2019 Year in Review - July through December

(A continuation of yesterday's post looking back on the activities of 2019.)

July, 2019
Just before I went to BreyerFest, I traveled to Indianapolis and had the mass on my pancreas biopsied. The results were mixed - what they thought I had was a precancerous Mucinous Cystic Neoplasm with elevated cancer markers. An appointment with a surgeon was immediately scheduled for me (I've learned that doctors act quickly when the pancreas is involved!) but the medical team was willing to make that appointment for after I returned from BreyerFest.

BreyerFest  is the biggest hobby gathering of all. I heard that 30,000 were in attendance this year!

With my appointment with the surgical team in Indianapolis on our minds, Craig and I traveled to BreyerFest.

I stopped by the Artisans Hall Thursday evening but mostly just walked around, talking to hobby friends and simply looking. My mind was more than a bit preoccupied.

Friday I braved the crowd in the 3:00 tent ticket line. While I ended up close to where the line began, I did not get Banner, the one model I had really wanted. Liz Cory told me later that she had spoken to some of Breyer's employees about the seemingly shortage of models and had been told that Breyer had left a whole pallet back in New Jersey by mistake and was overnighting them to the park for Saturday. What a shame!

Since Saturday was Music City Son Cole's birthday, I only did the one day at BreyerFest.

Craig and I drove down to Nashville early Saturday morning so that we could celebrate his birthday with him. I was seventy pounds lighter since he'd last seen me.

I'd brought some crafts to do with Pony Pals Kate and Julie. One was making boxes to keep their treasures in.

Kate always had this Appaloosa model horse with her throughout our visit. That made me smile and lifted my spirits a bit.

Monday we headed back home to Indiana only to unpack, grab some sleep, and then hop into the car and drive to Indiana University Hospital in Indianapolis so that I could meet with my surgeon and the team responsible for getting me through the surgery and whatever was found.

We were there for eight hours and I left feeling very overwhelmed. Cancer protocols and a lot of "what ifs" had been discussed, and surgery was scheduled for July 31. I had a whole regimen of nutrition, meds, exercise, and other things to do to prepare as I was told it would be a tough surgery. (It was.) And home I went to prepare and wait.

My friend Heather McCurdy, knowing I had wanted a Banner, contacted me and sold me hers at far under what it was selling for on eBay and MH$P. I named the model "Heather's Generosity" in her honor and it was a very bright spot in my life as I began wading through the preparation for surgery.

August, 2019

It might have been my birthday month, but August was a rough month for me. To my dismay, my pancreatic surgery had to be postponed for two weeks because I got sick. So, I became a hermit and stayed away from people. No church, no shopping, no going to the library, although I could go out to the barn and see Abby.

August 15 I finally went into surgery. Half my pancreas, my spleen, and eight lymph nodes were removed along with a tumor the size of a baseball. Thankfully, there was no cancer.

I had to be in the hospital six days to recover from the ordeal, had tubes everywhere, and was a mass of bruises. 

My blood sugar began swinging wildly and I was having sticks in my fingers every two hours and insulin shots several times a day. The surgeon was right - it was a tough surgery.

One day after I returned home, Craig drove me out to the barn to visit my girl. I was very weak and only stayed a few minutes, but seeing her again brought some much needed normalcy back into my life.

(At this point I had lost 80 pounds! No doubt that weight loss was helpful going into surgery - I cannot imagine going through that at 80 pounds heavier.)

September, 2019

September was a very horsey month despite my recent surgery and recovery. One of my biggest worries when I discovered that I needed to have surgery was that I was holding a live show with Allison Pareis on September 14.

She was fantastic and told me not to worry - that she could handle the load. We had a lot of help from Nancy Kelly, Liz Cory, Tara Oliver, Cristine Holt, and Stan Sollars, and The FAMulous Collectibility Show went very well.

 Allison, who loves Family Arabian Mares, and a cool nightlight that she brought to the show.

In September, I was feeling stronger and able to spend more time with Abby - no longer did I need Craig to drive me there and back!

September 28, Nancy Falzone was holding a get together at her home for long time collectors. She had asked me to write her history within the hobby, and then expanded it to include others whose roots go way back to our hobby's earliest times.

Liz Cory who was also attending invited me to spend the night at her home instead of getting a motel. I loved seeing her collection and some unusual items that she has like this carousel that belonged to Stu and Arlene Bentley.

 Nancy and me.

Nancy's gathering was well attended and lots of fun. We had people from seven states and Canada in attendance! I was pleased that, despite the long drive there and back, and the long day chatting with hobbyists and taking tons of notes, I was feeling more like myself.

October, 2019
GLC shows are always fun, whether my models do really well or not. October's show was plastic collectibility which is my favorite show of the year.

I also showed in the china division where Windsong Sherif did well.

I also won the theme class where you could show up to eight models under any theme you wanted. Naturally, I chose circus ponies!

Horse Buddy Trinity, our oldest granddaughter, flew out from Colorado and spent her fall break with us. She fell in love with Hokey, and he returned that affection.

The end of October brought us a new family member, black Lab Pepper! 

A Seeing Eye Guide Dog, she developed Addison's Disease and had to be retired. My friend Kathy Nimmer, who was friends with the woman who was guided by Pepper, recommended us as a retirement home and to our joy, we were accepted.

November, 2019

Pepper is a highly trained and very intelligent dog, but there were a few things she needed to learn about living with us.

Like how to watch her tail when she was with me in my office! There was no damage, and she figured out right away that that should not happen. We've not had one more tail accident since.

 Abby is a varnish roan and so her color varies from season to season. This year she was so frosty!

Tim traveled to visit family in November, leaving me in charge of the herd. Without much warning, four inches of snow fell, the temperatures dropped into single digits, and the trough froze over so hard that I could not break the ice.

Tim's son came out, broke it up, and placed the water heater into the trough. Problem solved.

 I finished sewing Cowpoke Susie's quiet book just in time for Thanksgiving.

Ian, Cowpoke Susie, Pony Pals Julie and Mila (with unicorn), and Lukie chow down at Grammy's Thanksgiving chuck wagon.

December, 2019

The last month of 2019 had some wonderful moments and one that was very difficult.

 I enjoyed putting out some horsey holiday decor.

 We went to Florida and had an early Christmas with Beach Boy Kyle's family.

 We had an early Christmas with Music City Son's family, too.

I recycled some old show ribbons for the annual family gingerbread house making competition.

A Breyer TSC special run Stella was under the tree for me

as was a set of three photos of the Pryor Mountain Mustangs taken by Denver Daughter Sarah.

But December, 2019 brought the most painful moment of the year for me, something that was even harder for me than my pancreatic surgery.

My dearest friend, Pam, someone I'd known and loved for thirty five years, passed away on December 26 after a ten year battle with breast cancer. Her funeral was this past Tuesday, December 31. While it wasn't the way I wanted to wrap up the year, I still treasure her friendship and her memory, take a couple of deep breaths and wipe away my tears, and move forward.

Here's to a good 2020, for me and to all of you that read this blog. 

2019 Year in Review - January through June

2019 will go down in my memory as a mix of ups and downs. Sadly, it ended on a very sad note for me as my very dearest friend lost her battle with cancer and died the day after Christmas. But there were good times, too, with visits to all six of our kids, a new dog, and lots of fun hobby events including a trip to BreyerFest. Here's a look back at the first six months of the year.

January, 2019
How thrilled I was to discover that the family of Sam Savitt, the illustrator of so many of the horse books I'd read as a child, was selling his original artwork and that I could actually afford to buy a piece.

 Sam Savitt was (and is) my favorite illustrator. To have a signed original was huge for me.

In other news, on January 16 I began a new weight loss journey. 

Tired of being heavy and in pain much of the time, I decided that I had to do something now as I did not have the quality of life that I wanted.

February, 2019
Much of this month was spent writing. I wrote the elementary curriculum for Purdue University's Pollinator Protection Project.

Me with a draft of the curriculum at at the annual convention of HASTI (the Hoosier Association of Science Teachers, Inc.) in Indianapolis.

Barn owner, Tim, is an entomology professor at Purdue and got a large grant from The National Science Foundation for the project. The high school curriculum is done and was released to Indiana teachers in June. The elementary curriculum that I wrote is now in review and will hopefully be released this coming summer.

I also worked on writing the thirty-five year history of Great Lakes Congress during February and got some preliminary work done on a book I am writing about the history of those who helped the model horse hobby get up and running. I shared some snippets from that here on Horsiemama in a series called Four Pillars and a Pair of Wings.


March, 2019

Show season began! I attended Silver Star Classic in Carmel, Indiana.

And I was finding success in my weight loss.

 I was now thirty pounds lighter at the end of March!

April, 2019

April brought me not only my most-sought after piece, the Metlox Poppytrail Medium Circus Pony in grey,

 but it also brought the same piece in palomino!

I was over the moon at adding these two models to my circus pony collection.

In April I also came out of retirement and took over SOAR, a program run by my school district designed to help deeply troubled kids who have been expelled from their schools continue their education. The teacher had had to suddenly leave due to health issues, and so I stepped in for the last seven weeks of the school year.

I am an experienced, veteran teacher, and this was absolutely the most difficult group of kids I have ever taught. Many days I drove home in tears, not only for their behavior during the day or the ugly things they said to me (and to each other), but more so for the heartbreaking situations and homes they came from. 

April, 2019

Model horse showing season was now in full swing. 

I attended the April Great Lakes Congress show and was surprised to be named Most Valued Member 2019 as a result of having written the history of the club. (I'm with Jamie Rott and Liz Cory.)

There was wild weather as I drove home from that show. I started back to Indiana from Illinois in a heavy snowstorm

and wrapped the trip up with no snow and encountering a cold air funnel about ten miles from home.

Weight loss continued - I had lost forty-eight pounds by the end of April! I'd had this tee shirt since the late 1980s and had kept it due to its Star Wars reference ("May the horse be with you") To my delight, I discovered that I could wear it once again.

May, 2019
Finally, finally, finally in May, I finished replacing my old, assorted brown shelves in my office. 

Now they are all beautiful matching white Billy shelves from Ikea. It was quite a project, but so worth it!

I spent time at the barn with Pony Pal Mila and her brothers, Ian and Lukas.

 Lukie gives Tim's pony saddle a try in the tack room.

Craig and I traveled west to visit Denver Daughter Sarah and her family in Colorado, and then up to Santaquin, Utah to see Mountain Mama Jessica and her family.

I also visited two of my favorite hobby people, Cristine Holt and her daughter, Tara Oliver. (From left: Chris, Tara, Tara's son, Jessica, and me.)

While in Utah, I met Riggs, an 18.3 hand black Percheron and the biggest horse I have ever been around.

May is a time for bad weather, especially when you are driving through tornado alley like we were.

 While passing through Junction City, Kansas we encountered not one

but three tornadoes! This photo is of one on the ground while a second one to the left of it is forming. It came down and touched the ground and then they both dissipated.

Sadly, there were tornadoes back home in Indiana and the blue barn and property took a hit. Tim sent me this text.

That's twice that tornadoes have been close to the barn since I began boarding with Tim, but this is the first time that we actually sustained damage.

By the end of May, I had lost sixty pounds and my clothes were starting to hang on me. But I wasn't complaining!


June, 2019
Preparing for Happy Trails II, the fun show and pony party that I hold in my home, took up much of my time in June. I spent nearly two weeks deep cleaning in preparation.

Back row: me, Yvonne Rott, Jamie Rott, Michelle Evans, Liz Cory, and Sande Schneider. Front row: Pat Reed, Steff Bodamer, Allison Pareis, and Stan Sollars.

 The stick pony competition during lunch was a blast.

Allison and Stan did a hilarious "free reining" exhibition to the song, "It's Not Unusual" by Tom Jones.

Sande shared the joys of having Buddy with her wherever she goes and her motto to always, "Speak softly and carry a big stick."

Liz directed a herd of liberty horses who obeyed all her commands and even knew their leads. Oh, how we laughed at all three entries!

But during Happy Trails, something was overshadowing the fun for me and was very much on my mind. I'd just had a routine CT scan of a tiny mass on my pancreas (it had been discovered three years prior during a CT scan for something else). Since past checks had confirmed that the mass was stable and not growing, I hadn't given this scan a second thought. Until I got a phone call just a day or two before Happy Trails telling me that the tumor was growing (the size of a baseball) and that I was being sent for further tests and to see a pancreatic specialist in Indianapolis.

That information would derail most of my summer plans and impact the next six months.