It has been so long since I’ve written, I don’t really know where to start.

Health-wise, I’m doing okay—or at least I haven’t had any new health crises. I’m writing this from Stan Fest. Last year, we found out 20 minutes before we left for Stan Fest that I had cancer. It was good to have the weekend to process it all. I remember one specific moment telling Scott that I didn’t want to do chemo again. I won’t be foreshadowing anything treatment-wise this year!

I managed to get my Herceptin treatment scheduled for last week. I get treatment on a Wednesday, and then end up spending most of Friday and Saturday in bed. It causes exhaustion. I guess my immune system is in overdrive for those days, reacting to the medications. Usually, by Sunday, I’m feeling better, and by Monday, I’m back to my normal self. I’ve moved to treatment every four weeks, which I hope helps reduce the side effects. That has yet to be determined, but it will at least reduce the frequency of the side effects, giving me more ‘normal’ weeks in between.

We have been off on a mini vacation—our last planned one for the summer—but we still have another folk festival to attend! We had a lovely time at Porter’s Lake Provincial Park. Then, on the way to Canso, we stopped off at Taylor Head Provincial Park and went for a lovely 4 km hike, followed by a frigid dip in the ocean—beautiful beach, but the water has yet to warm up!

I find the oceans here fascinating. They call Nova Scotia Canada’s Ocean Playground. Each shore, and Cape Breton, has very different oceans. On the South Shore, we have beautiful sand beaches at low tide. They warm up sometime in August, to the point where you can swim in them comfortably. The French coast has the Bay of Fundy. It isn’t a place to swim so much as watch the tides and walk on the bottom of the ocean. It is difficult to imagine 40 ft tides until you see them! We had a brief walk on the North Shore earlier this summer. It is rockier. The water was warmer but not yet swimmable (that was early July). We swam in Bras D’or, which is a brackish lake in the middle of Cape Breton. The North shore of Cape Breton has some beautiful sand beaches, and the water there was surprisingly warm. I really enjoyed my swim there. And now we are on the East Shore, which has some nice beaches closer to Halifax and gets rocky up here. The water was still frigid. I suspect it warms up at about the same time as the South Shore, as it is the same side of Nova Scotia.

Last year at Stan Fest, it was a real rain fest. That was the weekend that Bridgewater had 48 hours of thunder and lightning and over 100mm of rain. It caused a lot of damage throughout the province, but our area had it the worst. It seems the rainstorms and flooding are causing more damage in some parts of Nova Scotia than even the hurricanes do. One of our friends in Cape Breton mentioned the rains causing more shore erosion than the storms. That is crazy.

This year’s Stan Fest has been awesome. The weather could not be more perfect. It is low 20s during the day, comfortable for shorts and a t-shirt. The venues are covered, so we aren’t in the sun, which is nice. In the evening, at the main stage, it is nice but it gets cold. Neither of us were adequately prepared for that the first night. We did much better last night, but after two long days and then cold, we were both ready to pack it in early last night. Hubby has already suggested we go again next year. We looked into other folk festivals, thinking we would branch out, but there isn’t really anything else we want to do at this time of year.

Today we are enjoying a lazy morning. The first workshop I want to attend is at 11 am. It is the best kind of morning when we don’t need to move too quickly and can enjoy a coffee and some reading or writing before having to get up and join the world.