More Walks, Fewer Pills...

Folks - In between snowstorms, Alex and I have restarted our regular hikes in the woods. In the past few days, we've encountered an American Sycamore tree that's 100 years older than the U.S., and - prompted by our search for a chatty woodpecker - saw what we called the ''rainbow cloud,'' a puffy cottonball in the sky which at that moment was refracting light and appearing in prism stripes.

I'm literally taking further steps down the road to recovery and my doctors are cutting back further on the meds I have to take.

I'm still on 10 different meds, for a total of 23 pills at five different times each day. But because my bloodwork has continued to show good results, doctors have cut down on need for Prograf, a major drug to prevent rejection of the liver. I'll probably be taking it for the rest of my life, but I'm down to 5 mg per day from 8 mg when I left the hospital on Dec. 30.

I snapped up on the Internet a cheap and nifty watch with five alarms so I can be sure to take my meds on time. It also allows me to track moon phases, tides and time yacht races. I feel like I earned an advanced engineering degree in programming it for about an hour today. But the widely anticipated 6 PM bleeps made it all worth the effort.

There go the bleeps again... 8 PM and all is well...time for my nighttime steroids...