December 21
I've been marching along on my December focus using my Single Ring, whatever brush strikes my fancy, and rotating through my Stirling BOS, Jabonman Eufros Wet Earth (nice way to describe mud that smells like damp leaves and grass), and Mike's Hungarian Lavender. I even threw in a few travel shaves with my Trac II and a Tabac shave stick. Verdict so far is (a) that both razors shave equally well...yes, my Trac II is on par with a DE, and (b) all the soaps are top-shelf, but Tabac reigns supreme by providing the slick, yogurt-consistency lather that I prefer. I'm gaining more skill and a new respect for my synthetic brushes.
I'd like to say that I avoided the end-of-year buying frenzy, but I have still managed to stock 500 Voskhods, a dozen or more bars of Stirling bath soap, a couple of bottles of Stirling body lotion, and four bottles of Thayers Lavender Witch Hazel. I've purchased some other odds and ends, but they were used to build shave kits for good friends.
I've been preoccupied with life the past few months, but I hope to get back to more routine SOTD posts. My Bride continues to do exceedingly well on her treatments. The cancer markers in her blood are down by about two thirds. The docs tell us she is making terrific progress. We'll continue on our current path of treatment until these "markers" plateau or become non-detectable. Then we go to the Mayo Clinic for the stem cell transplant. It will be a mostly outpatient procedure, and our home-away-from-home will be in a transplant house with other families taking similar journeys. We have our ups and downs, for sure. But family and friends have gathered all around us, and we are incredibly blessed. We see God at work at every turn.
We have house sitters/watchers, so we plan to spend January in a condo overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. We have treatments lined up at the local hospital. Depending on my Bride's continued progress, we are taking another short trip with my sister to San Francisco in late Feb/early March. We are staying a few blocks from the vintage watch district in SFO, so that will be a fun trip. I'm hitting the watch shops one day while the girls do their shopping thing. And that puts us back at the Mayo Clinic sometime around March for a few weeks. We hear the weather can still be rugged in Minnesota during March, so I'm having a new "deep cycle" battery installed in my car on Monday morning.
I gave up on trying to pack my shaving supplies in my travel bag for the two extended trips, so I decided to fill a plastic tub with a full array of goodies.
I hope you all are well. I am thankful for my 30 Day FAMILY, and I wish you all a very Merry Christmas!
Click to expand...
