Sorry it’s been a while since I’ve updated. I’m still alive. Work has been hectic. The responses to our recruitment ads in the newspapers have been good, so we’re getting a lot of calls . . . so by the end of the day, I’m pretty tired. Also, we fumigated our house for termites over Memorial Day weekend, which meant days of prep (bagging food, etc.), followed by days of sleeping at my cousin’s house with Chloe, followed by days of cleaning pesticides off of dishes. In an age of organic foods and environmentally friendly products, we need to treat our entire house with lethal doses of pesticide, unless we want the termites to eat us out of house and home. Go figure.

On the personal front, I just found out that I have iron deficiency anemia. Yeah, again, go figure. Didn’t see that one coming, even though I was deferred from donating blood once for low hemoglobin (I thought I was just having a low iron day) and nearly deferred two other times recently. My doctor called to tell me that the normal range for iron saturation in the blood is 20-50% . . . and mine was 5%. In addition, my overall iron level was too low and my iron binding capacity was too high. Whoops. There goes my quest to save the world one pint at a time! So I’m on iron pills twice a day and on strict orders to avoid donating blood for a while. We’ll see if that works. So far, I’m still tired, but it’s good to know that I wasn’t just getting increasingly lazy with age. Not JUST, anyway.