of year, I get to celebrate three things in the span of a few days. Halloween on Wednesday (some of which you have seen in last week's posting - sorry if you weren't able to open the pumpkin slingshot video clip), the Mayan El Dia De Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) on Thursday, and my birthday on Friday.

Halloween was celebrated at home with usual dispensing of candy treats to make the neighborhood kids wired with sugar overload, and at work with some costumery. Our original plan at work was to poke a little fun at the newly painted interior of our building, which was redone in what we felt was in an institutional palette - like a correctional institution. So 42 of us ordered bright orange jumpsuits and stencilled "INMATE" on the back. This almost worked, but someone in the building thought that it would be "disrespectful", and we got an email from Human Resources that the jumpsuits were out. Well, maybe out for most people, but I still had to get one picture with the jumpsuit on in the office.

The alternate costume was a bear - back at the end of last May, a wild black bear was running through the south Puget Sound, and it was finally captured and tranquilized on our campus. So I became "Columbus the Travelling Bear" for the day.

The ID badge bore the disclaimer "In no way is this costume intended to disrespect bears or other members of the Ursidae Family".

Closeup of the "tranquilizer dart" stuck into my rump.

The Day of the Dead is a celebration to honor the deceased in Mayan culture, and still celebrated in Mexico and some Latin American countries. It is my opportunity to celebrate another year beating cancer and not joining the ranks of the deceased just yet (remember "I'm not Dead Yet"?). The good folks at Rogue Brewing in Newport OR brew up a nice ale to commemorate the holiday - Dead Guy Ale, and I use this as part of my celebration.

The birthday part - I celebrated my 50th trip around the sun this year, which by my calculations, comes to approximately 28.2 billion miles. We'll defer this year's celebration for a few days while my body adjusts to last Thursday's round of treatment.

This week's marker number is back down at 5.4, and we'll see if I get the same terribly unpleasant Jekyll and Hyde transformation that I got with the last double dose of Erbitux, which I have now come to call "the nuclear option".

"Bob - what has happened to your skin?"