What We're Up To

It is only a few days until Susannah goes into the hospital for her bone marrow transplant. The transplant day is referred to as “Day Zero,” so it sounds like her admission to the hospital on Friday is “Day Negative Six.” (Yes, this is a delay from our earlier schedule.) A number of you have asked us what we are doing with ourselves meanwhile. Here is a rough list:

• Massage. Kirsten Chamberlin, just outside Northampton, has been both giving Susannah massage and also teaching Ethan massage basics. Annie Galloway has loaned us a massage table, so we are all fancy like that.
• Cleaning the apartment and getting rid of stuff. We are moving towards eSimplicity, where you have a Kindle instead of a library and a laptop instead of a filing cabinet and so forth. Not exactly what George Fox had in mind, but easy to clean.
• Hiking to the corner of Massachusetts, Vermont, and New York, as part of a project Ethan has become fascinated with. Kind of an epic trip. Read about it here.
• Seeing some friends and family. We just made an excursion into Worcester and saw a bunch of dear friends there. We are also learning to use Skype (Find Susannah by searching for “Susannah McCandless” She is, like Tigger, the only one.) So we can stay in touch with you in a germ-free way.
• Watching movies and television-on-DVD. Via Netflix, another form of eSimplicity. We have gotten some great suggestions for movies recently (Thank you!) Susannah has a plan whereby the chemotherapy will temporarily knock out some of her short-term memory, and she will be able to re-watch her favorite movies and not see the plot twists coming in advance. We'll see how that goes.
• Cooking. Ethan is working through Moosewood Cooks at Home and Julia Child, and having lots of fun with that. We are still waiting to find out exactly how restricted Susannah's diet will be post-transplant.
• Eating out. Which we won't be allowed to do for a long, long time. The pioneer valley is full of very nice restaurants, but we have become especially fond of a hole-in-the-wall Puerto Rican/Honduran/Ecuadoran(?) take-out place up the road from us on 116 in South Amherst. They are called Latinos, and oh my god. 413-461-3551. They deliver.
• Going to the gym after eating all that food. And trying to figure out what all those strange, strange exercise machines do. Susannah also practices yoga regularly, and we've made some preparations so that she can do that in the hospital, as well.
• Meditation and visualization exercises.
• Reading. Susannah is reading Ursula LeGuin (on the Kindle), and Ethan is reading journal articles (on the laptop). See? No paper. In theory.
• Writing. Susannah has been revising her dissertation papers about land conservation and immigrant labor in Vermont, and Ethan is working on a few projects of his own. He has set a personal deadline of February 5th, when he will be 33-and-1/3, to organize his projects. It's not looking good.
• Mapping. Susannah is working with a colleague to map the relationship between gender, land use and biodiversity in ArcGIS, using the data from her Fulbright research at Finca la Bella in Costa Rica. Her hypothesis is that land managed by women (e.g. patio gardens) may be more biodiverse.