Animal Planet

Man, I must be more fragile than I think this morning. Was watching "Growing Up" gorilla, with two orphaned gorilla babies being raised by human women, and I was absolutely sure that's what I want to do when I retire. It' something that has been on my mind for a long time, and one of the women in the documentary, a previous volunteer at this refuge in Cameroon, flew in from Canada to help out. She was in her 50s, and said she had raised her own kids, but in working with baby gorillas she experienced a lifelong fulfillment, or something like that
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WE INTERRUPT THIS BLOG ENTRY FOR SOME IMPORTANT BREAKING NEWS!
5.30 pm. I got myself to go to a yoga class today! It's offered Tues/Thurs at the Hamden senior center, for free, by Ravindra Vashi. He worked as an engineer for Sikorsky for 23 years, then retired. After doing yoga on his on for a long time, he decided he wanted to share it/teach it "before I go to cremation," he said, so he went to India, got certified, and came back and has been teaching only since April. He's 65, in great shape, and wants to gear the class to us older folks with all the common older folk ailments. He even showed me some knee postures that he said should help a bit. He said one of his wife's allopathic doctors asked him if he would teach her yoga, he did, for no compensation save one: he said to the doctor, Don't give out drugs so quickly to your patients, until they have tried other means of dealing with their conditions. Then he proceded to tell many stories of people who thru yoga and diet have gotten off many of the prescription medications they were on. He was completely accommodating of my bad knees and the postures that I could not do. But I was reminded how good it feels to stretch parts of the body that have not been stretched in a very long time. Yeah me.

WE NOW RETURN TO OUR CURRENT BLOGGING, STILL IN PROGRESS.
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So, the baby gorillas. Doing something with wild animal rescues is definitely in the cards. I even have a contact in Tanzania, Patricia Moehlman, The Jackal Woman, who has been studying jackals forever, and said she could hook me up with a rescue preserve. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/jackals/woman.html

Then there was a segment about a large elephant that had gotten badly stuck in a mud hole, and the whole village came out to try to free the elephant who had been trapped for three days. It took them all day, much pushing and pulling and ingenuity, and finally she was freed. I almost burst into tears.

I had a PET and CT scan yesterday, a followup of the cancer diagnosis and treatment. That's a stressful thing. First they shoot you up with radioactive isotopes (aren't I glowing brightly enough ALREADY?), make you sit in a dim room doing nothing for an hour, then come and get you and make you lie still on the machine table while the table moves back and forth inside a four foot deep tube that makes all sorts of weird noises. I see the oncologist on Monday for results. I keep wondering what these tests do to one psychically, metabolically. Bleecchh.