The year is slowly going to its end

Today is already the last day of September. Time flies! And the older you get, the faster it seems to go - or is that just a feeling???

The heating has come on, especially in the mornings and evenings, when temperatures drop. Still, we can't complain as it is dry and sunny outside. Ideal for an afternoon walk along the river or in the forest. Near our home is a lake, and there you can also make a nice walk. I just savor walking right now, as I haven't been able to do it for 10 months or more. The medication I need to take against the cancer (Votrient) has a lot of side-effects (nausea, diarrhea, loss of white and red bloodcells, fatigue, hand- and footillness, infections in the mouth, ...). Against nausea and diarrhea you can take medicine, so that's under control, but I suffered a lot from pain in my feet. They looked infected,the skin red and sometimes purple. Some days I could not put a foot down without pain. But since I started taking Probiotical (a nature product), the pain has miraculously disappeared! The skin on my feet looks normal once more and I can make walks without feeling anything of pain.

So I look forward to the coming weeks and months. Some nice things coming up. Next week once more a long weekend at the coast (always nice, feeling the seawind in your hair) and then three weeks later we go to Manchester, UK. Not the first time there. This time we are going to attend a concert of Michael Bolton. Curiously, we always manage to get tickets for shows in the UK, but are seldom lucky in our own country (with the one exception, we could get tickets for a concert of Brian Ferry next year). And in December, we are going to Mexico. We'll spend a good week in Mexico City, from where we have planned various trips to explore, and then later on we go to a ranch some two hours away from the capital. There we'll celebrate New Year's Eve.  It's a luxurious resort (not cheap) but I think it will be great!

In-between we're meeting with our old friends, the girls who used to live next to us when we were young. We sometimes get together and talk about years past! That's always great fun.

Come to think of it, Chris and I are nowadays the eldest inhabitants of our street. I've lived here since my mother brought me home from the hospital after being born. So already some good 62 years! We've seen a lot of change in that time. Some new houses were built, others were sold, new families moved in. Our left hand neighbors are Polish and next to them are Turks. They're good neighbors, btw. The Turks will help out when we need to move something heavy, and together with our Polish neighbor we deal with problems that concern the two houses, like repairs to the roof. We just split the cost, no problem. On the right hand side of the house are Belgian people. They are a bit special. The man keeps lots of chicken and they also have noisy dogs. And can you believe it, the wife died two months ago, and we even didn't get  a notice! We had to hear it from strangers! Hopefully the guy will soon move out with his menagerie and then we'll get new neighbors.