Here we are again: 2015 is over, and a new year is beginning. As always, I’m stealing some time away during our family vacation at Stinson Beach to write up these reflections on the year that has passed. It’s been a mixed bag of a year, that’s for sure. Some was pleasurable, wonderful, beautiful, exciting and fun; some was the exact opposite. The first two thirds of the year were a mostly enjoyable blend of the usual hurly burly of personal projects, parenting and travel; the last third or so of the year got clobbered and overshadowed by big personal life drama when I was diagnosed with breast cancer in mid-September, right after coming back from Burning Man.
But let me back up and do the month-by-month review and put this in vaguely chronological order, for posterity’s sake. Again, I didn’t journal as much as I would have liked in 2015, but I do have my colorful quilt of a calendar and my photo log to remind me what I was doing so I’ll try to reconstruct as best I can.
January was as always reasonably quiet. We helped Eli finish up the high school application process. We saw the Wood Brothers in concert. We worked on decluttering our house some. I went to a tiny new little Comic-con in Petaluma (“Lumacon”) with my buddy Heather and sold a bunch of books. We had a fun and memorable weekend in honor of my birthday in Glen Ellen drinking wine and eating delicious food with Mark and Angelo. My cousin Lauren and I had a memorable weekend with our grandma going thrift store shopping for a new armchair for her new place here in San Rafael (she moved out here from Florida at the end of 2014). I spent hours and hours dealing with the insurance company and the tree removal guys and the carpenter dudes who were rebuilding our crushed fence.
In February I took my Grandma to go hear Bill Clinton speak at the Civic Center. I worked on getting our home mortgage refinanced (which was more complicated and took up way more of my time than I wanted it to, but at least it was ultimately successful). We continued with the fence building (it came out great though, with little glass marbles in it for decorative coolness, just because I wanted to). Eli had a sleepover/computer games birthday party. We worked on a Science Fair project with Isaac (making rock candy). I worked on getting things ready for our synagogue Purim-palooza service. We finally had a giant garage sale with all the stuff we had decluttered.
March brought with it Purim and FOGcon, with a writer retreat at Stinson afterwards with Gary and Heather. Isaac had a bowling and pie birthday party. We met up with Dave, Keri, Jonah and Zinnie for a day at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk (I hadn’t been there in a loooooong time) and the UCSC campus (also hadn’t been there in a long time). We saw Ani Difranco in concert. We found out that Eli had been accepted to both of the schools he’d applied to, and after much deliberation, chose one: The Marin School.
In April there was our traditional family Passover, and Eli went off for a week on a school trip during mid-winter break to Washington D.C. (it was weird being without him for so long, but he had a pretty good time.) Then things got a little weird when I had a bad PTSD-like flashback from a visit to the dermatologist where the doctor cauterized a mole he was removing and I went right back to the memory of the original lymph node biopsy that started the whole Hodgkin’s Disease story. It made me freaked out and then depressed and generally threw me for a loop emotionally for at least a few weeks, and I was having a hard time getting out of it until something new and surprising popped into my life: the handpan. (I actually blogged about this earlier this year.) After much research and a little luck, I acquired my first handpan (Saraz D Dorian 10), found a fabulous teacher (Judith Lerner) and started playing. Anji and I went to the How Weird Street Fair (Carnival themed) and met a new burner friend, David. I started making freak flag blanks in preparation for Maker Faire and Burning Man.
In May we visited DKJZ in Chico for a weekend. I made a bunch of freak flag blanks. We celebrated Mother’s Day with my parents, aunt and uncle and 94-year old grandma. I killed it again at Maker Faire with my Fly Your Freak Flag High booth (if I do say so myself) and then as has also become a tradition, I went off to indulge in multiple days of interesting feminist spec fic discussions at Wiscon while the boys all went to Kublacon. Another momentous thing happened at some point during this month, and that’s that I was asked to consider joining the Board of Directors for our synagogue (there was an unexpected vacancy). I said yes, mostly because it was such a great group of people to be doing good work with.
Then all of a sudden it was June and there were the usual end of the school year projects and concerts and hoo ha. We started the build for our Burning Man art project (the Pink Heart Carnival, complete with the Inner Freak Show Booth and the Wheel of Participation, along with a few other things). We visited Rio Vista for our nephew Finn’s birthday party. Eli graduated from middle school and in honor of that momentous occasion we helped throw a casual multi-family bbq party in Marinwood park. Then right after that we all took off for a family vacation with my parents and brother’s family in Maui. We were there for two weeks (including for Josh’s and my actual 20th wedding anniversary), which turned out to actually be a bit longer than it probably should have been, but worth it. For the first time we spent an overnight in Hana and got to go swimming in the gorgeous and sacred 7 Sisters Pools, which was one of those perfect peak experiences that I will always treasure. A few days after that I cut my hand really badly when a glass I was washing shattered, and wound up driving all the way across the island to the Maui hospital emergency room to get stitches. Though it took hours to resolve, the fact that both my parents and my brother had come with me made it at least good company, and the hand healed up well (and doesn’t seem to interfere with my handpan playing, which is of course what I was worried about.)
July started with our friend Zoe getting married out in China Camp and the traditional Marin County Fair/4th of July shenanigans, and then was mostly full of Carnival building and Iocari Games summer camp (which was hosted at our house). Though Josh and I did also sneak out for a few days to Ashland while the kids were away at ID Tech programming camp at Stanford, and that was awesomely fun as usual. (High point there was playing handpan in Lithia park on a beautiful summer day to accompany our new friend Gene while he taught T’ai Chi and the “pretty little city deer” wandered by.) I also went to the Rivertown Revival in Petaluma with Anji, and at the end of the month, another handpan arrived in my life (Halo Stratus Oxalis) and I had fun playing them both with whoever would play with me.
August started off with an amazing, fabulous trip that in hindsight was probably the highlight of the year: Josh and I went to Paris for a week in honor of our 20th anniversary (the kids were away at Camp Newman). We had such an awesome time exploring the city, seeing art and architecture and enjoying the temporary fake beach and even a flashmob brass band along the Seine. And of course we enjoyed the heck out of eating and drinking fabulous French food and wine...in fact we had one of the most amazing multi-course, “chef’s choice” farm-to-table meals I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing at a place called Saturne. We stayed in a little 5th floor walkup apartment in the Left Bank and Josh made me breakfast in bed and amazing dinners from ingredients fetched from the local farmer’s market and we never wanted to leave. But leave we did, and came back to final week of Iocari Gaming camp and a whole lot of build and prep for Burning Man. Isaac started school (5th grade), and Eli prepared to start high school (we missed his actual first week of school because we were at Burning Man, but did a lot of the orientation stuff with him before we left). We finished the Carnival and left for Burning Man at the end of the month, but right before we left I went to do my annual mammogram, which came back with a questionable dot so they did it again and then wanted me to do a biopsy. I asked if I could put it off until after Burning Man, and they said yes, so I put that aside while we finished prepping all our stuff and getting ready to go. (This was a special year of Burning Man and required extra effort not only because we made a humongous and cool art project, but also because we took my mom and her friend Rhoda for the first time.)
September was definitely a mixed month. We had a great burn (more detail in other blog posts) and arrived home in early September happy, exhausted and decombobulated as per usual. But I’m a responsible girl so I scheduled the biopsy and endured same, and then right after that it was Rosh Hashanah. On my way home from services I checked my voicemail and found a message from the Breast Health Center asking me to call them about my biopsy results. When I got home I called them and they told me the biopsy had come back showing cancer. It was a hell of a way to start off the new year. After that there was a whole lot of waiting around to do more tests and have more doctor consults and some wrangling with insurance about what or who would be considered in-network, and meanwhile life went on, albeit with a strange sort of cognitive dissonance to it. I helped Mom set up and break down her show at the Mill Valley Fall Arts Festival. Anji and I went to the Superhero Street Fair in SF.
October was more tests and more doctor visits and more cognitive dissonance. Isaac ran for Class President (and lost). We went to the Burning Man SF Decom event and set up the Freak Booth and the Wheel of Participation again in the park next to our Pink Heart camp space. It was a lot of work but once again gratifying to see people interacting with and enjoying what we had made. (Josh and I also played handpan there with some amazing violinists, which was really fun.) Mid-month, Josh and I went away for our Loveiversary for a weekend at the Sonoma Mission Inn and had some much needed relaxing spa time and a lovely wine cave dinner at Benziger Winery. I went to go play handpan for my friend Eileen’s Forgiveness retreat at Mt. Madonna. We got to be the exclusive guests/ketubah signers for Adrienne and Jim’s “tiny Jewish wedding” on her parents’ porch in Santa Venetia (and it was lovely). I had a few close girlfriends come over to my mom’s house and help me make a “boob cast” (a plaster cast of my torso, to commemorate my soon-to-be-removed boobies). Anji and I got all costumed up and went to two different giant Halloween events: Ghost Ship and Phantasm.
Early November was spent anxiously waiting for surgery and trying to keep myself busy and distracted. Eli and I went to workshops and build for Dickens Fair (and brought a couple of his buddies along with us this time). I spent a lovely afternoon playing handpan in a wine cave with my teacher Judith, and she recorded some of the session for her new CD. I drove Isaac’s class on a field trip to the Legion of Honor on a gorgeous San Francisco autumn day. Then finally it was time for my first surgery, which was a lumpectomy + lymph node biopsy and a breast reduction (in preparation for the mastectomy to follow). The surgery went very smoothly and my physical recovery time went better and easier than I’d feared...by the time week two rolled around I was ready and raring to go back to Dickens Fair, which I did for the December weekends. We had a nice quiet small Thanksgiving with my mom and dad and Marian, and a more boisterous but still nice day-after-Thanksgiving time with a whole bunch more people.
December was busy and full of Things, as usual, which was a bit of a struggle since my energy level was still not 100% post-surgery. There were three weekends of Dickens Fair, the traditional Hanukkah party at the Teitelbaums and latkes at our house, our big Black Turkey holiday party (19th annual!) and a big Archer family celebration at Brandi’s house for Christmas. We went to the city to see Mark sing in the SF Gay Men’s Chorus holiday show with Josh’s parents, which was a fun outing. We got all excited about the new Star Wars movie, which we saw on opening night with the kids and a bunch of our friends. (Then the boys and I saw it again a few days later at Skywalker Ranch, courtesy of our friends the Semanicks.) Then we packed up and came out here to Stinson for our familiar beach vacation and New Years celebration.
So yeah, looking back on it 2015 had some great things (handpan! Hawaii! Paris! Star Wars!) and some not great things (cancer!). Although I am sincerely hoping for more positive, fulfilling and exciting things in the year to come, I am also expecting that 2016 (at least in the first half of the year) will bring me significant challenges, mainly because I’m not yet done with this second visit to the cancer rodeo. I’m fairly certain that the familiar flow to my year will be disrupted, I just don’t know how yet. But I will take a deep breath and count my blessings, then hold on to this half-full glass and raise a toast to the New Year nonetheless.