Baby Jesus Pawn Shop by Lucia Orth has the amazing power to transport you to the Manila of 1982 and introduce you to those who suffered under the Marcos rein, and the author beautifully captures the lives of the Filipino people. I read this book with a mixture of desperation and helplessness and hope, feeding off the emotions of both Doming and his friends, as well as those of Rue, who “felt a dread, unnamable, that by not objecting she was also part of the farce and the horror.” I couldn’t help but get caught up, and this novel was certainly hard to put down.

The book is broken down into five sections, beginning with the chapter entitled ‘What is Real Food?’ that starts with a basic explanation of, you guessed it, what the author calls ‘real food’: the old and the traditional. Foods that were eaten long before food became part of an industry, foods that aren’t processed within an inch of their life, and foods that haven’t been enhanced and added-to before they’re sold are the staples of the ‘real food’ diet. Planck then moves on to chapters covering ‘The Fertility Diet’ [what to eat when you’re trying to conceive, and what foods best prepare your body for the rigors of pregnancy], ‘Forty Weeks’ [how the foods you eat can influence your baby’s development], ‘Nursing Your Baby’ [championing the benefits of breastfeeding over formula use], and ‘First Foods’ [introducing your child to something a little more solid]. The back of the book also provides a list of resources for further reading on a range of topics, from postnatal depression to autism and allergies and various birthing techniques.

Overall, this is a stellar book. Like I said, I’m nowhere near ready for the baby-specific information, but I read this book cover to cover, and it’s now full of post-it flags for easier future reference. I’ve found myself returning to the first chapter on foods basics more than once. A lot of what Planck presents just makes sense, and with so much information and misinformation floating around in the media – eggs are bad! no, wait, eggs are good! – it’s great to have something to fall back on when everything gets confusing. I’ve even broken it out when having baby-related discussions with friends and plan on presenting a copy or two as gifts to friends in the future. And, yeah, maybe I do look forward to using the information for my own personal use some day.

Jesse’s story begins shortly after she loses her family when they drop her off at an animal control shelter, but her life turns around when she is adopted by Ruth and her husband Hugo. She soon discovers a love for squeaky bones, being dried off after a bath, and new friends[both the two-and four-legged kind]. Ruth’s dream for Jesse was to become certified both as a Canine Good Citizen and as an International Therapy Dog, and with both love and work, the dynamic duo reached their goal. Shortly after, they began to aim for something new: Ruth would like to develop a volunteer-based group for adopted children and rescued pets where the two could interact and support each other. A few of Jesse’s friends get them started with the donation of a small play wagon so that Jesse can pull children around the neighborhood, and Ruth and Jesse hope to raise awareness of their Kids ‘n’ Kritters project.

This little book is a fun read, and the end of each chapter features a “paws” for lessons learned: Jessie tries to highlight the main points to take away from her story. Everyone can appreciate little reminders such as let go of the past; make good use of today! Jesse’s story is a lovely one, and demonstrates the healing power of love.

10% of sales of Bark Up The Right Tree go to Open Doors, an Amazing Grace Foundation’s Kids ‘n’ Kritters project.

There’s a clever aspect to this book – chapters of the story Lockwood is writing are interspersed with his adventures in trying to get them written, and so the reader has the opportunity to ‘meet’ Señora Casals and understand Lockwood’s motivation for making sure her story is told properly. George Rabasa does such a wonderful job of bringing Señora Casals to life – I regret that she is a fictional character, for I would have loved to hear her sing, or to lear more about her. One chapter from the ‘autobiography’ stuck with me, as it detailed a dark period in the Señora’s life. She was infatuated with the prince of a small, defunct European country, and to please him she changed everything about herself for him: her hair, her makeup, her wardrobe, her body. She sang only what and when he wanted her to, and she became a shell of her former self. After five years of starving herself and canceling her recitals and rarely singing in public, she snaps and leaves the prince, and returns to her former glory when she is out from under his thumb. And from that point on, she lives her life as she wishes to live it, not according to anyone else’s standards.

I have to say, this is such a great book. Lockwood’s character is a little irritating, but I think he was supposed to be, for by the end of the novel he’s being transformed by his efforts in telling the Señora’s story. The Señora herself is such a strong woman, full of strength and joy, even after her death, even as someone else is telling her story.

• Revise The World by Brenda W. Clough
• Dirty Little Angels by Chris Tusa
• Baby Jesus Pawn Shop by Lucia Orth
• The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist’s Memoir of Death and Redemption by Kamal Saleem
• Roastbeef’s Promise: When Your Dad’s Dying Wish Is to Have His Ashes Sprinkled in Each State, What’s a Son to Do? by David Jerome
• The Wonder Singer by George Rabasa
• Secrets Unveiled by Sheshena Pledger
• The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire by C. M. Mayo
• Stuffed: An Insider’s Look at Who’s (Really) Making America Fat by Hank Cardello
• Palace Circle: A Novel by Rebecca Dean
• Real Food for Mother and Baby: The Fertility Diet, Eating for Two, and Baby’s First Foods by Nina Planck
• Perfection: A Memoir of Betrayal and Renewal by Julie Metz
• Shanghai Girls: A Novel by Lisa See

Update August 26: Have finished the crossed-out books, and working on more! Reviews soon!

• The Textile Planet by Sue Lange
• Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town by Warren St. John
• Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story by Chuck Klosterman
• Bark Up The Right Tree: Lessons From a Rescued Dog by Jesse & Ruth Tschudin
• Living Dead In Dallas by Charlaine Harris
• Papillion by Henri Charriere
• Target Underwear and a Vera Wang Gown by Adena Halpern
• Pretty In Plaid by Jen Lancaster
• Tender At The Bone by Ruth Reichl
• Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl
• Spiced by Dalia Jurgensen

Books that I’ve read but won’t be reviewing — but that I will include toward my yearly total / donation — because I’ve already read them at least once previously include:

• Queen Of Babble by Meg Cabot
• Bitter is the New Black, Bright Lights, Big Ass, and Such A Pretty Fat by Jen Lancaster
• Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn by Stephanie Meyer

I’m sure there’s something that I’ve forgotten, though; there almost always is. Coming up tomorrow: a list of what’s on my to-be-read-in-the-immediate-future pile.

The house is now too quiet, and I can barely bring myself to walk downstairs into what was her domain. Saturday afternoon I could have sworn that I heard her sit up on her couch to peer over the back as I made my way down the steps. She wasn’t there, though.

Thursday morning she had one of her weekly checkups with the girls at the vet. It kind of went as expected: she was coming out of remission, due [in my mind] to the fact that during the previous chemo session she couldn’t have the ‘good’ drug, having reached her lifetime limit on it — it’s one of those drugs that can wreck havoc if given more than six times over the course of a dog’s life — and the substitute drug just wasn’t up to snuff. So the doctor went over the [dwindling] treatment options, and sent everyone on their merry way with an appointment scheduled for Tuesday.

Thursday night during dinner Puppy had a couple of very brief spasm-y, seizure-y things. Brief, but worrisome — but otherwise, she seemed fine. A little more quiet than usual, maybe, if anything. She laid with us in the living room as we watched the hockey game, and afterward took up her favorite position on the landing at the bottom of the stairs. As I sat in the living room watching whatever after-game program was on, I heard her stand up and take a few steps up the stairs. I leaned over to look down the stairs at her just in time to see another seizure send her backwards and her head hit off the wall, and I flew down. We sat on the landing for a while with her head in my lap, and then when I got up for something-or-other, she moved to a cozier spot behind our bar. I resumed my duty as headrest, and we stayed there until my mom came down. I couldn’t shake my bad feelings, and as we laid there, I begged Puppy in a whisper to make it through the night.

Friday morning I woke up to a terrible look on my mom’s face. The seizures had gotten worse overnight, becoming more frequent and more severe. Puppy was laying under a desk in our game room, and didn’t even thump her tail in recognition when I went to see her. My mom was on the phone with the vet, and we opted to take her in for emergency services instead of waiting for a late-morning oncology appointment. Normally hyper-enthusiastic about trips to the vet and any car-related adventures, we had to lift her up and carry her out to the truck, and halfway there, she seized in my arms.

Three hours later, my sisters, parents and I have gathered in a back room, waiting for the techs to bring Puppy in so we can say goodbye. The cancer had spread to her brain, the doctors think, and there was very little to be done. As we sat there, we exchanged stories, and we came to realize that somehow, the day before, we’d given Puppy all of her favorite things. She’d laid outside in the sunshine with my sister during the day, and she’d had a variety of her favorite treats. Thursday night, I took Puppy outside and we chased a rabbit all around the house, sat in the yard, and I fed her a few choice blades of grass. We had pizza for dinner that night, and she feasted on pizza bones [the crusts] and had an imitation ice cream treat for dessert.

One of our favorite girls at the vet game in with a clipboard and some forms, and being both closest to her and used to filling out the paperwork, I automatically reached for it. Turns out it was the authorization for euthanasia. I have never wanted to sign my name less in my life.

They brought her in and we began our goodbyes, and I was relieved to see her pick up her head in recognition at our voices. I selfishly wanted to delay the inevitable as long as possible, but when another seizure took her — the worst that I’d seen so far — I knew we’d have to let her go before yet another one hit. Saying goodbye was the hardest thing that I’ve ever done.

I keep looking for her. But she’s not there to greet me when I walk in the house after work, and she’s not scratching on the bathroom door when I’m getting ready in the morning, and she’s not jumping on my bed to bark at the neighbors and get her fur all over my work clothes.

Puppy never judged me, was never disappointed when I didn’t go to grad school, never questioned my bad decisions. She seemed to love me unconditionally, and I can only hope that she knew how much I loved her. How much we all loved her. How much we’re going to miss her.

In loving memory
September 2004 — May 2009

“Lowly MIT research assistant Matt Fuller toils away in a physics lab until one day he makes an odd discovery. A sensitive quantum calibrator keeps disappearing and reappearing moments later when he hits the reset button. With a little tinkering, Matt realizes that the device functions as a crude, forward-traveling time machine. With visions of Nobel Prizes dancing in his head, he latches it to a car and leaps into the future. The interesting wrinkle here is that each jump ahead is 12 times longer than the last. Matt’s successive futures involve jail time, unwelcome celebrity, and assorted holocausts in the earth’s climate. He begins to long for his native era.”

This book was a fun, quick, and easy read.  Not the deepest or most profound book out there, just something interesting to pass the time.

Next we have Timescape by Gregory Benford.  Amazon’s synopsis states:

“It’s 1998, and a physicist in Cambridge, England, attempts to send a message backward in time. Earth is falling apart, and a government faction supports the project in hopes of diverting or avoiding the environmental disasters beginning to tear at the edges of civilization. It’s 1962, and a physicist in California struggles with his new life on the West Coast, office politics, and the irregularities of data that plague his experiments. The story’s perspective toggles between time lines, physicists, and their communities. Timescape presents the subculture and world of scientists in microcosm: the lab, the loves, the grappling for grants, the pressures from university and government, the rewards and trials of relationships with spouses, the pressures of the scientific race, and the thrill of discovery.”

This one was a little longer and, imho, drier.  It’s chock full of scientific theory and physics jargon.  I normally enjoy this sort of thing, but this book was just plain boring.  I never really cared for any of the characters and nothing seemed to happen throughout the story.

—–

So.

I’ll admit to putting off writing this for as long as possible, because putting the last couple of weeks into words is going to force me to mentally relive it, and I’m not thrilled with the idea.

Basically, the short version of it all is this: we were thisclose to losing the Puppy last week. Things were so dire that her oncologist called to ask about ‘heroic measures’ [CPR and anything else needed to resuscitate should the unthinkable happen], and our favorite vet tech [the lovely and appropriately named Kat] spent a portion of her shift just sitting with our girl with Puppy’s head in her lap, all while imploring our vet to call us to tell us how bad things really were.

The good news is that she is — ever so slowly — on the mend.

Back in January, my mom and I noticed that the lymph nodes in Puppy’s neck were once again notably enlarged. We made the trek to see the oncologist and were informed that her lymphoma had come out of remission and given three or four new treatment options. We were able to start one of them right then and there, so that’s what we picked, and for a while, everything was good. Her lymph nodes decreased in size, and she was all bouncy and playful and mostly normal.

Cut to the appointment two weeks ago [on a Thursday] when we found out the the new drug was no longer working and we have to pick another kind of chemo. Puppy’s kind of wheezy because of the enlarged nodes in her neck, and kind of quiet, but pretty okay. Our oncologist advised us to come in sometime the next week ["Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, whenever's good for you, a day either way won't really matter"] for our next treatment of choice. We scheduled an early appointment for Tuesday because the chemo would take eight+ hours to deliver by IV.

When I left the house Saturday for Krystal’s bachelorette extravaganza — two days later — everything seemed okay. When I came home Sunday morning, Puppy was quiet and kind of picking at her food. It took her just about all day to eat her breakfast, and wasn’t nearly as obnoxious as she usually is — no bouncing me awake, no barking out the window at the neighbors. Monday she wasn’t better at all, but Tuesday was a nightmare.

Tuesday morning we made our way to the vet in a bit of a panic — and once we got in the front door, Puppy laid down on the tile floor and refuse to move. When Kat the Tech came out to collect Puppy for her treatment, my mom and I were in tears, Puppy still wouldn’t get up off the floor, and Kat, another tech, and I had to lift her up and carry her to an exam room. After that, everything pretty much kicked into crisis mode. Puppy was whisked away on a gurney, and my mom and I had no choice but to head to work and wait for the phone to ring — and panic a little bit lot each time it did.

Tuesday was the day of the ‘heroic measures’ phone call, and I was trying to hold out hope that I’d still have a Puppy by the end of the day. In the end, no news was good news, and when we finally heard from the oncologist again after work, well, the news wasn’t great, but it could have been a hell of a lot worse. The vet told us she’d call overnight if anything happened, but again, to consider no news to be good news. When I woke up Wednesday morning and realized the phone hadn’t rung overnight, I felt such relief.

Wednesday night we were allowed to go and visit her, and I was amazed by how much she’d improved overnight. She still wasn’t 100% — more like 60%, maybe — but the improvement was incredible. She was refusing to eat, but did manage to pull a couple of catheters out of her legs, so she had a little bit of spirit, at least.

Late Thursday afternoon we got the okay to bring her home — along with nine kinds of drugs. Several antibiotics, eye drops and ointments [for the lymph that had made its way into her eyes], an appetite stimulant, and some anti-nausea drugs, among other things. And Friday, she was kind of okay. Not great, but okay. We coerced her into eating some baby food [straight from the jar, no spoons or airplane noises necessary] and shoved some pills down her throat and crossed our fingers. But the pills didn’t stay down — hardly anything did. Shortly after that, we couldn’t tempt her with any kind of food, she had near constant diarrhea, and nothing would stay in her stomach. Sunday my mom and I packed her back into the truck and met with one of the vets with the emergency service. Several hours hours, some IV fluids, and some [bigger, better, stronger] anti-nausea drugs later, we were sent on our way — this time with injectable medications to replace the pills that Puppy couldn’t keep down.

That night, Puppy had a couple of sleepover buddies: she and I claimed the couch, and my mom slept nearby on a recliner in preparation for the hourly trips to the backyard and the 4am anti-nausea injections. I settled in with her around 1am, and that’s about when she decided that she wanted to eat. Things were looking up.

By Monday night the vomiting had ceased completely, though the constant, oozing diarrhea hadn’t cleared up. Sometime in the wee hours of Tuesday morning it took on a bloody tinge and I steeled myself to tell my mom that I didn’t think we could wait until Puppy’s 1pm checkup with the vet. And let me tell you about the panic that I had to fight — flashes of all sorts of things went through my mind: internal bleeding, organ failure, all kinds of horrible things.

Somehow, we managed to hold out until 1pm, and we were escorted into an exam room and Puppy was taken back into the lab for some blood work. We waited, and waited, and then Puppy came to wait with us. And then we waited some more. When her oncologist walked in, my heart was in my throat, and it stayed there until she told us that Puppy’s blood tests had some back mostly normal. A couple of things were low — her platelets and white blood cell count, so more antibiotics, yay — but the rest of the numbers that had been sky high a week previously– her liver functions, for example — has come back down into normal range. Better news came in the form of a reassurance that the blood we were seeing was a result of the low platelets and nothing to worry about just yet. Best news came in the form of the announcement that all of her lymph nodes — including the ones in her liver that had caused much of this mess — have come down to normal size and Puppy is in partial-to-complete remission.

Talk about a huge sigh of relief.

We’re still working on her. She’s only recently [as of this morning] eating regularly again, and she’s not quite bouncing on me in the morning, but she did come and give me kisses, instead. She’s still on eleven kinds of medicine, but there aren’t any more 4am injections. She’s still quiet, and she’s still sick, but she’s still around. And we’ll take it.

—–

Add to this mess the fact that my boss was on vacation, my best friend got married [and I was a bridesmaid] and my boyfriend moved to Philadelphia, all in the same span of three weeks or so. It’s not a great excuse, but it’s all I’ve got.

Hope to resume regular bookish stuff soon.

Glenna is the manager of the Whispering River Lodge in Oregon — so named for the high-pitched noise that can be heard throughout the town as the wind blows through a nearby canyon — and she’s doing her best to keep the lodge running smoothly and her guests from a major laceworker’s convention happy when her ex-husband shows up with a group of foreign investors. Shortly after he threatens to have her fired from the Lodge, her ex-husband turns up dead, and a length of silk stolen from the convention is found to be the murder weapon. The evidence begins to mount, and Glenna finds herself at the top of the suspect list, so she turns to the Lodge’s brand-new chief of security to help her clear her name.

I have to say, I loved the cast of characters in this book. Glenna’s best friend, Joy, the former owner of the lodge, George, who ‘haunts’ the resort, the new security chief, Craig — and even Glenna’s dogs — make this a really enjoyable read. I’m usually a little wary of mystery novels because my tendency to figure out whodunnit long before the last pages (I’m not sure if that is more a product of my mental skills or my bad luck in choosing mysteries to read) but this one kept me occupied and guessing and entertained until the very end. Lacing Up For Murder is billed as the first in the Whistling River Lodge mystery series, and I’m looking forward to seeing what’s going to be in store for Glenna in the future.

Lacing Up For Murder will be available at www.bookviewcafe.com.