Someday, I will point you, dear readers, to happy blogs. Blogs about cute puppies, fun craft projects and interior decorating.

If you know me at all, you probably know that is a COMPLETE LIE.

Happiness is nice for five minutes or so, but I generally figure it's only a small slice of the story. Real life is this big messed up mix of cute puppies AND bad economics; fashion AND discrimination; charity AND crime; interior design AND high-schoolers who for some reason think it's acceptable to manipulate the social spectrum and bully someone until they are suicidal or beyond. So, I am drawn to people and stories and situations that illuminate people who deal gracefully and courageously with life's more cruel and callous situations.

Bridget of My Big Girl Pants is doing just that. She's a five-year survivor of metastatic breast cancer. Metastatic is a fancy way of saying the cancer that started in the breast has spread to other less-than-nearby areas. It's advanced, and as far as cancers go, it's not good. So, when she says she's a survivor, she means that she's survived three recurrences in the last five years and finds herself in somewhat uncharted territory in that new and improving treatments are allowing more people to live with a cancer that in the not-so-distant past compelled discussions about exactly how much time was left.

Yesterday, she found out that the spot on her liver is cancerous. She and her husband went out for an insanely expensive dinner to allow themselves a night to feel sorry for themselves. Today, I gather, she plans to put her big girl pants back on...