Is it only me noticing it now or has blogger always included ads? I am tempted to switch off adblock to have a look what ads are running with my blog but nah, never mind.

Yes, you can have too many visitors, especially when  the guest list includes your bossy sister and all those cousins who came to gawk at my child. 

It has been a week of too much food, too much talk, too much heat and so in the end my body switched off and send me a heavy dose of vertigo. Thankfully, those who cannot handle ill health rapidly disappeared, while my lovely ones got the place sorted in no time and now all is calm and Sunday evening and I am working on getting my balance organs back into gear to stop the world spinning. All those silly thumb movements and standing on one leg with closed eyes (and bumping into the wall), while keeping my fingers crossed that it's only another bout of vestibular neuronitis and nothing else, thank you very much.

it's very something different

two things:

It is really really hot. The Irish cousins suffered greatly and with eminent relief boarded their planes back to rainy Dublin this morning.

Can you have too many visitors? I am finding out. It helps to have lots of towels.

We did. Cry like babies. For quite some time. Felt so good.

In less than an hour's time my child and her sweetheart will be on the last leg of their long long journey over here. I guess that at this very moment they are queuing up somewhere at Singapore airport. They only have to cover the last 10 000 km which is nothing. My heart is jumping in my throat as I am getting the beds ready and R is unpacking wine and antipasti and cheese and rinsing fat black cherries and apricots and little pink peaches.

I will bake a blueberry cake and feed the cat and then we will drive for a couple of hours to the big airport and check in to one of these big fat hotels right there in the terminal and try to sleep a bit before they land at the crack of dawn very early tomorrow morning. Excitement is too small a word for what I feel. We'll cry like babies, obviously.

da wee man from Strabane

As long as you are wishing for things to change, they never will. As long as you’re wanting yourself to get better, you won’t. As long as you are oriented toward the future, you can never just relax into what you already have or already are. 

Pema Chödrön

On Sunday evening I realised that my follow-up appointment with the immunologist was on the next day - is it a good sign when you space out the days with the expert?

R was all cool efficiency and got me there in no time despite all the traffic and the detours due to road works everywhere. 

It has been six months since we met and Dr B was all smiles. She is now blond, which makes her look even more like a Heidi. I proudly presented my latest lab results with the almost back to normal liver values and she liked that. But still. She dished out the hard facts with a smile: This is all good but don't fool yourself, there is no straight road to better and better. Be glad it's that good at the moment and I think you should have more rest.

More rest, as in don't do so much.

And then we talked about shoes and walking and I showed her my slowly deforming big toe joint and she told me that it sounds much more dramatic when I refer to it as the metatarsophalangeal joint and we had a good laugh not only because deformed toe joints are not related to having an autoimmune disease and who knows, maybe one day I will opt for surgery if only for the relief of having something removed and out and away with it. 

And then we talked about her breast implants and her nipple tattoos and that it will be five years now since her breast cancer surgery and we were quits. And she hugged me and I hugged her and on the way home I fell asleep in the car and in my dream I quietly chucked plan B out of the car window.

There is this Turkish word: yakamoz. The English-Turkish dictionary translates it as "phosphorescence in the sea", but this is so completely wrong that I almost feel sorry for the poor lexicographer, because today my Turkish colleague explained to me that yakamoz means "the reflection of the moon on water" and with a great sweep of her hands she leaned her head sideways and looked into the distance and let out this gentle sigh, yakamoz.

She also told me that the Turkish word seher cannot simply be translated as dawn, because it describes that very special moment when you know that any minute, any second now, the first ray of sunlight will inch across the sky.

 

summer

So we did go and see Bob Dylan after all. For free. It was very pleasant, of course, we didn't see him, but we could hear him mumble and croak quite clearly there on our blanket under the trees, with all the other grey-haired hippies, watching the boats going by on the river, sipping tea and white wine, nibbling on the last of the Swiss chocs R had brought back from Zurich last week. The sun was slowly setting somewhere behind us and when it was over the sky was pink and gorgeous.

As always when his holidays start, R went mad in the garden with the resulting back pain. Doesn't stop him, he walks with a stoop like Riff Raff from the Rocky Horror Picture Show and is now trimming the hedge, all 47 m of it, on a ladder.

Scandinavia

   Fleshquartet w. Anna Ternheim - Quiet Night 

Thunder rolling outside, on and off. One minute the sky is this startling clear blue with hovering insects in the heat, and then towering black clouds appear out of nowhere, the wind picks up and before you know like a deflating balloon it's all over and back to hot blue skies.

Soon, very soon, my child will be here. This morning on skype I told her that every day I remind myself to not treat her like a 16-year old when she comes. That I have the best intentions to stand back and let myself be overtaken by this glorious and grown up woman with a life and a career and a smart brain. And she laughed at that.

And I told her that R reminded me to not always refer to her coming "home" but she laughed at that, too. And then she said she will write to the bank to sort out the stuff about her missing card so that it will be sent here by the time she arrives and I quickly reminded her that she has been planning this for the last year and that we are now talking about 10 days which may be a bit tight and why not.... yes mum, said my 16-year old. And we could laugh at that.