Happy Holidays from the Ramirez Family!

Rick and I got a nice little break this holiday season with my parents coming into town and his family having their usual Christmas Eve party. It was an easy split with my family's traditional Christmas Day party. No missed flights, no last minute calls from work, or no forlorn phone calls to one or the other's family hundreds of miles away. The usual suspects were absent. "Usual suspects" being overwhelmingly represented by my immediate family. Sister, brother, niece, nephew...we know the drill. The recentness of the wedding which brought a bunch of my family out of the woodwork makes the absentee pill a little easier to swallow.  Rick's family has outgrown any of each other's houses, so this year they utilized an old bar belonging to a family friend.  This is the same abandoned bar where Rick celebrated his Bachelor party.  When he told me the guys were concerned that the strippers wouldn't come inside the place I was sure that having the Christmas party there was out of the question.  I mean this bar hadn't been occupied - or even kept up - for years.  But after weeks of clean up and the decorating expertise of a family friend, it was surprisingly clean and festive. In all it was a really great time, although Christmas day was made quite difficult by the Christmas Eve party.

I've come to build an interesting relationship with Rick's oldest sister and her husband.  I'm actually becoming more and more aware of the relationships that I have with Rick's siblings as individuals.  With such a large crew it's hard to realize how you really interact with each person singularly.  Rick's oldest sister and her husband are the kind of people that we can stay up all night with just talking and drinking.  Not doing anything special; just sitting around the table, sipping good tequila, and talking about life.  Clearly all that talking got away from us because it was after 5am when we finally looked at the clock. With my parents coming to our house that morning to open gifts I knew we were in for a rough one. Rick was lucky enough to get a second wind once he got home and walked the dog at which time he insisted we open a few presents. We were two presents in when he started to fall asleep sitting up. By that time it was easily 6:30am.  My parents did us the justice of not showing up until around 11am, but we still were rather rough for the wear.  Opened presents then back to bed.  We weren't ourselves at my Grandmother's house, but it was probably better that we couldn't have any of my Dad's (knock-you-on-your-you-know-what) egg nog.  As usual  my family brought back many great memories and made even more.

Looking forward to the all the great things this New Year will bring.  On the menu so far: a real budget that should have us back in the market for a house before the next decade (yay!), a lot of Cancer killing, maybe a 'Cancer-cation', preparations for my Golden Birthday, babytalk (from everyone besides us), and much, much more to come!

Where the hell have you been???

That is the question I must ask myself as I finally return to this blog.  Where have I been and why am I here again? You'd think after so long I'd lose interest and give it up. Well, besides being extremely busy planning my own wedding - no I am not going to start a blog about the wedding, wedding planning, wedding day events, wedding memories, etc - I have also been battling with the decision of how public I'd like to make my private life.  I was quite taken aback when a potential business client entered a meeting with me for the first time and noticing the engagement ring on my finger said, "so he finally proposed." Immediately thoughts of terror ran through my mind.  Do I know him? Where from? What did I say or do when we met? My heartbeat slowed only slightly when he said he'd Google'd me before the meeting and came across all my blog posts.  Creepy. Not him but me! How creepy of me to post my personal relationship happenings on an all too public blog. But wait that's the point of these, right? Right...I almost forgot.  It was then that I began an internal dialogue as to whether or not blogging was actually for me. I was flattered when my potential client (who btw is head of his company's Internet marketing group so it's only appropriate that he would Google me before the meeting) told me that my style of writing engaged him enough to read all the posts and wonder what had been going on since my last post oh-so-long-ago.  But was flattery for my creative writing enough to keep me blabbing about our private life? I soon decided 'yes!' And then the other foot dropped.  After a beautiful wedding and in the middle of an amazing honeymoon we discovered something that I wasn't sure I wanted to blog about. 

Cancer.

While we'd been feverishly planning the wedding of my - a'hem - our dreams a very active tumor had begun growing on Rick's lung and eventually migrated also to his heart. It was a pain whose cause is to this day shrouded in mystery that caused us to rush my new husband to a Dominican emergency room 2 days into our honeymoon. After many a scan and x-ray even the doctors didn't know what to think. They wouldn't show us any results for fear that we may not be equipped handle such news. Better that we travel back home in blissful ignorance than in distraught depression. Once back home the U.S. doctors were much more realistic, if not cruel, having almost convinced us that Rick had a lung cancer caused by asbestos. One which has a death rate that you could take to Vegas. After doing some research we realized that was close to impossible and found ourselves in a much happier place with more caring and knowledgeable doctors at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America. So far we've been happy with the treatment and if nothing else we've made some progress.

So let's get the basics out of the way now: (1) the doctors don't know what type of cancer it is. It has two different types of cancerous cells and it's lackluster response to the chemo treatment has made trial and error diagnosis unfeasible. We've coined it Rick Cancer - it's big, it's dense, it doesn't know what it wants to be, and just kinda sits there. Much like its host. (2) Rick isn't sick, he just has Cancer. When on Thanksgiving his sisters bawked at him going outside without a hat on his brother put it best when he exclaimed, "he's got Cancer, not pneumonia!" Rick is in amazing shape, he was losing his hair anyway, and he looks better bald - so no he doesn't 'look' like he has Cancer. (3) We're fine. Yes, he has Cancer and, yes, it's scary to think what we'll do if all these treatments don't work, but other than that it's fine.  (4) We don't feel like talking about it.  It will come up in conversation - and in this blog - (it's impossible for it not to) but it's not who we are so it's not all we feel like talking about. 

Whew - not that was therapeutic. Now we can move on.  Welcome back! Oh and Merry Christmas!