Daily Archives: October 22, 2007

San Diego Fires

San Diego County Wildfires

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UPDATED MONDAY EVENING:

Our area is still safe and likely to remain so, although we had a brief scare this afternoon when we heard reports of a brush fire at an intersection about a mile from our house. It was quickly contained and poses no further threat. Authorities believe it was started by flaming material blown from a wildfire almost 20 miles away from us!

Some 250,000 people have now been evacuated from their homes in the north and east parts of San Diego County. Thousands more are without power. A staggering number of homes have been lost. Keep those prayers coming.

Here’s a post from my friend Laurie, whose mother has been evacuated from her North County home and is now staying with Laurie’s family. Laurie has experience with evacuations—her family had to leave for 3 days during the fires of 2003. I sure hope that won’t be necessary this time. Laurie writes:

There is the worst corridor of fire North of us.

And as of tonight there is a growing corridor of fire south of us with the new evacuations of Chula Vista.

We live near the Qualcomm stadium, where they are sending evacuees, so hopefully that is a good sign that we may remain safe.

I
have clothes loaded into laundry baskets and photo albums in a box. The
file of important papers on the counter ready to go. Won’t forget the
laptop and cameras.

(The kids all packed their backpacks full of
legos and toys first thing this morning as they woke up and I let them
know of the danger.)

My kids packed their treasures this morning too, even though I assured them it is highly unlikely we will need to leave. People are evacuating to our area, I told them. Rose didn’t care. She was all for hightailing it out of here, the sooner the better. That’s about when I decided it would be a wise idea to turn off the TV news. The footage is horrific.

MONDAY MORNING:

From SignOnSanDiego (no link because I don’t want to jam their server):

7:25 a.m.
The San Diego County Office of Emergency Services reports there are
some 18,000 acres of San Diego County burning right now. That includes
the areas burning in the city of San Diego, officials said.

The fires are zero percent contained.

Our area is not likely to be in any danger, but parts of San Diego County to the east and north are seeing severe damage right now. As I type, I’m listening to a news reporter describe how the fire jumped over Interstate 15 at one point—a huge multilane freeway. It’s hard to imagine fire leaping across that expanse of blacktop, but burning embers can travel quite a way on the wind.

Please keep the evacuees (thousands of them) and firefighters in your prayers today.

Alicia and Kristen have blogged about this too. Boy, Kristen, I guess it’s a good thing we didn’t shoot for this week to visit the Wild Animal Park after all, eh?

Uncategorized

Time Out from Homeschooling Talk

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Just for a minute. Can we talk about sunscreen? One thing about living in San Diego—we are spending a lot more time in the sun than ever before. I’ve never been a sun worshipper. At our neighborhood pool in Virginia, I was the mom trying to squeeze myself into the bar of shade cast by the fencepost. In fact, I have friends who laughed hysterically when they heard I was moving to one of the world’s sunniest vacation spots. The climate, they feared, would be wasted on me.

What I didn’t realize about Southern California until living here was that, except for a few hard-baked weeks in the summer, sunny doesn’t necessarily mean hot. It’s balmy and breezy and just so darn pleasant. And so off we whisk to Balboa Park or Mission Trails, and the kindly sun beams down upon us.

Which means, of course, sunscreen is our new best friend. But I have to say I don’t entirely trust this friend. I once heard an oncologist say that if you use any sunscreen stronger than SPF 15, the chemicals are worse for your health than UV rays. I don’t know what kind of stats support that statement, but it’s always there in the back of my mind.

So what do you do? Chinaberry sells a "natural sunscreen" that’s supposed to be safer than most brands (it does not contain oxybenzone, whatever that is), but yeesh, the price tag! (Although when I went to get the URL just now I discovered they’re having an end-of-summer sunscreen sale, so there you go.)

In the summer the kids go through the stuff so quickly that I usually wind up opting for whatever’s on sale at Target. But ugh, that chemical smell, I can’t stand it. And what’s in that stuff? I seriously don’t trust it. For occasional use, fine, but for something they need to wear every day?

For myself, I seldom bother to do more than put an SPF 15 moisturizer on my face. I always forget about my arms…

I don’t wear makeup, but I’ve been looking at the SPF-containing mineral powders (like Bare Minerals) and wondering if they’re a better idea than the creams. But then I read that Bare Minerals contains bismuth, which sounds as sinister as oxybenzone. So I’m back to square one.

What brands do you use? For you, and for the kids? Do you use something
different for faces and bodies? Every day, or only in summer?

Books, Family, Leukemia, Robert's Snow

Blogging for a Cure: Robert’s Snow and David Macaulay

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"There are things I think people have a need to know . . . I want them
to look around more — to pay attention to the world around them, to
take an extra moment to look at things, to think about things."

—David Macauley

Ten and a half years ago, when our 21-month-old daughter was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, Scott and I were told to be thankful it was ALL and not some other kind of cancer. We were thankful, strange as it was to feel glad about anything related to a cancer diagnosis. We knew that the prognosis was better for kids with ALL than with other types of cancer.

But we were a full week into treatment before we found out how very good the prognosis actually was. Jane had started the week with two complete blood exchanges, purging her body of all the cancerous white blood cells that had escaped her bone marrow and were coursing through her tiny veins. She had made it through the first terrible week of chemotherapy—the fevers, the vomiting, the countless needle sticks. One week down, years to go. The head of the hem/onc department came in to meet us, and he asked us, rather professorially, what our goal was with Jane’s treatment.

"Remission?" I asked. He smiled in obvious amusement.

"Yes, of course," he said, shrugging. "We will get her into remission, and very soon. But that is just the beginning. Our goal is to keep her in remission. Our goal is a cure."

Scott and I stared at him. I started to cry. A week earlier, during the nightmarish hour between leaving our pediatrician’s office and arriving, per his urgent instructions, at the children’s hospital emergency room, we had swung by our apartment to restock the diaper bag. On the way out the door, I had grabbed an old (but not that old) medical reference book we happened to have on the shelf. In the car I read aloud to Scott in horror. If the pediatrician was right, if the baby had leukemia, the best-case scenario, according to this tome, was a five-to-seven-year survival rate.

Until that moment when the Chief Oncologist said the word "cure," Scott and I had believed our best hope at the end of putting Jane through the torture of chemotherapy was that she would live to see her ninth birthday.

"I didn’t know," I croaked. "I didn’t know there was a cure for cancer."

"For this kind, there is," said the doctor.

We all know that ALL is but one of the many, many kinds of cancer. The treatment—the cure—doesn’t work for everyone, but it works for a lot of people, especially children. Ten years later, Jane is still in remission and spilling joy everywhere she goes. If you find joy on this blog, she is a large part of the reason why. I threw that old medical reference book in the trash long ago, because the hard work of doctors and researchers, and the courage of patients who came before my Jane, had rendered its somber pronouncements inaccurate.

At the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, researchers are working on more, and better, cures. This research is paid for by the Jimmy Fund, named after a 12-year-old cancer patient who made a radio appeal in 1948 that brought in some $200,000 in funding for research that first year. Jimmy, like Jane, survived his cancer. It’s possible that Jane survived because of breakthroughs in chemotherapy protocols developed by the doctors at Dana-Farber—I don’t have any idea who all the people were whose work saved my daughter’s life. I only know that I am thankful to the very marrow of my bones. And hers.

Children’s book illustrator Grace Lin wrote a picture book called Robert’s Snow during her husband’s fight against bone cancer. Robert Mercer was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma just months after he and Grace were married. Grace tells the story on the Robert’s Snow site:

Nine months later, Robert was declared cancer-free. "Robert’s Snow"
was accepted for publication. We felt that our good luck had finally
arrived. But, in March 2004, Robert’s cancer returned. We were
devastated. Our doctor told us that Robert’s best chance for long-term
survival was a breakthrough in cancer research.

So we decided to help the doctors the best we could. Because
"Robert’s Snow" had meant so much to us the first time, we decided to
use it as an inspiration for a fundraiser. We recruited children’s book
artists to paint wooden snowflakes and auctioned them off — the
proceeds going to cancer research at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

The response was tremendous. "Robert’s Snow: for Cancer’s Cure" snowballed greater than we ever dreamed.

I am grieved to say that Robert Mercer passed away this summer. But Robert’s Snow lives on. To date, the Robert’s Snow snowflake auctions have raised over $200,000 for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. This year’s auctions will begin in November, and you can bid on a stunning array of snowflakes illustrated by some of the most talented artists in children’s books.

Starting last week, bloggers all over the kidlitosphere joined in an effort to spread awareness of the upcoming Robert’s Snow auctions. Encouraged by Jules and Eisha of Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, who dreamed up the "Blogging for a Cure" event, dozens of bloggers are featuring snowflakes by some of the participating illustrators. There are many, many more snowflakes being auctioned in addition to the ones you will see in these posts. I encourage you to go explore the auction site and feast your eyes on all these beautiful pieces of art.

Here is one of them. What an honor it is to be able to feature David Macaulay’s snowflake here at Bonny Glen. I mean, David Macaulay! Caldecott winner! Author of The Way Things Work! The man who taught Jane what a laser is, and how parking meters work, and what is the difference between nuclear fission and nuclear fusion!

David Macaulay painted a snowflake for the Robert’s Snow auction. Here it is, front and back, reproduced here with permission:

039_snowflake

Don’t you love that sweet, pensive face?

Ten years ago, when Jane was diagnosed, David Macauley’s books already had pride of place on our living room shelf. I first saw The Way Things Work in the children’s bookstore I worked at during grad school. I bought a copy with my employee discount. I hoped to have children one day, lots of them, and I knew they’d want to know how stuff worked.

Now here it is 2007 and I’ve got those children, a lot of them!, and they are indeed full of ‘satiable curtiosities. David Macauley’s books have helped show them the world. Sit down with one of his black-and-white "Building Books" masterpieces, and you’re likely to spend the whole rest of the day immersed in the details of another corner of the world. Here are some of the books he wrote and illustrated, a homeschooler’s dream library:

City: A Story of Roman Planning and Construction
Cathedral
Pyramid
Mosque
Ship
Underground
Mill

Cathedral    Mill   Pyramid

He also wrote the Caldecott winner Black and White, a stunner of a picture book, as well as the charming Angelo.

There will be three rounds of snowflake auctions, beginning November 19th. If you’d like to see David Macauley’s snowflake hanging on your Christmas tree or in your winter window, it will be sold in the second auction, which starts on November 26th. (Trivia time: one of the other snowflakes in that auction was made by the illustrator of one of my books. Do you know who?)

Many thanks to Mr. Macaulay and all the illustrators who donated these gorgeous works of art for the Robert’s Snow auction, to Grace Lin for founding the event (view her own snowflake here), and to Jules and Eisha for organizing the Blogging for a Cure effort. And many, many thanks to the folks of the Dana-Farber Institute for continuing to work toward cures for other people like Jane.

Here are the rest of this week’s Blogging for a Cure snowflake features (thank you, Tricia and Jen, for the list!):

Monday, October 22

Tuesday, October 23

Wednesday, October 24

Thursday, October 25

Friday, October 26

Saturday, October 27

Sunday, October 28

Related links:

Blogging for a Cure page at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast.

David Macauley page at Houghton Mifflin.

Robert’s Snow main page.

Main auction page.

David Macauley’s snowflake auction page.