Pretty little liar

On my trips to Houston, sometimes I stay overnight with a family consisting of two parents and a 8-year-old boy named Cole. I just met this fine Christian family in recent months. My brother J has known them for years.

Last week when I was in Houston, the adorable boy Cole took down the collage of his baby photos that was in the guest area where we were staying. He was embarrassed by one of the baby photos in which he was taking a bath and his private parts were showing. His mom made him put the framed glass collage back on the wall before he broke it. But we gave him an idea that he might put a post-it note over the one offending part of the collage. He ran in the kitchen, got a yellow post-it note, and covered the photo.

The cute little fella was relieved. He laughed along with the rest of us and said, "Sometimes I am forced to lie and say that the photo is of my cousin instead of me!" 

College friends and health updates

Sorry I haven't been updating the blog lately. I took a hit from chemo, but chemo is over now.

My brother J and I got a visit from some college friends yesterday. Wes S. and Steve P. came to visit for the day. We actually needed some help with some things, and they volunteered to come pitch in and help us out. We loved the fellowship time with them. Not only had we all gone to college together in Brownwood, but after college we all ended up in Fort Worth and attended the same church. I hadn't seen them in about 30 years, but we kind of picked up where we left off.

L to R: Wes, Steve, Elizabeth, J

We took 17 photos, and my brother J made goofy faces in all 17 of them. Someday I'm going to make a collage of his goofy face photos. Every goofy face is different.

In other news:

I defied the odds for months, but as you can guess from the photos, I finally lost all my hair. Well, not ALL my hair. I think I had about 137 strands of hair still intact at its lowest point. It started growing back a day or two ago, so I decided to own up to it. I never shaved my head through the entire ordeal, because I wanted to see what happened if you didn't shave it. Now I know. I'll tell you more about it some other time.

I'm having surgery this Wednesday in Houston. The surgeon will remove all the lymph nodes on the right side of my neck. Please pray for me. I don't know how much I can post during recovery, but when I am able, I"ll try to do a better job about updating this blog. It just feels a little strange to talk about life in Texas on a blog called "Stories of the Middle Kingdom." But I will. Thanks for understanding.