Thrashing around with a ton of things since we got back last Monday; right now I’m up to my eyeballs in paperwork. The memorial service went very well, and had a big turnout of friends and family from the Sioux Falls area; some came much further. More later.
…or something like that. I’m exhausted and shutting down for the night; we’ve been packing up for the trip to Sioux Falls tonight, and leaving around 9 in the morning. The memorial service is 1-4 on Saturday afternoon, and we’ll be seeing friends and family beforehand and coming back next Monday.
And yes, I’ll peek in from time to time in the meantime. Later.
Is it my imagination, but have hard drive prices doubled? I was looking for a new one for Susan (her graphics take up a lot of space) – say, a 1 TB internal SATA – and the prices were around US $65 – now, they’re twice that and more! What happened?
Connie, my mother-in-law, died tonight at 11:28 pm, Central Time, here at our home in Lisle. Susan, Meredith and I were all with her at the time.
She had been sliding downhill breathing-wise for the last couple of days, and was having a lot of trouble tonight; the oxygen machine was having problems as well, and it finally got fixed shortly before she died. The nurse was coming here for some help with her breathing, and ended up getting here in time for Connie to give her last breaths. She’s here now, calling the coroner’s office and the crematory folks.
Mere is hard to read, but she was crying a little. Susan is pretty OK all things considered, but she’s very sad and very very weary, and we’re all worn out and exhausted in all directions as we try to deal with the details. The hospice folks will be here tomorrow to take the equipment back, and the crematory folks will be here for Connie in the morning at 8 am.
The present plans are to take the ashes back to Sioux Falls and have a Memorial service in January; more details on that later. More details on everything later.
I told her to say hello to Jackie (my mom) when she saw her for me…
Mere didn’t go to practice this morning; all of us were really profoundly tired and under the weather, especially Susan, who has really been ganked by her sinus infection. Nobody had a lot of energy to do anything; Meredith decided to cook supper up from scratch, and did a pretty darn fair job of it. Last I saw her, she had finished her homemade chocolate and peanut butter ice cream and was working on how to create an origami shuriken from a you tube video.
When I mentioned to Mere tonight that her mom and I had some interestingly good news, she replied, “Sissy is coming?” Unfortunately not, kid. Susan’s Aunt Marlyce was going to come by on Wednesday noontime, and watch Connie while the rest of us went off for a nice lunch at Meredith’s favorite restaurant. Not as good as Sissy, but…
Connie’s gotten significantly weaker; she’s barely able to do anything in the very basic end…and her breathing is getting very slow and shallow. Susan’s been in with her all day and says that she’s just sliding out; we have to syringe what little water she can handle in her mouth without choking. I’m beginning to think that the end is tonight or tomorrow, but we’ve thought that before….
Connie was making more noises yesterday about being ‘ready to go’, and voiced her impatience in the speed of the process, as in ‘let’s just get this over with’ or some such. Most of the time, she sleeps quietly in her bed, and we check in on her to see if she’s still going strong – well, sort of strong.
So far, the holiday season has been a lifeless thing. Our dear friends Kathy and Zack came over to assist Mere with getting up and decorating the tree; Susan was busy with Connie and I was sleeping, have been up all night with a very restless and fearful Connie. Sinterklaas was a total non-event. And we’re trying to get the last things in for our ‘light’ Christmas…we don’t have the money to do a lot, and we’re postponing most of it to Groundhog Day (Susan’s birthday) when all this should be over with and our money situation should be better.
For a strong traditionalist like me, who delights in family fun holiday stuff, this is torture. I’ve resigned myself to not fighting this hard because I know that there’s no real option otherwise, but I hate it deeply all the same. And no, I’m not mad at anyone about it – that’s stupid and pointless and wrong. I just seriously hate that it’s going down the drain, and that it’s going to take a lot to kick-start things back into gear for next year. Ghosts of happier days haunt me.
While Susan and Mere were at a school concert (Mere’s a flautist in the orchestra) I was home watching Connie with the three dogs. As soon as they left, however, Jack went through a huge fit of separation anxiety – aroo, aroo, whine **screeeech** barkbarkbark.
Connie hasn’t eaten or emptied her bowels for over two weeks, but she’s still running…Susan’s best guess is that she ate well enough earlier that she’s running on reserves. In any case, Connie got scared and flustered, and I had to try to calm her down, and call the idiot (barkbark**screeeech*howl) dogs down. I even got Jack up on my lap, quivering like mad, and tried to pet and comfort him to keep him calm.
The first couple of times, Jack stayed there for a few minutes, jumped down, ran to the front door and cut loose again, starting the whole cycle up. I finally went out, picked up Jack, brought him back into Connie’s room where I was sitting, and tried to comfort him. He proceeded to pee all over me, and jumped down and got another chorus going.
Finally, the other two dogs decided they were bored with this, and that made it possible to get Connie to stay calmed down – but not Jack, who I’m considering making into a small dish of poodle stew. When Mere and Susan came back, though – oh, rapturous delight, my mommy is home!!!
Some months ago, Susan put her name in for a possible dog adoption with Poodle rescue; she had a small black poodle as a kid, and was very attached to it. In this case, especially with the present situation, it was rather surprising that a dog that fit her requirements came available – and we went off on a VERY long mission to get the dog on Sunday (from early afternoon to 11ish at night, from Lisle to Milwaukee to Madison and back home again).
The idea was that the dog (a black toy poodle named Jack, whose owners were too elderly and sick to keep him) would be Mere’s special dog – that his training, feeding and so on was for her to handle. She would have to bond with the dog.
So far, the dog has VERY much taken to her, and she to the dog. He’s protective of her, and devoted to her, and vice versa. And hopefully, her involvement with the dog will help her get through all this.
Susan went to bed early, coming down with a cold and just exhausted physically and mentally. I offered (while I was trying to catch up on laundry) to look after Connie after she went to bed. Didn’t expect it to be an up-all-night affair.
Connie started really getting confused and agitated; she wanted to get up out of bed, and started saying (totally non-Connie-ish) that she was going to kill someone; apparently, she was getting it into her head that someone had PUT her in that bed, unable to get up. She accused me of drugging her with something in the water, was sure that the doctors could do something, but I wasn’t letting them in, and so on. When I tried again explaining about the cancer, she point-blank refused to believe that was the case, and got angry. (I’m just glad Susan didn’t have to hear that in person.) it was awful, and I went through this more than once.
This on and off has been going on all night; I had to awaken Susan once to get Connie moved around in a big way early on, but Connie’s been waking up every 30-60 minutes scared as hell, and repeating the cycle, and it takes me a while to get her calmed down again. Susan’s been dead to the world…
Today, (Saturday) we were supposed to have friends over to help with putting up and decorating the tree, and then leaving in the early afternoon to go to Milwaukee to pick up a dog – a rescue black toy poodle named Jack. The idea presented by Susan is that this is supposed to be Mere’s dog, and that she will be responsible for him. (Susan had put her name in for a rescue adoption many months ago, and both she and Mere are totally into the idea of getting the dog; Susan had a black poodle named Cleo that she was terribly fond of as a child.) We’re supposed to meet the dog’s foster-owner at a custard joint in the late afternoon.
I’m not sure at this rate how awake I will be for any of the above during Sunday. More later.
It’s been a very strange day, to say the least. Connie is still with us, even joking to Susan and Connie’s sister Marlyce about things. Quoting Susan:
Mom hasn’t lost her sense of humor. Marlyce was telling her that she would take care of me for her. Mom very seriously told her that she knew she would, and “Don’t be too nosey”. Cracked us both up.
Mom doesn’t want to be alone, so we told her that we’d stay with her. I gave Marlyce my Kindle and asked what she liked to read. She said murder mysteries. We thought Mom was settling down to sleep for a while, then she replied “who killed Connie”. She smiled and said “it’s a joke”.
She had a few active bursts, and long stretches of drugged sleep; I can’t imagine what her pain levels would be without the morphine. Right now, Susan thinks she’s coming down with a cold, and went to be around 8 pm. I’ve been tired and logy all day long; ran some errands and did some housework – including as much laundry as I can get in.
Tomorrow sounds like a very busy day…Marlyce will be coming back to look after Connie for a little while, while we go on a trip up to Milwaukee to bring home a new member of the household, named Jack…
Yesterday, Connie just would not let Susan get very far from her – as a comfort, a rock, someone to keep the fear away. I went out last night for dinner with some friends, and came back to find Susan just where she had been; in a chair next to Connie’s bed, keeping an eye on her. I was very tired and went to bed soon after; Susan was supposed to come to bed then, but was up for another hour and a half; if Connie thought she was leaving, she would call out for Susan.
Both of them got a quiet night. Soon after I woke up around 7 am, Connie stirred and called out, and I got Susan up out . (Meredith was overnight at a friend’s house, and would call up shortly for me to pick her up and bring her back home.)
Connie told us that ‘today is my dying day’ at the start. She had been going on about a ‘perfomance’, and now added that she wasn’t sure she was ready for the perfomance – needed more practice, needed to have her wardrobe ready. Even joked about having her red stripey shirt (a trademark of hers to her kids and grandkids) as part of the wardrobe!
Connie wanted to speak to various people: to her friend Bruce; to Susan’s brother Doug, his wife and kids in Sioux Falls – and to me. Bruce was talking with her about ‘how to let go’, which she wanted advice on…and to tell the Sioux Falls folks that she loved them. (The two youngest couldn’t bring themselves to come to the phone.)
She really hasn’t been that interested in calling people during this, too hard, and too much energy she didn’t have to do it.
“Don’t worry about not remembering, Mom. I’m here to remember for you.”
-Susan, this morning, while taking care of her mom (Connie)
-Dan Quayle, 1988
“When they incorporated the town, they tried a few names, but those already existed, and somebody wrote back saying we should try something more ‘peculiar.’ And, son, we did.”
- citizen of Peculiar, Missouri, quoted in the NYT (10/12/2008)
I tried to explain things to her, and she was saying ‘what about the doctors’; it was very very hard to tell her that the cancer had spread too far, and that the doctors had said that there was nothing they could do for her aside of keeping her comfortable.
That sort of thing is something you don’t want to hear over and over again.
It’s pretty clear at this point that the bathroom fall, for any number of reasons, pushed Connie along on the path towards death. She’s glassy eyed all the time, and has spoken only a couple of times – nothing all that clear or profound. She’s lost in an incoherent jumble of dreams and past memories; needing to call in to a former supervisor in the school system she retired from years ago to ‘tell him I was in an accident and can’t come in.’
She doesn’t recognize much of anybody, in person or over the phone.
The other signs we were given about the progress towards death are coming up pretty steadily. Last night, she wanted to watch TV, but couldn’t follow anything, and Susan came up with a bunch of old favorite songs of Connie’s on her iPod and let that run for a while.
We figure that it’s only a couple of days now. Susan has done a lot of work on the arrangements for her cremation and the memorial service in January, so that’s pretty much lined up…and we wait for the inevitable, trying to keep her as comfortable as possible. It’s not a pleasant wait.
We don’t **know** that the fall and injury caused anything specific; you’d have to get Connie to a scanner to know much of anything, and I doubt hospice would go for that, from the standpoint of ‘what’s the point, she’s about to die anyway?’ But from observing Connie since that happened, I’d say (my doctorate’s in law, not medicine) that it’s at least a contributing factor. She’s just gone to **VACANT** too thoroughly and quickly since then.
Poor Mere is sleeping in this morning; was not a very happy birthday for her yesterday, and I feel for her. Even the dogs have been aware that something’s happening; Dot has been sticking with Connie all the time, and Dash is sleeping close to Mere a lot.
As Connie weakened, and her anxiety increased, Susan’s load went further through the roof – she was horribly stressed and sleep deprived. This got worse when a very weak Connie kept trying to get out of bed and go somewhere or do something; we finally had to have someone in the bedroom with her all the time at night to keep an eye on her, as she would wake up every two hours or so and try to get out of bed to ‘do stuff’. The person on watch would end up sleep deprived and stressed, and there wasn’t much relief from it. And telling her not to do it didn’t make any difference; she’d just forget it in a few minutes.
On Tuesday, November 29th, I got up way early and couldn’t go back to sleep, and went off to work on my laptop in the dining room; Susan was in Connie’s bedroom sleeping. Around 5:30 am, I heard noises in the back of the house towards the bedrooms – and thought it was our blind dog Dot trying to maneuver around. And right after that, there was a huge, heavy CRASH that got me right out of my chair and woke up Susan; Connie had tried to get into the bathroom next to her room and had stumbled and fell to the floor, hard.
Her body blocked the door, and Susan had to squeeze in and see what was going on and try to get Connie back up.again. Connie had cracked her head HARD on the tile floor, and there was a lot of blood from a nasty-looking head gash. Susan and I got her out of there, cleaned her and the floor up, and took her into the living room recliner to rest. I contacted Connie’s hospice folks, and they informed the twice-a-week nurse (who was coming that morning anyhow to check her out) about the fall. I was also concerned about Connie from the standpoint of the hard head crack causing a concussion; I didn’t want to give her morphine and have that mask any concussion effects.
The nurse came at 8:30 am, and told us to move up her fentanyl patch dosage and the amount of morphine and lorazepam she was getting due to the increased pain levels and the sheer agony of the injury. She zoned out soon after that, and Susan and I started to review our options. And Connie didn’t need stitches for the cut.
One thing was certain; we couldn’t sustain this whole 24/7 close watch on her. Over the days since then, we found that the options were limited to either (1) keep up her care at home, or (2) pay a lot of money we did not have to put her in a nursing home with trained nurses to watch her. There wasn’t any public help available that was any significant use to us in this situation; Connie was on Medicare / Medicaid, but the state was very tight on this sort of thing and simply wouldn’t pay.
What hospice did do was to put better rails on the bed that were too difficult for Connie to deal with and too high to get over – and to dope her up further, as noted above. Connie’s face was pretty messed up by the fall; she looked like she’d been on the losing end of a boxing match, with two black, swollen eyes and the scrapes, head knot and gash. She swore to us over and over again that she would never try that sort of stunt again…
…but she was also sleeping a lot more, and her eyes started looking very vacant. She’s forgotten who I am, and is either very spaced or not terribly coherent. All that is progressing pretty quickly now; our advisors told us that once she was out of the super-anxious stage, she’d slide into a near comatose state. Seems to be playing out that way.
We also have a set of ‘jingle bells’ on the railing of the bed so she can call for assistance, and that’s working, and Susan’s catching up or her huge sleep deficit.
And Mere is starting to show the strain. From Susan’s journal (December 1st):
Today is Meredith’s 12th birthday. Not one we’ll look back on with happy memories. Marlyce came over this morning and sat with Mom so Jim and I could run some errands and stayed for dinner. We got carryout from a local restaurant. The food was not up to her expectations and Mom’s decline made for a somber meal. Mere came home from school, expecting to see Grandma sitting in the living room and was upset that she wasn’t. Meredith has always been very cheerful around Mom and usually comes home with a smile and a ”Hi Grandma”. Today, Mom wasn’t able to respond.
It’s been a very tough day. Mom is no longer able to get out of bed and isn’t really capable of responding to anything. She can’t even turn over by herself.
Tonight, Susan and Connie’s sister Marlyce were taking close care of Connie, and I have no idea what was happening, but the broken-hearted looks of a very tired and very sad Susan told me enough- that Connie was probably failing further. At this point, it looks like the fall will speed up the process quite a bit. I saw this before when my Mom died of cancer nearly a decade ago, and I really hate seeing it again with such a sweet lady.
We called to wish Meredith Ellen a happy birthday, and ended up leaving a message. Mere was obviously sad and unhappy this evening, and there wasn’t much we could say or do.
MERE’s 12th birthday was today (December 1st), and the present situation was really overshadowing it. Didn’t help that a new local Creole/Cajun Restaurant (selected by Mere) that we had eaten at during Windycon earlier in November was providing the birthday dinner via carry-out, and that the food was truly horrible. Mere and I were shocked, and I think she was beyond disappointed.
THE REST OF EVERYTHING is crappy, to say the least.
CONNIE: I mentioned last time that she was getting weaker and more confused / anxious; it got a lot worse. I’m going to excerpt from Susan’s journal on CaringBridge for Connie:
Mom is pretty much the same as my last post, except for her nightime confusion and inability to sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time. It’s essentially called sundowning where there is increased agitation and confusion in the evening hours and at night. Mom sleeps (deeply) for much of the day, but gets really confused and anxious at night. Since she is much more wobbly, we don’t trust her to walk to/from the bathroom by herself, but she will still try to do that at night because she doesn’t want to wake anyone up (and it’s something she’s always been able to do). Besides, by the time she’s awake enough to realize that she needs to go to the bathroom, she’s already gone. We have lots of laundry, now.
That we did. We gave up on nightgowns because of her regular bouts of incontinence, and put washable and disposable pads everywhere plus pullups. (As I write this, I’m in my office and more of the laundry is going through the machines.)
The hospice nurse told us that she couldn’t predict what would happen when, but we knew about various signs of ‘progress’ towards the end; Susan and I kept an eye on her for these, and they started to pile up. From Susan’s journal:
All these were showing up in different ways; she’d come out of her bedroom and want to go into the living room and watch television all day. At first, she was awake and kind of mindlessly watching a lot of daytime ‘reality’ TV; she stopped watching anything that was too demanding or too uncomfortable for her. Then she started falling asleep for greater and greater periods of time, woken up now and again due to breathing problems (she had an oxygen machine since early September, and her lungs started to get clogged) or trips to the portable commode next to her recliner.
And always, she was massively uncomfortable due to the pain from the tumor(s). Most she interpreted as either hunger or cramping lower back muscles that had her moving here and there and getting more meds and pillows and whatnot to try to avoid the worst of it. Her meds doubled to cover the pain, but it served to increase the hazy mental issues and her deeper sleep and maybe stay ahead of the pain levels.
MERE had a birthday party sleepover with a bunch of her friends, manically had tons of fun with them, and is now sleeping – appears that some of the manic-ness was a cover for a flu or cold, so *she’s* down for the count tonight, tired, stuffed up, and miserable.
CONNIE is fading badly. Sleeps practically all the time, is horribly confused and anxious a lot when sorta-awake, and doing a lot of morphine (up to 1ml every 2 hours) for the pain. Her BP’s up, heart rate’s up, and she’s gotten profoundly weaker. I expect that she’ll be pretty much bound to her bedroom by midweek; Susan and her Aunt Marlyce worked on re-arranging the furniture, and I have to work on setting up a TV for her to watch in there. Horrible to watch this fade…
SUSAN has been working on planning the stuff for the memorial service and whatnot – better to do so now than to struggle to do so under even worse emotional stress than we have right now.
HOLIDAYS are being very muted. Thanksgiving will be here with Me, Susan and Mere, plus Aunt Marlyce and her friend Carol, and essentially ‘catered’ in from a local restaurant. We have no set plans for anything past that. Not even when to set up the tree, et cetera. I had to cancel the annual family dinner (the one that’s been going since 1951) because I simply couldn’t say whether something involved with Connie would force me to do so at the last minute. Nobody’s had much spirit for anything, I guess.
I’m back at work again at my home office, but struggling with my files and records and piled up and mooshed around paperwork that now HAS to be gone through and dealt with. Some items that I thought I could immediately find turned out to be lost in the morass, and I’m frantically trying to find them.
Susan and I have had a couple of small VISA cards from (BIG ANNOYING BANK) for years; I dumped one account this year because they wanted to charge an outrageous fee for keeping the account open. Trying to pay both of them off…and yes, (BIG ANNOYING BANK) is one of the outfits that is now skinning everyone for new profits since they took a hit from their Stupid Bank Tricks earlier.
Just got letters for both accounts basically saying that “We need to make more money, so unless you say no to each of these ten areas, we’re about to sell your information to all sorts of people who drive you crazy with BS offers.” Needless to say, the letter, properly checked off, will go off in tomorrow’s mail.
Massively irritated. Oh, I’ll never do business with these creeps again…
On m
y Facebook list of ‘friends’, there ‘s a picture thing going around that looks like this:
I about blew a gasket on this one, and rather than bug people about it, figured I’d whip out my Lawyer and Historian hats and explain why this particular notion is a crock.
First off, the US Constitution (1st and 14th amendments) said all along that the government is not allowed to bring any particular religious point of view in and say – this faith is better or more approved by the government than any other.
The reason for this was really simple – in most of the countries of Europe, you had an Official Religion of the Government; Catholicism, different variant Lutherans, Presbyterians (Scotland), and so on. God blessed the ruler on top, and God’s blessing said that if the ruler was a Lutheran, you’d better be one too – or face a lot of other problems. Extra taxes, can’t vote, few if any legal protections, can’t publicly worship in your chosen faith, and so on.
The reason that America got so popular is that it allowed a lot of people who didn’t care much for their ruler’s religion somewhere to go, and there were a lot of them, including pretty much any Christian church, and any non-Christians. My Rittenhouse roots are from Mennonites who left Germany and the Netherlands to follow William Penn to the safe haven of Pennsylvania. Maryland took in Catholics, New England took in all sorts of odd Protestant groups, and so forth. And Utah took in Mormons escaping persecution in the rest of the country.
When I was little, in the early 1960′s, they did have school prayer, all right – the principal or teacher would lead a prayer, and you had to say exactly the same prayer that they said, or get in trouble and be sent to the office on report. If they made a Protestant kid say a Catholic prayer, or a Jewish kid say a very Christian prayer, that was just too bad, and you had to obey anyway.
(The people who usually push this may have some sort of idea that their religion would come out on top. Don’t bet on it.)
The Supreme court decided in 1962 to stop this sort of thing, because you were having a agency of the state push a particular religious view down the throats of people. When you mix Church and State, you are letting someone in the government pick a religion they like and use the power of the government against people who don’t follow that religion. And, of course, people who disagree with any law in a church/state mix become people who are ‘against God’s will’…and can suffer horrible consequences. Just ask the Jews of 20th century Europe.
You can’t stop people from praying to God privately in school; tons of kids do it every day, asking for all sorts of help and advice. All the present laws do is forbid the people running the schools from pushing any kind of religion at the kids. To me, that’s the job of the family and their temples, churches, what have you, to support and build up a love, interest and involvement in their faith. Not the assistant principal down the hall with a paddle.
Yes, Mere and I will be at Windycon on and off; we’re commuting, and will be dependent on Susan dropping us off over there, so I can’t say as to when you’ll see us. I’ll also not be terribly mobile; I’ll be using my scooter-thang to move around, but the hotel is spread out enough that it’s not a lot of fun to run all over the place. I don’t have any specific commitments to be on panels, and Mere’s not working the con suite, so it’s hard to say where and when you might catch us!
MERE is performing at her Lisle Junior High concert tonight; we’re going, of course. She has been working on her flute and her new baby, a piccolo (think small, higher-pitched flute and remember what Yankee Doodle sounds like). (sound example) She was working on the material on and off all summer and steadily since then…all sorts of patriotic music for Veterans’ Day.
When Mere practices, it tends to be in rapid spurts at the spur of the moment; five minutes here and there, or ranging around for most of an hour. There’s no outside rhyme or reason as to when and what; she just roars away at it. Sometimes, she’ll use the band music; sometimes, she’ll dig through other sheet music – Neil Young, Ian Anderson/Jethro Tull, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, etc.
She’s also on the high honor roll at school; I really want to be able to help her with homework, but she isn’t that hep on the idea…I’m too slow and involved for her taste in explaining things, I gather. She goes through much of this sort of thing like she’s killing snakes – at Ramming Speed, using full blazing candlepower. I grimace, and worry that she’s not going to know what to do when she gets beyond easier stuff and has to really dig…
SUSAN has her hands full.
CONNIE is steadily declining as the cancer spreads; the pain from it is enough that she takes in quite a bit of morphine for pain and various anti-nausea drugs and dozes a lot. She’s getting congested in her left lung, her eyesight and hearing have dropped a good deal, and she’s easily anxious about all sorts of trivia. Again, just the disease process.
Old friends from South Dakota have dropped all sorts of cards and notes to her, along with emails; she’s had a few visits from folks, most especially her old pal Bruce, who was here a few times recently – and has been very helpful to us (various important handyman and outdoor stuff we couldn’t do or get to) and to her (dealing with her impending death, with lots of long religious/philosophical talks).
Of course, we all know that she’s well into the process, but it’s hard for anyone to say how long she has left – there’s been enough in the way of odd twists and turns already. We’re re-doing the usual Thanksgiving celebration; it’s going to be here, because I doubt Connie would be able to leave the house. We’re still going to have the ‘holiday’ dinner in mid-December from my family – going on since 1951 – but it will be someplace really close, because it would be too hard on Connie for us not to be at the house for very long, even with a person minding her.
Today and yesterday, Connie’s sister Marlyce has been with her during the day, looking after her; since I’m limited by my foot, and my car has been in the shop this week, the extra pair and hands and care are very helpful.
I’m over a week late with this update on What’s Going One Here, so please bear with me. It’s been a difficult time.
The timeline goes like this: Originally, I had serious problems with my left foot; they couldn’t image up anything, but the podiatrist / surgeon knew that something soft-tissue-ish was growing in my foot and creating that sore on the bottom of my left foot, against the left-center edge. Said sore area was way tender to damn painful, and there was a bulge on the side of the foot (not the bottom) that was next to it and likewise quite painful.
So I had surgery on my left foot the day after Labor Day (September 7th) to fix the problem. The surgeon took out a couple of lumps of fibrous tissue, which he thought would relieve the pressure and allow the sore to heal up. This didn’t really happen. The lump in question grew after surgery, swelled a lot more, and got to be 9.5 on a 10 scale painful – and not mitigated very much by strong pain killers.
Around Friday, October 21st, the podiatrist gave up and went on a hunch that the ‘lump’ was inflated with loose fluid, and drew out 40 cc’s of bloody (not obviously infected) fluid. Very quickly after he did, the whole lower half of my foot rapidly became nastily inflamed with a massive infection, and I hauled it and me into the ER at Edward Hospital for treatment the next Monday morning (October 24th).
Sure enough, the cellulitis /infection was stomped with intravenous Zosyn and Ancef over 6 days. Midway through my stay, the podiatrist / surgeon operated again and drained out more fluid and took out a bunch of scar tissue inside that had grown in since the September 7th surgery! Through a lot of this, I was seriously loaded up with Norco and was enduring very serious levels of pain…
I was sent home with Keflex orally (six 500 mg tabs a day for 10 days), as the latest bug was a penicillin-resistant Staph Aureus breed, and have been laid up, with strong orders to Stay Off The Foot. So I’m doing a lot of lying or sitting around with my feet propped up, walking with a crutch or scooting with my Roll-about. But not lifting stuff, and keeping the foot elevated and weight-free as much as possible, with regular bandage changes and so on.
The area had gotten very raw, and a good chunk of my foot looks pretty horrible, but the doc says that he’s seeing plenty of promising signs of healing – especially around the sore, which is fantastic news. All in all, my mangled foot problems have seriously messed me over for four years, and I’m beyond tired of it all.
Otherwise, I’m also making some strides in straightening out my sleep problems. I have had terrible insomnia for a long time, and recently signed up with a new set of docs and meds on this issue;
However, being in the hospital with all sots of people going in and out of your room at odd hours (poking you, giving you meds, checking to see if your body assimilates oxygen, and so forth…) means that one’s sleep-the-night -through efforts get hashed up. Add in the pain from the foot – which was severe and is now a lot better – coming and going, and I wasn’t able to sleep more than two-three hours at a time in the hospital.
Collecting my stuff and up late doing it; I expect to be checking into Edwards Hospital for a 3-4 day stay for other foot infection..
Look at your left (bare) foot, and go down the left side to about the middle. That’s where the right-after Labor-Day surgery took place. Imagine that there’s a bulge of sore tissue over there on the edge, and an open area on the bottom of the foot about an inch-plus toward the middle of the bottom of my foot. That’s a rough description of where I was after the surgery.
The bulge dropped down after the surgery, and started swelling and hurting like mad. The podiatrist and I were doing everything we could think of to reduce it, but it got larger, sore-er and redder – and more sensitive to touch., Over the last week or so, my pain levels soared to a 8-9 on a 10 scale, and I was taking a lot of painkillers to deal with it,
The podiatrist drained a bunch of fluid from it late last week, and I hoped that would do the trick. Nope. Over the weekend, the upper third of my foot has looked worse and worse, and the MRI that the podiatrist ordered for Monday morning is going to be more like the first stage to me being admitted for IV antibiotic treatment of the foot. I really don’t see a way around it.
Rather dramatic and interesting YouTube video of a **serious** amateur rocket launch: set youtube at HD if you can, it’s worth it Thanks to Dave Ihnat for the link!
http://hackaday.com/2011/10/10/22-miles-straight-up-in-90-seconds/
(click on image for larger picture…)
I used to have a WordPress plugin/widget on the site a while back that you could input books that you had on your just-read pile, your about-to-read pile, and so on…and be able to have the whole thing be a part of the site. As these things come and go, I’m looking to put up a new one, but I’m not getting a lot of luck doing searches on ‘library’ or ‘book’ or ‘booklist’ on the Widgets/plugins search function on the site dashboard. If anyone out there has a suggestion, I’m interested in hearing it.
In bits of spare time, I want to prune and revive the use of the basic http://journal.memnison.com site, and that’s a part of it all…
I get some of my odd stuff through Twitter scans; doing so, I recently ran across @historyancient, which is a feed of new articles dug up from all over the place on the internet and filtered and presented in a blog that I highly recommend:
History of the Ancient World Ancient History News and Resources
Seriously neat stuff in there, and the area coverage (geographically) is all over the place.
People have been asking in all sorts of ways as to how I’ve been doing since the surgery; the answer is that I’m still off my feet, still in a doctors care, but doing better.
The foot surgery was held up for several hours because, as usual, people were having a lot of trouble getting an IV into me. Including the anesthesiologist, who was somewhat elderly and shaky…I’ve always been a horrible stick, and this was a world-class performance of Hide the Vein! It runs, it hides, it shrinks from the needle. Lots of fun being poked full of dry holes, so to speak.
The surgeon found two growths that were helping cause all of the pressure…about an inch thick. Luckily, they weren’t malignant, and they’re out now, The area is healing *slowly*, but its still swollen and often painful. I’m able NOW to get around without a walker, crutches or Roll-a-bout all the time, but still cant carry much of anything, or walk very far, stand for any real length of time, and its annoying. Still taking Norco for pain, which comes and goes.
This hasn’t really resolved the underlying problem with the sore on my foot being open, however…just stopped the progression of pain and having it get bigger. Which is something, of course, but I really need this to heal up and stay healed.
The day after Columbus Day, I go back to work (in my basement office), with a whole new situation…my boss for the last 20 years got reassigned by management, and then got another job in the agency that more fits her talents. So right now, I have an acting boss who is a very nice guy (no, I don’t want a managers job) and no idea who will take the job permanently. Last time this happened over 20 years ago, I got a boss-from-hell who was actively trying to force me to leave the agency.
On top of that, there’s been a major reorganization, and all of the external work on the agency’s site is being transferred to other hands in order to consolidate it to a very few. This was rather sudden, and I have to re-gear myself and my duties to different areas. It is what it is, and that’s all I’ll say here.
This week, since Wednesday, Ive been nailed by a gut virus that saps all of my energy…sleeping on and on all day and night with brief breaks. Very very not fun, especially since an old family friend is in town this weekend to look after Mere and Connie, so that Susan and I could get away for a day or so and celebrate our 17th anniversary. If nothing else, Susan will be able to get some much-needed rest and de-stressing while I do a Rip Van Winkle imitation, but that’s not the romantic part I care for at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_have_been_pied
Just sayin’. I see that they don’t have Ronald Reagan there; a local semi-revolutionary whose ‘name’ was ‘Pancho White Villa’ (White Villa was a now-gone Dayton area food processor) and his ‘Revolutionary Three Stooges Brigade’ pied Reagan in the Oregon district of Dayton on a campaign swing in the 70′s.
From a Dutch magazine (translated):
Cakes-Teams
As in the case of Anita Bryant, the majority of the work carried out by teams better pie. In addition, the Groucho Marxists of Vancouver and the 3 Stooges Revolutionary Brigade of Dayton, Ohio, the most successful. Both have countless pie-jobs’ in place and the pie-throwers without exception supported by the frame to escape.
The victims of Groucho Marxist Frankie Lee include the former radical Eldridge Cleaver, psycho-surgeon José Delgado and two ministers from the Trudeau government, Bill Vander Zalm and Marc Lalonde. Rake on each cake was a clear press release. Brain Surgeon Delgado was hit by a mixture of cow brains and tomato paste. Eldridge Cleaver, the former revolutionary who had suddenly discovered Jews and preached everywhere, was an audience of 1,500 Christian children in a horrible way to hit a hit as you rarely see. Questioning the New-Coyote Brigade betaartte another Minister Trudeau, Ron Basford, due to the expulsion of helping American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier to the U.S..
Unlike the easily entertained American media, rebuked the Canadian press the politicians for their nonchalant reaction. A columnist huffed: “Driven terrorists hijack airplanes, cowardly … throw pies Pie Throwing is the easy way to get rid of it”. The Vancouver cake layers, liberal helplessness and verbal abuse in the newspapers it helped that the Trudeau government was defeated in the elections and the Conservatives came to power. This is similar to the riots in Chicago, Yippie who helped Nixon to power.
The 3 Stooges Revolutionary Brigade (R3SB) holds with their infamous purposes betaartingen usually local in nature. A spokesman for Dayton’s electric utility, for example, or a SWAT team cop of the arrest. R3SB joints also sent to public and celebrities like Grandma Carter organized giant Mother’s Smoke-ins. Their most famous action was the poet Rod McKuen, by Pancho Villa White was fitted with a sugar-syrup pie.
Pancho: “McKuen’s America’s most wretched poet. It appeals to the lowest common denominators. While other countries are represented by legs as Pablo Neruda, we are saddled with him. His poetry is junk food.” The statement following the tails of the man of the electricity, “although not of national importance, this was a classic local pie murder. In everyday life, playing local bastards often a more important role than some abstract national leader. Everybody likes to those chasing up their electricity bills, hit by a pie to be seen. ” GEB’er later denied to the press that he had ever touched. “That may be” responded the brigade “but if he walks around with a face still full of sticky pastries.”
Just added CAPTCHA to my home journal site; got tired of the tons of bots trying to set themselves up as users on the site. Also didn’t want to make things too difficult for the folks who do want to use the site…
L’shanah tovah tikatev v’taihatem / v’taihatemi; or Happy New Year to my Jewish friends!
We seem to be having a problem in the back yard with carpenter ants; this is the stuff that I’ve been digging up about it, looking for the method that gets the job done and isn’t horribly toxic, Unfortunately, it looks like the best thing to do is to hire a pest guy and have him poison the gregarious little stinkers.
If any of y’all have an idea of how to handle them, let me know….
CONNIE: Her 70th birthday was last Thursday, and she’s had visits that day and since by her sister Marlyce, nurses from hospice, our Minister Rev. Kitty, and my BIL Doug, who stopped by for Saturday and Sunday to see his mom as a break from his long-distance truck job. There’s been a steady flow of cards, notes, flowers and calls from others, and generally, Connie’s not up much to talking on the phone. Too demanding of her strength.
Generally, it’s a day by day up and down as to how easily she gets worn out and then sleeps a lot. Mostly, she sits in the living room about the time that everyone else gets up (say, 6:30 or so) and stays there till we all go to bed (9:30-10:30 pm) watching all sorts of reality TV (Judge Whoever, Dr. Phil, etc) and some sitcoms and news. And dozing on and off.
Hospice is in control of her care, and so far, I’ve been pleased with what I’ve seen…she has regular visits from a nurses’ aid for baths, regular checkups from the nurse, and supplies keep coming easily. I’m concerned because the stuff that they prescribed for her for a blood thinner is just way too expensive to continue with (most is paid for by Medicare, but there’s a high copay that isn’t – about $200 a week or so) and so we’re resorting to meds that aren’t as well-tuned to be effective, but are incredibly cheaper.
Aside of problems with her lower GI tract from time to time, there’s been little change from all this. Something could happen tonight or next month.
”Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn’t matter which color is doing the hating. Its just plain wrong.”
- Muhammed Ali
Even if I were still a Republican, I think I would have been one of those people who were not terribly impressed with the ‘talent’ available that’s running for the GOP Presidential nomination.
Too many people have suddenly made major ‘conversions’ to more ‘conservative’ positions out of the blue – because they suddenly decided that their interest in being President beats out their personal judgement or principles. If that’s so, I simply wouldn’t consider their judgement, honesty or ability to do things that were hard for them but necessary for the country.
Too many candidates are trying to use really stupid scare-the-public statements to get public interest…or making outright lies, like ‘I’ll make gas $2 a gallon again’ that they can’t really accomplish, but if you, as a member of the voting public, are gullible enough to buy the fear or greed, it suits them.
There’s also been a number of burn-and-crash situations, where the more you find out about the candidate, the more you realize that they are phonies, liars, cheats and hypocrites. Or that their personal lives and/or wallets are corrupt, usually on the same things that they rail about in speeches about other people. The more I hear someone going on about their superior morals or patriotism, the harder I hold on to my wallet.
And remember; it’s still pretty early in the process, and all of the crapola hasn’t come out yet. John Edward’s disastrous affair didn’t come out in the media until after the 2008 primaries were over, a long time after the affair began. It took over two years for us to hear the name ‘Monica Lewinsky’ after that affair started in the Oval Office. Expect more of the same. Unfortunate, but generally true.
Connie is sleeping soundly behind me as I write this in the living room (my PC was brought upstairs) and some tinkly new age music is playing as a background.
Actually, it’s very relaxing!
My surgeon saw me this morning, and told me that I was healing on the incision VERY well, and he’d see me in two weeks to take out the stitches. Nothing yet back from pathology, but he swears that it did NOT look malignant to him.
Connie came home on hospice care yesterday, and she’s using a oxygen tank system – portable on wheels, acts as a compressor / CPAP sort of machine. We have her on different meds, including a anti-coagulant that is horribly expensive…and that’s after taking off $1000 / week that medical insurance is willing to pay on it. The hospice people basically took over in regard to care and equipment, and I was busy a lot of yesterday hunting down various outfits that had brought in equipment for her to take it back.
One such outfit said that they couldn’t take back the oxygen tanks used to get her here – that a doctor would have to order them to, or she’d have to pass on. Gee, thanks, guys. Another said – well, that CPAP will be paid for in October and released to you guys in November, so let’s just wait and see…**sigh**
There’s flowers and poems here for Connie, sent in by friends, a bulletin board full of get-well cards, various treatment and feeding stuff, and – well, we have no idea what will come next, or when. We just hang on.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/trialsanderrors/2887484840/
Old poster from the Brookfield (Chicago) Zoo. Pandaphiles rejoice!
The real underlying news is that Connie’s condition has been really going downhill since Doug and his family left; Tuesday night (actually, about 3 am Wednesday) Connie started having pains, a racing heart rate and other troubles; Susan quickly decided that whatever was going on was way serious, and called up an ambulance – which took her to nearby Edward Hospital (not Loyola Hospital in moderately-far Maywood, which is where all of her cancer treatments and GP were based).
Susan and Mere got in her SUV and took off to Edward Hospital, and were there on and off all Wednesday and today by herself. I went over Wednesday evening with them, but Connie was very under the weather and could barely speak.
They figured out pretty quickly that what was happening was that Connie had built up a large number of blood clots in her lungs and legs, with a particularly big one in her lung that really bothered them. According to the hematologist I spoke with, Connie’s blood was particularly ‘sticky’ due to the cancer, and it would be tricky to put the right amount of thinners or clot-buster stuff in her without risking something going wrong. What they did do late Wednesday, just before we got there in the evening, was to put a clot-filter in her vena cava to prevent a pulmonary embolism.
I don’t have a total understanding of where things are after today; Susan was talking to them, but she hasn’t told me many details; she’s really exhausted and stressed, and I wasn’t pushing. Connie has decided not to do any further chemo, and has been set up for hospice care at home (they sent over a hospital bed, oxygen and a few other things) and has been in serious pain from all of this. She’s coming home sometime tomorrow…
I don’t expect miracles on this at this point. I’ve had a good friend die suddenly from an embolism, and I didn’t hear anything about any major clot successes today. It’s not looking good at all, in a shorter time than I expected.
A lot of today was spent (for me) calling up people and answering the phone, setting this or that up and making some arrangements. I’m very sad to Connie, and most of all for Susan and Doug and the kids, because I’ve always known that the closeness and love they’ve had to one of the most loveable people I’ve ever met (you could NOT ask for a better mother-in-law) would make her passing beyond agony – for them. For her, I think she’s not willing to go through more of this, that she would have far rather lived a good deal longer (she turns 70 in a few days) and seen the grandchildren blossom, but that she’s ready to go.
And me, I will most definitely grieve. She’s been a wonderful, fun person to know and just easy to love. I will miss her enormously. And I will do what I can to comfort Mere and Susan from this end.
The surgery took place late on Tuesday morning; the pain levels are not what I had feared, and I’m doing moderately well. I am taking Norco for the pain; it makes me sleepy and foggy. A few things of note:
(1) Surgery was supposed to start hours before it did; I’m a very tough ‘stick’ for things like IVs, and I was a little dehydrated, so it was a serious mess getting my IV in. Didn’t help that they didn’t take my advice on where to get the best veins for almost all of that time (the backs of my hands), and the anesthesiologist was really upset that he wasn’t getting it and had to stop and take care of other surgery cases and come back later. Must have been drilled 17 times…
(2) The surgeon told me that he found two ‘growth’ or ‘masses’ in my foot that were causing all the problems. He didn’t recognize what they were, but they didn’t look nasty to him – he sent them to pathology to be looked at anyway. That worries me a little…I’ll see him on Saturday and see what the results were and where we go from here.
(3) I’m up in the main floor of the house. My PC is up from the basement, on a small desk in the living room next to the TV, and I’ve been out only once (to see Connie in her hospital room yesterday for a few hours). Basically, I rotate from an armchair in the living room (to watch TV), a chair at that aforementioned desk (for putzing on the PC) with my feet up as much as possible, and the bedroom (ZZZZ).
Due to stuff going on, which I’ll describe in my next post, I’ve been doing a lot of stuff on the PC and phone to talk to X about Y, looking up stuff and taking care of it, and so on. The new setup has my docs scanner, and I need to do a lot of stuff with scanning mail/bills/reciepts to our house archives and working on a household financial system. And just sitting back and watching some canned TV and movies from the TiVo. Frankly, I’ve been too busy to do much of that; I’ve been catching up a little on my reading from my Kindle DX for entertainment.
Still feeling groggy today; got woken up enough times during the night with people going to the john (and Dot the Dog trying to ram her way past the gate at the top of the basement stairs to find a dog that had left earlier that day – thought it was someone trying to break in with all that racket).
End result was that I had some trouble trying to go back to sleep; when I did, I slept until 11 am – a total of eight plus hours. The groggy was balanced off by a dose of being pissed off; that and three cups of coffee and my ADD meds kept me going to now…9:30 pm. And feeling stressed, but tired…
It’s been a very busy weekend; Susan’s brother Doug, his wife Becky and their four kids came to say what could well be their goodbye to Connie. The weekend was very busy, and everyone had a good time hanging out and doing a few things, like going out bowling (my feet don’t fit bowling shoes and I’m having a lot of pain trouble with my feet right now, so I didn’t go) and a set of family pictures with everyone (first time we’d had all of them here for several years) that look very good. The real farewell session on Sunday was very emotional for everyone, and that’s all I’ll say about that. (.Mere was off on a sleepover and wasn’t here for that.)
Back to Labor Day: Worked hard all day trying to clean the house, run errands, do laundry from 11 to now, and trying to pack up my PC stuff and anything else needed to keep me bandaged, medicated, and occupied for a while. I also still have to dig out my scooter and crutches for tomorrow…when we leave at 5:30 am to get my foot operated on.
As noted before, the surgeon is cautiously optimistic, but he’s somewhat in the dark as to what he’s going to find or what to do to repair it. To say the least, I’m depending on his skill and hoping that he can fix things, eliminate the open sore and put me in a better position than before…
So I’m apprehensive. I’d feel better about this if it was more straightforward. I also expect that the next two-three days will involve a lot of pain on my part, and a lot of low-end opiate use, which I really hate; partially because I hate feeling drugged, and partially because it constipates me terribly.
As the title says, I’ll see you on the other side of this…
My foot surgery (for the quarter-sized open sore on my left foot due to pressure, etc) is due to take place on the 6th – the day AFTER Labor Day. Not looking forward to the pain or the three weeks of can’t-walk, but hoping for a resolution of the open-door-for-infection and the bloody-and-painful-to-be-on-my-feet parts.
Basically, I will be in my library / basement lair for most of that time, and not terribly mobile. After a day or three, the pain from the surgery should die down, and I can do stuff while sitting down, but I’ll be back to my scooter-thang to get around, even in the basement.
There’s always ten tons of things to do; I’m going to be off work for around three weeks, and I’ll have time to catch up on reading, my archived TiVo stuff, you name it. The hardest problem is going to be that Susan will be stuck with a lot of the household stuff to do; I won’t easily be able to go up and down stairs at all, and can’t really carry anything heavier than a can of Pepsi. So my present duties will have to devolve onto other hands. An old friend who isn’t working at present will possibly come out here and be of some help, but if you want to help out in some way, contact Susan and let her know, and she can sort it out. Normally, the situation wouldn’t be that bad, but with us putting a lot of time and effort into taking care of Susan’s mom Connie, I dread putting any more stuff on Susan’s shoulders at all.
Taking a brief break from chores to post; I have to empty out my old yearbooks and my collection of Point Of Divergences from the basement closet to somewhere in the bookcases…which is going to be a real PITA, but it has to be done. Using the space for storage of board games, extra towels and blankets for the downstairs…and seeing how much more can be carved out for Susan’s use. Not much, I think, but we’ll see.
The basement is looking fairly decent to me, but it has to be in even tighter order; my brother-in-law Doug, his wife Becky and their four kids are coming to visit this weekend. Connie is not doing well in dealing with her cancer, and they figured that a trek here was in order for everyone there – which will eat up Saturday – and I need to make sure that the basement’s presentable and possible to use for the kids possibly crashing here overnight.
We’re also making plans to get family pictures taken with Connie while they’re here.
Sunday, there’s a staff meeting of the Windycon Food Guide (me, Zach and Kathy), and otherwise, there’s a blue ton of things to do around here.
We’re adjusting to a new system of who-does-what here as well. Mere is now doing more to clean up and do things like her own laundry, and I’ve taken over a lot of kitchen maintenance and laundry chores. We’re also all getting together to figure out menus; since Connie sleeps a lot of the time and only eats through a gastric tube, it feels very odd and sad not to include her in stuff like this – or much of anything else – other than making her comfortable and seeing to her treatments and care.
Finally got the house ‘financial’ PC back up and running; a recent Windows 7 update had crashed it pretty severely, and really messed up its connections via a wireless fob to the house network. After some messing around, I came to the conclusion that the best way to fix this was to (a) buy a 50′ length of Ethernet cable and (b) string it under the bookcases in the basement library, hooking it to the basement Ethernet switch and then to the PC. After that, (c) – recover from a pre-update save point.
Which all worked, thankfully, and the new wired connection is doing just fine. Eventually, I’m going to have to get a bigger switch for the basement, but that’s a ways off. Now, I’m just doing all sorts of updates, and getting it back to stuff as soon as I can; since the main house document scanner is attached to it, I could really use this being functional.
Also, my life / schedule is largely being run out of my iTouch; or it was until the thing started getting seriously flaky on me. Mere’s old iTouch isn’t being used by Connie (and I doubt she ever will again), and so in case mine is dead…so I have a morning appointment at the local Apple store to have the main one looked at and to see what needs to be done to clear out the other one for my use if the main one is dead.
All things considered, when I got into PCs in 1983, neither the PC or the Mac existed – it was a hodgepodge of stuff, and I used CP/M machines for a while, and then PC-DOS (much more sturdy and reliable) and finally Windows in the early 1990s. I was exposed heavily over the years to Apple products – but when I could have shifted around 1991 or so, I kept with DOS/Windows, because that’s what work used and Mac then were more toys than anything really useful to me.
Of course, that’s no longer true. Mere now wants to get a Mac Air, and loves the size, design and lightness of the thing; Susan and I said last night that if we were coming into the market now, we would have gotten Macs, probably. And yes, I know that’s heresy, but it’s just my opinion.
Since I’m now the designated Doer of Laundry, I’m trying to deal with a backlog of stuff; I think I have everything downstairs and sorted out, it’s just a matter of going through huge amounts of stuff – and the interruptions in the sequence. Mere wants this smaller bunch done right away for her first day of school (tomorrow, for the 7th grade), and Susan wants this bedspread that the dog urinated on done right away, and so on. It’s just time consuming once you get a rhythm started, and I don’t think I’ll have any more priority interrupts…I hope.
Connie’s old pal Bruce came here for a week and a half, starting last Monday, and he’s been doing a lot of stray stuff to help us out…greatly appreciated, especially since I have had a really bad siege of interrupted sleep over the last week or two, and that does nothing for my energy levels. Believe me, I’m grateful for everything he’s doing, which has included teaching Meredith how to play poke and talking a lot to Connie / cheering her up.
Competitive so and so that Meredith is, that along with the sharp mind for stuff in general and numbers in particular – she loves the game, and has been busy playing on and off (mostly against Bruce) for the last couple of days. Since she already liked Blackjack, I’m afraid that she’d become a terror in a friendly game pretty quickly. (She’s not a mean loser or winner, but she is reasonably competitive and is learning the fine art of the bluff.)
On the other hand, on the laundry front, she can grime up the bottom of any pair of socks you care to mention in record time, requiring blasting powder to clean it properly. And when she was helping me run 50′ of Ethernet cable in the basement, she was still majorly majorly squicked by any dead bugs she found in a stray corner…so she’s still Mere.
Tomorrow after Mere’s home from her first partial day at school (yes, there will be bear photos) and I’m off work, we’re going to go down to Chinatown and hit Ten Ren Tea for new supplies of tea for Bruce and ourselves, and have a dim sum dinner at Mere’s request. (Not that I’m the slightest resistant to the idea!) .
Saw my foot doctor over lunch on the oncoming surgery to my left foot to close up and sort out a wound that isn’t closing on it – and it’s scheduled now for next Tuesday. I got the necessary scrips from him for a hospital bed and a wheelchair, and his scrip for blood tests needed for it – and talked to Susan on the subject of whether this was going to work out, time-wise.
After going over the cons involved with doing it next week with Susan, we agreed that next week was way too crazy and way too short notice for us. Doesn’t hurt that I’ve been weirdly stem to stern exhausted for the last few days; both of us have been coming down with ailments that are fed by mental and physical burnout. I managed to avert a new foot infection from going to overdrive, which was great, but I could use a week of Not Doing Anything But Sleeping, the way I feel.
I don’t think that I mentioned that in an effort to find out why my insomnia levels are up, I went to an allergist, and found out that I’m allergic to various grasses, birch trees, dust – and feathers. Of course, my down and feather pillows and I are not on speaking terms now…
So I’m putting the surgery off for two weeks and setting things up to have folks come in and help us when I’m down for the count (Doc said it would be upwards to three weeks off my feet, yay rah.) At present, a very old friend of Connie’s (and the family’s) is here for a little while to help with Connie’s needs and help us with stuff we’ve had to leave alone because we’ve been so loaded up from other things. God bless ‘im.
Mere has been on a streak of last-gasp marathon hangout and sleepover events with her close buddies; she starts school next Monday for a part of a day, and full time after that. She wants to go over and start skating again, when she can…it’s that much of a natural pull to her.
Courtesy of the geeky web comic XKCD:
Over the last couple of months, I’ve noticed (1) a huge hike in my electric bill, (2) a huge jump in email and mail offering better rates for power than ComEd, the local (expensive) utility, and (3) a huge number of storms and heat waves – leading to power outages from damage or lack of power available from the grid to your house. So what do you do to keep up the power, especially when it’s hotter that Hades outside?
Susan sent me this article from a local paper going on about generators that are installed and run off of your natural gas supply, and I read this article on using your hybrid/electric vehicle to power the house (sort of in reverse). Both are nothing you’d want to do for a long time, but certainly interesting things for emergencies…
As a lot of you know, I was diagnosed over four years ago (on the day after I turned 50) with Chronic Leukocytic Leukemia (CLL); you can live for decades with the stuff, but it’s bad news. I have had recurrent hospitalizations since then – horrible trouble with opportunistic infections (greatly reduced immune system) and it just drains me of energy in general. And there’s always that sword of Damocles hanging over my head that it could suddenly go into overdrive…and switch to a more fast acting version. Or whatever.
Most of the time, I don’t actively think about it. I can’t. I don’t dare do my usual research on the disease, because the variable nature of the thing from person to person, each with their different stories, is such that I’d go into deep depression worrying about any and all of it. What I do just do the maintenance stuff to ward off problems as a standard (like brushing teeth or washing hands) that I don’t think about.
It also means that I can’t read or watch stuff about leukemia in general without it depressing me; I just avoid it. And I’d give plenty for a cure.
And now, one may be right around the corner: there’s a story on tonight’s NBC Nightly News on it, and a similar one on Today.. see also the articles from the researchers at Penn in the New England Journal of Medicine and Science: Translational Medicine.
The Penn scientists targeted chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), the most common type of the blood disease. It strikes some 15,000 people in the United States, mostly adults, and kills 4,300 every year. Chemotherapy and radiation can hold this form of leukemia at bay for years, but until now the only cure has been a bone marrow transplant. A bone marrow transplant requires a suitable match, works only about half the time, and often brings on severe, life-threatening side effects such as pain and infection.
In the Penn experiment, the researchers removed certain types of white blood cells that the body uses to fight disease from the patients. Using a modified, harmless version of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, they inserted a series of genes into the white blood cells. These were designed to make to cells target and kill the cancer cells. After growing a large batch of the genetically engineered white blood cells, the doctors injected them back into the patients.
In similar past experimental treatments for several types of cancer the re-injected white cells killed a few cancer cells and then died out. But the Penn researchers inserted a gene that made the white blood cells multiply by a thousand fold inside the body. The result, as researcher June put it, is that the white blood cells became “serial killers” relentlessly tracking down and killing the cancer cells in the blood, bone marrow and lymph tissue.
As the white cells killed the cancer cells, the patients experienced the fevers and aches and pains that one would expect when the body is fighting off an infection, but beyond that the side effects have been minimal.
Apparently the holdup on wider testing is – funding, with grant money from the US Government so heavily whacked on. For all those who want to cut the heck out of medical research funds, this sort of thing is the result…people die. People suffer. But a wealthy couple set up a charity to do this sort of groundbreaking research, and it paid off…God bless them.
From the UPenn press release:
The work was supported by the Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy, a foundation started by Penn graduates Barbara and Edward Netter, to promote gene therapy research to treat cancer, and the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.
Would I go through that sort of ‘fevers, aches and pains’ for weeks to get a CURE for this monster? God, yes. In a heartbeat. No question. Better being sick as a dog for a few weeks while the T-cells do their work than to have a bomb in your body that drains you down all the time. Over 4000 lives a year could be saved by this research directly with CLL, and many more with any allied treatments for other cancers that come from this.
A quote from a Webmd article on side effects and results:
The treatment was not a walk in the park for patients. One of the three patients became so ill from the treatment that steroids were needed to relieve his symptoms. The steroid rescue may be why this patient had only a partial remission.
“Those engineered T cells don’t hug the cells to death. They release an array of substances, nasty things that have evolved to clear virus- infected cells from your body,” Galipeau says. “But now they are using this to melt down a couple of pounds worth of tumor burden, you will get some side effects.”
One of the patients, whose case is reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, described his experience in a University of Pennsylvania news release… He was diagnosed with CLL at age 50; 13 years later his treatment was failing. Facing a bone-marrow transplant, he jumped at the chance to enter Porter’s clinical trial of CAR T cells.
“It took less than two minutes to infuse the cells and I felt fine afterward. However, that fine feeling changed dramatically less than two weeks later when I woke up one morning with chills and a fever,” he says. “I was sure the war was on. I was sure the CLL cells were dying.”
A week later the patient was still in the hospital when Porter brought him the news that the CLL cells had disappeared from his blood.
Is he cured? Doctors hate to declare a cure until patients have been cancer-free for at least five years. But there are signs the CAR-T cells persist in patients’ immune memory, ready to mop up any CLL cells that reappear.
And there’s a big downside. The CAR T cells that fight CLL also kill off normal B lymphocytes. These are the cells that the body needs to make infection-fighting antibodies.
As long as the CAR T cells persist — which may be for the rest of patients’ lives — patients will require regular infusions of immune globulin.
You know what? I already have monthly immunoglobulin infusions to fight infections, so what else is new? And there’s always a good shot that the treatment will get refined so as to eliminate or greatly reduce this problem.
More stories on this:
I swear that if one more thing blows up on me today, I’m gonna go out and buy the best, cheapest baseball bat I can find and…
Mere is off with her coach’s family to the National Championships in Fort Wayne; she wanted to be over there early for the trip, but they were running late, and left several hours later – hope she didn’t drive them crazy in the meantime! Very ready, very enthusiastic to go, but wanted lots of Mom and Dad hugs before we left…wonder if we’ll hear from her tonight.
I was really busy churning through a lot of laundry before she left (mostly hers) and have a ton more to go; the dryer had problems drying in some sort of reasonable time period, and Susan and I found that a recent handyman visit had messed up the vent out. I went off to get the replacement hardware, and Susan cleared out and cleaned up the loads of crud that had spewed out behind the dryer. We got the new ducts in, got the dryer back to work, and the slog of going through preteen endless laundry restarted. It still doesn’t act right, which is still dragging things out…
it’s going to be really quiet with Mere out of the house for this next week; Dash (one of our dogs and very fond of Mere) was pouting in Mere’s bed as it became obvious to her that Mere was going away…the dog hates change, and anything in the house resembling moving / change puts her into a mild depressed tizzy.
And I’m also working on some way to capture the video from the USARS TV site to save and view later – Connie will be in the hospital overnight tomorrow (they’re putting in the feeding tube noonish, and have to keep her there overnight to watch her) and won’t be able to see Mere’s first televised event.
Meredith has her old pal Jessica over, and the two of them (mostly mine) are making enough noise to wake the dead in every cemetery between here and New Brunswick. Whoever said girls are dainty, quiet, proper creatures never lived with a preteen girl…
Susan is fried, I’m frazzled. Forgetting a lot of stuff or muggling it up, and this isn’t the time to drop stuff between the cracks. I’m working on getting Mere’s laundry done for her trip, and there was a lot that had built up since Connie started getting weak; she kept telling me ‘no, I’ll take care of that’, and being too beat to actually handle it. So now, I get the chance to work out the backload on that and other things.
Susan took Connie over to Loyola Hospital early this morning, and they’re on their way home now; after an unsuccessful effort to get a feeding tube in Connie to relieve her hunger. Her breastbone was too short, to they’re going to have to go in again on Monday and do it with some sort of radiology guidance, I gather. Can’t be soon enough for us…
(largely cribbed from something Susan wrote up)
The live video can be seen at: http://skatersplace.com/Streaming.html
All times Central Daylight Time (USA)
Monday, July 25, 2011
Fresh/Soph A Pairs – 9:15 pm
Not sure how many pairs are competing. Last year, Meredith and Eric placed first in Fresh/Soph B.
Thursday, July 28 7:45 am
Juvenile/Elementary C Girls Freeskating Elimination
This should be a very large field. They have allocated 2.5 hours for this event. Meredith wasn’t expected to qualify for this event at Regionals, so no guesses about her chances of making the finals. That depends on how well she skates and on how many girls who should be skating the A or B events are also skating the C event. Meredith skates to The Addams Family theme. Here’s her routine at Regionals
Saturday, July 30 7:00 am
Juvenile/Elementary C Girls Freeskating Final
If she qualifies.
Saturday, July 30 7:15 pm
Junior/JWC Pairs Short Program
They are skating to music from Avatar. This routing is similar to their Fresh/Soph B routine from last year, but has much more difficult elements. Here is a video of their performance at Regionals There are at least 2 teams skating this event. Amanda (from our club) and Jeremy represented the US at the World competition last year. There may be a brother/sister team from Florida that Meredith and Eric skated against last March in Pennsylvania. Meredith (age 11) is not eligible to be on the US Team until next year, so they are skating this event for the experience of competing at this level.
Saturday, July 30 8:30 pm
Junior/JWC Pairs Long Program
Music from Avatar. similar to their Fresh/Soph A routine. Just longer and some different elements.
Sorry I was so obscure earlier on what’s going on: here’s a less censored version.
Susan’s Mom retired several years ago, and moved in with us to help with Meredith (and so on), and – well, you couldn’t ask for a nicer mother-in-law. Very nice, sweet-tempered (it’s a real shock for the grandkids when she loses her cool) and kind.
Since late April, she started to lose energy and feel rotten; at first, I thought it was the never-ending cold that everyone else suffered this year, but when she started having other troubles, Susan got her into the docs and got them digging to see what was going on.
Over the last week or two, the results started coming back over a week ago; esophageal cancer.
The docs continued to conduct all sorts of tests to get a better handle on it, and much of last week, Susan and Connie were off at a variety of doctor’s offices, test labs, etc. Some of the tests and scans contradicted each other, so she had to retake them.
Meanwhile, Meredith Ellen was up here visiting for a week – and we had to scramble. Susan closely monitored and arranged all of the very confusing and changing doctor stuff for Connie and took her in for that (our GP is about 15 minutes away, but the Hospital where most of the specialists are is about 45-60 minutes away, so = lot of running) while I kept the kids going, having fun – and in the dark as much as we could about it, at least until the visit was over. Didn’t want to put a damper on things.
Household stuff was radically revamped to fit in and around everything else, including a near-daily heavy skating practice schedule for Meredith (about 3-6 hours a day); that most especially included reshuffling house stuff Connie had been doing here. Susan has her hands full with the med stuff, time wise and focus wise, and had to pivot on a dime in case they double booked Connie. Mere and I are picking up the house slack.
This week, the docs are starting out the early stuff on treatments; more tests, checks and setups. The treatments will be near-daily and go on for weeks, and they’re going to be helping her in other ways. But it is taking a **ton** of time to attend to and sort out.
Add to this that some unexpected large expenses on repairs to house and cars came in out of the blue – at the worst possible time for us. And I have a good deal of foot surgery coming up (new BIG sore on my left foot) and lesser stuff for Susan. That has to be shuffled around (along with recovery for each) Connie’s needs.
We were going to be in Fort Wayne for the Nationals this long weekend and the next , but due to a serious time, money and leave time crunch, plus looking after Connie, we decided that we would send Meredith on with close, trusted friends to Nationals and go there on the second weekend and catch three of her pairs competitions. We will have to miss the ones from next Sunday through Tuesday.
That’s the broad picture, leaving out a mass of details. Some of you who contacted me directly and got a better idea of what was up offered specific help, and I bless you for it. But right now, we’re in the awkward situation of not really being able to take you up on it – nothing you can really do at this phase.
Highly recommend the Grauniad….er, the Guardian’s coverage on this story. And the New York Times has been adding its bit.
My own take is that we’re just seeing the beginning of the lift-the-rock-and-see-the-bugs-scatter part of bringing down News Corp in all of its various manifestations, and ti’s going to come on like a freight train. But we will see what will happen.
Meredith is going off to Nationals at the end of the week with her coach and his family, and will be there through the weekend after. I ***may*** go with Susan for weekend #2, but it’s not certain.
I cannot go into it now, and asking why right now will be futile because I can’t say what’s up, but Something has come up that is totally eating our time and attention in a VERY big way, and making hash out of all of our commitments and obligations. I apologize profusely to anyone we had such arrangements with about this, but assume whatever it was in the next month or more is out of the question or at best very very very shaky and possible to be dropped on short notice – including Musecon (which is still on the schedule, but…), private parties and dinners, you name it. I’ll let you know the generalities if and when I can.
For the group mind: Meredith has a iPad (16 GB Wifi only); we’re trying to figure out how to put Skype or something similar on it, and hook up a webcam of some sort to use for video purposes. We’re kinda running in the dark; no extensive experience with the iPad (she got it as a gift from friends, and has pretty much been the sole user) and no idea how much of an absolute kludge this is going to be – or if it will work at all!
PLEASE NOTE:
Thanks for any help!
…and really, MONTE CARLO was a cute bit of teenager romantic fluff. Parents, it’s watchable if you care to, and your brains will not rot on contact with it. Selena Gomez does a nice job, but I swear I could see every pore on her skin.
Had problems over the last few says since the storm with the cable, internet and phone being out at various times, which messed considerably with the twins’ Fun Things To Do At Home. They’re getting along well, of course. Meredith Ellen has this overwhelming desire to mess with my hair for fun, which I find irritating, as My Hair Is Not Something To Be Messed With. But she’s been a really good guest.
There’s all sorts of thing going on here that I can’t discuss that have nothing to do with the kids, and it’s occupying a lot of the adults’ attention…so I try to step in and be the Person For Fun and take them places. But really, the weather’s either been stormy or freaking hot, so nobody really feels like going anywhere if they don’t have to.
I should mention here that I’ve been having some residual foot problems on my left foot, and will have to go in sometime after Nationals for surgery on it. However, there’s enough other stuff going on that I’m not doing anything on the surgery (which I just want to get ti over with ASAP) until things are more firmed up on important family plans. That should be soon, I think.
Especially for the paper fans and the folks in the general Philadelphia area: The folks at Historic RittenhouseTown are giving classes from time to time on the subject of papermaking. (ok, they say ‘Paper Arts Workshops’ because it covers some other areas) which sound wonderfully worthwhile; I’d go, but it’s too far for me without a teleport device.
Of course, I’m predjudiced; the RittenhouseTown site is the orginal ancestral home of us Rittenhouses in America (we came over in the mid-1680s and set up the first paper mill in America, and in Philly, the name Rittenhouse = serious old money…my part of the family gave all that up and emigrated to South-Central Ohio before it was a state, and were farmers until my Dad left home in 1930 at the age of 15 to hit the bright lights of the city).
But over and above that, it and the other classes sound really cool. Go check it out.
See also this book in regards to the origins of American papermaking and William Rittenhouse.
A big storm came through here and did a lot of damage – trees and power lines down everywhere. This messed up other things for what the girls were going to do, and they’ve been quietly at home most of the day, playing in the house. (Susan drove off for a few appointments this afternoon and took Mere’s skates with her…so Mere couldn’t do any skating today. The rink is still open for club practices, but there’s no power – so no lights and no music for practice, and no AC either. Right now, the girls are making some kind of chocolate pudding for a pie (actually, a pile of tarts) and having a glorious time with it.
Susan and Connie have a set of medical stuff they have to deal with tomorrow, and so I’m the Parent In Charge; took the day off on short notice. The girls want to see the new Selena Gomez movie, so…
Meredith Ellen on skates,. watching her sister do her routine.
Meredith Ellen on the rink with Meredith Grace’s skating coach, Jim – he’s showing her how to skate backwards.
OK, which is which...each image should link back to the original in full size.
Mere waiting for Sissy to show up at Midway airport...
The twins waiting for Meredith Ellen's luggage to come from the plane...
Meredith Ellen dumps the airline escort at the gate and makes a beeline to grab her sister who's been waiting for her...
Hot out today; still have 5+ hours to work on basement (laundry room and library) till we have to leave for picking up Meredith Ellen from the airport. Twin #1 was too excited to crash last night; a large lead ingot might have been useful, or chloroform, to get her to go the frint to sleep!
Went to bank, farmer’s market, and grocery store this morning…didn’t plan on all the running around, but about $400 in incoming checks, and a lack of some basics (we could have skipped the blueberries and tarts stuff for the twins to fuss with later, but toilet paper…) – that made the difference. Taking a break right this second and cooling off, because it’s HOT out there….
On Saturday afternoon, we’ll be going off to the airport to pick up / greet Meredith’s twin sister Meredith Ellen for a week-long visit – leaving next Saturday. I know that Sissy (the term the twins use between them for talking about the Other One) wants to watch Mere perform, skating-wise, and she’s going out to the rink to watch a couple of practices. (Meredith got Gold Medals in two Pairs competition and placed in the Individual Girls’ skating, so she’s competing in three categories this year at the National Championships at the end of the month in Fort Wayne.) Aside of that, nothing is really planned for them; we have ideas for this or that, but we’ll see what they’re up for. Needless to say, both are really excited to see each other again…
Before we go, I have to clean up the library area and the laundry room; have done some work on it, but there’s lots more to do. Meredith has been (ever since she got out of school) a lot better at being helpful around the house, but Connie has been feeling under the weather and hasn’t been up to much.
I expect that Susan, Connie and Mere will go off on a trip to Sioux Falls sometime soon, and I’ll be here with the dogs.
Meredith is now out of school, and sleeping some very long hours, catching up on her sleep, energy, you name it. Her artistic roller figure skating training schedule for the upcoming meets (Regionals in Flint, MI at the end of this month, and probably the National Championships in Fort Wayne at the end of July) mean that she’s spending every day except Friday and Wednesday at the rink at one time or another – working on her own freestyle routine, or the pairs routine. And this weekend is a special event for her skating club at the rink; a showcase / revue for the public of the younger kids who take the group lessons on Saturday mornings, and the hot skaters and their routines, including Mere’s pairs and her freestyle single. And she has a two-hour plus practice that morning….
Given her crunch / tired levels, money and time for all of us, we are way cutting back on things this month; no Games Day and no Duckon. Period.
Depending on what she places in at the Regionals, her practice schedule will be different after the results are known: if she and her partner place in the pairs routine (and she places in nothing else) her practice time will be cut down to the stuff that she’s going to compete in at the Nationals in Fort Wayne at the end of July.
After that, we will be at Musecon the first weekend in August; it looks like a real blast. No Worldcon in Reno in mid-August, however, and nothing else until Windycon near us in November.
As I was just saying, I have a pile of stuff to do this weekend – some cleanup, some where-is-it searching, some serious amounts of household paperwork / financial stuff that I need to wrap up. But when I came down from breakfast this morning, after a nine-hour sleep, I was too foggy (even with a cup of strong coffee in me) to do much of anything; my nerves were jangled and I was way overheated.
I like our basement – quiet, dark and cool are major pluses to me. Noise, heat and overbright are all significant minuses to me re thinking and doing at prime level. So as I came down, I quickly decided that I needed to crash. Susan was back with Mere; the former had gone back to bed, and I had tried to encourage Mere to nap with no real results. I figured – if I nap beside Susan, Mere would **certainly** never break down and do so; Mere will nap beside Susan, but not if that space is taken…
That and the sinen song from the cool and dark convinced me, and I hit the recliner for another couple of hours.
Now, to do what I can until we have to go to the rink…
Seriously crappy, rainy weather out there; supposed to rain like heck all day and night.
Mere and Susan have been at our local rink in Lombard’s roller skating meet; getting up and out the door before 5 am is not for sissies! Both Saturday and Sunday mornings went like that, and they came back as soon as they could and and crashed/napped/ rested for a while. Mere is up for her more complex single freestyle stuff this evening around 7ish – the meet’s schedule is running a half hour early last we checked, and while it’s not great for me to go in at 3ish, I bow to the needs of the many.
Been tired and catching up with sleep both days myself – somehow also really easily overheating a good deal. And it’s not even summer yet!
Spent a good deal of time tracking down and killing off a virus on Mere’s laptop – something in the malware direction from guffin.com. A lot of sites or software try to get you to install some browser addons, and this was connected up with a game thing. Had to run Malwarebytes on the durn thing SEVEN times to kill it!
Back when I was young – we’ll say when I was 10, 1967 – gasoline generally cost about $0.32 per gallon. Gas Wars would occasionally come up where there’d be a thrash over what sort of extras (glasses with a fill-up, etc.) would pull the business in – and sometimes, it was brute-force-drop-the-price. I can remember seeing an occasional drop to say, $0.27 or so, but pretty generally, that’s where things stuck.
Jump forward to today – where the price over the last month has floated in the Chicago area between $4.00 and $4.50 – and I started wondering – how much of this is strictly the inflationary rise of 32 cents to some larger amount, and how much was rampant price rises fanned on by commodities speculators trying to squeeze the market?
So I went first to the inflation calculators, and here’s what I got; 32 cents in 1967 would be worth $2.15, or $2.15, or $2.07. I’m aware that this isn’t all of the picture, and you all are welcome to write in and tell me how I’m missing stuff. But that means, by itself, that about half of the price these days is the same as it used to be…so what’s the rest of it?
WIRED magazine on why Special Forces had to land in person and not nail with a unmanned drone aircraft or just bomb the site from a distance. The site is surrounded by all sorts of high-level Pakistani government / military sites, including their military academy, and drones or sloppy bombing could end up with worse problems than going in with a Special Ops team.
My take on this was they wanted Osama dead or alive, and they really didn’t worry about which result that they got.
Notes from the articles:
(New Yorker) It stretches credulity to think that a mansion of that scale could have been built and occupied by bin Laden for six years without it coming to the attention of anyone in Pakistan’s Army.
The initial circumstantial evidence suggests the opposite is more likely—that bin Laden was effectively being housed under Pakistani state control. Pakistan will deny this, it seems safe to predict, and perhaps no convincing evidence will ever surface to prove the case. If I were a prosecutor at the United States Department of Justice, however, I would be tempted to call a grand jury.
While I’m at it, the one weird note that was struck last night was the speed of the DNA analysis; when we did the DNA tests for the twins in 2004, it took about a month to get the results, not a few hours. This article addresses the probable protocols used in such an analysis, and says that you could do this in under 5 hours! Amazing.
The GM Moraine (Frigidaire) plant, which employed my mom, dad and grandmother at one time or other and that my dad retired from in the early 1970s, was closed by GM in 2008, and is possibly being re-opened and operated as a manufacturing site (with many different tenants splitting the space). Details here in the Dayton Daily News story. Personally, I think it’s a lovely idea, but I’m highly uncertain if there’s anything more than hopes and pixie dust to this. ..at it’s height, it employed 20,000 people, and might in this incarnation employ 750-2000 workers, the lord willing and the sun shines.
…Toyotoho! Kohler’s $6500 way-high-tech toilet, with all the gimmicks. (last two links are to YouTube.)
BBC play set in 1964 about an effort by radical students to kidnap Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home (yes, this really happened) and Issue Demands. Sir Alec was alone (his bodyguard was elsewhere and this was in the middle of Nowhere, Scotland) and managed to talk his assailants out of the act. Well, he also used some beer…
Needless to say, this would have made a heck of a Point Of Divergence for an AH story…it became Secret History, because the missing bodyguard begged Douglas-Home to keep it secret, and he did so for many years, and only opened up in private about it long after his retirement. One of the people who heard the story wrote it up in his journal, and THAT didn’t get out till the late 2000′s.
Royal wedding: Just another week for the Abbey – Telegraph.
Article about how Westminster Abbey is always busy-busy, and this is largely just another week – with the exception of Prince William’s wedding.
“Between now and the royal wedding, the Abbey will hold 27 different services. Yesterday, the Queen came to the Abbey to present the specially minted Maundy money to pensioners; an echo of the Last Supper, when Jesus washed the disciples’ feet. The monarch also washed the feet of the poor until James II stopped the practice at the end of the 17th century. Yesterday, the Queen turned 85, and so 85 men and 85 women received Maundy money…Edward the Confessor’s Purbeck marble shrine is still the central axis around which the whole Abbey revolves; it lies only 20ft east of the spot where Prince William and Kate Middleton will say their vows next week. Nearby is the 1301 oak Coronation Chair that Prince William will return to sit in, on another of the Abbey’s red-letter days; every monarch since William the Conqueror has been crowned in the Abbey.”
If you ask me what the real situation is with the Japanese reactors, I’d say I haven’t the foggiest (but I’m alarmed) because there’s so much stuff being spouted in all directions, and that I have little faith in any entrenched bureaucracy or organization to tell anything straight in the direction of bad news. I am absolutely repelled by the people making jokes about it (especially those that lean heavily on stupid Japanese stereotypes left over from World War 2) or claiming that This Is A Sign Of The End Times.
If you ask me when I’m going to get over this *D!d## cold/pneumonia, I can only say Insh’Allah (as God wills it), because I’m beyond discouraged about it.
If you ask me as to whether Birch Bayh is rolling in his grave over his former ‘centrist Democrat’ Senator son becoming a big business lobbyist and talking head for Fox News, I would presume so, but I haven’t gone to the gravesite to confirm. Whoops, he’s still alive…
If you ask me how far people can pander to get the Presidential nomination, I’d say having a born and bred Minnesotan suddenly pick up a Southern drawl when he goes vote-shopping in the South to be right up there, but that I don’t know how many worse/dumber things have gone on that we didn’t realize.
Here’s some odd bits of fun music that you may not realize that I like:
This is one that my Mom hooked on as a kid; a pre-war number called When Yuba Plays The Tuba Down in Cuba. Very silly novelty song, with a fun Latin beat to it.
Stephy Lee (mail link) just called and said that Marta Rose, local fan and huckster, died suddenly earlier today. I didn’t know Marta very well, but others have mentioned her attendance at the local conventions, working huckster rooms, and her service with the Mundelein Library and the Kirk Players.
If you’re looking for more info, click on the above email link to Stephy, who was rattled by the news. Further Deponent Sayeth Not.
As long time readers of this journal will know (I have an online journal for things I want to talk about, and it’s NOT a blog, and I don’t call it that) (Editor: PURIST!) (Writer: So what else is new?), some time ago, there was a article that started up in the Jiangmen (the twins’ home town in China) newspaper about the two of them…it was horribly twisted around, and was highly embarrassing because of the number of weird things the writer decided to throw in that were far from the truth. Very melodramatic stuff.
One of the most outrageous parts of that story is the part about a mangy pet sheep that Meredith (ours) was supposed to have, and that she named ‘Dick’; needless to say, we don’t have a pet sheep – we have two wire haired fox terriers (Dot and Dash) who could be mistaken for sheep only if you weren’t familiar with either dogs OR sheep; they are mostly while and wooly, but….they’re pretty obviously DOGS, and aren’t worth a plug nickle, except to us.
So now we have a story out of China, about a dog-sheep hybrid, and even the lead cryptozoologist around says, nah, it’s just a fuzzy dog. (Needless to say, there are sheepdogs out there that look sheepisher than our dogs.) I’m inclined to agree, and write it off as more Chinese newspaper writers’ overactive imaginations…
As promised, the other links to Tim Curry’s musical performances! A special shout-out to Cynthis Knight who introduced me to all of this a LONG time ago. I wish the video was better; I’ll refer you to anything of his on CD for better sound.
Susan has been busy over the last week or so overseeing a room switch – Connie is moving into Mere’s room (which has earwig problems in the spring) and Mere in Connie’s room (which is also warmer in the winter). This has necessitated a lot of Digging Through Built-Up Stuff, so a lot of stuff is being donated or trashed. And a lot of thing Long Lost have reappeared (‘oh, That’s what happened to that’) much to people’s surprise.
One of which was a – well, a doodle page, I guess. Susan and Connie are distantly related to Donna O’Dea, a psychic / medium in Sioux Falls, and Connie has used Donna for a couple of readings in the past. About the time that we found out that Meredith was a twin, Susan and Connie got a new reading over the phone, and the psychic recorded the call and sent Susan a tape after the fact of the conversation / reading, along with the piece of paper she was drawing on and listing out certain themes in the reading. In any event, that page of paper resurfaced, Susan took a look at it, and in the part of the page that was worked on while Susan and Ms. O’Dea were talking at length about Mere, there is one drawn graphic. Note that this was when Mere was pushing four and a half, about seven years ago.
The graphic is very obviously a ladies’ roller skate…over two years before the subject of Mere on roller skates ever came up, or she started learning how to skate.
Susan was astonished. I’m baffled. I’ll have to find that old tape somewhere…see if anything was mentioned on it. Dunno to make too much of it, but it’s definitely weird on a stick.
Government’s defeat sets up election call – Canada – CBC News.
Should be interesting to watch how this plays out; my Canadian readers are welcome to pitch in their ten cents on all this, as I don’t follow Canadian politics closely.
Still coughing and whatnot, but it seems that the more unbroken sleep I get the better off I am – also did a little shopping and took care of some quick errands with my MIL driving me around on Saturday; first time I’d felt like I hadn’t been knocked around for a week or so. Enjoyed the nice weather (raining cats and dogs now) and soaked up a little sunshine; hadn’t been out of the house for a while except to go out to eat or to the doctors’ office for a while.
Susan and Meredith or on their way home from the meet at Donora; they had a good trip with good weather, should be getting back this evening. Mere was 4th or 10 in the freestyle singles, and 2d in the pairs, but most people thought the judging was whack on the pairs, I believe. It didn’t upset Mere…she’s now more gung-ho than ever to get out there and work her heart out, and she’s been offered some really good coaching help to improve. There’s a lion’s heart in the girl…
I’m taking a minute from working on finances and document organization and the taxes to come back to my main PC and check the news and the mail. I’m staying on top of the Libya stuff and Japan as best as I can; it sounds as if the immediate threat in Japan is dying down, but that the damage to the economy, to the nation and the probabilities of the radiation exposure are wreaking a lot of quiet havoc there. Supplies are getting short, power is low, lots of damage, huge numbers of people hurt, ruined (house or business or both gone) or dead. Auto parts in other countries shutting down because of a lack of certain Japanese parts. That sort of thing. It’s a spiderweb of interdependence…
Ask me again about Libya once we see how determined the ‘alliance’ is about tacking Ghadaffi on the ground via close air support, targeted bombing and the like. I am not a believer in the absoluteness of air power. And why anyone is paying any attention to the unhinged rants of Ghadaffi is just beyond me. It’s like trying to make sense of a conversation between Donald Duck, Dr. House and Herve Villechaise, all stuck in a locked room and tanked on LSD and crystal meth, with Charlie Sheen giving the play-by-play.
When I was first introduced to Science Fiction Fandom in 1977, one of the first people I ever met regularly at cons was Mike Glicksohn. I learned several things from him, even if they didn’t catch on immediately to my boyish brain – that you should never get involved in a poker game unless your were really good at it, and to avoid Diablo (a variant) Poker at all costs as being merciless to your wallet. Also, that you can be clever and thoughtful and also be mild enough in your speech that you don’t have to honk someone off while supporting your point of view.
He and I were not close, but we ran in similar fanzine and conrunning circles to know each other by sight and to walk up and say hello, etc. While a lot of people I knew looked at him with awe, the older I got and he got, the more I realized what a mature and complex man he was.
Mike Glyer has an excellent Obit for Mike in the latest bit of File 770; I suggest you read it for more on the guy. You’re also welcome to comment and describe the process of Diablo Poker.
http://www.timelordcardiff.com/1440/index1440.html
six channels on one page – with BBC World, NHK world and four other Japanese news channels, some in English.
I’m looking for some kind of document manager that will be able to easily file away my own, personal digital documents collection; scanned personal papers, scanned financial papers, pdfs of technical articles, that sort of thing. A good friend who is far more adept at programming came over the other day and was chatting at me about his similar needs, and that he wanted to know what I had found out – he’s even thinking about programming one up, and he’s good about that sort of thing.
Operating system: I basically run Windows 7 here, but could easily set up a dual boot to Ubuntu for any machine if needed. Mac is right out, as is OS9 and the like, as I don’t use them and won’t for this project.
PC: I run a now-medium gutsy Intel-based PC with a couple of years of use. Was really gutsy when I got it then.
Underlying software: I don’t care, as long as it’s simple to manage and use. Could be php, Ruby, Python or whatever. I was trying to reseach out Knowledge Tree, but was going insane trying to figure out how to use it and set it up.
Cost: I can’t justify anything over $70-100 dollars, and I’d have to be talked very hard into that. A lot of these Big Systems that are commercially available are way more expensive than I could handle – in the 2-8000 dollar range. I could easily see having this all on some removable large HD and paying for the hardware. It’s way to big to fit on my hosting account.
I need it to:
(1) be able to take various forms of documents (Word, pdf, etc) and store them for easy retrieval / search – metatags would be very useful to be able to find stuff, and so would a brief description of what the heck it is.
(2) be able to store it all in such a way that it’s easily backup-able and not in some proprietary format.
(3) be able to handle variable sizes. Some of the docs would be 10kb in size, some 20 Mb.
(4) be flexible enough that if I need to recategorize a document because it turns out that the subarea it is in should be split up into two or three groups (usually when the project or filing area starts getting larger as time goes on…example: Blue Cross papers divided into years (2005, 2006, 2007), credit card bills divided similarly (outfit the card is with then the year). Or even (Medical bills split out by outfit or hospital)-> (same, subdivided first Medical Bills -> Susan -> Allergists-> 2008)
I don’t need it to:
(1) Collaborate with anyone else. Having it be a system that I could reach through a web interface on any PC in the house would be wonderful, but I don’t do much in the house of collaborative writing. A lot of the CMS systems I see available through the web are designed to make it so you can pass around a document inside a work department for everyone to collaborate on….
(2) Likewise, don’t need anything for check in and out, revisions and so on.
(3) Scan and OCR as I go; I have a Fujitsu S300 ScanSnap doc scanner, which works just fine and turns out PDFs, JPGs, or even TIFFs of scans (two-sided) at variable DPI and will OCR with the PDFs. I just am not that thrilled with the built-in filing system it has.
(4) set up / build any kind of web portal. This is for my own use, on my own PC, inaccessible to the outside world. Also, the total collection will probably run large, into tens of gigs of material, minimum.
Any suggestions or thoughts?
Still bearing on with this cold/whatever; saw the doc yesterday, who put me back on Prednisone. I just ran out of my antibiotic (ceftin?) and it’s apparently the cause of a huge rash of hives; they don’t bother me as such, but they look horrible. She said that a lot of my respiratory problems were what she called ‘Reactive Airway Disease’, which I understood as ‘bad asthma for a little while until you body quiets down’. Medical experts in the audience are welcome to chime in.
She also told me to stay home today and get as much sleep in as possible, and to hit the breathing treatments hard. She didn’t have to push me on the latter…I do NOT like not being able to breathe easily. Nossir.
At this point, I’m not planning anything significant for the rest of the month.
While looking through a gaming company’s site online, I found this:
http://www.atlas-games.com/product_tables/AG2704.php
The Antarctic Express
From outside came the sounds of whirring propellers and rumbling engines. I looked through my window and saw an airplane standing perfectly still in front of my house.
Renowned Mythos aficionado Ken Hite retells H P Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” in this parody of classic children’s literature.
Late one evening after the city has gone to sleep, young Danforth boards the mysterious airplane that waits for him: the Antarctic Express bound for the South Pole. When he arrives, Professor Dyer offers the boy the chance to learn any thing he desires. The boy modestly asks to probe the depths of the eldritch city of the Old Ones. The request is granted. On the way his memory is lost while fleeing from the piping shrieks of the shoggoths. On Christmas Eve, the boy finds his memory of that whistling cry returns. For you see, all who visit the Old Ones’ city forever hear the sound of the shoggoths.
Ken? I know you’re out there, guy…just waiting to sell Santa Old Ones to the little boys and girls…
Yes, the cold and cough are still hanging on. Much to my extreme annoyance; I’m not getting a lot of unbroken sleep because of coughing fits, and I can’t think straight. (Think general cold muzziness from feeling like dog dirt added to by torn up sleep.) Asked my doc for some kind of cough syrup today to help with this…I have such a pharmacopaeia going through me that I can’t keep track of interactions, so I’m not doing anything without advice.
We got another two weeks of time till the shutdown iof the federal government; instead of it starting for us next monday, it’s going to be the 21st; the day Susan and Mere come back from the Donora Invitational skating meet near Pittsburgh. I can’t go – we’re trying to keep it cheap and I can’t say that I’ll really feel much like going, though God knows I could use some different scenery. (For those who haven’t see video of her performance at the recent meet in nearby Romeoville, there’s video on YouTube: http://bit.ly/g98PVw and http://bit.ly/dQjyVb )
Dot, our older Wire Fox Terrier, has developed first diabetes, then cataracts and is pretty much blind. For a dog with all sorts of show Champions in her background (both parents, for starters) she’s been a biochemical and hormonal mess for most of her life…we have to give her insulin shots twice daily, but there’s little we can do about the cataracts that wouldn’t be VERY expensive and possibly undone again by the diabetes.
For those who didn’t get the message earlier, I caught a cold that really got going the Friday before Valentines Day. Had to skip Capricon; Meredith went for about half the con, but I was way too sick to deal with it. The cold turned into a sinus infection, and then on towards bronchitis and finally pneumonia by the 18th (the day before my birthday), and I was hauled off to the ER who confirmed what we’d guessed was going on. Four days later, the docs decided that things were safe enough to send me home, and I take breathing treatments roughly every 6-8 hours, and a big dose of oral antibiotics and Mucinex twice a day. Spent the rest of the week blasted and trying to recover; I’m somewhat better, as I can now sleep in my bed for 5-6 hours at a crack. I would love to be able to take another week to recuperate, but…
And yes, I spent birthday #54 in the hospital (February 19th). My family came out that night and had dinner with me (and shared a piece of my favorite dark chocolate cake, made by the Macaroni Grille). But I was quite happy to get home; the hospital’s air was very dry, and the CPAP I use to sleep with wasn’t up to keeping up any humidity levels.
I’m VERY easily tired out, and slept a big chunk of this last weekend. Still feel terrible, but it’s less terrible than earlier. Coughing my guts out a lot. ears still stuffed up – can’t hear all that well.
Not at all looking forward to the anticipated US government shutdown starting next Monday; for one thing, we get paid on Tuesday, and we’re not sure with the shutdown that we will be. Which will cause a great deal of havoc here, money and bills wise – we went through this in 1995 for 20 days, but we didn’t have a kid in school, and we had a good financial backup from my Mom (which isn’t there now) for an emergency. And as a Democrat and a member of a public service union, I’m strongly supporting holding the line against efforts by the super-hard-right to squash unions or try to make employee pay the reason for budget deficits.
