I returned home last night from my trip to Virgina to visit my folks. It's always good to get back home after a trip, and the more trips I make, the more true that is...
Debbie had a difficult day yesterday: our oldest cat (Pana, at right) had reached the point where it was time to say good bye, and Debbie had to both make the decision and act on it in my absence. Tough for her, but she did it. We've waited too long for some of other other animals, and have regretted it for years afterward; she was determined not to let that happen again. And she didn't. Little Pana was between 22 and 24 years old, a small all-black cat that was likely part Turkish (because he liked to play in water) that we rescued when he was quite young. He had a long, happy, and safe life in our home...
This morning I did all my usual chores, then fired up our Kubota diesel tractor for another one: digging a grave for little Pana. I was surprised when the tractor fired right up, as I hadn't started it for over a year. But start it did, on the first turn of the starter. Then I lifted the front bucket and the rear backhoe bucket and started moving toward the grave site. Moments later I was swarmed with yellow-jackets, especially on my right hand.
They were in full “defend the nest” mode, stinging away as fast as they could. I got stung quite a few times on my right hand and arm, twice above my right eye, and several times on my back and rear end. Ouch! I jumped off the tractor, leaving it running, and ran far enough away to escape the horde of angry yellow-jackets, then killed all the ones still stinging me.
The last time I had something like that happen to me was when I was a child – as an adult, I've only had one or two stings at a time. I was worried what sort of reaction I might have to so many stings, but now (two hours later) all I have is some localized swelling. My hand is by far the worst, but I expect it to go down within a few hours. I've taken Benadryl and iced the hand; all the advice I can find on the web says those are really all I need to do. Then wait :)
I found the reason why those yellow-jackets were so mad at me: they had constructed a nest under the left rear tractor tire. When I moved the tractor, I ripped the roof right off their nest. If some monster came along and ripped the roof off my house, I'd be pissed off, too. I'd probably let him have it with my “stinger” (in my case, a semi-automatic 12 gauge shotgun). Tonight, assuming it gets cool enough to slow the yellow-jackets down, I will destroy their nest.
I don't think I'll leave my tractor parked quite such a long time again :)
I'm getting on a plane this morning, bound for Richmond, Virginia to visit my folks. I'll be back in about a week. Meantime, blogging will be intermittent at best...
Today is my blog's sixth anniversary - six years ago today I started contributing my fair share of junk, chaos, cat videos, and political hand-wringing to the web.
Feels a bit like I should celebrate, but how exactly does one celebrate a “bloggiversary”?
Sorry about the light blogging, friends. We've been a tad busy :)
First, on Christmas Eve, Debbie had her “two month” surgery followup – and the news was almost entirely good. The joint is healing nicely, and the surgeon expects to release her for weight-bearing in four weeks. Her flexion was good – good enough for him to accuse her of “showing off”! The only thing her surgeon didn't like was her extension – it was not quite as good as on the last followup, mainly because she was so focused on the flexion. Debbie left that followup in good cheer, a marked turnaround from last time...
Yesterday we watched the old version of A Christmas Carol (the 1951 version starring Alastair Sim); it's a Christmas tradition for us. At the same time, I roasted a 22 lb. turkey, and for dinner we had a simple repast of fresh-roasted turkey, homemade gravy over rice, and peas. Delicious! The turkey came out surprisingly well (considering that I cooked it, instead of Debbie), and the gravy was terrific. Yum! Then later in the day, our friend and neighbor Jimmy brought down two dinner plates for us from their Christmas dinner – we're looking forward to devouring them today. He also brought down some pieces of Michelle's awesome lemon cake, sprinkled with fresh berries – I'm afraid none of that survived past this morning. Yum!
This morning I dismembered the turkey, producing a full gallon container of tender turkey meat and a lovely skeleton which is simmering on the stove as I write. It will become the base for turkey variant of the traditional Mexican soup Caldo Tlalpeño. We're not using any of the recipes at the linked page; I just wanted to give you an idea what this soup is like –most of you probably never heard of it. We discovered it at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Chula Vista years ago, and have loved it ever since. The cilantro and lime are vital components – if you choose to try this soup, don't forget them!
I can tell from my email (and my mother's phone call) that some of you have been wondering why this blog hasn't been updated for the past few days. Most of you, quite sensibly, couldn't care less. If you're in the latter camp, please feel free to ignore the rest of this post...
My long-time readers will know that my wife (Debbie) competes in dog agility, and that she runs with one field spaniel (Miki) and one border collie (Race). This past Sunday, she and Race were in Vista at a seminar teaching some of the finer points of running dog agility. Like any agility training, both the dog and its handler were being trained. In one practice run, Debbie was running flat out, and Race did something very undesirable: he ran behind her, from her left to her right. He smashed at full speed into the lower bone (tibia) of her right leg when it was extended behind her. Down she went, and she didn't get up on her own.
I wasn't there to see this. The first I heard about it was a roughly 10:30 am call from a very tense-sounding Debbie, telling me that she'd hurt her knee and we needed to go to the ER. At that point she was about 70 miles away from me. So of course I went zooming up there, and found my girl sitting on a chair, knee wrapped tightly in about 4 miles of Ace bandage, with ice surrounding it. It was obviously badly swollen. Off we went to the ER at Palomar Medical Center in Escondido, a facility recommended by several other seminar attendees.
I won't bore you with all the details of our 10 hour ER “adventure”. Most of it was waiting. It took three hours to make it past triage and get into an examining room, where a doctor agreed that pain medication was in order. After seven hours, she'd had a cursory exam, an X-ray, a CAT scan, and a thorough exam by the orthopedist on duty.
Debbie and I have lived through an ACL break before – mine. We knew what those symptoms were like. The symptoms Debbie was showing looked the same to us, so we were expecting to hear that she had a torn ACL and probably meniscus damage on top of it. So when the orthopedist came back with a diagnosis of a fracture of the tibial plateau, we were quite surprised. The more we heard from the orthopedist, the more dismayed we were. For starters, he told us that while an ACL tear wasn't very likely, some meniscus damage was. Then he told us what recovery would be like: three months without being able to put any load at all on her right leg. That means a walker or crutches for that whole time. She would be in physical therapy for range-of-motion and strength during that period, but inevitably her quads will atrophy significantly. Then she starts two to four months of gradually increasing loads on her right leg, with physical therapy to build her strength back up. He told us that if the surgery went well (about an 80% chance) then in about a year she'd be back to her previous condition. If the surgery didn't go so well, she might never regain her full abilities, plus there may be early arthritis and even a debilitating disability. On the other hand, if she skipped the surgery the odds were flipped: about a 20% chance of a good outcome, and an 80% chance of a bad one. Yikes!
The worst part for me was noting that the orthopedist was very interested in Debbie's case – because her injury was a bit unusual (naturally). I hate it when the doctor thinks my case is “interesting”, and it seems to happen way more often than you'd expect to both Debbie and me.
Most of the time, he told us, tibial plateau fractures occur on the outside of the leg. Debbie's fracture was on the inside. He then told us that because of the nature of her fracture, he thought it was a good candidate for a relatively new technique called “balloon osteoplasty” (see explanatory video below). As he explained it, this technique stood a good chance of making the best possible reconstruction of Debbie's tibial plateau. The better the quality of the reconstruction, the better the chances were for a complete recovery. He gave us the option of going for conventional surgery right then (Sunday night), or of waiting for Tuesday, both for a hole in his schedule and to have time to get the equipment brought in (this technique requires gear that isn't normally part of the operating room's inventory). We opted for the balloon osteopathy and waiting for Tuesday.
The more we spoke with this orthopedist (whose name I won't publish until we know the outcome), the more we liked the guy. In addition to being easy to talk with, straightforward, and unhesitating in answering our questions, he also had an appealingly quirky sense of humor. We also noted the deferential way the ER staff treated him – and when I had a private moment with an assistant ER doctor, I asked why. The answer I got was, basically, “Dr. X is a god. He walks 5 or 6 feet above the water. Everybody here loves him because he does such a great job on his patients!” That's a positive endorsement in my book!
So the surgery was scheduled for 8:30 on Tuesday morning, and the hospital staff figured they'd wheel Debbie down to the OR for prep around 6:30 am. So I arrived at Debbie's side at 6 am to be sure I was there to see her off into surgery. 6:30 came and went; no word. 8:30 came and went, no word. Finally at around 9:00 am, one of the floor nurses got in touch with someone in the OR who knew what was happening: the special gear the orthopedist needed for the balloon osteopathy hadn't yet arrived. He was shuffling his schedule to keep a spot open for her, and as soon as the gear arrived she'd be slotted in. Dang.
Finally, just after lunch, the trolley and a couple of runners showed up to send her down to the OR. I sat with her through prep, which mostly meant paperwork and endless rechecks of vital signs, administration of antibiotics, etc. But this experience was far more harrowing than we expected. In the little curtained off area right next to us, an elderly gentleman was coming out of anesthesia after his own surgery. We found out later that he was a dementia victim, very confused all the time, with significant mental impairment. But all we knew at the moment was the horrifying, heart-rending, and very loud moans and groans that he was emitting. If you didn't have the nurse there to tell you what was going on, you'd imagine he was having his fingers pulled out one by one, or something along those lines. Debbie, already frightened by the whole process, was very uncomfortable in the teeth of this poor man's agony. It didn't matter what the nurse told her; it was so awful (for all of us, even the nurse) that added to her pre-existing fear it was nearly overwhelming. Finally, and mercifully, they wheeled Debbie into the OR for the surgery. It was 1:30 pm, and the surgery was scheduled to take 2 hours.
Off I went to the waiting room, to ... wait. I couldn't do anything that required any real thought. I ended up watching a TV for an hour or so; a strange experience as it was tuned into a Spanish-langauge station (and I don't speak Spanish at all) talking about the U.S. election. It was easily the most palatable election coverage I'd run into yet, not least because I couldn't understand any of it.
At almost exactly 3:30 pm, Debbie's surgeon came walking out into the waiting room to talk with me. The first thing I noted was his demeanor: this was one very happy man. I shortly found out why – the surgery could hardly have gone any better. First of all, the balloon osteopathy worked a treat, and her reconstructed tibial plateau was “perfect”. I like perfect. Then he went on to say that he couldn't see any meniscus damage, and that her ACL was (as expected) intact. Debbie's got some hardware in her leg now: a big surgical steel plate and three titanium screws. But the most important thing: her surgical outcome was better than we had even hoped for, and she's got an excellent chance at a complete recovery. Whew!
It was an hour after that before I could see her again, in the OR recovery area. We were there for two hours before they would release her to her room. But finally, at about 6:30 pm, we were on the way back to her room. We had one very bad experience as the two people who transported her back to her room transferred her from the gurney to her bed. They slid her off the gurney into the bed in a manner that suggested they were unaware that her knee was injured. The result was some immediate and extremely bad pain for Debbie. She was out, unconcious, briefly; then back with us and telling us all (very explicitly and descriptively) just how bad her pain was and how willing she'd be to execute the people who had done this to her. Prior to this, she was in no pain at all. Making it even worse: in the confusion around her transfer from OR to the floor, there were no orders for pain medications in the computer record for her. The floor nurses were sympathetic, but couldn't actually administer any pain medication until they had orders (really, that means until a doctor says it's ok). That took around 15 minutes, which seemed like a very long and hell-like eternity to Debbie. They finally did get the pain meds into her, and she finally got some relief.
For the next few hours, Debbie faded in and out of consciousness. Often, she woke up very confused about why she was in the hospital; she had no memory of having been injured. I stayed with her until around 11 pm, and another friend of hers was with her for a while as well. Around 10 pm she finally fell asleep; fitfully at first, but finally into a full-on snore-o-rama. So I went home to take care of the animals and get some sleep myself.
This morning (the day after surgery), I got a phone call at 5:30 am from a perfectly lucid Debbie. I don't have the words to convey just how good it was to hear her normal self back with me. Even better: she wanted coffee - a nice big cup of Starbucks latte, with an extra shot. That's my girl!
And today she's doing much, much better. She's finally got the word about the excellent surgical outcome. While she still professes a desire to execute the two people who caused her pain last night, one senses that it's more pro forma at this point than it is for real. She had a little physical therapy today, ate a little food, and had some nice visits from friends. Her room is full of flowers and cards; there's no longer any space for more. She must have gotten a dozen calls from friends today. She's still got some pain, but the floor staff is doing a good job keeping it under control. We can see a recovery in her future...
We got home late last night, greeted by four ecstatic dogs who fell all over themselves trying to say hello to us. After a short night's sleep, I'm back at work again. It will probably take a day or two for me to get my act together on the blog...
We're up in Sandpoint, Idaho. This morning we're headed out on the trail, doing a little hiking in the beautiful mixed conifer forest at around 2000', just north of Lake Pend Oreille. We last saw this area around 12 years ago, and we were stunned to see just how much the trees had grown in the interim – the flora is exhuberant up here, especially by comparison to what we're used to in southern California...
I have no idea whose blog this is, but they have put up signs in Lawson Valley sending people to it. There are only two posts up so far, first on one July 22, so it's a bit hard to tell what sorts of things are going to be posted there. So far its theme is much more coherent than my blog's theme: it's local news. This valley's plenty big enough for two bloggers – welcome aboard, neighbor!
After a marathon day of travel from Newark, New Jersey (involving getting up at midnight to taxi to the airport, 6 hours in Newark airport, oversleeping pilots, broken airplanes, and missed standbys), I finally made it home to San Diego. From that point on, things were just wonderful: a smiling Debbie picking me up from the airport, four ecstatic dogs bowling me over when I walked in the door, and innumerable cats saying “Yeah, I remember you. I'll let you live. For now...” Then early this morning, the dog walk – under a spectacularly clear, moonless desert sky, the Milky Way a splash from north to south, directly overhead, in cool, crisp, dry desert air with all the wonderful aromas of the desert wafting about. Beautiful. Just beautiful.
And now, dang it, I'm on my way into work at the office. What I'd really like to do right now is take about a month off :-)
Your blogger is back in the USA, and even had a day of rest (at my parents' home in Virginia). I'm not sure what time zone my body is occupying; I'm still a little fuzzy even after my morning cup of tea.
On Friday evening, I started transferring my “stuff” from my old Macbook Pro laptop to my new Macbook Pro laptop. My laptop is full of all the sorts of tools and daemons a developer needs, and this makes the transfer more complex. Added to that, my old laptop's operating system was two versions older than that of my new laptop, and that indroduced other difficulties. Even worse, my user's UID on my old laptop was different than my user's UID on the new laptop, and I didn't realize that until I was half done. Oh, and did I mention that my old laptop had a half a terabyte of data on it? Bottom line: while I'm using my new laptop right now, many things are still not working on it. I've got some work to do today!
But it's not that I spent all weekend working on my computer. I should be so lucky! Nope, this was the weekend of the “great burn” – Debbie and I were committed to burning the rest of the giant burn pile that's been sitting in our front yard ever since we trimmed up our pines last year. And we did it, with just a half hour to spare before the 3 pm deadline (the time at which we had to put out the burn pile, per our burn permit). We even raked up all the innumerable twigs scattered about the yard, and burned them as well. The big logs – a couple cubic yards worth – that we thought were going to be a disposal problem turned out to be no problem at all. Our neighbors Wayne and Marissa were happy to take the pine logs, as they have a big open fireplace in which they'll burn just fine. It was quite a nice feeling of accomplishment to get that intimidating task done...
Then last night, after finishing the burning, I repaired Debbie's “Easy-Up” – a kind of portable folding canopy. There's a complex-looking mechanism that forms and expandable framework, involving many hollow metal bars with pivots at each end and the middle. Two of the end pivots had worked loose and fallen out. I manufactured replacements by getting one inch long 10-24 stainless steel bolts and jam nuts, then using a Dremel tool to grind a cavity in a molded plastic piece of just the right size and shape to hold the jam nut. I felt like a dentist with his drill, making this teensy little cavity in my big plastic “tooth”. In the end, the thing was better than new, as the original design didn't use jam nuts and the bolts could easily come undone.
Now this morning as I sit here typing this post, I'm sore all over – my muscles aren't used to this kind of workout! I'm almost 60, and this morning I actually feel like I'm that old (most of the time I don't feel that way at all)...
One of the things about this little blog that I monitor is where my readers come from. Over the years, I've commented a few times about surprises in this. In general, this blog has two kinds of readers – a core of mainly friends and family who visit regularly, and then lots of readers who come in because some post of mine popped up in their Google search results (I get hits from other search engines, too, but Google totally dominates). That latter group is where the surprises generally come from: some search term that gets used frequently and points to my blog.
For example, one search term that regularly pops up is “kevlar shoelaces”. Enter that search term into Google, and (at this writing) my blog post shows up as the 11th hit. That generates a lot of visits to my blog.
Right now another search term is leading the pack: “servicenow ipo”. My blog post the other day is the third hit on the results of that search, and it's bringing an interesting group of readers to my blog. I can tell roughly where these readers are, by their IP addresses – the people searching for “servicenow ipo” are mostly in New York, London, San Jose, and Los Angeles. That sounds like financials, tech, and investors to me.
I don't really know what any of that means, but it sure is fun to watch and wonder!
