I’m Renee. This site is about what it’s like to be me. I’m a cancer survivor, mommy, baker, gardener, designer, counselor, advocate, diyer, artist, animal rescuer, and a lot of other stuff too. While the title of the site might make you think there’s a train wreck happening here most of the damage is of the good kind. And even that which isn’t helps to make life interesting…
I’ve got a 100+ year old house in Michigan’s Capitol city and that’s where most of the craziness happens. I’m working on fixing it up one bit at a time. It was a 2 flat one upon a time and I’ve converted it back to a single family space. It’s been an absolute labor of love and while I piss and moan about the hard work quite regularly, I wouldnt change a thing.
I’m a single mom (widowed) to a funny, sassy, artsy, emo 11 year old. She’s really everything to me. When she was 6 her father, my long time partner, died suddenly. Life has been messy and chaotic since he died but she’s amazingly resilient.
I’m a cancer survivor. There’s a whole bunch of baggage that comes with that word. I’ll get to that in some posts eventually. My last round of chemo was December 31, 2014 following a double mastectomy for triple negative breast cancer. My mother died from the same cancer in 2008. Apparently there’s no known genetic component to mine but I’m more apt to believe they just haven’t found the right one yet.
There’s an ever changing menagerie of animals here- I live in an urban area and someone is always dumping/ abandoning some poor living soul and a lot of them land here. Currently there are dogs, cats, fish, guinea pigs, a rabbit, a corn snake, a leopard gecko, a crested gecko, and hamsters. I’m usually taking care of something outdoors too- mostly birds, squirrels and opossums.
I’ve got a BA in English, a BA in Religious Studies and a Master’s in Rehabilitation Counseling. I was planning to have a PhD but the cancer jacked that up and now I’m just not that motivated to do that. We’ll see if that changes…I’m not dead yet.