The Minneapolis trip I'm not telling you about

At potluck dinner in Minneapolis

Nobody wants to hear too much about someone else's fabulous vacation (like looking at all the photos, seriously?) so I will try to summarize my great trip to Minneapolis.

I loved staying at Lonny and Andy's Airbnb for the second time, and I ran around nearby Powderhorn Park, (or did a slow jog, actually, trying to see how my toe would react), had dinner with Marysue and Eliza while Katie was working, had some "free time" to write while listening to wind chimes in Lonny and Andy's backyard, took photos of their cute little dogs, and with Katie, walked around beautiful Lake of the Isles (a lake or a park around most every corner!) rode bikes from Dinkytown to Minnehaha Falls, went to an artsy neighborhood and saw "Ragtime" at Theater Latteda preceded by dinner at the bar at Northeast Social where we chatted with the cute bartenders, met the chickens at the house that Katie shares with a group of cool people, curled up on her bed in her cozy room and said I might move into the attic, spent a little time at that house during one of their potluck jams, ate good vegetarian food, and did a little jitterbugging in the kitchen with Katie while talking to one of her interesting friends and listening to the acoustic music and old songs coming from the living room.

Tiny and Zeuss

It is a little like the house that Lise Gescheidt and I shared in Brookline with a group of other grad students, law students, med school students and others at that stage of life (shared meals on a pingpong table in the dining room) only in Katie's house their bookkeeping is all computerized and not scribbled in something called "The Books," and they actually want to do chores and keep the place clean because they motivate themselves by jamming through it while at our house many were kind of disdainful about chores (chore wheel, bah!), and I thought my parents would pass out when they visited. But I liked it a lot and have good memories and am glad that Katie has found her people, all committed to good causes. And I almost fell out of my chair at ECP (which would not have been good because I had a needle in my arm), when I saw Lise across the room with her husband, who was also being treated, and realized it was the same Lise who I lived with in said house, and we entertained the nurses with tales of the goings on in that Victorian.

In the department of strange happenings, I was telling Marysue about the Michael Brecker connection to my fourth transplant (without him going public with his search for a donor, I would never have gotten Denise), and she said she had been wondering what music to play for me, and it was the late musician's "Nearness of You."

She couldn't find it so we listened to him on Spotify, but later when she found it she texted me the cover and said we'd listen to it the next time, which might be sooner rather than later.

While in the airport waiting for my flight home, I got a call from the dermatologist's office. All three biopsied spots are squamous cells. The nurse said she would all over to the MOHs center to see if they could do three, adding she never had to ask that before. It's so nice to be different. (Not.) Then she said I might be able to just put chemo cream on my nose, so that is what I'm going to do. When I got back home I made the appointment for the hand and forehead. Though something I am used to it is still a downer. I shook it off, though, on the tennis court on Wednesday, playing on after the clinic for a total of about three hours in cool weather perfect for playing.