William Faulkner’s ‘The Sound and the Fury,’ movies ‘Moonage Daydream,’ ‘If These Walls Could Sing,’ and ‘The Banshees of Inisherin,’ plus Melissa Villaseñor, ‘This Way Up,’ ‘The Big Brunch,’ and Southwest Airlines flight cancellations.
Many people whiz down Green Bay Road between Kenosha and Racine every day, and although they may see the Hawthorn Hollow sign across from Petrifying Springs Park, most don't know about the treasure inside its gates. Hawthorn Hollow Nature Sanctuary & Arboretum is...
Energetic thinker Russell Brand — whose brand new book is called Revolution — has a YouTube show called The Trews ("The Trews is news if the news were true") on which he discusses current events and world problems. Back in August, The Trews gained attention through...
I didn’t know what to expect when I got done with the chemo, surgery, and radiation. I was hoping to get back to normal. For the most part, I guess we have. We’ve been able to get together with family for birthday celebrations and going away parties and festivals.
Today marks one year since being diagnosed with breast cancer. I remember it was a very nice day much like today. It was kind of hard to enjoy because we knew the call could come, but as the day went on I didn’t think it was going to happen. The call came around 3:45 p.m. and it could have gone either way. It was just so surreal when the radiologist said, “Yeah, the biopsy shows that there are cancer cells”.
It’s just about 11 months since my breast cancer diagnosis (8/14/13 3:45 p.m.), and I’m coming into the home stretch on my treatments. I feel fortunate that I haven’t had too many terrible side effects along the way. I just now — after 27 treatments of radiation therapy — am having some uncomfortable itching episodes on the skin around my neck.
I love to cook, and one of the easy, healthy, go-to chicken recipes that I make quite a bit is Chicken Chili with Beans. I thought I would share it — and experiment with making a YouTube cooking video. I start off by making my own beans. I use my pressure cooker,...
It’s been two weeks since my emergency surgery and things seem to be going along okay. I have learned to live with this PICC line and IV pump attached to me pretty much 24/7. Mark has become quite the expert on changing out the medicine bag each day.
It’s been three weeks since my bilateral mastectomy and things move along better each day. I still have problems reaching for things really high up in the cabinets or bending down to pick things up from the floor.
I can’t believe it’s already a week since my double mastectomy. I feel so good to have it behind me and that I am on my way to recovery. Never having been in the hospital before I think I hit the jackpot in terms of outstanding care and fabulous accommodations at Froedtert.
It’s been four weeks since my last chemotherapy treatment and boy does it feel GREAT!!! For the most part, I am getting back to feeling normal. My taste buds seem to be back, and the sensitivity in my nails has pretty much gone away.
I have been in better spirits this past couple of weeks. I loved being together with family and friends during the holidays. I was so happy that everyone was feeling well and we were able to be with both our families for Christmas.
I finished the book Empty Mansions that I had downloaded from the library to my Kindle. That was pretty fascinating, to read about the wealthy Clark family and how much the heiress Huguette gave away to her caregivers.
We had a very quiet Thanksgiving, Mark and I celebrated by ourselves at home. We went for an afternoon walk at Petrifying Springs in Kenosha. Then on Saturday my girlfriend Michelle came over and decorated my head with a henna tattoo (also known as Mehndi) using the henna cones my neighbor Angela so generously lent me last week.
The last treatment of chemo really affected my digestive tract and I think I finally got my system working the way it should. My next treatment is the last of A/C, then I move onto the 12 weeks of Taxol. I am excited to be done with the A/C and ready to move forward.
It’s been a while since my last post. I didn’t have a lot going on this week so there really wasn’t too much to report. The side effects of my chemotherapy treatments come and go. I had a day or two that I didn’t feel so good.
I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when my hair started coming out. I thought that maybe Mark and I could tackle it on our own with a pair of clippers borrowed from my sister Marianne. Then last week I received a phone call from my sister Kim who works as a nail technician at a salon.
It’s happening, my hair loss has begun. So it’s a good thing I have the appointment for my head shaving on Thursday. I have been wearing a cap when I sleep as well as when I am sitting around the house. I find it helps to make my scalp feel a little better and it will maybe hold on to any hair that falls out so I don’t have as much hair piling up all around me.
Last week, besides beginning chemotherapy, I had my appointment for my wig fitting at Lucia’s Wigs with The Salon in Kenosha. Melissa Simon is the wig specialist there and she is such a kind and compassionate person. She is very knowledgeable about dealing with cancer patients and wigs. Melissa had me try on a few, and then took out a couple of catalogs to look through. I ended up picking one out of catalogs.
Today I am feeling great. Yesterday was not too bad. I woke a little nauseous, but that went away. We had to go back to the hospital for my shot of Neulasta. The only thing I noticed yesterday was being a little sleepy most of the day. I lightly slept while Mark drove to Froedtert Clinical Cancer Center.
I got one round of chemotherapy down and it didn’t go that badly, as you can see in the video above. When I got home, I decided to take the neighbor’s dog for a walk. While we were out, we ran into a fellow dog owner whom I met briefly from across the street a week or so ago. She was walking her new puppy and I asked what the breed was. She said a Bichon Frise and Miniature Dachshund
The YouTube video above is something I stumbled upon while researching the Canon PowerShot S100. It's a great little camera — but who are the kids in the video testing it? Their YouTube channel is called VleraBrite, and it is said to contain "TeraBrite daily vlogs!"...
George Harrison, dead now almost eleven years, has remained relatively unstudied — compared with, say, fellow Beatle John Lennon — despite the richness and depth Harrison contributed to the Beatles' music, his significant post-Beatles work, and his generally...
Over the weekend, I was surprised to hear that another of our nephews is a huge Pink Floyd fan. Of course our nephew Elliot, 25, has been smitten with Dark Side of the Moon for years — to the point of buying import copies on vinyl, getting a Dark Side of the Moon...
It's funny how one random item on the Web can lead you through a tunnel of connections you never imagined yourself following. Today's rabbit hole was pointed out by my friend Phil Inzinga of the Inzinga and Spinozi Afternoon Show on 96.9 BOB FM in Oklahoma City....
Social Media Week Chicago took place last week, and one of the sessions generating some online buzz was the event above on Friday evening, featuring: Nancy Loo (@NancyLoo) Robert Feder (@RobertFeder) Richard Roeper (@richardroeper) and Steve Dahl (@SteveDahlShow)...
Here's a video that showed up in my YouTube subscriptions stream, and now I can't stop playing it: "Heart in Chains," by Kate Voegele, from her latest album Gravity Happens. It may not be a groundbreaking pop song, but it has some very sturdy hooks, nice changes of...
The chipmunk noise in this video was recorded on our front doorstep a couple of years ago, but we have the same situation in the backyard today. After weeks of air conditioned cabin fever during the Heat Wave of 2011, the windows are finally open here at the...
Watch this video in full-screen, 720p mode. The Hummingbird Moth is difficult to see at first, but it comes closer during the second minute of the clip. The first time I saw one of these, my mind briefly went into a strange Twilight Zone mode because I couldn't place...
Above is a YouTube video of Jackson Browne performing "The Barricades of Heaven" at the Glastonbury Festival in southwest England in June of 2010. The song — originally released on Browne's 1996 album Looking East — has been my constant earworm for several days...
Here's our YouTube video of the Blizzard of 2011 as we experienced it here in Racine, Wisconsin. 23.5 inches of snow fell here from Tuesday evening until Wednesday morning (February 1st and 2nd), the greatest snowfall anywhere from this storm. If we sound dead tired,...
Here is our first look at the results of the Blizzard of 2011. (We have since posted a more complete Blizzard of 2011 video.) This clip was shot at about 7:45 this morning from one of our bedroom windows, near Mitchell School in...
Above is an outrageous Second City Network video from the site of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear on Washington D.C.'s National Mall this past weekend. Andy Cobb of The Partisans asks attendees, "Is Obama a Keynesian?" You have to...
Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey recemtly, and during the hour, Oprah showed brief clips of the Harvard Commencement speech Ms. Rowling gave on June 5, 2008. Those excerpts were intriguing enough to make me want to hear the whole...
When news broke last weekend that President Barack Obama would be holding a town hall meeting here in Racine on June 30, the area media struggled to understand its purpose. On a national level, there is currently no sharper political analyst than MSNBC's Rachel...
The thought of Thanksgiving dinner coming up and people having to figure out how to carve the bird reminds me of two extremely helpful things: The baseline cutting trick, as demonstrated by Alton Brown in the video above from his Food Network show Good Eats. This...
Early yesterday morning, I heard an interesting On The Media special about the future of the music industry. Long story short, it's floundering. Back then, I had never heard of Pomplamoose. Update: Pomplamoose show Beginning January 18, 2011, a live webcast show --Hey...
When astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon 40 years ago this Monday (that's Buzz Aldrin pictured above), I was nine years old and absolutely transfixed by the entire mission. I had several plastic Revell models of the various spacecraft — the...
I love Drive-By Truckers, and I love this song, "The Righteous Path." The clip above is from their just-released CD/DVD combo Live from Austin, TX, recorded live at that legendary Texas PBS showcase, Austin City Limits. The package...
The YouTube video clip above comes via Straight Sets, the NYTimes.com tennis blog. It's former tennis superstar Justine Henin singing a duet with Belgian balladeer Salvatore Adamo. There was no explanation there, but a little Googling reveals that back in May, Henin —...
Meet the very first camcorder we have ever owned. It's the Flip Ultra HD, which arrived on the market at the end of April. It also comes in white. I had been lusting after something like this since reading Andy Ihnatko's Flip Mino HD...
In case you missed it this past Monday (May 11), here are The Killers performing "A Dustland Fairytale," with orchestra, on the Late Show With David Letterman. We know nothing about The Killers, but apparently they're from Las Vegas. At any rate, it's certainly a...
Billy Bob Thronton and his band The Boxmasters were interviewed by Jian Ghomeshi on CBC Radio's Q yesterday. Their latest album is a 2-CD set called Modbilly. Here is last night's AP story: Joaquin Phoenix II? Billy Bob gives odd...
We're ditching the commentators on the various networks and watching C-SPAN's inauguration coverage today on TV. Meanwhile, over on the computer, I am getting blown away by the astounding seven feeds of HD video streaming from CBS2Chicago.com. Breathtaking.
This was the view outside my window at about 9:20 this morning. I think I'm going to send it to Charles Osgood and ask him to use it as the last minute of this week's CBS Sunday Morning. The snow has since stopped, so now we're going...
Here at the Mark Czerniec Internet Testing Laboratories, we like The Digg Reel. As a matter of fact, we have secretly been enjoying The Digg Reel since — well, since September 6, which is when we discovered Miro, the thing we use to download and watch The Digg Reel....
Fred Armisen was jeered pretty roundly when he started playing Barack Obama on SNL, but I always thought he had keyed in on several quirky traits, and that the parody just keeps getting better and better. Last night's "Obama Plays It Cool" piece was his best yet....
Well, this is right in my wheelhouse! I watch a lot of chef shows and cooking TV, and I love strange Internet finds. There is a YouTube playlist out there intended to hold my food and cooking favorites, but there are only two videos on it so far. I never imagined...
What spawned my Web wandering — and my tenacious earworm — was my friend Duwayne putting this "Bohemian Rhapsody acoustic" video on his MySpace page. It seemed harmless enough when I began to watch it yesterday morning. The guy sits down, reels off a darned skilled...
Follow your bliss. If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field...
I just stumbled across this clip on YouTube while monkeying with stuff on my Google homepage. It's Erik Mongrain, from Montreal. I've never heard of him before, but I imagine we'll be seeing more of him from now on.
Jennifer, whom I don't personally know but who sends me links fairly regularly, emailed me last Tuesday about an item at Google Video. Expecting to find a short clip only a minute or two in length, I was surprised to see instead that blogger Chuck Olsen has posted his...
Here's a kooky little item I saw on Pogue's Posts and decided to steal: Will It Blend? The site, created by Orem, Utah based heavy-duty blender maker Blendtec, advertises their impressive Total Blender via David Letterman-inspired viral video demonstrations of its...
The first time I heard Josh Rouse was when "Dressed Up Like Nebraska" was played on the TV show Ed a few years back. It impressed me enough that I Googled the lyrics, determined the artist's name, and bought the song via iTunes. I still love it. More recently, when I...