Return to Normal?

Well Folks, it's over! Or, I should probably say "It's almost over!"

What's that, you ask?

The COOKBOOK, that's what!

At least the order is filled out and almost everything that is needed for the publisher to start work on our Cookbook is now safely enroute to Kansas, via the good old U.S. Postal System as of about 11:30 this morning anyway.

And baby, am I ever relieved!

Now, maybe I can go about returning to my so-called "normal" and fairly lazy way of life -wiling away my time, eating bon-bons and embroidering!

Well, at the very least, I know I won't be sitting here, stressing out, considering pulling what few hairs I do have now (that just started to grow back in about 2-3 months ago, after spending the previous six or seven months in a state of baldness.) One thing's for sure, I won't be needing to look into getting either a new curling iron much less hair straighteners -and that's a big relief!

I don't know if I mentioned anything before in any of my posts about my hair and the regrowth I'm seeing these days. But it's been quite an interesting experience for me, that's for sure!

If you weren't aware or don't recall this, from the chemo treatments I had last fall, I lost all my hair! Yep, pretty much every last strand fell out by mid-October of last year and on Maya's seventh birthday, I had my next-door neighbor come over and shave off what little bit of stragglers were left behind. So, as a result, I spent the winter totally bald and shivering a good deal of the time then too. You have no idea how much warmth one's body does receive from the hair on your head until it's all gone. Just take that little tidbit of wisdom from me to the bank, ya know!

But the really, truly upside for me with this hair situation came as a total surprise to me. When my hair finally began to re-appear, back in early April, it was almost the equivalent to growing a beard I think you could say -just a teensy bit of stubble. It really wasn't till about mid-June that the growth really was becoming noticeable and one day, while I was in the bathroom, I happened to glance into the mirror and was really very shocked with what I saw.

There, in my own reflection, looking at the way the hair on my head was coming back in, all of a sudden I realized I'd something else too. I'd seen someone, somewhere, that looked like I looked at that time, with the way the hair was growing in and it dawned on me that OMG! -I looked very much like my dad -or my hair did anyway!

And that feeling I got from that realization was quite the shocker to me.

After all these years that I've been around, it was the first time I actually felt a true, physical kind of connection then to my Dad!

He died of cancer when I was not quite 3 weeks old, therefore, I had never had the opportunity to know him at all -nor him to know me. I'd never had any kind of feeling of being connected to him growing up, much less as an adult because I didn't know what he had been like, ya know. I never thought that I looked like him either over the years because, well let's face it, I really didn't see much in the way of resemblance to him from photos I've seen over the years.

But about a year or two ago, a cousin of mine had sent me a photo -one of the few I've seen, much less that I actually have now -of him, and it was him holding a baby girl -who happened to be the cousin who sent me the photo and the view of him on that picture is sort of a side view, but it shows very nicely the way his hair grew. Okay, maybe that sounds a bit weird or odd to say it that way but really, it does show up so well on that photo that his hair grew and just sort of rolled back across the top of his head in these nice gentle waves and that, my friends, is just exactly how my hair began to appear once it was really growing back in for me!

And it gave me a sense of peace, of being really his daughter after all because now, all of a sudden, I have this wavy hair that looks pretty much identical to how his looked -except for the fact that mine probably has a bit more grey hairs interspersed in it than his had back then, about 68 years ago!

I was going to post that picture on here so I could show you what it is I'm rambling on about but be darned now if I can find where on earth (on the computer) I stored the darned thing!

Oh well, for now, guess you'll just have to take my word for the hair regrowth thing.

But but now, I'm gonna do a good bit of relaxing, unwinding from all the mega stress that's been hitting me big-time this past week with this cookbook project and get back into doing some embroidery once again.

I do still have some uploading I have to do to the publisher - photos and a few other things, plus I still have about 200 recipes that I have to "verify" too before I can send the recipes to the publisher. Guess I better get on the ball about that since without those recipes there will be no cookbook regardless of whether I got the paper work completed and sent off to the publisher in time!

I may even do a bit of extra celebrating later this evening and kick back with a cold brew or two.

Hey! I think I deserve one for all this stuff I finished, don't you?