It’s been a real struggle finding the time and proper mindframe to add to the almost-daily diary. It’s becoming increasingly distant from the concept of almost-daily, for sure! Used to be that just writing up the three major weekly rides… Tuesday morning, Thursday morning, Sunday… that alone would be 3 of the 7 days of the week.

It was easier when more of my life revolved around cycling, but life has a way of catching up to you, perhaps at an increasingly-fast pace as you get older. Karen’s (my wife) recent diagnosis of Stage 4 cancer has certainly been a substantial player in my life. Making sure she’s getting the best-possible care isn’t as easy as it should be. And the roller coaster you get onto, with bad news following bad news when it turns out there was actually some bad news that was a mistake, so maybe things aren’t so bad? You get hopeful that maybe there’s more possible missed good news, maybe there’s a possibility she’s not actually Stage 4. But you have to be careful, make sure you’re not trying to rationalize things too much.

The trip. The big two week vacation I take with Karen each year. Amazingly, somehow, I planned a trip a month later than normal, which is just such an incredible thing because the normal timeframe, no way would Karen have been able to make it. Not with the diagnosis and the surgery to remove the tumor from her lung, and she still fighting an incessant coughing that’s knocking the crap out of her, with no source. You’d think maybe it’s somehow related to the cancer that had gotten into her left lung, but apparently not.

So now, many nights, instead of writing here, I feel like I’m juggling too many balls, dealing with too many moving targets. And yet still completely hopeful that, this time next Thursday, Karen and I will be on a plane heading to Hong Kong, spend a couple days there, then get onto a cruise ship that will bring us to Vietnam, Thailand and finally Singapore.

It’s all going to work out, but getting there is pretty darned tough.