Adventure of the Soul

I've just started a big, fat autobiography of Gandhi. The introduction has me so interested in it already. Gandhi writes that, in his life he wants to achieve only Moksha - what others might call salvation - and that for him, God is Absolute Truth, although he has only had faint glimpses of this. He also says, "..for the essence of religion is morality." Thus, he decided to write of his "experiments" with truth in his choices and actions.

I have vague memories that Gandhi has been criticized for not treating his wife and children well, so I will be looking for the truth of this, too.

How to Learn Something

Saw this post in a library professionals newsletter, and since I now have reached the era of "senior moments," I was really interested in it. I remember back in the bad old days that I never believed in studying regularly - I was always cramming at the last minute. In some ways that worked well for me, but this article shows how I could have done better - but not by starting earlier and being more consistent about it.

If the best way to learn something is to repeat the process of remembering it at a point (not too long after you first learned it) where you really have to dig around in your memory for it, here will be the acid test for me: remembering a new password. I usually use the same old one and never change it - a mortal sin on the Web, apparently. I'm going to change my Google password right now - and not write it down! Stay tuned.

Now I Can Heal

Since Halloween, I've been treating the skin on my face with Fluorouracil 5, a cream based on chemotherapy concoctions that exposes and destroys precancerous skin lesions caused by sun damage. It's a long and demoralizing process - scares kids, too - but the payoff is that it can treat all active and latent skin lesions in one shot.

After I saw the Website posted by a guy who went through the same thing nearly 10 years ago, I was encouraged to stay with it until my dermatologist finally said I was done last Tuesday.

The first photo shows me in the beginning when I only applied the cream at night 3 times a week for a month. After that, it was every night for two months. Ok, I got one week off right after Christmas, but that was all. I could cover most of the red spots with Bobbi Brown concealer, but after awhile, even that couldn't hide them all. People at work were understanding, but I got a lot of horrified looks from library patrons.



The last photo shows me last Tuesday with bare skin - right after I got the good news to stop the treatment. I'm a mess, but the scabs are starting to flake off already with new pink baby skin underneath. The doc said I lasted longer with the cream than any other woman he's treated. Let's hope my results (no skin cancer) last longer, too! Moral: use sunscreen.