Howling at the Moon

Hang Time

2011-12-16T15:27:00.000-08:00

It's almost a straight shot from the kitchen, through the living room, and down the hall. At first you just hear the thunder of whippet feet as they race through the kitchen, then the skratchel of their nails (whippets are hell on hardwood floors) as they accelerate towards the bedroom and gather themselves to leap…
…
……
………

I've had this post partly written, in my head, since about the time I put up my last post. I just didn't want to write it. The longer I waited, the more I felt I should write something. I started to feel kind of bad about it. My initial intention of having a blog where I could scribble down the casual observation du jour had become an obligation where I felt compelled to submit a tidily packaged essay. An obligation!

Well, that does it. Time for a blog sabbatical.

I don't know how long it will be. Setting a date for my next post feels kind of obligation-y, so I'm not going to do that. If I'm not back before the holidays, whatever you celebrate this time of year, have a wonderful, festive season.

I'll be back.

So Stop Dithering, Already!

2011-11-17T15:26:00.001-08:00

From the moment that envelope arrived, I knew it would be trouble. It lurked, sullen and threatening, on the far corner of my desk, until I finally acknowledged the inevitable, and set Scarecrow to work on it with a very pointy letter opener.

Back in June of 2009, when I officially retired from gainful employment, December of 2011 seemed unimaginably far in the future. I had no idea how I would patch together some kind of spiderweb of health insurance coverage that would last until I finally became eligible for Medicare. Somehow, between the COBRA subsidy, Tuffy being a university student, and Scarecrow losing one job and immediately finding another, we seem to have managed it. Now I'm simultaneously extremely relieved, and very apprehensive. I've spent the last couple of weeks, off and on, trying to figure out Medicare.

The following probably won't be of interest to anybody who's already on Medicare, because you already know all this. And it won't be of interest to anybody who's not on Medicare, because you don't need to know about it. It won't even be of interest to anybody currently sorting through their Medicare options, because you probably don't have the same choices I do. But blogs aren't about what you want to read; they're about what I want to write. And I need to sort this stuff out. Just so you know.

So, Medicare.

My first option, as I understand it, is to do nothing. Being a lazy slime weasel, this has a certain appeal. If I do nothing, I'm automatically enrolled in Medicare part A, the original major-medical-type Medicare, and Medicare part B, which covers outpatient-type stuff. There is a premium for Medicare part B, which is automatically withheld from my Social Security benefit. This option has the advantage of being easy, cheap, and I can go to any doctor who is willing to accept what Medicare is willing to pay them. The downside is that it leaves some significant gaps in coverage, not least of which is that there is no limit on out-of-pocket expenses, and no prescription drug coverage.

Another option, almost as easy, would be to supplement regular Medicare parts A and B with what they call Medicare part D. This is a policy sold by a private insurance company to cover prescription drugs. Different companies offer different policies, covering different drugs, with different premiums and different co-pays, so figuring out the best choice for the drugs you take today, and for the drugs you may be prescribed in the coming year, is no small undertaking. Still, once you do your homework, this has the advantages of unadorned Medicare, and it covers drugs. It also leaves Medicare's coverage gaps, including the lack of limit on out-of-pocket expenses.

There is something called a Medigap policy, which sounded like what I was looking for: Medicare, with some of the gaps filled in. Turns out this is something insurance companies only need to offer to you if you qualify for Medicare by turning 65. If you qualify for Medicare when you're younger than 65 – like because you're disabled – most states don't require insurance companies to offer you this kind of policy; Washington doesn't, and they don't. Next!

OK, now it gets complicated. Medicare part C, as I understand it, is a policy sold by a private insurance company. It replaces Medicare part A and Medicare part B, usually with some additional coverage, maybe including drug coverage but maybe not. Some policies limit you to providers in their network but some don't. They have different premiums and co-pays and coinsurance and drug formularies and a million other moving parts. The Medicare website offered to help me compare the 53 plans that are available in my area. It took a while, but I finally managed to narrow it down to two. The major difference between them is that one plan limits you to providers in their network – and it's a pretty small network. The other plan has a very large network of providers, including the family practitioner, neurologist, rehab specialist, physical therapist, and occupational therapist I've been seeing for the past couple of years, and is somewhat more flexible if you don't find anyone you like. It would also probably cost about $1500 more a year.

So after all that comparing, and what-iffing, and back-and-forthing, and endless dithering, it comes down to this:

You get what you pay for. And you pay for what you get.

Might As Well Start Now

2011-11-15T16:25:00.001-08:00

If you say you'll laugh about this one day, you might as well start now.

After yesterday, I've been laughing so much my ribs hurt.

It was one of those days. It started out with getting packed up to go into Scarecrow's office at Gloria's Books and Adult Day Care. He has mostly been working from home, which is amazingly wonderful for a number of reasons, but occasionally a little face time is required. As usual, I was going along, to hang out in an empty corner of the warehouse, entertaining myself and generally staying out from underfoot. Since my laptop is what I use to keep myself busy and out of trouble, I was trying to be unobtrusive about watching Scarecrow pack it up, to make sure that the earbuds and microphone and AC adapter and other bits all made it into the bag.

The commute to the other end of town wasn't too bad, all things considered. Even in Seattle, a little rain can do bad things to rush-hour traffic. It was only after we got there that Scarecrow realized that he had left my carefully-packed laptop at home. (Carefully-packed lunch, too, but it is possible to get lunch in Renton, if need be.)

Well, without my laptop, I'm pretty much screwed. Ironically, at one time, a day in a book warehouse would have been my idea of a really good time. Now, although I'm surrounded by books on just about any topic you can imagine and some that you can't, I can't pick them up, can't turn the pages. Screwed.

Not only that. I use the laptop to IM Scarecrow when I need his help; like for a bathroom break. Screwed.

Well, whatever. I can use the time to practice meditation. I've been meaning to do that. Or I can do some serious napping. Whatever. It's only eight or nine hours. No big deal.

So as I pulled into the wheelchair lift to negotiate the 4 feet between the parking level and the warehouse door, I was chatting with Scarecrow, secretly congratulating myself for not going postal over the carefully-packed laptop still sitting next to the front door at home.

"We're not there yet," I said, when the lift stopped halfway up.

Scarecrow pressed the button again. He turned the key off and on, then pressed the button again.

"It's not going," he said. "It's stuck."

He checked to make sure the doors were closed, and the power appeared to be on, and the other obvious stuff. Nothing. It was going just a minute ago. It was working fine. It just stopped.

OK, a couple of minutes ago, when I thought I was screwed? I really wasn't. Now I'm screwed.

The maintenance guy who takes care of this kind of thing wasn't in yet. I'm sure this was just the kind of thing he was looking forward to on a Monday morning – a medium-sized old lady in a 300 pound power chair stuck in the lift.

I have to say he took it very well, particularly considering that this wasn't the only disaster awaiting him; one of the conveyor belts in the warehouse was stuck, too. After messing with some fuses and circuit breakers and other obvious stuff, he conceded that he had no idea what the problem was with the lift. He called the company that serviced the thing, stressing that with a medium-sized old lady stuck in the lift and it looking like it was about to start raining any minute, this was a problem of some immediacy. They said they'd be there in 10 minutes. Maybe 15.

It probably wasn't any longer than that, but I've got to tell you it feels pretty stupid, being stuck 2 feet up a 4 foot lift, waiting for the rain to start.

The lift guy used a 1 1/8 inch socket with a nice long lever to crank the lift up manually, about an angstrom at a time. Whatever works.

Once we were inside, Scarecrow set me up with a movie on his iPod Touch (have I mentioned that I'm easily entertained?). That was working fine, until a reminder popped up, stopping the movie and taking over the display. And bonging. And bonging. And bonging. And bonging. And bonging. Now, Scarecrow is pretty hard of hearing, and he's got that alarm set so it'll get his attention if the iPod is in his pocket. I was getting it through earbuds. Since I couldn't dismiss the pop-up or take out the earbuds, this went on for 15 minutes, bonging, and bonging, and bonging, until the device finally gave up.

After the bonging stopped I got some time to practice my meditation, or maybe I was taking a nap, when Scarecrow stopped to check in. He dismissed the pop-up, and restarted the movie.

Five minutes later, the reminder popped up again. He had obviously hit Snooze instead of OK. Bong. Bong. Bong. Bong. Bong.

The next time Scarecrow stopped in, he said he was going to talk to Bob (of Bob's Books and Adult Day Care), and then we'd call it a day. Since he was only going to be a few minutes, he packed up the earbuds, set the iPod on the desk, and went off to talk to Bob. Five minutes later, the reminder went off again. Bong. Bong. Bong. Now I remember – there's no such thing as a short conversation with Bob. Bong. Bong. Bong. By now it's really pretty funny. And as long as it's not going off right my ear, I can laugh.

Might as well start now. I know I'll laugh about this someday.

The little rodent who had built a snug little nest inside the lift machinery, only to find out there was a good reason that nobody lived there? Well, he had the worst kind of bad day.

Samhain

2011-10-31T17:29:00.001-07:00

Samhain is said to be the time of year when the veil between this world and the next is thinnest.

I wouldn't really know about that.

Lots of cultures have some kind of Day of the Dead, set aside to remember family members and friends who have died. That seems a reasonable thing, to me. It's not inherently creepy or evil. It's more like an acknowledgment that death is as much a part of life, and as necessary a part of life, as birth. It's a time to think about the ending of things, accepting losses, coming to terms with them, getting ready to move on. I'm down with that.

So I'm thinking, and accepting, and coming to terms, and getting ready.

And wondering.

Why the heck don't we ever get any trick-or-treaters?

Typhoid Tuffy

2011-10-29T11:40:00.001-07:00

Tuffy came down sick last weekend. I mean sore throat, goopy chest, nasty cough, staying-home-from-the-gym sick. Bad sign. For this kid to stay home from the gym, she has to have one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. She says she's feeling some better, but still sounds terrible. She's got kind of cough that hangs on forever.

Scarecrow came down sick a couple of days later. He took off work for a couple of days, and Scarecrow never takes off work. He took off work, even though he's been working from home. That's how sick he was. Even thought about getting somebody in to take care of me, he was that sick.

Me? I'm feeling like an opossum in the middle of the road, trying to ignore the headlights.

Looking for Sparklies

2011-10-24T16:40:00.000-07:00

Two of my blogger buddies have asked where I'm getting all this stuff about stalking dead people. Since two people probably constitutes a supermajority of the people who normally read this blog, it's like an invitation to write about something people might actually be interested in. What a concept!

Before I jump in, I should emphasize that I'm no kind of rigorous, by-the-book-type genealogist. In fact, I'm no kind of genealogist at all. Those are people who meticulously document the blood relationship between descendent X and ancestor A. I don't do that.

A Family Historian tries to understand what life was like for people in their family; where did they live? who did they live with? in what kind of house? what kind of work did they do? what kind of clothes did they wear? what did they eat? That's a little closer, but I don't really do that, either. Not in any systematic way.

I'm more of a magpie. I go after the sparkly bits. Rather than following one person's life from start to finish before starting on another one, rather than starting with my parents, then going to my grandparents, and carefully working my way back from there, I jump from wondering why my grandmother had her picture taken on a farm when she was 17, to wanting to know how much stuff a typical voyageur canoe held and how many men it took to paddle it, to being tickled to find that in the late '20s Willys-Overland Motors made a car called the Whippet, even though I don't think anybody in my family worked there at the time. Or wait. Maybe they did…

Nope. My paternal grandfather worked there (as a woodworker!) in 1918, but by 1920 he had a grocery store. My dad and my uncle Willie weren't there until later – Willie, the older brother, didn't graduate from high school until 1937. So, no.

You see what happens? In checking to see what years various forebears might have worked at Willys-Overland, I ran across a photo of a jeep in a museum exhibit that looked like it might've been designed by a place I used to work. The museum exhibit, I mean, not the jeep. Of course, I had to see if the place I used to work actually designed that museum, but the museum webpage didn't say, and the place I used to work is out of business now. So that was an hour spent chasing after something totally unrelated. And I never did find out.

It's not that I mind. I don't have any place I need to be, or any time I need to be there. I'm just not very focused about this, I guess is what I'm saying. I can't tell you how to do genealogy, or how to research family history. I can only tell you about being a magpie.

And a disabled magpie, at that. At some point, people doing this kind of stuff usually wind up going places, like libraries, or archives, or courthouses; and opening books, or turning pages, or scanning microfilm; and writing stuff down. On paper. I don't do any of that. If it's not online, I can't get to it, so I don't bother looking for it. I don't collect paper copies of documents, because I couldn't file or store them if I had them.

So, after all that, where do I find all this stuff? I've got to tell you, there's a ton of stuff out there, with more appearing online by the day. In true magpie fashion, I have about a million bookmarks, organized in a way that doesn't make a whole lot of sense even to me, most of which would only be helpful to someone whose family happens to come from the same places mine does. There are, however, a couple of good general places to start looking:

Cindi's List probably comes as close as anything to inflicting some kind of organization on the bewildering amount of genealogy information available on the net.

FamilySearch is the genealogy website of the LDS church. In addition to a lot of how-to information, it gives you free access to a lot of genealogy database resources.

And as always, Google is your friend. Cindi's List even has links to information about how to take advantage of it.

So, that's a lot of disclaimer for not very much information, but there it is. I don't know How It Should Be Done. I just look for the sparkly bits.

Medicare for Dummies

2011-10-18T11:39:00.000-07:00

OK, I need to buckle down and do this. After two years of scrambling to patch together some kind of health care coverage that we can more-or-less afford, in December I finally become eligible for Medicare. Apparently there are decisions to be made. I'm a little apprehensive about this.

Fortunately, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services provide a little (147-page) booklet:

Medicare and You

This is the official US government Medicare handbook

Yes! Documentation! A user manual! As one of the infinitesimally small number of people on this planet who actually read these things, I find this very reassuring. It's filled with pictures of such happy people. If they've done this Medicare thing and they're still so cheerful, how bad can it be? Aside from the gray hair, most of them don't even look all that old. In fact, they look about my age. What's up with that? The print is comfortably large, I guess so they don't have to produce a separate large print version – accessibility and all that. Well, maybe not. On the back cover, it says it's "also available in Spanish, Braille, Audio CD, and Large Print (English and Spanish)." I wonder how large the print is in the large print version?

So I start reading. They put the index in the front, which seems odd. I don't know if I like the idea or not. On page 58, I find:

Things to Consider When Choosing Your Medicare Coverage

Excellent. This sounds like exactly what I'm looking for. They followed this with a bunch of questions:

Are the services you need covered?
Are you eligible for other types of health or prescription drug coverage?
How much are your premiums, deductibles, copayments, coinsurance, and other costs?
How much do you pay for services like hospital stays or doctor visits?
Is there a yearly limit on what you pay out-of-pocket?
Do your doctors and other health care providers accept the coverage?
Are the doctors you want to see accepting new patients?
Do you have to choose your hospital and health care providers from a network?
Do you need to get referrals?
Do you need to join a Medicare drug plan?
Do you already have creditable prescription drug coverage?
Will you pay a penalty if you join a drug plan later?
What will your prescription drugs cost under each plan?
Are your drugs covered under the plan’s formulary?
Are there any coverage rules that apply to your prescriptions?
Where are the doctors’ offices?
What are their hours?
Which pharmacies can you use?
Can you get your prescriptions by mail?
Do the doctors use electronic health records or prescribe electronically?
Will the plan cover you in another state or outside the U.S.?
Are you satisfied with your medical care?

Seriously.

The Socratic method is just not working for me here. How the f#@k should I know? Isn't that what I'm trying to find out? If this is an FAQ, I've got the Qs. What I need are the As. And the $$. I need to know about the $.

Aside from the gray hair, I do not resemble the smiling, happy people in this booklet. Maybe I shouldn't have started in on it when I was already cranky about MetLife terminating my group life insurance because they aren't sure I'm still disabled. I wasn't really feeling open-minded and positive and cheerful.

Seriously.

If I put off dealing with this until I'm feeling open-minded and positive and cheerful, it'll never happen. That's just a fact. Aside from the gray hair, I never look anything like the smiling, happy people in this booklet. Maybe I'm going to need to grit my teeth and slog through this stuff anyway.

Maybe tomorrow. Maybe I'll do it tomorrow.

Seriously.

2011-10-14T18:05:00.000-07:00

“Block Card 902 Locust Street, c1937, courtesy of the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library, obtained from http://images2.toledolibrary.org/.”

I just found this picture of the building where my dad's family was living when he was born. Turns out the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library has an archive of photos of buildings, many taken in the 1930s by the WPA for tax assessment purposes (and to give people jobs). This was obviously the same building that was there in 1920, when my dad was born, and the U.S. Census said the family was living here. Cool, no? Amazing, what you can find on the Internet.

My dad never liked the name Ezra. It always startled me a little when his brothers called him Ez, because nobody else did. Everybody else called him Charlie, after a trumpeter who led a big band in the 1940s. As long as I knew him, he introduced himself as Charlie. He used E.C. in correspondence and such like, but Charles wasn't his middle name. He didn't have one. He just picked Charlie, I guess because it was better than Ezra.

For those of us trying to untangle the limbs of the family thicket, a distinctive name like Ezra beats the heck out of a Charlie. In Scarecrow's family, I'm indebted to those old Puritans who gave their offspring names like Hachaliah Brown, or Preserved Reade. Or Philo Dibble Bates. As it turns out, the Puritans in Massachusetts and Connecticut were way more creative in their choice of names than their contemporaries north of the border. How pathetic is that?

You'd think, with the big French-Canadian families of the previous couple of centuries, that you'd see a large number of very imaginative names, just to keep them all straight. I wish. What happened was that the first boy got his father's name, the first girl got her mother's, the next couple maybe got the grandparents' names, then they'd start handing out names of aunts and uncles. So even if 15 kids had 15 kids apiece, they were all drawing from the same pool of 15 names, generation after generation. They might be in a different order, but every family had an Antoine, a Joseph, a Pierre, a François, and so on. To further confuse the issue, everybody wss Marie-something or something-Marie. This was so common that they'd sometimes leave the Marie part out, without feeling the need to mention it. And they sometimes recycled names, even within the same family. If Jean Baptiste or Marie Louise died young, the parents may bestow the same name on a later child. So you frequently got several people with the same name, living in the same place, at the same time.

The cultural peculiarity of assigning dit names makes it both easier and more difficult to track down individuals. As I understand it, it was common in the military of 17th-century France to give soldiers a sort of nickname. Gilles Couturier, for example, might become Gilles Couturier dit Labonté, or Gilles Couturier called Labonté. Since many of the early residents of New France came from the military, it was a common thing. Another Couturier might use a different dit name, perhaps Couturier dit Verville, which would help tell the different Couturiers apart. Or not. It turns out Gilles might be referred to as Couturier, Couturier dit Labonté, or just Labonté. One (or more) of his offspring might adopt the dit name, or not. Or they may choose a different one. I guess you had to be there to understand it, because I sure as heck don't. In addition to spelling being flexible in a largely illiterate population, it's sometimes not clear, at least to me, what name they're trying to spell.

On the other hand, at that time women in France – and New France – typically kept their father's surname after they married. So there's that. One Pierre Couturier might be the offspring of Joseph Couturier and Gertrude Maugras (hopefully not Gertrude-Marie or Marie-Gertrude), and another Pierre Couturier the son of a different Joseph Couturier and Marie Allard. If they were both Mrs. Couturier, I don't know how you'd ever sort them out.

So it's a puzzle. Some future family historian may get stuck trying to figure out what happened to Ezra, who was born and lived with his family and went to school and then seemingly disappeared. And where did this Charlie-person come from, anyway? It will be a puzzle. Dad would like that.

And I don't blame him. I wouldn't want to be called Ezra, either.

How Much Does an E-Book Weigh?

2011-10-03T16:46:00.000-07:00

As grateful as I am that e-books became widely available just about the time I began to have trouble managing regular physical books, some e-book features require this elderly canine to attempt some new tricks.

I've been reading regular books for a long time, you understand, and I'm pretty well accustomed to that way of doing things. For example, just about any e-reader gives you some way to tell how much progress you've made through the book, and while I know the slider bar on the edge of the screen (or whatever) is conveying that information, it is not (yet) as intuitive as comparing the difference in thickness between the pages on the left side of the open book with the thickness of the pages on the right.

I also seem to have a heck of a time remembering to note how many pages are in an e-book. With physical books, it's obvious, isn't it? The breadth of the spine, the weight when you pick it up — it's not something you have to remind yourself to do. E-books, on the other hand, all look pretty much the same. It was only after I got started onCryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson) that I noticed that turning virtual pages seemed to have remarkably little effect on the position of the slider bar at the edge of the window. I guess it wouldn't. Turns out the darned thing is 1168 pages long, although admittedly that includes what they call "e-book extras".

If I'd been paying attention, I would've realized that I didn't need to check out any other books at the same time; particularly not The Game of Thrones (George R.R. Martin, 835 pages) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Haruki Murakami, 640 pages). The Game of Thrones returned itself to the library when I was part way through it, thoughtfully sparing me any overdue fines. I had to put it back on hold, and I'm waiting for my name to get back to the top of the list.

Format aside, I guess it's a good sign when you finish a really long book, and would look for other books by the same author. Cryptonomicon is something of a classic in its genre, and deservedly so. Parallel storylines, engagingly geeky characters, elements of the theory and history of cryptology — it took me a while to get into it, but it was a lot more fun than I expected.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle… not so much. My English-major daughter recommended the author, so I expected it to be challenging. Opaque was more like it.

Just because I knew you'd want my opinion.

Stray Parsley

2011-09-27T16:00:00.000-07:00

I'm not usually one to badmouth written instructions. I spent most of my working life writing technical documentation, and apologizing for it. I know how hard it is to explain something in a way that will provide all the information anyone would need, and be totally clear to everyone who might read it.

Maybe the problem is that I expected this to be confusing, so I'm making it harder than it really needs to be.

Or maybe I just assume that anything having to do with the healthcare delivery system is going to be a pain in the butt. You start with healthcare, then throw in insurance and the government, and it's got to be bad. Wouldn't you think?

Maybe I just don't want to be doing this. Well, that part's true, for sure.

But I've got to tell you, trying to figure out what I need to do about my upcoming eligibility for Medicare, and how it may or may not coordinate with the insurance I'm buying through Scarecrow's employer, is giving me a new perspective on what it must be like to live with a learning disability. I can still read the words. I can still understand each of them individually. At least I think I can. I'm just having trouble extracting information that might be encrypted in those words, arranged in that order. I read them slowly. I read them multiple times. It's like reading a webpage that Google has translated. Each of the words is right, but they're just… not… coming… together.

I was recently reading a page that was originally written in Russian. I don't know any Russian, so I don't know how good or bad the translation might have been, but I thought I was kind of getting the gist. Then I came across this:

"But as in all of Russia, the big crisis came to Bobruisk, in connection with the attitude of the Jewish population to the Russian school in the 70's. This crisis was, as is known, connected with the executing of the law of general military service in Russia (1874), which gave great privileges to people with Russian education and origin--shorter military service. It was a stray parsley! Even in extremely religious circles the "fence-breakers" multiplied."

It was a stray parsley!

Questions I Should Have Asked

2011-09-20T17:20:00.000-07:00

I ran across a list of questions I've been meaning to ask my dad the next time we spoke. Nothing of world-shaking importance, no grand questions about life-lessons learned. Truth be told, my dad and I did not often agree on the message to be taken from those life lessons. I didn't expect him to impart great wisdom from the perspective of one who has lived a long and eventful life. They were mostly just questions that came up when I was rustling around in the family shrub. Why did your dad never tell you what his name was before he came to the United States? What year did you buy the house you live in now? What was the first car you ever bought? I kept putting it off.

Dad died August 26.

It wasn't a tragic sendoff, as these things go. It was not unexpected. He was almost 91 years old. He finally accepted some drugs, so he wasn't in pain. He was home, with his family, the way he wanted. It was time. He was ready. Everybody should be so lucky.

Like most of us, I suppose, he didn't finish everything he meant to do. He was always going to write down what he remembered about his family, but he kept putting it off. He'd get distracted by trying to pin down exactly when the family moved from one house to another, when plus or minus 5 years would have been plenty close enough. He'd go chasing off after details, or get frustrated because he was such a crummy typist, and he never got around to telling the whole story.

Family history is all about the stories, isn't it? I'm not much interested in genealogy. My lineage is not so illustrious that proving it beyond all shadow of a doubt makes any difference to anybody. I don't need three original sources to confirm every detail. I don't agonize over getting every source citation exactly right. I don't really care all that much. I'm just in it for the stories. It's all about stories. It's history, the way it happened to one family. It's getting a sense of ordinary lives, the way ordinary people lived them.

Knowing that Louis Badaillac dit Laplante was born in Sorel, Québec in March of 1680 and died in Detroit in 1703 doesn't really say much about who this guy was, except that he was only 23 when he died. Finding that he accompanied Antoine de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac, when he went off to found the city of Detroit, one might be tempted to imagine a rather heroic figure. Finding that between that convoy and his eventual demise he was busted a couple of times for "fait la traite de l'eau de vie avec les iroquois" and for "causé un bruit public", he starts to look a little grubbier. Not pretty, maybe, but more like a real person. (Did you know, by the way, that Cadillac had a really big nose? He was nicknamed the Falcon, and often compared — presumably behind his back – to Cyrano de Bergerac. Hey, I read it on the web, so it must be true.) See what I mean? It's all about the stories.

I need to write down what I remember about my dad. As best I can, I need to tell his story. I'm not religious. In the metaphysical sense, I have no idea where he went, or what he's doing now, besides a literal, obvious fact – he donated his body to science. He made arrangements for that years ago. Some med students at UCLA will get a skinny old white male cadaver. They will get to know my dad in considerable detail. In a different sense, he's here as long as someone remembers him. Those stories he told over and over? I should know them well enough by now to be able to inflict them on someone who never got a chance to hear them from the source.

I've been wondering whether this blog is the right place to do that. I initially set it up as a place to dump MS-related stuff. Going off on a family history tangent seems pretty seriously off-topic. I even got as far as setting up a template for a new blog, called "Out on a Limb" (get it? Am I witty, or what?). Then I decided it was a pretty stupid idea. If I had two blogs, I would post even less often on either of them than I do on this one now. Besides, the topic of this blog is whatever I want it to be. Whippets don't have anything to do with MS, as far as I know, and I write about them all the time. So I'll be stalking dead people, and I'll be doing it here. It's too bad, though. The new blog was looking pretty cool.

There's a barbecue/potluck/celebration of my dad's life/excuse to put away large amounts of tequila planned for this weekend at the old home place. I won't be able to make it down for the festivities, but here's the story I would tell if I were there:

So many times when I was a kid we'd ask, "Dad, do you have a ____ <fill in the blank with the most bizarre item you can possibly imagine>?" He'd think for a minute, disappear into his garage, rustle around for a while, and reappear holding said bizarre item.

I thought everybody's dad could do that.

A Moment of Silence

2011-09-18T15:47:00.000-07:00

Dad

27 November 1920 — 26 August 2011

I'm not sure how a moment of silence would work on the Internet, but my dad was not a religious guy and I'm not sure how else one might mark his passing. I'm also not sure how long a moment would last, on the Internet, but I guess we'll find out!

Happy Birthday, Mom!

2011-09-13T17:48:00.000-07:00

My mom is 90 years old today.

It's not for wimps!

Time Passing

2011-08-25T15:41:00.000-07:00

I published the first post on this blog two years ago today. Having recently retired from my day job, my intent was to document the process of applying for SSDI, which I expected to be a long drawn out and frustrating experience. Six weeks later my claim was approved, and I was officially out of stuff to write about. Not having anything to write about does not appear to have held me up much.

I started out posting every day. That lasted about a week. Then it was every other day. Then a couple of times a week. For the last couple of months, posting once a week or thereabouts seems to be a comfortable compromise between feeling obligated to write something, and not having anything to say.

As if to mark the anniversary of the blog by reminding me of its initial purpose, I got an envelope from the Social Security Administration the other day full of stuff about applying for Medicare. I haven't been able to work myself up to look at it yet. It's sitting on the corner of my desk, looking ominous and threatening. I tell myself that applying for SSDI was a lot easier than I expected it to be. Maybe signing up for Medicare won't be that bad. Maybe.

Several times over the last couple of years, we thought my dad was dying. Each time, he defied the odds and confounded the authorities, stubbornly refusing to relinquish the place on the planet he has occupied for almost 91 years. He wasn't ready to go. Now, I think he is.

Spending so much time lately climbing out on limbs of the family shrub, I find myself thinking about all this birthing and dying stuff. I mean, duh? Although I may well think about it differently when I'm confronted with my own imminent demise, at least from this vantage point, dying doesn't seem all that scary. Pain, now, pain is scary. But if you can die without pain, you know, you've got to go sometime. I don't remember being afraid wherever I was before I was born, why should being dead be any worse? Dying is just part of the deal. It's inevitable, and while I guess it's always a little painful for the people you leave behind (at least you'd hope somebody is sorry to see you go), it's not always bad.

Stalking dead people in the parish register of Sainte Genevieve de Pierrefonds from 1782, so many of the burials are for babies only a few days, or months, or years old. Early census records note the number of children each woman bore, and the number currently living. The two numbers were rarely the same. And the record of a baby's baptism sometimes preceded that of the burial of a young mother. That's a different kind of death altogether. Those deaths are tragic. Although I don't know those people, reading about what happened to them makes me sad. And then there's what looks like a hastily-scribbled note stuck in the pages of the register that records nine names, "tué par les Iroquois." That doesn't sound exactly like a peaceful sendoff to me.

For my dad, dying is a process. He's getting ready to go, but in his own time, on his own terms. At home, with family and friends around him. He's not eating or drinking much. He refuses pain meds. He seems to be aware, at some level, of what's going on around him, but doesn't respond much (other than to spit out the pain meds). He likes sitting in the sun in the afternoons. Last weekend, his grandson's new bride brought her viola and played for him. He liked that. He is dying. We will miss him, but this death is not a bad thing.

My dad always said he wanted to live to be 100, and be killed by a jealous husband. I don't think he's going to make it to 100, but who knows? I guess it's still possible that a jealous husband will show up and send him on his way. He would like that, although I'm not sure my mom would be so crazy about it.

Maybe It Was a Day like Today

2011-08-19T15:20:00.000-07:00

I don't know who these people are — the photo is just labeled "Paiement family." "Mount Royal Park, Aug 1908" is written on the front. Although the Paiements I've been stalking had left Montréal for Michigan by this time, becoming Payments in the process, they still had plenty of kin in the Montréal area. Mount Royal Park was probably a nice place to spend a summer afternoon.

I don't know anything else about this picture, and I don't really care if I can figure out who's in it (although I'll probably try, just for grins). It just makes me happy to look at it.

Record Straight-Setting

2011-08-17T17:12:00.001-07:00

Looking back over my last post, hoping for a blinding flash of inspiration which, in case you're wondering, totally failed to materialize, I realize I've been somewhat unfair. Dragon NaturallySpeaking isn't really as bad as I made it sound. Not nearly.

That's not to say that it didn't record the stuff I attributed to it last time. It did. But none of it was while I was dictating something I expected it to transcribe. It recorded most of those examples when the microphone was listening to me talk to someone else, or someone else talk to someone else, often in a different part of the house, or the radio talk to nobody at all. Sometimes I left the microphone on by accident, other times it turned itself on spontaneously, which is an annoyingly frequent occurrence.

Voice-recognition software really is pretty amazing. I use it, with head tracker mouse software, all day, every day. I use it to work on the desktop, clamber around the web, and use programs that don't know anything about voice-recognition, and I spend a lot more time doing that than I do dictating text. Although I sometimes get tangled up in too many layers of technology, for the most part, with a little patience and creativity, I can do whatever I need to do you dog wants you to do anything she's trying to be polite but you're not paying attention these are you think it's bug in the meantime I'll let you know

Sorry. I was talking to Scarecrow, and the microphone turned itself on.

Sometimes Dragon NaturallySpeaking really does misrecognize what I say. This can be either funny or annoying, depending on my state of mind, and the kind of mistakes it attempts to attribute to me can be devilishly hard to find. But really, most of the time I get caught writing something stupid, it's because I wrote something stupid. Without any help from anybody. Voice-recognition software can be a pain in the butt, but without it, I'd be in a world of hurt.

So, there's that.

It appears Tuffy is going to survive her latest medical adventure. What is it with this kid? She had a small sore get infected. It was looking pretty bad, and considering that she spends half her life on pestilential wrestling mats, I suggested she have a doctor take a look at it. It must've really hurt, because she did. The provisional diagnosis was MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), which sounded pretty bad. The doctor drained the owie, put her on antibiotics, and told her to come back every day for the next four or five days. Turns out it wasn't MRSA, just garden-variety staph, which is bad enough. It's healing up surprisingly well, considering how bad it looked. The doctor says she won't even have much of a scar.

So, there's that.

Stalking Sparky

2011-08-04T15:37:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, I swear, if I didn't have vicarious adventures, I wouldn't have any adventures at all. Pathetic, I guess, but there it is. Fortunately for me, my brother Sparky (the electrician) is off on quite the adventure, and thanks to modern technology and his unhealthy obsession with electronic doodads, he's taking me along.

Having recently married off his number two son, Sparky took off on a motorcycle trip. The first leg of his trip took him from Southern California up here to Seattle, mostly following Highway 1 along the coast. An 1100 mile warm-up, shakedown kind of thing. He spent a couple of days here, checking over his bike and messing with his GPS, then took off on the real adventure. From here, he's off through Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, to Yellowstone and the Continental Divide Trail, and over the next couple of weeks, somehow, back home.

The techie stalker thing comes in because he's wearing a little doohickey (my voice recognition software, about which more later, suggested "too geeky", and while it's not what I was after, it's eerily apt) that tracks his location and displays it on Google maps in near-real time. (I don't mean to shill for this place, but if you're interested, it's this.) So I know, for example, that earlier today he got a spot at Norris Campground, then he stopped at the Canyon Visitor Education Center and the Canyon Village Gen. Store, and now he's at Old Faithful. And at 8:44:32 a.m. on Wednesday he was at the Oasis Bordello Museum in Wallace, Idaho. Not really. He probably stopped for gas. At a gas station right next to the Bordello Museum. But still, is that creepy, or what?

Now, I'm all about technology. I'm sitting in a power chair, talking to my computer, using a head-tracker mouse. I'm first in line when it comes to taking advantage of technological advances, but I'm sometimes confronted with the downside. The same technology that I use to stalk dead people makes it possible for me to stalk my brother. The same technology that I use to talk to my computer makes me write really stupid things.

Here, for example, is my latest batch of Dragon-isms, collected over the last couple of days:

a guy is a will is will is a you will you as a is will is a you will you as a all will is a you all you as you rule is a you a you as their root, you will will will show you will you will a you a you a you as you as you as you are a you a you and you as you you he is cool you are you as a will is a you is you are you are a cool day and a you and you and you as you are you as you rule to the city a is a more is that I and you and you shall know a you as you as you as he is in is cool and he is a is a you he you a you as you you as you shall know he is a you a a a a a a a a you and a you as you as you as you are you will you and will you know you are you are you a woman will be

as I will you will you go. On the road and would very very short or will she will will will a a will and a you are you are you a you are you will you as a you as you have is a oh

worries what will is router that was just a West is losing the Yankees you pull my copy of where to reach a good sleep it' Or actually warhorses for. Are you a

Woodruff: well for you as you and the

A save you a you are you are you will and you as a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a you as you are you are a is a and he is is is is you will a a a you he is a you and a you and I and. I and you are you I will and I and is he is an and he is a y and I and you as a you and a a a you a will is there is all I is a you will you a a a a a a is is him and you as a a a a a a a a a a a a a little while you as you are in a a will and a you and you and you as a you and you and you and you and a a a a a a a a a a a you know is will you are you are you as you are you are you as you go is a a a a a a a. A a a a a a a a a a a a a is a you are you in and I are you are you a you a you are you are you a you will you will just a you a you are you will you will you will you a will all go a and are you as you will will will you and you and I and is is is is is is is is is a on a Ou as you will soon is a a a a a a a a very a a a a a a a a a a is a law is is you as a way

in K she growls item you were when you now am I haven't find are OK of them could you L controllability of the details you will are you getting ready to go are you OK

qeasu)rifile

My world, and welcome to it.

Standing out in a Crowd

2011-07-28T16:49:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago, I found myself looking over my dad's side of the family shrub. It doesn't take that long; there's my dad, and his parents. That's all I know. Well, almost.

Investigating my mother's side of the family offers so much more in the way of immediate gratification, and me, I'm all about immediate gratification. The Catholic Church keeps such obsessive records, French-Canadian women kept their father's surnames, I can almost read the original documents – well, I bet I could almost read them, if it weren't for the obscure handwriting and archaic language on scanned images of 300-year-old documents. With all the information available on the Internet, you sit down to trace a family, and 15 minutes later you're back to the flood. It's almost too easy.

Scarecrow's family is pretty much the same, easy-wise. Not only did the Puritans keep pretty close track of who married who, and who was born to whom, but the documents are even in English. Kind of seems like cheating. They didn't seem to make much use of those records to avoid consanguinity, though. I found at least one marriage between first cousins, which I've been telling Scarecrow explains a lot. < snrk! >

My father's family is more of a challenge. His parents were among the eight bazillion people who immigrated to the US from Eastern Europe in the first decade of the 20th century.

Beyond not having much to go on, everything seems more foreign, somehow. Even when they're written in English characters, the names of people and places sound so… ethnic. It's farther away from here, both geographically and culturally, but it's more than that. I can imagine 17th-century Québec, but a village in Minsk in 1900 eludes me.

I know nothing about my grandmother before she turned up in Chicago at her wedding to my grandfather in 1913. In contrast to the embarrassing abundance of documentation for my mother's side of the family, she didn't know for sure when she was born. She told my dad the name of the town she was from, but she couldn't write it in English, and by the time he told me what he thought she said, it could've been anything. Same thing with her name, when you get right down to it. It could be spelled any number of ways which, taken together, become the local equivalent of 'Smith.' I don't know when she came to this country – only that my dad said she called my grandfather a greenhorn, because she was here before he was. OK, I give up. Maybe I'll take another run at it next Mother's Day.

With my grandfather, I have a little more to go on. Not much, but a little. From Ellis Island, my dad procured the passenger list from the SS Petersburg, which made the crossing from Libau to New York on 27 December 1906. There's a name on it he believes is my grandfather. I don't know why he thinks that. The name doesn't match, but, like a lot of people, for a lot of reasons, we know he changed it when he came to America. We don't know what it was before.

According to the passenger manifest, the person my father believes to be my grandfather was 23 in 1906. In 1913, his marriage certificate gives his age as 26. Seven years later, he's only three years older. I wish I knew how he did that.

Here's what else the passenger manifest to us about him:

Birthplace: Karpilovka (a town in what is now the Ukraine, pretty close to where my grandfather said he came from)
Occupation: joiner (cabinetmaker, which is what my grandfather was)
Height: 5'2"
Eyes: blue
Hair: blue

If this is really him, I have no idea how he got from New York in 1906 to Chicago in 1913, or how he met my grandmother, or why they wound up in Ohio.

Really. How hard can it be to track down a little guy with blue hair?

Can We Just Not Talk about MS for a While?

2011-07-25T14:30:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I go through a stretch when I just don't want to think about MS. As much as I care about the well-being of my blogger buddies (you know who you are), I don't want to read blogs about MS. It's not denial. I did my usual checkup with the neurologist, which was unremarkable, as usual. She wanted to do some lab stuff, just to make sure that, other than MS, I'm generally healthy. So I did that, and I am. (That whole concept never fails to crack me up, but there it is.) I took my power chair in to the shop a while ago to find out what's wrong with it, and taking it back tomorrow to get it fixed. I do what I have to do, MS-wise. I just don't want to give it anymore of my attention than that. And since much of my own blog is about MS, I don't much want to look at that, either. So I've been doing other stuff.

For one thing, while Tuffy was in southern California for a family wedding, I've been stalking her on Facebook. Creepy, I know, but fun seeing the pictures she and her cousins took while she was down there. She did the obligatory grand-parental visit, and the folks look good, considering. Dad's wearing his Toledo Mud Hens baseball cap. Where does he get these things? She's back now, says she had a blast, but was ready to come home.

I've been stalking dead people in Scarecrow's family, too. Like my family, they're mostly just regular folks, but fascinating for all that. You just never know what will turn up.

For one thing, there are some great names. Jehoshaphat Prindle. Perseverance Johnson. Ebenezer Dibble. And a good thing, too. With surnames like Bates or Whitman, it's easy to get lost in all of the Johns and Daniels and Sarahs. A name like Philo Dibble Bates gives you something to hang onto.

And then there are the Puritans. Finding that Scarecrow, militant atheist, is descended from a bunch of Puritans, is more than a little amusing. I first stumbled over this sometime last week. My ribs still hurt from laughing.

Richard Palgrave and Anne Hooker came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony from England in 1630, part of the first major European settlement in New England after Plymouth Colony, and part of John Winthrop's effort to establish the colony as a Puritan "city upon a hill."

Anne's brother Thomas Hooker was a prominent Puritan religious and colonial leader, who founded the Colony of Connecticut after dissenting with Puritan leaders in Massachusetts.

Richard and Anne are Scarecrow's 10th great-grandparents on his mother's side.

They are also the 14th great-grandparents of George W. Bush.

Hey, I read it on the web, so it must be true.

Going South

2011-07-13T13:50:00.000-07:00

Tuffy left for LA yesterday morning. One of her cousins is getting married on Saturday, and I guess she thought that was a good excuse to hang out in southern California for a week. Could do worse. She had to buy the plane ticket, but once she's down there she can stay with my brother Sparky (he's an electrician), and mooch food from various relatives. This is not the first time she's traveled on her own – she went back to Michigan for a wrestling tournament when she was in high school – but it's still an adventure.

Grandma and Grandpa will be happy to see her. Spending time with my brother's boisterous, rowdy, somewhat overwhelming brood will be… different… They're all good people; they're just very… large. They're big people, with big personalities, big voices. When you get several of them together, they really fill a space. She's an only child, from a generally quiet family. She can hold her own, I have no doubt. It'll just be different. Which is good. What would be the point of going someplace if it's the same as the place you left? Besides, other people's weddings are always fun.

Scarecrow and I get to try out the whole empty nest thing. It's still too soon to say how we're going to like it. She's only been gone a day.

Oh Say Can You See…

2011-07-05T16:53:00.000-07:00

Oh say can you see
By the dawn's early light…

A day late and a dollar short, as usual. I hope any blogger buddies in the US had a festive fourth of July weekend, and I hope your dogs have recovered from the fireworks.

Our narrow dogs seem pretty blasé about the whole fireworks thing, which is odd considering how they can be totally wigged out by much more commonplace occurrences. Like running the vacuum cleaner. Or the power washer.

The other day Scarecrow was using the power washer to blast the moss off the roof. We knew Bareit had issues with this device, but his last experience with it was a while ago, and we thought he might've settled in to where it wouldn't be a problem anymore.

It was still a problem.

After Scarecrow went to work with the power washer, he realized Bareit was nowhere to be found. Even after the latest round of repairs and improvements, it seems he can still get through the fence whenever he wants. So Scarecrow went off to look for him.

A few minutes later, Bareit wandered through the office. I figured Scarecrow found him, let him into the house, and went back out to find out how he was getting through the fence.

A few minutes later, Scarecrow came in. He came back from looking for Bareit to find the click front door standing open, and both Bareit and Jasmine running around in front of the neighbor's house. Apparently, Bareit came home, let himself in, and in doing so, let Jasmine out. Fortunately, they were both very relieved to see Scarecrow, and raced him to the door.

They're never boring. And at least they're not afraid of fireworks.

As Dragon NaturallySpeaking interprets our national anthem:

José can you see
By the dawn's early light…

O Canada!

2011-07-02T17:26:00.000-07:00

O Canada!
Our home and native land!

A day late and a dollar short, as usual. I hope all you Canadian blogger buddies had a festive Canada Day. Happy Canada Day. Merry Canada Day. Whatever greeting is appropriate on the occasion.

In Scarecrow's youth, his family always spent summers in a cottage his grandfather built on the north arm of Lake Gowganda in northern Ontario, making an annual trek up from Florida. We went up to the cottage a couple-three times when we lived in Michigan, although I'm afraid Tuffy was too young to remember. Since we could only manage two weeks of vacation, we tried to predict (with only limited success) when the wild blueberries would be ripe, and schedule our trip to coincide with the height of the season. What do you think? Late July? If they haven't had much sun, maybe they'll ripen late. Maybe early August would be better? We haven't been back to Gowganda since we moved to Seattle, distance and logistics and disability issues being what they are. It comes to mind this time of year. We can visit vicariously, but it's not the same.

As it happens, I've been Stalking Dead Canadians lately.

Scarecrow's mother's family comes from Ontario. After some digging around, it was starting to look like some of them arrived in Canada when British loyalists decamped from the colonies around the time of the American Revolutionary war. Thinking that was kind of cool, I told Scarecrow what I'd turned up. His response left something to be desired on the shock and awe front. Apparently family lore said something to that effect, so he wasn't surprised. Seriously. When I tell you I managed to track down a guy named "William Bates" in Burlington, Ontario, in 1800, you could at least pretend to be impressed.

I got to tell you, it's a little weird reading about the French and Indian war from the French perspective, or about the American Revolution from the Canadian point of view. Refreshing, and interesting, for sure, but weird.

O Canada!
Our home and native land!

Summer Solstice

2011-06-21T14:35:00.000-07:00

Summertime,
and the livin' is easy
Fish are jumpin',
cotton is high
Your daddy's rich,
and your momma's good-lookin'
So hush, little baby,
don't you cry

I always feel like I should celebrate the solstice by being up in time to watch the sunrise. That would mean getting up before 5 a.m., but considering that for years – decades – I got up at 5:30 every morning to go to work, it shouldn't be that big a deal. Still, I haven't managed it yet, and didn't do it this morning.

I can probably still be up to watch the sunset at 9:10 p.m. That will have to do.

Kind of thin, as celebrations go, but from here on in, the days are getting shorter. Why would I want to celebrate that?

Today is very nice, though. Blue skies, 68°, lunch outside on the deck with a really good book about the Canadian frontier and the last brownie left from a mini-late-birthday visit with a friend last weekend.

Nice.

The e-Library

2011-06-18T16:51:00.000-07:00

The thing I really like about checking an ebook out of the library is that when it's due, it just goes away. No pestering Scarecrow to return it, no overdue fines, nothing like that. I'm ashamed to admit that it's saved me a chunk of change. This is a very fine thing.

The thing I really don't like about checking an ebook out of the library is that when it's due, it just goes away. Even if I'm part way through and really want to finish it and I can't renew it because I know there are holds on it so I know this is evil but I want to just pay the fine and hang onto it for an extra day. Or maybe two. But I can't. When it's due, it just goes away. I have to put another hold on it and get back in line. By the time I can check it out again, I'll have forgotten where I left off.

On the bright side, if you'd call it that, by the time I can check it out again, it'll be like a brand-new book. I must've liked it, because I wanted to finish it. So there's that. I don't know that my pathetic reading retention is an MS thing. I'm more inclined to think it's an easily distracted old lady thing. In either event, I can reread my favorite books, and enjoy them all over again. I can even reread mysteries, and not remember who done it. It's a silver lining type of thing.

Also, getting back to ebooks, the whippets have yet to come up with a way to chew them up. It's not that they're all that bad about chewing up books. They've only totally decimated one hardback, and nibbled around the edges of a couple of paperbacks. The commute to Scarecrow's new job way down at the other end of town makes for a long day for them to be all alone, poor dears. Of course the paperbacks were ours. The hardback was a library book.

Where was I going with this?

In a comment on an earlier post, which I know I should respond to but rarely do, Donna at Arranging Shoes wanted to know how I manage the reading thing anyway. Here's the scoop.

I used to use the eraser end of a pencil to turn pages on a real paper book. Sometimes, at a good time, on a good day, with a cooperative book, I can still do that. Sometimes I have to ask Scarecrow to turn pages for me, and amazingly, sometimes he's willing to interrupt what he's doing every minute and a half to do that. I've got to say that struggling to turn a page, or having to ask someone to turn it for me and waiting while they do that, does not do good things for my reading comprehension. Yeah I know, excuses, excuses. But some books just aren't available in a digital format, and won't be anytime soon. You do what you gotta do.

For digital books, I really like the whole eReader idea. Books and gadgets – what's not to like? I wish I still had enough manual dexterity to hold one and make it go, but I don't.

Audio books can be nice, especially when they're read by somebody good. My problem with them is that when I'm distracted, or stop paying attention, or fall asleep, the reader goes merrily on without me. Finding where I left off has not been easy. With a real paper book, or even an ebook, I can always pick it up where I stopped turning pages.

So mostly I read ebooks on my laptop. And wait to get to the top of the library hold queue.

Three O'clocks

2011-06-15T13:53:00.000-07:00

Must be a good day for bugs. Or maybe a bad day, I guess, if you're a bug. A brown creeper and a red-breasted sapsucker have been working over the tree trunk in front of my window. There were showers last night and it's still damp outside. Bareit's head was all wet when he came in from the yard. I wonder what he was doing out there.

What is it about three o'clock, anyway? At three o'clock in the afternoon, I can barely keep my eyes open. Not that it matters – one of the few cool things about not having a day job is that if I fall asleep at my desk, nobody cares. It's more of a problem at three o'clock in the morning, when I'm wide awake. And thinking about, you know, stuff.

Getting up is not an option. I'd have to wake Scarecrow up to do that, and he does have a day job. It's bad enough that I wake him up a couple of times a night to turn me over; let's not make it any worse. Since I can't toss and turn, I'm not going to wake him up doing that. So I'll just think about stuff.

I didn't have anything monumental, or even all that interesting, to think about. I usually don't. We recently watched The Triplets of Belleville, which is a French animated feature. No subtitles required, even for those of us whose French aspires to inadequacy – there's no dialogue. A synopsis of the plot sounds pretty wacky: a woman helps her grandson grow up to be a bicycle racer. When he is kidnapped, she rescues him with the help of his dog and three women she meets. It's about family and friendship, and what people will do for those they love, and all that stuff. And it has the coolest soundtrack ever! We watched it twice before we returned it, but I want to watch it again. Maybe I'll get it for Scarecrow for Father's Day.

I'm bad that way. I admit it. On festive occasions, Scarecrow usually gets gifts that I want myself. I was going to get him a coffee roaster, but decided that was a little obvious since he doesn't really drink coffee. Ditto the birdfeeder, since he's not much into birds. The DVD I think I can get away with.

I could think about something to scribble on my blog. I could write about waking up at three o'clock in the morning; the implications of having my circadian rhythm reversed, because I'm asleep at the one in the afternoon and wide-awake at the one in the morning. That's the kind of idea that seems pretty clever at three o'clock in the morning.

Later in the day I find it doesn't seem nearly so promising.

The Odd-Fish

2011-06-07T15:02:00.000-07:00

"As an Odd-Fish, it is not my job to be right", said Sir Oort. "It is my job to be wrong in new and exciting ways."
-- James Kennedy, The Order of Odd-Fish

I need to read this book. I don't know anything else about it, but I obviously need to read it. I mean, really, how could I not? I've never heard of an Odd-Fish, but Sir Oort is obviously talking about me.

So many books, so little time.

The problem with sites like goodreads.com, and with the King County Library System online catalog for that matter, is that there are so many books! I can spend hours browsing, hopelessly adding even more books to my already hopelessly long list of things to read, using time I could spend reading to make an already hopeless problem even worse. Clever, no?

So I have a gloomy afternoon with nothing much else going on. I think I'll spend it making my Books to Read list a few pages shorter.

Stalking Dead People

2011-06-04T14:38:00.000-07:00

I was wrong. I don't often admit my mistakes – I'm kind of bad that way – but I was wrong, and Uncle Al was right. My attempt in an earlier post to assign a different gender to my Aunt Ginny was pretty much a total failure. My cousin said Aunt Virginia, who is his godmother and whom he has known well all his life, is definitely the third urchin from the right in the photograph, and definitely a girl.

My cousin sent along another photo, which was obviously taken the same time, at the same place, of the same kids.

In this one, the child in question is standing up. She's still wearing shorts and my cousin admits she still looks like a boy, but he says he's seen many pictures of Virginia as a youngster, and that's definitely her. Hard to say. Kids that age are kind of androgynous-looking. But I'll take his word for it.

A picture of some of the same kids, cleaned up and dressed up, taken a couple of days later, is a little more convincing, although I can't help but wonder how long it took to get them cleaned up and how long they stayed that way.

This one, just so you know, is my mom, Aunt Virginia, and Aunt Alma. Uncle Chuck, the oldest of the kids, is sitting in a chair on the porch.

It turns out Uncle Al had an advantage when it came to dating the photographs; my cousin said the date was on the back. Duh.

I've been kind of obsessed with old family stuff lately. It started as a half-assed interest in constructing a family tree. When I knew I was going to have to retire from my day job, I started putting together a list of things I could do to keep busy if I got bored. Really, it was no stupider than a lot of other things on that list. Then, because I'm lazy and it was easy, I followed my mother's family back to 17th-century Québec. And got stuck there. Not so much who is related to who, but what was life like in New France in 1650? What did they do? Where did they live? What did they eat? What did they wear? Why would anybody in old France want to go there?

Tuffy calls it Stalking Dead People.

For example, the Louis Badaillac dit Laplante mentioned on this marker is our seventh great grand uncle. He must've been quite a character. In February 1701 he was banned from Montréal for six months and had to pay 200 livres fine for selling liquor to the Iroquois. In 1703, he and his brother (Gilles, our seventh great-grandfather) were in court again for the same thing.

I know. I really need to get out more.

The Physics of Whippets

2011-05-25T18:36:00.000-07:00

Bareit – formally known as Summit Grin and Bare It – is four years old today.

When he came here, he was not yet two years old. He'd been in five different homes – all kind, loving homes, but that's still a lot of different places to live in two years.

He was a little anxious and clingy; understandably so. Ernie, our unflappable greyhound, was a steadying influence and helped him settle in.

When Ernie died about this time last year, we became a two whippet family. Jasmine is sweet, charming, submissive, insecure, a little neurotic, butterfly-brained, and in constant motion (we call her Brownie). Bareit became the older dog, the one showing the new kid how things are done. He has grown into the role. He's handsome, confident, secure, and not nearly as naughty as he used to be. He still likes to roughhouse, which Jasmine does not, and he likes to play Chase Me, which Scarecrow was never very good at but Jasmine enjoys very much. He still likes to take his toys, and the occasional odd item of clothing, outside to play with, and leave wherever he happens to lose interest.

Bareit is still teaching us about the whippet concept of space and time. I don't understand how a whippet can be on either side of a fence, seemingly at will. We're still working on that.

Whippets believe it is possible for two bodies to occupy the same space at the same time. It wasn't possible to demonstrate this concept until we had two whippets, because Ernie wasn't having any of it.

We don't understand it, but find it hugely entertaining.

Happy birthday, little buddy.

Seeing Red

2011-05-24T15:53:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of traffic on the trunks of the black cottonwoods outside my window. Seems like everyone's wearing red today.

There's the male Robin who was driving the whippets crazy a couple of weeks ago. He finally stopped attacking the bird reflected in the kitchen window, found a mate, and built a nest in one of the trees on the west side of the house. They've been a pretty constant presence, busily doing the baby bird thing.

A Red-breasted nuthatch put in an appearance. I haven't seen (or heard) them around here much before. Their red breast is more of a pale rusty color, but whatever. They're very handsome little birds, and they have at least as good a claim to a red breast as a Robin, whose breast is more of an orangey brown. Or maybe a brownish orange.

Then there was a Red-breasted sapsucker, a bird I don't remember ever seeing before although I don't know why not, because they're common enough around here. Now that's red, sure enough – candy apple red – but you don't notice it on his breast so much as all over his head. I guess the name "red-headed woodpecker" was already taken.

The Hairy woodpecker who showed up to work over a gnarly bit of trunk is a fairly regular visitor. It was the female this time so she didn't actually have any red on her, but a male would have some.

Ditto for the female Anna's hummingbird who has been around from time to time lately. A male Anna's would have some serious red.

Makes me want to go put on my University of Georgia T-shirt, the one that says "Junkyard Dogs." I bought it 33 years ago when I was in Athens for an American Society of Mammalogists meeting. I'm pretty sure I still have it – I don't turn my closet over very often, I guess. It's old, but it's very red.

It would be a good day for one of our Pileated woodpeckers to stop by. I haven't seen one, but the day's not over yet.

(I wish I had great photos of all these guys, but I don't. I don't even have not-great photos. The best I can do is to send you to All About Birds. Lame, I know. Sorry.)

Maybe tomorrow will be chestnut day. There's the Rufous-sided towhee who has been picking disgusting looking things out of the leaf detritus on top of the shed, and the Chestnut-backed chickadee, my new favorite bird of all time. On a scale of cute from 1 to 10, they're an 11. And maybe a Rufous hummingbird. It could happen.

You've got to get excited about the little things, don't you know.

Uncle Al Must Be Nuts

2011-05-22T14:46:00.000-07:00

Ever since my previous post, I've been studying (some would say obsessing over) that picture of my mother's brothers and sisters. The more I look at it, the more I'm convinced that my Uncle Al can't be right. Those kids can't be who he says they are.

If you're bored by my fixation on old family photos, now would be a good time to go read something else.

For one thing, it looks to me like the third kid from the right in that photo is a boy. Uncle Al says it's my Aunt Virginia, but if so, she's got a boy's haircut, and she's wearing shorts. If this is 1927, give or take a couple of years, girls don't wear pants, even to play outside.

Another reason I think Uncle Al must have his siblings scrambled is that there's another photo, with some of the same kids in it. I don't know when it was taken, but I'd guess maybe a year or so later. In this one, I'm pretty sure I know who's who.

In the center is my grandmother, Helen Catherine, looking, if I may say so, like a woman who's had twelve children. Around her, clockwise from the top:

Marie Helen (my mother)
Virginia (scowling at camera)
James Carl
Harriet Ann (sitting next to g'ma)
Corrine Audrey
Pat Mae (on grandma's lap)
Alfred Paul

The Alfred Paul, in this picture, looks very much like the third kid from the right in the other photo. The one Uncle Al said was a girl. I don't think it was a girl. I'm thinking it was Uncle Al.

If that's true, the other picture couldn't have been taken in 1927, because Alfred Paul wasn't born until March of 1928. So I'm back to not knowing who the kids are in the other picture, but here's my guess: let's say, instead of 1927, it was taken around 1934. Let's say all the kids in the picture were siblings, not neighbors. And let's say that the girl 4th from the right, scowling at the camera, is Virginia, because my mom says that in every family picture she ever saw, Virginia was scowling at the camera. I'm pretty sure the girl third from the left is my Aunt Harriet, and despite Uncle Al's assertions to the contrary, the boy third from the right is Alfred Paul. The others might be:

Pat Mae, about 1
Fred (about 18)
Harriet Ann (17)
Marie Helen (13)
George Francis (15)
Virginia (11)
Alfred Paul (6)
James Carl (8)
Corrine Audrey (2)

This still doesn't quite work. Some of the ages don't look right, and some of the kids in the first picture don't seem like they could be the kid in the second picture just a couple years later. But that's OK. I'm not sure I'm ready to have the mystery solved. I kind of like looking at the picture and wondering who those kids were.

I really need to get out more.

Another Exciting Day

2011-05-19T17:05:00.000-07:00

OK, I give up. Waiting for something exciting or noteworthy to write about – even if I set the bar for "exciting" or "noteworthy" pretty low – makes for a pretty sparse blog. Never let it be said that not having anything to say kept me from saying anything. You've been warned.

The latest issue of the Greyhound Pets, Inc. newsletter is off to the printer. I wish this was a project I could get more excited about. Maybe I just don't play well with others. Still, the point is not to have a good time, it's to help out GPI. Other people seem to be happy enough with the result. So, OK. That's done.

Some while ago one of my cousins sent me a photo of some of my mom's siblings when they were kids.

I had never seen it before, so I sent it to my mom to see if she could tell me who was in it. My mom couldn't remember where the picture might have been taken, and wasn't sure which kid was which. In her defense, she really can't see very well anymore, and it was a long time ago, and 11 siblings are a lot to keep track of. I tried to figure it out starting with the birth sequence (boy, boy, boy, girl, boy, girl, girl, girl, boy, boy, girl, girl) and the difference in ages, but just couldn't make it fit.

It remained a mystery until my cousin, who still lives in Ohio near my (our) Uncle Al, found time to visit him and ask about the picture. According to Al, it was taken September 9, 1927. At the time, he said, the family lived at 1525 Milburn Ave. The photo was taken in front of the neighbor's house, at 1523 Milburn Ave. The reason I couldn't match all of the faces with names on the family roster is that they don't all belong there – two of the kids in the picture were neighbors, and two of the kids in the family weren't in the picture. They are, from left to right (because I know you really want to know this):

James Carl, 1 yr.
Edward Lewis, 13
Harriet Ann, 10
name and age unknown, neighbor
Verne, age unknown, neighbor
Marie Helen, 6 (my mother, since I know you're wondering)
Virginia, 4
George Francis, 8
Alma Louise, 2

At the time this was taken the other two boys in the family were Charles Ernest, who would have been 16, and Fred, who would've been 12.

In the years after this moment was saved for posterity, my grandmother had three more children, rounding out an even dozen, and replacing the original mystery (who are these kids?) with another. My Uncle Al wasn't born until six months after this picture was taken. So how did he know all this stuff?

If this is what passes for exciting, I think maybe I need to get out more.

The Mom Thing

2011-05-08T18:23:00.000-07:00

For the last couple of days, I've been watching a family drama taking place outside my window. A fledgling Black-capped Chickadee has been trying to convince a parent that it really still needs to be fed. It's a pretty good flyer now, and it's as big as the adult, so it's not very convincing when it sidles up next to the adult (I find myself thinking of this as the female, although I know both parents feed the young), flutters its wings, opens its hungry little mouth, and gives it the sad little starving Chickadee eyes.

The adult obviously thinks this has been going on just about long enough. Most of the time, the adult hops away. The fledgling follows, with more gaping and begging. The adult flutters to another branch. The fledgling follows. Occasionally, with an air (I know I'm being anthropomorphic here) of exasperation, the adult stuffs something into the gaping fledgling maw.

Seems like if the youngster spent the same amount of energy rustling up its own food as it does begging, it would get more to eat, for less effort. But you can't tell a kid anything.

I know what it's like.

Yesterday, Tuffy asked me how they charge for text messages on her cell phone. Um, beats the heck out of me?

She waited for me to continue. I resisted the urge to do so.

At one time, I was the one who sorted through all the eight bazillion combinations of cell phones and plans and carriers, tried to guess which would work best for us, signed us up, and paid the bills every month. Eventually, however, I stopped using my cell phone at all, and Scarecrow only used his in emergencies, at which time he would inevitably find that he had either left it at home, or forgotten to charge it. Since Tuffy was the only one using the darned thing, it seemed reasonable that she should take over its care and feeding. She can get whatever phone she wants, whatever plan she wants. Not my problem. That was a couple of months ago.

At one time, I'd have offered to track down the information she needed. This time, I didn't do that.

I finally explained that if she wanted to find out how she was billed for text messages, she could do the same thing I would do – rummage around on the carrier's website.

She whined (it was subtle, but it was definitely whining) that the website was confusing. Imagine the fluttering wings, hungry little mouth, and sad little Chickadee eyes.

Yup, I said. It can be confusing. We waited to see who would talk first.

If you still can't figure it out, I said, pick up the phone. Call and ask somebody. You're a clever girl. You can do this as well as I can. I wasn't born knowing how to do stuff, and I didn't take care of these chores because I enjoyed them; I did them because they had to be done. There's a lot of that in life. You can do it.

That fledgling Chickadee is still out there harassing its mom (I know it's the mom; I just know it), and not getting much for the effort.

I guess one of the hard things about being a mom is learning to let go; teaching them they can fly without you. As Mother's Day presents go, realizing that your kid can do that is the best one ever.

Mayday! Mayday!!

2011-05-02T10:10:00.000-07:00

Hal an' tow, jolly rumble-o,
Leap an' caper all befor' the day-o!

Oh wait. That was yesterday.

Well, I really did imagine pulling out the old Morris kit, putting on the vest, tying on the bells, and dancing the sun up. I must've done a good job of it, too, because we had a beautiful spring day yesterday. Today, of course, it's back to being gloomy and gray and leaky. And I've got the Fools Jig tune stuck in my head. Appropriately and, apparently, permanently.

Scarecrow spent the weekend ridin' fence. I always thought that was a chore associated with containing livestock, but maybe the phrase 'little dogies' pertains to whippets, too. They had all day yesterday to test his repairs. Of course they didn't, because we were home. They were quite happy to hang out in a sunny spot in the yard with the rest of the pack. Today will be the test.

When Scarecrow came in, grubby and sweaty, from working in the yard, I realized how much I miss being able to do that. Not fixing fence – that's never a fun job – but generally grubbing around outside, getting dirty. Running or hiking or riding a bike, and coming in sweaty enough to have to quarantine my clothes. Pulling weeds! Death to blackberries! (If you're not from around here, Himalayan blackberry is an invasive species that is attempting to use the Pacific Northwest as a base from which to take over the planet.) Death to English ivy! (Ditto.) In addition to being cathartic, ripping out weeds is a great way to get dirty. Planting vegetables and herbs and flowers. Watering and weeding and sticking my fingers in the dirt for no reason at all. Having to leave muddy shoes at the door, and use a brush to scrub the dirt out from under fingernails. It's hard to come up with a way to get really dirty these days. I'll have to work on that.

Happy belated Bealtaine!

It's Not Just Me

2011-04-30T17:45:00.000-07:00

My calendar has lost a couple of days. April ends on the 28th, which is a Thursday. The first of May isn't until Sunday. Aren't there supposed to be 30 days in April?

I'm so glad it's not just me.

Before I had to retire from my day job, it was hard to get too far out of sync with the rest of the world. Five days of work, two days of weekend. I might have to stop and think about whether it was Tuesday or Wednesday, or whether it was Wednesday or Thursday, but it didn't usually happen that whole days went missing.

Even when I was just tagging along with Scarecrow to Bob's Books, he worked a pretty regular Monday through Friday schedule.

His new job has a lot more potential for working at home. In fact, in his first month, there's only been one week when he went in to the office every day. Last week, he only went in one day out of five. While this is great for a lot of reasons, I find it easy to lose track of what the heck day it is.

It doesn't help when the calendar is missing two days. I looked at that darn thing for an embarrassingly long time before I realized that it wasn't just me. The calendar was wrong.

It's OK, really. I only get it for the greyhounds. I buy a Celebrating Greyhounds wall calendar every year from Greyhound Pets, Inc. They make a little money, and I get to look at nice pictures of greyhounds all year. It's a way to get my greyhound fix, since we (temporarily) don't have any retired racers hanging around the house. If I just wanted to know what day it was, I could always check my computer.

Duh.

A Lesson You Don't Want Me to Learn

2011-04-20T17:08:00.000-07:00

I think it was last December that I noticed the control on my power chair was acting a little wonky. It took me a while to convince myself that it wasn't just my imagination. Mike the Wheelchair Guy first checked it out in January. He confirmed that it was, in fact, wonky. After fiddling and plugging and unplugging and much head scratching, he decided that maybe Mike the Permobile Guy better have a look at it.

So, OK. We made an appointment with Mike the Permobile Guy. He confirmed that it was, in fact, wonky. He fiddled and plugged and unplugged and scratched his head, and decided that the problem was the control unit. Unfortunately my chair, a 2007 model, uses older electronics than they're putting on newer chairs, and it might take some time to come up with a replacement.

That was in January. Now it's April.

I started sending polite e-mails requesting status updates last month. The first polite e-mail to Mike the Wheelchair Guy got an auto-reply saying he was on vacation for a week, but would contact me when he returned. Not wanting to be pushy, I waited for his reply for another week after he got back, but never got one. Hey, I've been there. Your e-mail box can get pretty full when you're out for a spell. Stuff gets buried. It happens.

So I sent another polite e-mail requesting a status update. This time Mike the Wheelchair Guy replied, saying that Mike the Permobile Guy had finally found a control with the older electronics, and he would be calling me early the following week to set up a time to try it out. Mike the Wheelchair Guy would be seeing Mike the Permobile Guy at a conference in Las Vegas the following weekend, and would "remind him of his commitment to getting this problem resolved." Yeah, right.

So it gets to be Thursday of the following week, and I haven't heard anything. I don't want to be pushy. It probably takes a couple of days to recover from a Vegas conference. But on Thursday I sent another polite e-mail, asking if there's anything I can do to get this moving along.

Mike the Wheelchair Guy replies by cc'ing me on an e-mail he sends to Mike the Permobile Guy, asking what's going on. Very helpful. I don't know if Mike the Wheelchair Guy got any response from Mike the Permobile Guy, but I sure didn't.

When I still hadn't heard anything by Tuesday of the following week (that would be yesterday), I was starting to get a little cranky. I pointed out to both Mikes that we started working on this problem in January, and now it's April, and my chair is still broke. My insurance is different now, which is going to make all this more of a pain than it would otherwise be. I'm tired of being nice. I'm ready to start rattling cages.

I got a call from Mike the Permobile Guy a couple of hours later. He made an appointment to come and try the new control box the following afternoon (that would be today). The timing is fortuitous, because Scarecrow was planning to work at home anyway, so we won't have to take time off work to get this done. Finally.

Wait wait wait… not so fast. The appointment was for 2:00. Around 2:45, he calls and says he's running late. Can we do this tomorrow?

Um, not really. We're not usually home in the middle of the day. It just happened that we could do it today. Tomorrow is not a good day.

Mike the Permobile Guy has no idea how lucky he is that Scarecrow answered the phone instead of me. (Actually, it's a pretty good bet, since I can't physically answer the phone unless it rings on my laptop, and he was calling our home number. So scarecrow always answers the phone. But still.) I'm tired of being nice. You have no idea how much of an effort that is for me. I would have used Discouraging Words. I would have let him see the real me, and friends, it would have been a conversation he would not soon forget.

I don't know the end of the story. I don't know whether Scarecrow can arrange to work from home tomorrow, or if we have to try to find another time to get the chair fixed.

I do know that the lesson I take home from this is that as long as you try to be nice, as long as you're polite, as long as you're not pushy, you'll be at the bottom of everybody's priority list. It's only when you speak up, make it clear that you're tired of waiting around for people to get their fudging thumbs out of their ears, that you expect them to get their butts in gear and get it done, that things start to happen.

Don't be so nice. That's a lesson I can learn, but trust me, it's better if I don't.

Purpose in Life

2011-04-18T15:50:00.000-07:00

I have never spent much time worrying about my Purpose in Life. I have no philosophical bent, and I'm not religious. And, I admit, it's partly because I'm shallow and intellectually lazy. But I like questions that I can answer, or at least questions that can be answered, by somebody. The Grand Imponderables are not something I'm inclined to spend a lot of time pondering. I don't know if there's a Purpose or a Reason. I'm here. I'll just go with that. It works for me.

Imagine my amazement to realize that I do have a Purpose in Life. I occupy an important place in the grand scheme of things. I play a role in the great cosmic events that determine the direction of the universe.

I allow Scarecrow to use the HOV lane.

In case you're fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with Seattle traffic, it's a mess. A lot of cars want to go the same place at the same time, and where ever you are, there's water between where you are, and where you want to be. Scarecrow's new commute takes him through the thick of it. Every day. Twice a day.

The HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lane, reserved for transit vehicles or cars carrying two or more people, has so few qualified users that these fortunate few can zip past the numberless horde, as they wait more-or-less patiently in line to reach their destination. If it weren't for me, Scarecrow would be waiting in line with the rest of them.

You might think this is a job that can be done by one of those life-size inflatable dolls, but the requirements are, in fact, considerably more rigorous, as many drivers with inflatable passengers have found out. The police expect a high occupancy vehicle to be occupied by at least two people who are breathing, and have a pulse. I can do that.

I have a Purpose in Life. Who knew?

Return to Jurassic Park

2011-04-12T15:54:00.000-07:00

When Tuffy got home from class yesterday, she found a note on the door saying that our dog had been running loose in the street, and had nearly been hit by a car. Bareit, clearly the subject of the note and clearly still loose, greeted Tuffy at the front door.

Crap.

If there's a way to keep this darned dog in when he wants to be out, we obviously haven't figured out how to do it. Although I admit our fence needs work, it was good enough to keep two greyhounds safely contained for three years. If Bareit wants out, he's out in about five minutes. He's been over it, under it, and, most recently, through it. Fortunately, he usually runs to the front door and waits to be let in. Sometimes he doesn't, and that's bad. It makes me queasy to think about him running in the street.

When I lived in Laingsburg, Michigan, on any crisp fall afternoon I could count on Maggie Blue to make a break for it. She was an English setter, and she lived for birds. If I wasn't going to take her out to look for them, she'd go by herself. We lived on 5 acres, surrounded by corn fields amply populated by ringnecked pheasants. There was a very entertaining pen full of quail behind house, and a bunch of fat, slow chickens. The road that went by our house got little traffic, and although there was little reason for her to go that way, I was still terrified that Maggie and a car would somehow wind up in the same place at the same time. (Never happened. She moved with me to Lansing, and later to Seattle, where she lived to a ripe old age.)

The street we live on now isn't the autobahn, but it carries a lot more traffic than a road in rural Michigan. And really, it only takes one car, coming along at the right time, to make a dog seriously flat.

Scarecrow erected a temporary barricade last night, confining the wandering whippet to the least permeable part of the yard. Seriously, if he can get out of this, I really don't know what else we can do. He won't get as much exercise, but at least he'll be alive to get fat.

The little s#!t.

Sensory Deprivation

2011-04-10T18:25:00.000-07:00

Scarecrow just took the screens off the windows in our office at home. It's still not warm enough to have them open, and you can see out a lot better without screens on. Duh.

The view isn't particularly spectacular. Close-up, there are the trunks of a couple of large but scraggly black cottonwoods. Since the house sits up above the street, the window looks across the street to Swamp Creek Park. As the name suggests, it's not a lawn-and-rose-bushes kind of park (although there is a patch of grass with some picnic tables further in). From here, I'm mostly looking across the street into the canopies of assorted deciduous trees, which are just beginning to think about leafing out, and a couple of red cedars. There's some seriously ugly fencing that doesn't even do a particularly good job of keeping the dogs in, not that anything seems to do a particularly good job of keeping the dogs in, but the window mostly looks across the top of it and birds sometimes stop there to check out the neighborhood.

We do get some good birds. Nothing exotic, not that I would recognize anything exotic, but close-up views of birds that like tree trunks. Downy woodpeckers, brown creepers. The occasional pileated woodpecker. Robins and juncos and towhees and Steller's jays and chickadees and Bewick's wrens and golden crowned kinglets and similar Little Brown Birds. And crows. And squirrels. I can see the weather outside, and tell whether it's day or night.

There are no windows in the bunker at Gloria's Books and Adult Day Care Center.

When last I worked at a real job in a real office, the 'windows' in my office looked out on a hallway. I called it the Burrow. For half the year, it was dark when I went in and dark when I came out. I never knew whether the sun ever came up or not. I felt like a gopher. Still, there were people and meetings and things to do and background noise and a coffee pot in the kitchen. There were pictures on the wall, and a whiteboard, and my greyhound calendar, and a bookcase, and geological layers of assorted desk detritus.

The bunker is different. It opens off of a dark interior hallway, way the heck at the other end of the warehouse from most of the office activity. One wall is cocoa brown, just a little darker than the walls of our office at home. The other three walls are that institutional not-quite-yellow color. There is nothing on any of the walls except dings and gouges, which I did not put there but which I'm sure my chair will make more of. In this big empty room, there's a little table against one wall, with my laptop on it.

Was it something I said, do you think?

Seriously. It's quiet. That's good. I can put up my greyhound calendar. I'm connected to the 'net, so I've got books and tunes and movies and blogger buddies and whatever else. Scarecrow's got a job, and I've got a place to be while he's there. This is all really good. Really good.

But I gotta tell ya, it sure makes me appreciate my window.

Gloria's Books and Adult Day Care Center

2011-04-02T15:50:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Scarecrow started his new job at Gloria's Books and Adult Day Care Center. It's exactly like his previous job at Bob's Books and Adult Day Care Center, except it's more than twice as far away, in the other direction. Bob even works at the new place. It was just like they never left. Bob even wiped out an entire database, and threw away the backup tapes. Just like a normal day at Bob's Books. (Bob is the sweetest man you could imagine, but he belongs in a home for the technologically impaired.)

Just like the bizarre arrangement we developed at Bob's Books, I went in to work with Scarecrow. He helped me with lunch and bathroom breaks, as necessary. Elsewise, I just tried to stay out of the way.

I'm embarrassed at the lengths to which Gloria has gone to find a spot for me. She had obviously given it a lot of thought, and offered me a couple of choices. Choices! I'm happy to be allowed to sit in a corner, out of the way, and you're giving me choices? After a tour of the facility, we decided I would take up residence in a big empty room waaaaaaaaaaay at the other end of the (really big) warehouse. It's a veritable crip suite, as it's right across from an accessible bathroom, with nobody much else around. I heard a couple of people talking, but didn't see anyone else all day. I certainly don't feel like I'm under foot. There are no feet to be under. Feet under which to be. Whatever. I hooked up to the wireless 'net, and we're good to go. How cool is that?

My new hangout is, as I said, a big room with no windows, a warehouse-high ceiling, and concrete warehouse floor. It's warehouse temperature, which this time of year is still pretty brisk. It feels kind of like a bunker. Gloria brought in a rug for the concrete warehouse floor. Seriously. I can't believe this.

I wish I could still use binoculars. The warehouse backs up to a wetland, and I bet there are some good birds out there.

So, that's it. Who knew there were two book distributors in the greater Seattle area that would let an employee bring a disabled partner to work? Well I guess, as an old friend of mine used to say, 'You don't ask, you don't get.' We're in.

Sharing the Pain

2011-03-31T19:05:00.000-07:00

Many of the websites I visit and the blogs I read are MS-related. Most of the time, I don't find them all that depressing. For one thing, a lot of the time they're not about MS. These people do have lives, after all. But even when they're writing about MS, reading them doesn't usually make me feel depressed. Yeah, having MS is crummy and I'm sorry that anyone has it. I wish I didn't have it myself, truth be told. I don't like reading that anyone's having a flareup or that their symptoms are getting worse. It might make me feel sad, but not depressed. The other day, however, I ran across a blog that I found profoundly depressing.

It's written by a 19-year-old girl who takes care of her mother. The mother has MS, and is apparently pretty seriously disabled. The girl is torn between loving her mother, and hating having to take care of her. It was not easy reading. It left me feeling really depressed.

You see, everything she has to do for her mother, Scarecrow has to do for me, and more. How could he not hate it?

Thinking about it, I realized I mostly avoid reading caregiver blogs. It's so hard for me to put myself in caregiver shoes, to imagine doing that job. I don't know how they do it. It's just too hard, and it never stops. It's easier for me to deal with having MS myself than it is to think about what it does to my family. I have no choice, after all. They could walk away, but they don't.

I've tried to avoid having Tuffy take on caregiver chores, to the point of hurting her feelings sometimes, I think. I don't want her to feel that she has to stay here and take care of me, instead of living her own life. It's a luxury we have because Scarecrow takes care of me instead. If it weren't for him, my daughter might be the angry young woman writing that blog. Hating herself, for hating her mother.

So, there's that. It took a serious dose of old-timey music, a couple of books with absolutely no edifying content, and some really stupid movies to restore my normal grumpy, cynical outlook on life. Sometimes it helps to share pain. Sometimes shared pain just makes more people hurt, and what's the point of that?

Tomorrow is Scarecrow's first day at Gloria's Books and Adult Day Care. The adventure begins…

There's an Outside, Outside!

2011-03-25T19:07:00.000-07:00

I really need to get out more.

There are doors that go outside the house. I had almost forgotten.

It's been amazing. For the last three days in a row, the middle part of the day has been sunny and warm. And dry. Sunny and warm and dry enough to eat lunch outside. I had forgotten how much fun that was.

Scarecrow has been working on the deck, replacing some rotten boards. The month he had between jobs seemed like it would be a lot of time to work on household projects, but somehow there's less than a week left. How does that happen?

I'm bracing myself for when Scarecrow heads back to the salt mines, for all that I'm glad he's got a mine to go back to. It's not like I actually do any work when I go with him to work, but with the going and coming, it's a lot harder than staying home. So I'm enjoying these last few days of not-work. And if it's sunny and warm and dry enough to eat lunch outside, how cool is that?

Squirrel!

2011-03-20T16:30:00.000-07:00

I sound the alarm!
Sneaky squirrel on our fence,
Come to kill us all!

EeerrrrwwrrowrrRRRrrwroooowrr...

It's quite a sound. I can't really describe it. The first time I heard it, I thought one of the dogs was in great physical distress; perhaps being disemboweled. Now I know that's not it. It's more like, "I need to be someplace and I'm going as fast as I can, but it's not fast enough."

EeerrrrwwrrowrrRRRrrwroooowrr...

A moment before, the ever-vigilant whippets might've been perched on the couch, ceaselessly scanning the horizon for intruders. From this vantage point, they can maintain surveillance through both the dining room and living room windows. Although these dogs typically have the attention span of a gnat on crack, they will carry out this visual patrol for hours at a stretch, on the alert for the least glimpse of a tiny paw, or nose, or the flash of a tail.

EeerrrrwwrrowrrRRRrrwroooowrr...

When one of them spots their quarry, or thinks they do, their legs are scrambling at maximum speed before they even touch the ground. It takes a moment before their flailing limbs gain purchase on the hardwood floor. Imagine Wile E. Coyote, taking off across the desert in a cloud of dust. It's like that. They're here, then they're both heading for the door at maximum whippet speed, which is really very fast. It's like watching a flock of birds, or a school of fish. How do they all turn at the same time like that, without running into each other? It's like two dogs with one brain. Pretty impressive in one way, but in another way, maybe not so much. I mean, two dogs, with half a brain each?

EeerrrrwwrrowrrRRRrrwroooowrr...

They drift sideways as they take the turn from the dining room into the kitchen, scrabbling for traction on the much-abused hardwood. Imagine the Doppler effect on their doggy siren as they negotiate the chicane through the kitchen and laundry room, and jostle for position as they approach the (narrow) dog door. Not being able to keep up with a whippet I never actually see this part of the pursuit, but Jasmine, being at a significant weight disadvantage, probably gets bumped out of the way. The slap of the door flap, and they take off across the deck.

Thunderthunderthunderthunderthunderthunder…

By the time the whippets race the length of the house, yowling the whole way, the squirrel is long gone. I haven't actually heard the squirrels snicker and chortle from their place safely beyond whippet reach, but I'm sure they do.

A couple of minutes later our tireless guardians trot back inside, hop back up on their perch, and the whole thing starts again.

And there's the male robin who, impelled by his annual case of testosterone poisoning, is determined to drive his reflection in our kitchen window away from the territory he has claimed. Every time the dogs hear him bonk against the window, they go streaking outside to keep us safe from robins. Since the robin starts bonking against the window as soon as it's light enough for him to see the evil interloper, the ever-vigilant whippets begin the day by tearing outside, taking the sheets and blankets from the bed with them.

Ah, spring.

*Apologies for the riff on Doggy haiku

Learning about Lightning

2011-03-17T14:40:00.000-07:00

They say lightning never strikes twice in the same place. It makes sense, if you think about it. How much of a place is likely to be left, after it's been hit by lightning?

But me, I don't believe it anymore. Lightning can strike the same place twice. It may not happen very often, but it can happen. I know it can. Because it did.

On April 1, Scarecrow starts a new job that is absolutely amazingly like his old one. Who knew there were two book distributors in the Seattle area that would allow him to bring his disabled partner to work with him every day? It's way the heck the other end of town, so it will be the commute from hell, but how can you complain? Well, I can, of course. I can always complain. I'm really bad that way. But it beats the heck out of not having anything to complain about!

We still have some insurance problems to work out. Smaller problems than we were looking at before, for sure, but anything having to do with health insurance is always a pain in the butt. So there's that. But still.

Timing is everything, isn't it? Our old washing machine, which had been making an ominous clunking sound for some time, finally started smelling funny and filled the utility room with smoke. The new machine has many buttons, and can wash dog beds. Scarecrow likes.

Why Would You Want to Go Anywhere Else?

2011-03-02T18:26:00.000-08:00

It looks like the snow last week is going to be the highlight, weather-wise, of the next couple of weeks. This is looking gloomy, even for Seattle, even for this time of year. Gloom, gloom, gloom.

It was Scarecrow's birthday yesterday. His first day of unemployment, which took some of the fun out of it, but still, having a birthday is better than not having one. And it's not like birthdays seem to have much of any effect on him. Although, as a 'nom de blog', Scarecrow is a pretty good fit on many levels, I could just as well have gone with Peter Pan:

I'll never grow up,
never grow up,
never grow uu – UP,
not me!

And the Yakima Fruit Market is open for the season. It always opens around Scarecrow's birthday. And since it's between our house and the vet clinic and the library, we go by there often. (The vet clinic and the library are close together, which is convenient.)

Scarecrow is going to talk to somebody about a job tomorrow afternoon, which means a couple of things:

He had to get a haircut. Well, he may not have had to, really. I think this is going to be pretty informal, but still, it's the done thing. I can't remember when he last cut his hair. Probably when he was refereeing wrestling, when Tuffy was in junior high (she's now a junior at UW). Anyway it was long enough ago that he had a waist-length ponytail. 'Had' being the operative word here.
This meeting is way the heck the other end of town – several towns, in fact. It will take a couple of hours, at least, what with getting there and back, and Tuffy has to work, so we're doing the home care thing again. It's the safest thing to do. I need to get used to the idea. It's not really that bad. Really. I know I'll get used to it. Eventually.
The meeting might lead to a job. And that would be good.

More Odds Than Ends

2011-02-28T11:45:00.000-08:00

Blue sky and snow. We don't see too much of either of those things in Seattle, but last Wednesday we had both. Kind of unsettling.

When I don't feel like putting together a blog post, it's usually either because there hasn't been much going on, or a lot has been going on, and I haven't been able to sort it out. This time there has been lots going on, with the sorting definitely running way behind.

Most immediately, today is the last day for Bob's Books and Adult Day Care. Although the warehouse is looking pretty empty, there's still a lot of stuff to clear out. Scarecrow has worked here for almost 15 years, so not working here will definitely be a change, for him and for us. He's following up on a couple of job leads. If any of those turn into an offer, we'll see what we can do to make them work, day care-wise. In the meantime, we've got plenty of half-finished household projects to keep him busy.

A couple of people asked about the home-roasted coffee I mentioned in my last post. It was not roasted in our home, but in the home of one of the women who came to visit. Her husband has started buying green coffee beans in bulk, and roasting them himself. She says they bought a roaster, but that you can roast beans in the oven, or in a modified hot air corn popper. The end result, I've got to say, was pretty tasty.

I need to put some time in on the next issue of the Greyhound Pets, Inc. newsletter. Tell me again why I volunteered to write an article about intestinal parasites?

Scarecrow sent me this the other day:

Before you start in on me, I understand about disabilities that may not be apparent to the casual observer. I am not equating that with being lazy. Been there, done that, I get it. This is about people who really ought to know better than to park in a space reserved for people with a disability. Just a funny way to make the point, is all I'm sayin'.

That's about it. Lots of odd, not many ends.

A Very Ordinary Visit

2011-02-22T16:26:00.000-08:00

A couple of people I used to work with came by the house for a visit yesterday. We caught up on jobs and kids and whatever else might've changed, or stayed the same, over the past couple of years. We drank home-roasted coffee, shared some bakery goodies, and yammered for a couple of hours.

The coolest thing about it – the very coolest thing about it – was how ordinary it seemed.

Yeah, I was sitting in my hideous black monster robo-chair, drinking the home-roasted coffee through a straw from a cup in my Doc Ock cupholder. And Scarecrow had to feed me the white chocolate brownie.

But we talked about how the places we used to work weren't the same as they were when we started there. We reviewed, at considerable length, the shortcomings of distressing coworkers. We talked about travel in Africa and South America. (They talked; I listened.) We talked about kids in, and out of, college. We talked about the future of tech writing, or the lack of same.

I don't mind talking about MS or disability or any of that. I wasn't particularly trying to avoid it. There wasn't that "elephant in the room" feeling. At least, I don't think there was. It just didn't come up.

It was really cool.

And the white chocolate brownie was so totally worth it.

You Could Be a Dog on the Internet

2011-02-18T16:22:00.000-08:00

There was a piece on NPR the other morning about the difference between your Internet persona and the person you really are. In addition to places like Second Life, where you consciously create an avatar who may or may not be kind of like the real you, there are the tracks you can't help but leave behind in e-mail, IM, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and all the other kinds of e-communication that people use to form an image of what you must be like.

That got me thinking about what I must seem like to people who only know the e-me. What do you reckon? Dour? Sarcastic? Cynical? Not misleading, I'm afraid. That's the real me. Guilty, guilty, guilty.

I've had people tell me I seem shy. I am, a little, but I don't think that's what they're seeing. It's just that my mom always said, "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." I frequently don't have anything nice to say. Similarly, I'm frequently rude, although that's not my intention. At least not usually. I'm just oblivious to the finer points of social interaction. I'm not great fun at a party.

So the e-me is pretty much the same as the real me, as unpleasant as that may sound. Or rather, it's the same as the real me used to be. On the Internet, my arms and legs work as well now as they ever did.

Although this blog is all about MS and disability (more than I would like, truth be told), elsewhere on the 'net I probably look pretty normal. Corresponding with people I haven't seen in person since before MS really started to kick my butt, it usually doesn't come up. In most contexts, having MS shouldn't matter. I wouldn't say I'm hiding behind my able-bodied Internet persona, exactly. It just doesn't come up.

As much as I like being able to preserve a part of my life where MS just doesn't come up, it can make meeting people in person kind of awkward.

There is a plan in the works to get together, real life in person, with a couple of people I used to work with. In fact, they were the reason I moved from Michigan to Seattle in 1995. They're both smart, talented, funny, well-read and widely-traveled. They make me feel kind of ignorant and hopelessly provincial. I like them a lot. They have both known I have MS for about as long as I have, but I haven't seen either of them in person for several years. When last we met, I was a lot more capable than I am now. Although we've kept in e-touch from time to time, my physical abilities, or lack of same, just didn't come up.

So when we meet, acknowledging the differences between my Internet persona and the real me will be kind of awkward, but we'll get past it, then Scarecrow will conduct a guided tour of our remodeling project. We'll catch up on the gossip at the places I used to work. Our dogs will convince them that whippets are unmannerly and disrespectful. We'll resolve to meet up again, which may or may not happen. It'll be fun.

Then I'll go back to being the e-me.

I Love the Smell of Hops in the Morning

2011-02-17T16:01:00.000-08:00

One of the things I will really miss about not coming in to Bob's Books and Adult Day Care every morning is the smell.

The warehouse that accommodates Bob's Books also houses a craft brewery, and brewing beer is aromatic business. Some mornings we're greeted by the fresh scent of hops, herbal and citrusy. Some mornings it's yeast. Some mornings it's rich, sweet, toasted malt. The lovely fat essence of organic esters. The ingredients of a wholesome, nutritious beer that will really stick to your ribs.

I'm told that not everyone appreciates the whiffy aspects of brewing beer. My mom says my granddad used to brew beer, and my grandma wasn't crazy about the smell. Or the occasional bottle that would explode in the basement. I've always enjoyed the olfactory experience, myself. Good thing, because Scarecrow has been a homebrewer for 20 years, and the process is every bit as aromatic when carried out on a smaller scale. While I could do without the sticky malt residue that covers every surface in the kitchen after a brewing session – Scarecrow is a congenitally messy guy – I've always enjoyed the smell. Well, that, and the beer. The beer is almost always good. (If you've never tried it yourself, it's not hard to make good beer. Scarecrow's first batch was one of his best ever. What's hard is making beer that is consistent from batch to batch. But it's almost always good.)

Another advantage to having a brewery next door is that Scarecrow could get yeast from them. He'll miss that.

Update from previous post: Sparky is planning to spring my pop from the joint this afternoon. Apparently he's looking and feeling better, although he's very weak, easily tired and a little confused. They never found out where he was leaking this time, but seem to think they got it plugged up for now.

I tell you, gettin' old is not for wimps.

Pop Sprung a Leak

2011-02-16T16:12:00.000-08:00

My dad is back in the joint.

My brother (I'll call him Sparky – he's an electrician) called the other day to say that dad was weak and a little confused. Like, too weak to get out of bed. They got him in to the doctor, and found that his hemoglobin was way low. Again. He's sprung another leak.

They packed him off to the hospital, where they filled him up with blood. After that, Sparky said he was looking and sounding better. Now they need to find out where he's leaking.

Dad has a history of bleeding from holes in his gut. It has almost been the end of him on several previous occasions. If that's what it is, this time they probably caught it early. Who knows? He's 90 years old, for Pete's sake. He's got a lot of miles on the chassis. They're keeping him in the hospital for tests.

My mom, who is 88 herself and has more than her own share of medical problems, seems to be getting by on a combination of willful ignorance and denial. Sparky said she had a total emotional meltdown when he talked to her on the phone this morning, but by the time I called she had all the input filters firmly back in place. Whatever works, I say.

Whatever works.

House of Cards

2011-02-08T16:49:00.000-08:00

The trouble with a house of cards is it's awfully darn fragile. A mishap that would barely cause a ding in a sturdier structure will likely bring the whole thing down in a heap. It's a precarious balancing act.

The house of cards at Bob's Books and Adult Day Care is coming down at the end of the month. Bob is closing up shop. Scarecrow is looking for a job; either one that will allow him to care for a disabled partner on-site, which seems pretty unlikely to me, or one that pays well enough to have someone else take over the job.

By unfortunate coincidence, my COBRA subsidy ends at the end of the month, too, so my health insurance will go from pretty reasonable to pretty scary. After three months of that, continuing the policy will cost 150% of what my employer pays. I'm pretty sure we couldn't do that, even if Scarecrow still had a job.

I knew from the beginning when the COBRA subsidy would end. I knew the situation at Bob's Books, while more open-ended, couldn't last forever. They were nice while they lasted. We were lucky to have had them for as long as we did. I'm grateful. I really am.

So. What next?

I'm going to take a couple more days to get over feeling like I just swallowed a large rock. Read some escapist literature. Watch some really stupid movies. Then I'm going to balance my checkbook. It's a control thing. After that, I'll take a look at the budget. Just to see where we're at. Knowing is better than not knowing, kind of thing.

We can do this. There are a lot of people who are a lot worse off than we are.

It'll be an adventure.

Ode to a Marmot

2011-02-02T15:30:00.000-08:00

Happy Groundhog Day!

They say Punxsutawney Phil had to dig out of a snow drift today before he could undertake the annual search for his shadow, which was nowhere to be found.

I have no idea what that means. I just like marmots. And old-timey banjo.

“Ground Hog” by David Johnson
from Smithsonian Folkways

Invalid

2011-02-01T15:32:00.000-08:00

I am really feeling very sorry for myself. The display on my nearly brand-new laptop went south on Saturday morning. Fortunately everything else still worked, so I could plug into an external monitor. Not easily portable, but better than nothing, especially since I didn't have anywhere I needed to go. Yesterday morning Robert the Computer Tech appeared at Bob's Books and Adult Day Care with a replacement display which was, alas, the wrong one. If the problem were a loose connection somewhere, we were hoping that just putting it back together would fix the problem. No joy. The right part should get here in a couple-three days. In the meantime I could use a dim, fuzzy, flickery old 15-inch CRT monitor that Scarecrow liberated from the file server here. This morning a different computer tech shows up, this time with the correct display. By the time he's finished, the display works, but the webcam doesn't. Of course, we didn't realize the webcam didn't work until after he left. After another seemingly interminable troubleshooting (duh?) session, they're sending another computer tech out tomorrow.

In addition to making me whiny, unpleasant, even downright cranky, this situation has me thinking about how much I rely on a great deal of human, mechanical, and electronic assistance to do pretty much anything. Does that make me an invalid?

Even though I can be, I admit, kind of fussy about words and this is something about which otherwise temperate people can get pretty darned touchy, I mostly don't much care about the word used to describe my current inability to do everything I used to do.

Some people refer to MS as a sickness, an illness, or a disease. I guess it is, but those feel wrong to me. I generally don't feel sick, or ill. And 'diseased' sounds so icky. But the words don't offend me.

A guy I met whose wife has MS was incensed that people would refer to her as 'handicapped', thinking it connoted begging, with cap in hand. Although I don't think that's the derivation of the term, I guess a lot of people share his view, and it's not the politically correct thing to say. I can't get that worked up about it, myself.

I've seen references to people who were 'differently-abled.' While I understand the desire to come up with a term that no one could possibly find offensive, this is just wrong. To me, it implies that these people acquired different abilities to compensate for the normal abilities they don't have. Maybe it's just me, but I sure didn't get any different abilities. Still, if you want to use 'differently-abled', knock yourself out.

At the other end of the PC spectrum, there's 'cripple' or 'crip.' I can refer to myself as being a crip, and frequently do. (When I started this blog I thought about calling it 'Tales from the Crip', but it's been done.) Fellow crips can use the term, in sardonic recognition of our shared predicament. It's ok for my family to call me a crip, because I know they mean it in the nicest possible way. At least I think they do. But it's kind of like the 'n' word; you can only use it if you belong to the club. You gotta draw the line somewhere. But depending on who's using it, I'm OK with crip.

You could talk about an 'impairment' or a 'disability'; either of those is fine with me. I realize that in addition to occupying different places on the spectrum of political correctness, and possibly causing different levels of offense in the population to whom they are applied, the words used to describe physical or cognitive limitations all have slightly different definitions, and different shades of meaning. Pick one that works for you.

The term 'invalid', however, gives me a little trouble. One definition, according to Merriam-Webster, is:

Noun: One who is sickly or disabled
Adjective: suffering from the disease or disability
of, relating to, or suited to one who is sick

OK, I get that. Aside from my previous reservation about being labeled sick, I can't really object to anything here. My problem is that when I hear the word 'invalid', what I hear is 'in-valid.' As in:

Adjective: not valid:
a: being without foundation or force in fact, truth, or law
b: logically inconsequent

Logically inconsequent? I don't think I'm ready to go quite that far. I may be disabled, but I need to think I'm still valid:

1: having legal efficacy or force; especially: executed with the proper legal authority and formalities
2a: well-grounded or justifiable: being at once relevant and meaningful
2b: logically correct
3: appropriate to the end in view: effective

And my favorite, although I admit I don't exactly see the relevance:

4: of a taxon: conforming to accepted principles of sound biological classification

There are lots of words one might use to summarize my particular combination of cans and can'ts, and really, I'm just not that touchy. I know that talking to somebody with a disability can be awkward, and most people mean well.

But invalid? In-valid? I'd rather not go there. Nope. Not me. Not yet.

Hardware Heck

2011-01-29T17:27:00.000-08:00

So, OK, I'm sitting at my desk this morning, reading my e-mail or whatever, just minding my own business, and the display on my brand-new laptop begins to slowly fade to white. It then gradually darkens to a kind of streaky gray.

Now, I'm not a hardware person, but this is not looking good to me.

It's not really a brand-new laptop, truth be told. It's refurbished. You know – just as good as new, but a lot cheaper. The place I used to work always bought refurbished machines, and the IT guys at a software company should know, right? Since they're the ones who have to fix them if they break? I've had pretty good luck with refurbished computers in the past. Although, now that I think about it, I did have the motherboard replaced twice on my last one. But that was a long time ago. It's run without a hitch since, and Scarecrow has been using it since his (refurbished) machine died. And fortunately the IT guys where I used to work also recommended buying the 1-2 day on-site repair service, you know, just in case.

So, after a long troubleshooting session with a very nice man who spoke impeccable English in a call center in India that needs a little better acoustic insulation between cubicles, someone will be out Monday or Tuesday to fix it. And, in the course of troubleshooting, the nice man suggested connecting the laptop to an external monitor, which I wouldn't have thought to do. Apparently the problem is the display; the computer works fine. The monitor makes the laptop somewhat less portable, but it beats being without a computer until sometime next week.

Isn't it wonderful the way technology enhances our lives?

St. Scarecrow

2011-01-27T16:41:00.000-08:00

On the radio this morning I heard a piece about a guy who had an unfortunate encounter with an officer of the law. I wasn't really paying attention so I didn't catch the details. Apparently Bad Things Happened, and the guy got his head slammed into a concrete wall. He is now totally and permanently disabled.

I started listening when they talked about how his wife has to take care of him 24 hours a day. She has to feed him. She sleeps in the same room, because she has to wake up three times every night to turn him so he doesn't get bedsores. She's a saint, they said.

Fortunately the $10 million she gets from the lawsuit will make it possible for her to care for her husband for the rest of his life.

Unfortunately for Scarecrow, I did not have the foresight to acquire a disability that is somebody else's fault. He feeds me, he wakes up three times every night to turn me over, and he does a lot more besides; I will need this help for the rest of my life, and nobody is going to pay him $10 million to do it. Yet it appears he's willing to do it anyway.

He says I would do it for him if our roles were reversed, and while I like to think that's true, I'm not really sure I'm that good a person. He's just a good guy. I wouldn't say he's a saint. He doesn't believe in them anyway. But he's a really good guy.

So, in lieu of $10 million, I thought I should tell him that I love him and I appreciate everything he does for me. Since it seems kind of self-serving to tell him this while he was actually doing something for me, I wanted to wait for a time when he wasn't. The opportune moment, kind of thing. I had to wait a long time. I hadn't realized how much of his time he spends doing things for me.

The beginning of our care partnership was so gradual that I can't remember how it started. He just started helping me do things that were hard for me. Some tasks I did not want help with, no way, no how. (I can sometimes be a little stubborn that way.) He allowed me to struggle, and when I finally gave up and let him help, he never asked why it took me so long. The number of things I resisted assistance with were so few compared to the number of tasks that somehow Scarecrow assumed without my ever realizing it. When someone reads your mind so much of the time, how irritated can you get when they occasionally provide help you don't want?

As Scarecrow started helping with more and more of the things I used to do for myself, we evolved some very complicated procedures that I can't imagine anyone else ever figuring out, and even if they could, I can't imagine anyone but another ex-wrestler being able to perform. Even for $10 million.

I'm glad that woman and her husband were compensated for the injury that was done to him, but nobody's going to pay Scarecrow $10 million to take care of me. I guess he's OK with that.

Good Enough

2011-01-19T17:12:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I read something that just stops me in my tracks. It might be prose so perfect, so beautiful, it's like music. It might be an essay that is so insightful and elegant, so well-written, so much better than anything I could ever do even if I worked at it for a million years, which of course, being a lazy slime weasel, I wouldn't do, that I'm embarrassed to be caught trying.

After I read something really good, I am not inspired to write anything myself. Quite the opposite. It takes a while before I feel like howling again. I can't come up with anything good enough. I don't really have anything much to say, and I'm not that good at saying it. I can't offer knowledgeable comments on events of global import, or pithy observations on the human condition, or erudite analysis of, well, anything. I rarely have exciting events to recount, even setting the bar for 'exciting' pretty low. Nothing momentous or noteworthy. I'm tired of writing about MS (actually, I'm always tired of writing about MS and MS-related stuff; it is, however, a regrettably abundant source of topic material), the dogs haven't done anything despicable (another regrettably abundant source of topic material), and there's nothing much else going on. Just life.

But, you know, it's my life. And I can write about it better than anybody else.

It's good enough.

As usual, somebody else already said what I think I'm trying to say better than I could.

A BETTER VOICE
©1990 Joel Mabus
originally on the album Firelake

Sometimes I wish I had a better voice
to sing my song for you -
A voice so brilliant, rich and clear -
Soaring and gliding through the air,
Hanging the melody in your ear
The way good singers do.
But my voice cracks like a back porch chair,
Growls and groans like a big black bear,
Full of whispers, kinks and snares
And I sometimes miss the key -
But nobody sings my song like me.

(Joel Mabus is an amazing musician, singer, and songwriter from Michigan. If you ever get a chance to go hear him, do yourself a favor…)

Well Now, That Wasn't so Bad, Was It?

2011-01-10T16:39:00.000-08:00

Last Thursday night, Scarecrow went up to the high school to keep score at a wrestling tournament. And I stayed home.

It wasn't such a big deal, really. He wasn't gone that long. It was mostly an excuse to do what we've been meaning to do for years, but kept putting off. We had a home care person stay with me while he was gone.

Neither of us wanted to do this, but we need to have a backup plan in place in case anything ever happens to Scarecrow. Or, you know, he just needs a break. From me. Or whatever. So we'll have this agency send somebody to help out for a couple of hours every now and again, just so we've got somebody we can call if we ever need someone to take over for Scarecrow. For whatever reason.

So we did it. They sent a perfectly nice young woman who seemed willing to do whatever I asked of her. She fed the dogs. She reheated some leftovers, and fed them to me for dinner. She swept the dog hair and dust bunnies off of the floor, and, without being asked, took a damp mop to the kitchen tile, which was really pretty disgusting. That all took, I dunno, maybe a third of the time she was here. I'm just not very good at asking for help. I couldn't think of much for her to do.

No. That's not true. There was plenty to do. There was laundry. She could have trimmed my nails. I could have had her help me clear the detritus off the desk. There was plenty to do. I just felt bad about asking her to do it. Even though she was perfectly willing and cheerful, and that's why she was there, for pity's sake! Fortunately, I didn't need to go to the bathroom.

I'm telling myself I'll work up to it. This should be a real milestone, finally getting set up for home healthcare, but it doesn't feel like we're there yet. I need to learn to do this. I need to stop feeling like I should be entertaining the healthcare aide. We don't need to chat. I don't need companionship or conversation. I need to learn to ask for help with chores. I need to learn to let someone help me with those icky personal care things. I can do this.

There's another wrestling tournament next Tuesday. I'll need to be ready.

Who knew it would be this hard?

Communicado

2011-01-05T15:39:00.000-08:00

I'm communicado again, more or less. That is, after having been pretty much in-communicado for the last couple of weeks. Having to choose between a keyboard (= voice recognition software) and a mouse (= head tracking software), and having to disable this before I could enable that, and applications crashing right and left, was making me kind of cranky.

Then Scarecrow's laptop died.

So I've got a machine that can't do what I need to do, and Scarecrow's got no computer at all. Tuffy's been using the laptop my former employer let me keep – that's how old it was – since her laptop was stolen, but it's running the wrong operating system. Before Tuffy took it over, I replaced the pathetic Windows Vista with Fedora, which I really like but Tuffy… ah… doesn't.

Everybody has their priorities. Some people expect to buy a new car every couple of years. I've never done that. I'm not a car person. For me, a car is just a way to get where I'm going. As long as it can manage that, I don't really care how old it is. Our four-year-old minivan still seems pretty new. We sold the car I used to drive, and since Tuffy doesn't drive, we're a one car family.

We don't have a travel budget and we don't eat out much. We don't have an entertainment center or a big-screen TV. No TV, no cable subscription or satellite dish, no game console.

We have our fiscally irresponsible hobbies. There are the dogs, for example. And we are a three computer family. At least.

So we bought a refurbished laptop, and we're playing musical computers. I'm shifting my stuff onto the new laptop, and Scarecrow and Tuffy are negotiating the allocation of the remaining two machines.

It will take me a while to figure out this new operating system, get everything installed and configured and what all. But I'm communicado again. More or less.

Decisions, Decisions

2011-01-03T15:31:00.000-08:00

I've spent the last couple of weeks trying to decide which I need more: a keyboard (that is, voice-recognition software), or a mouse (or the head tracker equivalent).

Not surprisingly, both voice-recognition and head tracker mouse software place considerable demands on processor resources; resources which my aging laptop does not possess in any abundance. The CPU, which was quite the ticket in its day, is just not up to the task. It was doing pretty much OK with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, as long as I was using a regular hardware mouse. However, replacing the regular mouse with head tracker mouse software, which is a total CPU hog, was just asking a little too much. They would both load, and run, but I couldn't... do... anything. If I opened a browser (Firefox) or an e-mail client (Thunderbird), they would crash. Same for my database and checkbook applications. Nothing spectacular, just...*poof*

By alternately disabling DNS or the head tracker I might be able to get through checking my e-m*poof*

Or not. Sending e-mail wa*poof*

I tried balancing my checkbook, but th*poof*

OK. I need both a keyboard AND a mouse, or their logical equivalents. I want both. And I need to have enough system resources left over to run applications without crashing.

Software is available these days that can do ever more magical things, if you've got the hardware to handle it. It's shallow of me, I know, but one of the things I miss about working for a software company was always having a computer that was fast enou*poof*

This is not a great time to buy a new com*poof*

Well cr*poof*

Welcome Winter!

2010-12-21T16:45:00.000-08:00

We're celebrating the winter solstice today. If you don't observe one of the many religious holidays that occur this time of year, it can be a little hard to come up with a "How to Celebrate" template. Fortunately for us, a lot of the holiday symbols aren't inherently religious. Evergreens? Check. Holly? Check. Mistletoe? Check. Wreaths? Check. Sparkly lights? Check. Frost? Snow? Icicles? No problem. Presents? Anytime. Over the years we've incorporated these things with other bits from here and there into a holiday observation of which we have become rather fond.

One of the things we do, and I don't remember whose crazy idea this was, is to experience the shortest day of the year by not using artificial light. We get up when it's light which, here in the Pacific Northwest, means we get to sleep in. We use whatever light is available during the day, and plan to be done with whatever we're doing by the time it gets dark. Since, here in the Pacific Northwest, this comes pretty darn early, the person responsible for the holiday dinner has to do some pretty intricate planning. If nothing else, by midmorning you realize that it's pretty much a reflex to turn on the light when you go in the bathroom.

As it gets dark, we listen to music because there's not much else you can do without turning on the lights. When it's dark, we light the candles, light the fire, put the tin sun ornament on the tree, open the wine, exchange presents, eat dinner, and all that.

It may not be exactly what everybody else celebrates this time of year, or exactly the way anybody else celebrates it, but we're OK with that. For us, it's all about love and family and eating too much and presents the recipient will need to return and the days starting to get longer. Not necessarily in that order.

It's getting dark. I wonder how Scarecrow is doing with dinner?

...rise up, Jock, and sing your song,
For the summer is short and the winter long,
Let's all join hands and form a chain
'Til the leaves of springtime bloom again.

Stuff

2010-12-19T13:00:00.000-08:00

The other day, before I put up the post about Tuffy's birthday, Scarecrow observed that there wasn't much new material on my blog this month. Since that was true, I sat down (virtually speaking) and wrote something.

Reading it over (yes, I do that, even though it probably doesn't seem like it), I found this:

"This is all sounding rather whiny and petulant, and I don't mean it that way. Whatever point I might have been trying to make, it appears I totally missed it. In fact I should probably scratch this post and start over, but I can't think of anything else I really want to write about and at least one of my four readers is obviously restless so I'm going to post it even if I sound like a whiny jerk...."

Wait wait wait. Wait. Hold on just a minute. I'm thinking I shouldn't post what I've just written, but I'm about to do it anyway? How stupid is that? Am I really afraid "my readers" will be disappointed? Oh please. I really need to get over myself. Besides, writing for readers other than myself starts to feel an awful lot like work. Been there, done that.

So it's been kind of a thin month, content-wise, on this blog. You can thank me later.

Instead of scribbling, I've been kind of preoccupied with holiday shopping.

This time of year isn't really about Stuff. I know that. It's shallow of me to admit how much grief my gift list causes me, when it's the thought that counts, it's about love and family and being together and pretty soon the days will start getting longer. But there it is.

I have never been one of those people who can always think of the perfect gift, the one that the recipient didn't even realize they wanted until they got it, after which they can't imagine ever having lived without it. That kind of gift always involves an element of risk. I'd rather forgo the possibility of giving the recipient a pleasurable surprise if it means reducing the likelihood of witnessing speechless dismay. Give me a wish list every time.

Tuffy's good that way. She's got a wish list online, with links to everything from boxing gloves to cool chopsticks to sparkly hairpins to rubber boots. She updates it regularly. Lots of choices, but there was her birthday, in addition to the whole solstice winter holiday thing.

Scarecrow is more of a challenge. Throughout the year he mentions stuff he would have on his wish list, but come December I'll be darned if I can remember what he might have been lusting after in March or July or October.

I'm still working on it. No rush.

Birthday Girl

2010-12-15T16:40:00.000-08:00

Today is Tuffy's 21st birthday.

I guess there has to be some arbitrary age at which people are considered adult, and twenty-one is as good as any. It's not like she's really much different today than she was yesterday. In some respects she's been amazingly adult since she was five years old. In other ways I wonder if she'll ever grow up. But, officially, today's the day.

I don't know what I expected. It seems like a surprisingly unremarkable day. From my perspective, at least, something of an anti-climax.

Maybe I'm a little slow, but it wasn't until I first went into labor, 21 years ago, that I was struck by the terrifying realization that I was about to do something I could never undo. From that point on, I would always be a parent. That's when it became real. At that point, I couldn't possibly imagine her turning 21. Or 18. Or starting school. Heck, I couldn't imagine her ever being big enough to fit into six month size baby clothes. But if time flies when you're having fun, I must've been having a blast.

She's grown up to be a remarkable person -- beautiful, smart, talented, funny... I guess parents always say that about their kids. But she really is. She's athletic, like her dad. Like me, she believes that anything worth doing, is worth doing fanatically. She doesn't much like dogs, so I guess in some ways she's her own little creature.

Seems like we ought to mark the occasion somehow, although I'm not sure we'll even see her today. She was still in bed when we left for work, and she'll be at the gym by the time we get home. Her friends want to take her out to party, even though she doesn't drink.

I've been trying to think back to what I did when I turned 21, but I really don't remember. I know that by that time I had already made a couple of serious life mistakes, ones that Tuffy has thus far managed to avoid. Maybe that's because we were really good parents... but I doubt it.

Happy birthday, kiddo. Happy birthday.

PFM

2010-12-06T15:16:00.000-08:00

Long ago and far away, an eager young tech writer asked a senior software developer what protocol a server used to send configuration settings to a client device.

"PFM," the developer replied.

The tech writer looked blank.

"Pure F#@kin' Magic," he explained.

Smartass.

But now, many years later, I've come to believe he was probably right. Technological advances notwithstanding, I think a lot of things still rely on that protocol.

As we were leaving the UW Medical Center the other week, a woman was watching as I drove my power chair into the elevator and turned around.

"How are you doing that?," she asked.

"PFM," I wanted to reply. But I didn't. I explained about the head array control.

It might not be magic, exactly. I leave gouges in the walls and dents in the furniture. I go backwards when I meant to go forward, and vice versa. I whine and complain about how it makes my awkward, clunky power chair even more awkward and clunky. In spite of all that, I'm using it. I'm glad to have it. I'm keeping up with the Red Queen. That's pretty magical.

My latest adventure in assistive technology, and the reason I've been away from this blog for a couple of days, has been a search for a way to control a computer mouse without using my hands. I can get by without a keyboard. For entering text, Dragon NaturallySpeaking does fine. For moving around the desktop, it's beyond awkward. I'm not the first person to run into this problem. There are solutions. It's time to start checking them out.

The most likely-sounding options use head tracking. A webcam tracks the position of your head, and moves the cursor accordingly. They can be pricey, but there's an open-source option. I've spent the last couple of days playing around with it.

Like the head array, you wouldn't use it if you could use a regular mouse or trackball. It's a major drain on system resources. And something keeps crashing Firefox and Thunderbird. But it kinda works. No hands! How cool is that?

PFM.

Just Another Day in Paradise

2010-11-28T15:22:00.000-08:00

This photo was taken around 1930 in my grandfather's grocery store in Toledo, Ohio. Standing by the counter to the left of the picture, in the long apron, is my uncle Willie. Behind him, looking proprietary, is my grandfather. To his right is one of the neighborhood kids, and then two men who sold produce to the store. The guy in the back corner is my uncle Leon. The young man at right, wearing knickers, is my dad, the baby of the family. He turned 90 yesterday.

A WWII veteran, he went to the University of Toledo on the G.I. Bill and moved to Southern California for grad school at Cal Tech. A few years later, he and my mom bought a house near the ocean. In those days, mere middle-class mortals could afford such things. My brother and I grew up in that house. My mom and dad still live there.

He got up early yesterday and went for a walk, as he does most mornings. He went to the beach and back, a walk of maybe a mile, including a significantly steep hill. He says he has to stop and rest several times on the way up, but still. Mom says when he goes all the way down to the beach he sits in a chair for the rest of the day, but still.

He has his share of health problems. In May 2008 he was in intensive care with three holes in his gut. Nobody expected him to live through the night. He worked his way back, a little at a time. He still can't do everything he used to do, but he can do a lot more than anybody ever expected. The man is a force of nature.

Whenever I ask him how things are going, he always says, "Just another day in paradise!" He says every morning when he wakes up he thinks, "Another day! And I'm here to see it!" When I was living at home I sure don't remember my dad being such a relentlessly cheerful guy. For whatever reason, he seems to have come to really appreciate what he's got, and not waste much time thinking about what he's lost. Maybe I could learn a thing or two from the old guy yet.

Happy birthday, Pop.

Giving Thanks

2010-11-25T15:05:00.000-08:00

“Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us all be thankful.”
-The Buddha (Prince Gautama Siddharta, 563-483 BC)

To blogger buddies in the United States, happy Thanksgiving. To blogger buddies elsewhere, happy Thursday.

Dog Years

2010-11-23T18:17:00.000-08:00

In response to the folks who read my last post and tried to convert my age in dog years to people years, there really isn't a simple linear equivalence. Dogs are sexually mature at six months to a year, which might correspond to human of about 13. They're physically mature at two or three years, comparable to a human in their late teens or early 20s. They're mentally mature at, well, don't hold your breath. For either species. A dog might start to show its age at 7 to 9 years, like a human who can start taking advantage of the senior discount at the movies.

But it's not that simple. While small dogs tend to mature faster and live longer than large dogs, the relationship between size or weight and longevity isn't linear, either. Some breeds typically live longer than others of similar size. It all depends. If you're really interested, and not just trying to guess how old I am, here is a pretty good summary.

My conversion algorithm is proprietary, based on an imaginary giant breed with a mature weight in the neighborhood of 150 pounds. Among other inherited tendencies, the breed is prone to skeletal problems due to its bizarre tendency to walk on its hind legs. Which is to say, I just made it up. Truly, I don't feel a day over 435.

Aside from the birthday thing I wouldn't usually give my age that much thought, had I not picked up a webcam to use to try out a hands-free mouse. Those things are brutal! (The webcam, I mean, not the hands-free mouse. The mouse is kind of remarkable, about which more another time.) Seriously, I have never been under the impression that I look like Charlize Theron and I'm totally OK with that, but one of the advantages of rarely confronting oneself in the mirror was being able to imagine that I was aging gracefully, you know, along the lines of a Jessica Tandy or Jane Goodall. According to my new webcam, this is not the case.

But for 443, I look pretty darn good.

Two Dog Night

2010-11-21T15:50:00.000-08:00

It's starting to get cold here at night. Cold for Seattle, that is. It's not the same as Michigan-cold, of course, but cold enough for narrow dogs that don't carry much adipose tissue or fur for insulation. Although we provide them with dog beds, they prefer to sleep in a pile with the rest of their pack. On our bed.

Or more accurately, in our bed. They bring their wet fur and gritty little feet and cold pointy noses in from outside and hover expectantly until Scarecrow lifts the covers, letting in a rush of cold air, and they burrow to the foot of the bed, jostling for the best spot, between the humans. It can be very bracing.

If Scarecrow doesn't lift the covers, either because he's asleep or because he doesn't want the bed to be infested with cold wet whippets, one of them will insert a pointy little nose under the edge of the blankets and, in an attempt to get under the covers without assistance, will bulldoze them into a pile at the bottom of the bed with its head and possibly its shoulders under the pile. Alternatively, one of them will tromp around on top of the bed until the covers are in a small heap, and will then lay down on the heap.

Best to let them in. They warm up before too long.

After a while, the mattress starts to vibrate. They're panting. It's only a matter of time before one of them stands up and jumps off the bed, taking the covers with them.

I've read speculation that one of the benefits that canine domestication offered to both species was that sleeping together would conserve heat.

I'm not buying it.

On an unrelated note, I had another birthday yesterday. It kind of snuck up on me. You lose track, once you get to my age. That would be... let me think... 443. In dog years. But I really don't feel a day over 435.

All in My Head, Part Two

2010-11-17T15:02:00.000-08:00

After another week using the head array control to steer my power chair, I think it's working pretty well, considering.

It's not as convenient or as easy to use as a joystick, if you can use a joystick. I can tell you from personal experience, though, that it's a whole lot better than trying to use a joystick if you can't use a joystick.

For the most part I've still been keeping to a speed that can be best described as 'glacial', although I prefer to think of it as 'stately.' Or perhaps 'dignified.' Getting down hallways and through doors at home and at the warehouse where I spend my days is enough of a navigational challenge for the time being.

Turns out one of the hardest things to do is go in a straight line. My chair (Permobile C300) doesn't track worth a darn anyway. With the lateral switches on the head array being either on or off, it's hard to straighten out just a little bit. Being front wheel drive, the chair has a tendency to fishtail when going downhill. I don't remember noticing it that much with a joystick, but it's really hard to control with the head array.

We've been dinking with the position of the headrest and the lateral switches. Really small adjustments can make a huge difference in how easy this thing is to use. If the side pads are in close, it's easier to turn the chair but harder to go straight. The best position for the head rest really depends on how you're sitting in the chair, which changes during the course of the day.

To respond to the comments on my last post (which I do appreciate very much even if I hardly ever respond to them directly because I'm a lazy slime weasel), using this thing does require a fair amount of head control, but not that much range of motion.

I don't need Scarecrow's help to change the speed profile. Although I can't press the buttons on the display, I've got a separate switch I can use as a kind of mode selector. That gets me to the settings menus, where I can select a different speed profile, or change the tilt, recline, etc. Navigating the settings menus and selecting options entails a series of taps on the side and back pads of the array, which is kind of awkward but not complicated. Sure beats having to ask somebody to do it for me.

Yes, I'm still learning (the hard way) that leaning my head against the head rest when the chair is on can send it crashing into walls or furniture. The dogs? Well, they're whippets. If they can't stay out of the way of a chair set to 'glacial', there's no hope for them.

I haven't taken it out in the real world much, yet. Excursions to the UW Medical Center and the optometrist went OK. I'm feeling like I'm safe enough to give it a try, but the weather has been crummy. This being Seattle, it should stop raining sometime next July.

OK, so. Mobility problems under control, for the moment. Thanks to TinMan, Cupholder v.3 is working great. My next quest is to find a hands-free way to control the cursor on my computer.

It'll be fun!

It's All in My Head

2010-11-08T16:46:00.000-08:00

I've been using the head array control to drive my wheelchair for a couple of weeks now, and I know you're just dying to hear how it's working.

No?

OK. Most people will never need to know this. Even people with MS will probably never need to know this. I sure as heck didn't figure that I ever would. But in the unlikely event that you should go looking for information about using a head array -- what the equipment looks like, and how you use it to steer a power chair -- I can tell you from experience that there isn't much of anything out there. Besides, Herrad at Access Denied was curious about how it works and how it looks. So, here:

This is the head array control installed on my power chair. There is a switch installed in each of the three sections of the headrest. Touching the headrest lightly activates the switch in that section. All the rest is software.

The way my chair is currently set up, touching the center section of the headrest makes the chair go forward. Touching a side section makes the chair pivot that direction. Touching the center and a side section simultaneously makes the chair veer to that side.

Unlike a joystick, where the distance and direction you move the stick controls where you go and how fast, each of these switches is either on or off. To change speed, reverse direction, or control other chair functions (tilt, recline, etc.), you select options from menus on a control unit.

If you could see this better, you could see that it displays battery status and whether the chair is moving or on standby (duh). It also shows which speed profile is selected, and whether the chair is going forward or backward. Each of the five speed profiles is preset to accelerate, travel, turn, and decelerate at a selected speed. To change speed, you go back to the menu and choose a different profile. The profiles are configurable, but the wheelchair tech is probably the only one who has the software to do it.

This is just one example of a head array control set up. There are head arrays with more switches, fewer switches, or different kinds of switches. Newer control units are a lot cooler, but my three-year-old chair is too old to be compatible with them. The software is pretty much totally customizable.

So what's it like to use?

It takes some getting used to. You'd expect that it takes practice to direct the chair where you want to go, and that's true. It does. And you might expect that your neck gets sore, because you're using it in unaccustomed ways. That's true too. You might even expect that you need to make sure the power is off before you rest your head on the head rest. Unfortunately, I keep forgetting to do this. And it's surprising how often you need to look at the display to see if you're going to go forward or backward. And it's surprising how often I forget to do this, too. It's not nearly as convenient or intuitive as a joystick. It seems like I'm always having to stop and dink around with a menu to change a setting.

Still, I have better control with the head array now than I have had for a long time using a joystick. Although it took forever and cost a lot, I've caught up with the Red Queen again. For a while.

Remember remember

2010-11-05T15:55:00.000-07:00

Remember remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot...

Maybe it's just me, but being burned in effigy every year since 1605 seems a little excessive after the man was tortured, and then sentenced to being hanged, drawn, and quartered. Even if plotting to blow up Parliament was a really bad idea.

I don't suppose it's any creepier than Halloween. Any excuse for a holiday, I guess.

Happy Guy Fawkes day?

All Hallows Eve

2010-10-31T15:36:00.000-07:00

Halloween. All Hallows Eve. Samhain.

We never get any trick-or-treaters. In the five years we've been in this house, not a one. I don't understand it.

We always got a few brave souls at our old house; kids who knew there was a house at the end of that long, dark, scary driveway, even if you couldn't see it from the street.

When we moved here, I figured we'd attract a swarm of little ghosties in ghoulies. OK, the driveway is kind of steep, but it's not very long, and from the street you can see there are two houses once you get up here. And we're not out in the middle of nowhere. It's a normal suburban neighborhood, one that I would once have considered a reasonably target-rich environment. We don't go crazy with Halloween decorations, I admit, but we did put out a jack-o'-lantern for the first year or two. We quit when it didn't seem to make any difference.

This year, it will be different. This year, we will be visited by every trick-or-treater in western Washington state. This year, they will come.

This year, we didn't buy any candy.

On a Halloween-ish note, Scarecrow passed along a video clip of some clogging mummies. It's too good not to share:

Every time I watch it, I find myself thinking there are couple of steps I could steal. Even though that train left the station long ago, I can't seem to help it. I do the same thing when I listen to somebody play banjo. "Oooh, that's cool! I could do that!"

I can't, of course. I probably couldn't then, truth be told. I never was much of a musician. But I played when I could. I danced when I could. That's going to have to be good enough.

That's good enough.

15 in 15

2010-10-26T11:39:00.000-07:00

On Facebook (this is my penance for being one of those creepy moms who lurks on Facebook, spying on my kid) Tuffy tacked me on to a list of friends she challenged to come up with a list of books I've read that stuck with me; 15 books in 15 minutes. I usually hate these chain letter type quizzes, but this sounds like fun.

The rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag fifteen friends (or, if you're lazy like me, whichever number seems appropriate), including me, because I'm interested in seeing what books my friends choose. Do yours before you read anyone else's....

OK, here we go...

The Once and Future King, T. H. White
Sociobiology, E.O. Wilson
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Sherman Alexie
The Panda's Thumb, Stephen Jay Gould
Horton Hatches the Egg, Dr. Seuss
Emma, Jane Austen
Small Gods, Terry Pratchett
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
The First Circle, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Big Red, Jim Kjelgaard
Introduction to Population Genetics Theory, C.C. Li
The Elements of Style, Strunk and White
Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Moby Dick, Herman Melville

I probably spent more than 15 minutes, but not a lot more. I'm kind of surprised at some of the things that bubbled up from my subconscious to wind up on the list. Some are books I haven't thought about in... decades. Big Red? Where did that come from? They're not all books I loved. For example, I had a love/hate relationship with Intro to Population Genetics Theory. And I definitely did not love Moby Dick. It was assigned in one of the few English classes I ever had to take. This was back at the dawn of time, you realize, but it really stuck with me. It really stuck with me. The book and the class about did me in. Tuffy, English major that she is, loved it.

I found it got easier to come up with books as I went along. By the time I got to the end, I was having to choose between books with equally valid claim to a place on the list. For some authors, it was hard to pick one book that stuck with me more than others. Sherman Alexie? Terry Pratchett? Stephen Jay Gould? Toni Morrison? If they wrote it, and I read it, it stuck with me.

Well, that was fun. Comparing my list to Tuffy's, I look like a troglodyte. I haven't even read most of the stuff on her list, and wouldn't be inclined to try. It looks like work.

Maybe that's why I wasn't an English major.

Murder in Kenmore

2010-10-22T15:48:00.000-07:00

I live in Kenmore, a suburb of Seattle at the north end of Lake Washington. About 6:30 the other evening I was sitting in the car while Scarecrow went in to Safeway to pick up a prescription. I was just sitting, not thinking about anything much, when after a while I noticed that crows had been flying overhead for kind of a long time. As I watched, they continued to fly overhead. Sometimes I could see 10 crows, sometimes maybe 50, sometimes only one or two, but for as long as I sat there I could see crows flying northward over the parking lot to their evening roost. I'd say I was there for about 15 minutes. When we left to drive home, they were still flying overhead.

That's a lot of crows. A murder of crows.

Their winter roost is a mile or so from our house. Every evening this time of year American crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) congregate in this area in large numbers. Really large numbers. Tens of thousands. John Marzluff, a guy at UW who studies them, says the local crow population began to expand during '70s and since then has "increased 30-fold."

"It wasn't really a comeback," he says, "it was an invasion."

Crows are not your rare, exotic, or retiring bird. Even I can watch them. You don't have to creep up on them, stealthily, in inaccessible places, using a long-range spotting scope, at the crack of dawn, hoping to catch a fleeting glimpse. If you want to watch crows, toss a couple of Cheetos out there and you'll have more of them than you can keep track of. (Marzluff used Cheetos as bait when he was netting birds for his study. He says they're like crack to crows.)

Nothing bashful about crows. They are raucous and noisy and disputatious. They're smart and social and amazingly adaptable. They can figure out a way to live pretty much anywhere.

I really like them.

I admit, though, that watching them, I can't tell one from another. They have the advantage of me in that regard.

Is That a Caveman or Dick Cheney? Crows Know the Difference

The "D" in DME

2010-10-20T15:50:00.000-07:00

So, about the head array control on my power chair. Because I know you were dying to hear.

The initial speed and acceleration settings were way too energetic for negotiating tight spaces. Or even for negotiating pretty roomy but not entirely wide-open spaces. This is a switch control, remember. It's either on or it's off. Go or don't. I've spent the last couple of days trying really hard not to ram into things. With only moderate success.

The chair I used when I was trying to decide if I wanted to install the head array was much easier to control, so I knew it was possible. On Monday I called Mike the Wheelchair Guy about adjusting the settings. This morning he came and did it. I now have a Granny Gear for getting in and out of the van, or creeping down the hall and turning through the door to the bathroom. Without damage to walls or woodwork. Much better.

The new control uses a micro-switch to turn on, toggle between forward/back, select the speed range, and control seat functions. The switch emits a rather loud chirp whenever I tap it. That's obtrusive but tolerable, since hitting the switch inadvertently and turning the chair on without realizing it would be bad. If I press the switch and hold it, I can turn the chair off. This causes the switch to scream loudly for 5 seconds.

Five seconds is a lot longer than you'd think, when you're making a really irritating noise and there's no way to shut it off.

I asked Mike the Wheelchair Guy if there was a way to make this stop. He said he didn't think so, but he'd check with the manufacturer. Still, if it turns out to be the worst thing about this new setup, I'm OK with that.

In the course of crashing about over the last few days, I managed to get my new drink holder hung up on the edge of the door when I was getting out of the van. Scarecrow got me loose, but in doing so broke the cupholder. (In situations like this, Scarecrow is not likely to take a tentative approach. As my dad is fond of saying, "Don't force it. Get a bigger hammer.") This made us both very sad.

Scarecrow told TinMan what had happened, admitting that he had subjected the cupholder to serious abuse. TinMan allowed as how that might be the case, but maintained that the D in DME ought to stand for Durable.

He is at work on cupholder v.3.

DME-Day

2010-10-15T14:40:00.000-07:00

Having finally decided to get a head array control installed on my power chair, and given Mike the Wheelchair Guy the go-ahead to get the parts, I was starting to think it had been kind of a long time since I'd heard anything. (I'm bad like that. I take forever to decide what I want, but once I make up my mind, I want it yesterday!) I even put a note on my calendar to call and pester them. Then, on Wednesday, they called to say they had the stuff and wanted to see if Mike could take my chair off to the shop for a while on Thursday, that would be yesterday, to install everything.

You bet, I says.

So that's what happened. He picked up my chair, took it away for a couple of hours, and brought it back with a head array control. I was too tired yesterday afternoon to mess with it much, beyond noticing that I need a speed that's slower than Slow. Unlike the proportional speed control you get with a joystick, the switches in the head array are either on or off. To get moving, the chair starts off with a surge of speed that's a little faster than it's set to go. Even at the slowest speed setting, that's a little too exciting for negotiating tight spaces. Easy fix, but I'll need to get Mike to do it. They don't let me mess with the software, which is probably just as well.

Thus far, I'd say that I do not love it. Navigating menus to control various functions is something I have to think about. I still need to use a couple of micro switches, and can't figure out where to put them. The steering on this buggy is pretty darned touchy. But I can see that all these things will get better with tweaking and practice. And it sure beats having Scarecrow drag me around.

And then there's the Patient Lift. Mike brought that yesterday, too. Yeah, I know we need it. We've been all over that. If something happened to Scarecrow, I couldn't go to the bathroom until he was better. I get it. But it's huge. Huge. When we remodeled the house to make it accessible, we neglected to add a wing for storage of durable medical equipment. There's the power chair. And the charger. And the shower chair. And the passenger seat from the van that we took out so I don't have to sit in the back. When you're not using it, all this stuff has to go someplace. And now this ginormous patient lift. Which is really big. Did I mention that?

Maybe we can leave it in the middle of the living room, and string it up with twinkly lights.

Inspiration-Free Zone

2010-10-11T15:49:00.000-07:00

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

-- Samuel Johnson

I'm starting to accumulate partially-written posts that I set aside for one reason or another. Sometimes I didn't know what I wanted to say. Sometimes I knew what I wanted to say, but decided it wasn't interesting enough to write about. This being a typically self-indulgent blog, I don't give a moment's consideration to whether it would be interesting to read, but I need to find the writing at least mildly entertaining. Sometimes I'd be chugging away on something and I'd think, 'Nah. This is starting to feel like work.' And I'd stop. Hey. I can do that.

When I had a regular day job, waiting for inspiration to strike wasn't an option. If I felt inspired (not very likely, considering the subject matter), I would write. If I didn't feel inspired, I would write anyway. That's what writers do.

I don't think I ever would've said I love to write. My situation was better summarized by a quote I took from Linda Ellerbee, which she attributed to her grandmother:

"If you don't read, you can't write, and if you can't write, you must work for a living."

For me, writing always beat working for a living.

I'm not a writer anymore. I'm a retired person. I don't need to write. If I feel like writing, I do. If I'm not inspired, I don't have to. I'm accumulating partially-finished blog posts, but that's OK. I may come back and finish some of them. Others may never see the light of an LCD display, and that's OK too.

While I'm nattering on about inspiration, I should make it clear that I'm talking only about being on the receiving end, myself. If you're looking to be uplifted and inspired, keep looking. This is not the place for you. I'm not good at it. Plenty of bloggers strive to be inspirational, and do it much better than I. If you need inspiration, try one of them.

While I'm writing about what I don't write about, I could add that I don't blog about MS symptoms, either, unless I have them, or MS treatments, unless I'm taking them. There are plenty of websites that do a much better job of that than I would.

At this point, I could go back and try to figure out what I was writing about. But that would start to feel like work.

Bareit's Busy Day

2010-10-01T14:00:00.000-07:00

Jasmine is not really all that fond of squeaky toys. Nylabones are OK. Dental chewies are nice. Scarecrow's knitting bag, however, is irresistible.

This is what we found when we came home the other day:

Bareit was obviously involved in this escapade. He likes to take his toys outside. Through the dining room...

Into the kitchen...

Through the kitchen to the utility room...

Through the utility room...

Out the (narrow) dog door...

Around the corner...

And out into the yard.

Note to whippets: if you want Scarecrow to finish your new sweaters before the weather gets cold, you'll want to stop doing this, even if he forgets to put his knitting bag were you can't reach it. Assuming there is such a place.

Where Did I Go Wrong?

2010-09-29T14:18:00.000-07:00

Tuffy started her junior year at UW today. She's an English major.

Nothing wrong with being an English major. Some of my best friends were English majors. I just never expected my daughter would be one.

Looking back, I guess I should've seen it coming. She has always been a relentlessly verbal child. She had rules of grammar, even for made-up words. Instead of 'forget', for example, she used to say 'getfor.' But if it happened in the past, she would say 'gotfor.' Perhaps I should've realized it was a bad sign for a toddler to conjugate made-up verbs.

Instead, I was encouraged when she referred to a pair of objects as 'two ones.' I thought it reflected a sound understanding of basic mathematical concepts. And she always did fine in math and science -- at least as well as I ever did.

So where did I go wrong?

We always spent family vacations outdoors; camping, hiking, birdwatching. We bred and showed dogs, and more recently worked with retired racing greyhounds. How could she not grow up to be a little naturalist? A mini-me?

I held out hope last quarter when she took a comparative psychology class from David Barash. Animal behavior is fascinating, and if Barash teaches anywhere near as well as he writes, it should be a great class. How could she not be sucked in?

She liked the class. She did fine. She's still an English major.

It's not the prospect of dire job prospects that concerns me. A zoology degree doesn't buy you much, either. I spent the majority of my working life as a tech writer. She'll find something to do. That's not the problem.

It's just that whole nature-nurture thing. The idea that a child is a blank slate.

Nope. No blank slate here. Some behavior must be hard-wired. My daughter is an English major.

It could be worse, I suppose. She could be majoring in psychology. Or philosophy. Or she could be dealing drugs. Or voting Republican.

I'll deal.

Last Chance

2010-09-28T16:00:00.000-07:00

For the past week or so it seems like I've been inundated by e-mail inviting me to donate now and help end MS. Well, that would be cool, wouldn't it? Right now, they say, we are closer to ending MS than ever before! (The exclamation mark is theirs.) They couldn't say that if it weren't true, could they? The missive I got this morning says if I donate by midnight tonight I will help accelerate their efforts to end MS forever. Imagine that. I'd better hurry. Wouldn't want to miss the midnight deadline; maybe they stop accepting donations.

Psssh.

I don't mean to rag on the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. They do a lot of good stuff, and I've taken advantage of their services on several occasions over the years. I realize that if they want to accomplish anything, they have to raise money. I know that. Services cost money. Research costs big money. They obviously don't know that MS already costs me plenty. How could they? How could they know that every nickel I spend on this stupid disease feels like money down a rat hole? And that apparently bottomless rat hole, my friends, has taken a lot of my nickels.

Although it totally hacks me off, I can almost ignore the tone of their communications. Some marketing/PR person probably spent a long time on the wording of those solicitations. They were probably reviewed and scrutinized and tested on focus groups. They can't help it if I don't belong to their target audience. I never liked writing that stuff, I was never any good at it, and I really don't like reading it. It sets off my manipulation detectors. Exclamation marks make me suspicious.

I'm waiting for the point of this post to become apparent, and starting to think it's not gonna happen. I don't know why this makes me so cranky. It just does.

The MS Society wants me to donate?

Nah. I don't think so. I spend enough on MS already.

Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head

2010-09-27T15:44:00.000-07:00

As weird MS symptoms go, I was thinking this one had to take the cake. It almost felt like... a drop of water on my face. But it's the middle of the night, and I'm lying in bed. How crazy is that? Maybe I dreamed it.

In the morning, there was a smallish puddle of water on the windowsill above my head. OK, so I didn't imagine it. And it had rained that night. But it wasn't windy, and even if it had been, the window is under a broad eave. The outside of the window -- a brand-new window, by the way -- was dry. There's no water anywhere else. Why was there water on the windowsill?

The next night it rained again, and yes, we did indeed have a leak in the roof. It was dripping right through our brand-new sheetrock ceiling, onto the head of the bed. Scarecrow set out buckets to catch the worst of the drips, and moved the bed away from the drainage. We went back to sleep as best we could, listening to water plink into buckets.

In the morning he went up in the attic to find our roof perforated by a tree branch about 18 inches long, maybe 2 inches in diameter. Yeah, that would do it.

Now we remember that some weeks earlier we had been sitting around the house one afternoon when we heard/felt a huge WHUMP!!, like maybe a large tree branch landed on the roof. This happens from time to time. We have a row of black cottonwoods along one side of our house, and they drop stuff. The trade-off for this known risk to the roof is that they provide very effective and inexpensive air-conditioning during those rare spells of hot Seattle summer weather. You pays your money and you takes your chances.

When Scarecrow checked it out he didn't see anything on the roof, but there was a really really really big branch in the front yard. Maybe it just clipped a corner, made a lot of noise but didn't do any damage? We figured we'd dodged a bullet. A limb that size could have caused some serious grief.

Turns out we did dodge a bullet -- a limb that size would've taken out our roof -- but we weren't entirely unscathed. The thing that actually made the noise was a much smaller branch that punched a hole right through the roof, into the attic, where you couldn't really see it from the outside. You wouldn't notice until it started to rain.

Scarecrow cobbled together a patch, and one of the guys who worked on our house during our remodeling project came by and patched his patch. It must've worked. This was a couple of weeks ago, and it hasn't rained since.

The Last Day of Summer

2010-09-21T15:05:00.000-07:00

The sun's not up yet when the alarm goes off in the morning, and the leaves are starting to turn. The days really get shorter fast, this time of year. I'm resigned to fall.

I can celebrate winter -- even if it's gloomy, the days are getting longer. I can celebrate spring -- the trees leaf out, and everything goes green. I can celebrate summer -- the days start early and go late, and they're occasionally even sunny. But fall -- I'm resigned to fall.

Even in Michigan, where the crisp fall days were a welcome relief from the hot muggy summer, and the sugar maples in September looked like they had batteries, I couldn't help but anticipate the cold, dark days coming up. Once the leaves were down, fall was gray, gloomy, and seemed like it went on for a really long time.

Around here, the fall foliage is not nearly as colorful. The deciduous trees let go of their leaves without much fanfare. Scarecrow and Tuffy shovel them into limp, sodden piles that nobody would be much tempted to jump into.

Today is the last day of summer. I'm looking at blue sky outside my window. Fall doesn't start until tomorrow.

Use Your Words

2010-09-18T17:08:00.000-07:00

For toddlers, using newly-acquired language skills is really hard. Preschool teachers are always reminding kids to "Use your words", instead of using a right roundhouse to express their feelings more directly. Even my relentlessly verbal daughter would sometimes resort to "point and grunt", and, when her rudimentary vocabulary proved frustratingly inadequate, was occasionally reduced to smacking a schoolmate upside the head. (Some things never change. Eighteen years later Tuffy is still relentlessly verbal, and still smacks people upside the head. At least now she does it at the gym.)

On one occasion a teacher broke up a physical altercation between two little boys, telling them to use their words. One of the combatants marched up to the other, got right in his face, and shouted, "WORDS!!!"

My dad tells a story about a long-ago conversation between his older brother and a high school counselor. My uncle did well in science and math, but saw no point in studying English. When the counselor pointed out that mastery of grammar and spelling would make my uncle better able to express himself, my uncle replied, "I ain't never had no trouble expressin' myself." I'm not sure the story is really relevant, but I've always liked it. My uncle was a real jerk.

I've always thought I had a reasonable facility with words. Now that I find myself having to use words and nothing else, I'm learning that it's a lot harder than you'd think.

For example.

One of our regular weekend tasks is clearing off the detritus that accumulates on top of the desk in the office. It's something I used to do myself, because Scarecrow doesn't much care where stuff winds up. Now that I can't shuffle or file papers myself, I need Scarecrow to open envelopes, extract contents, sort stuff into piles to be paid, or filed, or otherwise dealt with, and file the papers that we need to keep. It sounds easy enough. The physical part of manipulating paper isn't something you have to think about. Until you have to do it using your words.

To keep things simple, let's assume I can actually think of the words I want to use, which is not always the case. The routine goes something like this:

"Can I see that? No, the other one... the one on the left. On the left. Put it on my keyboard, so I can see it. The first page. The one on the top. Closer. Not that close. OK, can I see the next page? No, the backside... turn the page over. You can recycle the rest of the stuff. Where did that come from? No, not that... keep the statement, the first two pages. Put it in the pile to be paid. The second pile. Second from the left. Stack it so I can see the balance and the due date. OK, that was easy. Next?"

The only reason it goes as easily as it does is that Scarecrow has developed an uncanny ability to read my mind. If I had to do this chore with anybody else, it would be a lot harder.

Situations that take a whole lot of words to do something really easy come up all the time. You have no idea. They say a picture is worth 1000 words, but I tell you what: when all you've got is the thousand words, just being able to do the point part of "point and grunt" would save me about 10 zillion words a day. And I'm not exaggerating.

Sometimes I just want to whap somebody upside the head.

Weenie Whippet

2010-09-09T15:32:00.000-07:00

The other morning I was lying in bed, trying to pretend it wasn't morning yet. Scarecrow, having fed the dogs and started the coffee, had progressed to the bathroom phase of his morning routine.

Suddenly, from the other end of the house I heard a prolonged, agonized SCREEEEAMM!! followed by chesty, I Am a Very Big Dog!!-sounding barking.

WTF?

Scarecrow obviously didn't hear it, couldn't hear me, and there wasn't a darn thing I could do about it besides imagine a rat... or a squirrel... no, an opossum... no, maybe a raccoon! coming through the dog door. I have a very active imagination, but none of the things I was imagining would be good. Scarecrow was still in the bathroom.

Presently, everything was quiet. Jasmine trotted down the hall and jumped on the bed. No sign of copious blood loss. I know Bareit was in his crate, so unless our local vermin are very determined and exceptionally talented, he was OK.

WTF?

I never realized how long Scarecrow spends in the bathroom in the morning.

Anyway, when he finally came out, I told him what I had heard and suggested he might want to go down and check it out.

He found a mouse in the kitchen sink. Munched.

Apparently Jaz encountered the mouse in the course of her usual morning inspection of the kitchen counter. The mouse, being outweighed some 300 to 1, got the worst of it, but didn't go down without a fight. I'm pretty sure it wasn't the mouse I heard screaming. It was our weenie whippet.

So far, the effectiveness of various mouse eradication systems we have implemented stack up as follows:

kitchen trash can 4 (that I know of)
mousetrap 1
whippet 1

If we were to award a score for drama, however, the whippet would definitely win. it's a good thing she's cute.

Doc Ock

2010-09-04T20:10:00.000-07:00

It might not be quite as cool as this, but it's pretty close.

TinMan (Scarecrow's senior sibling) was pretty sure he could design and build a better hands-free cupholder than the one I had. I needed something that would attach to my chair or a table, and hold a drink where I could get to it without needing to use my hands. To my surprise, there weren't a lot of commercially available devices that would do this. The closest thing I could find was a bright yellow plastic baby bottle holder that worked, kind of, but broke the first week I had it.

TinMan was all over this. Scarecrow sent him photos and measurements of my chair, and the two of them had lengthy discussions about various design and material options. He contacted the chair manufacturer (Permobile) for dimensions of possible attachment sites. He put his son, who was home from summer session for a one-week summer break, to work building it. (Sorry, Tin Jr. This was not my idea!)

It arrived Thursday, and I've got to say it's pretty cool. There are brackets to attach it to either side of my chair so it reaches around over my shoulder, and it's quick to install or remove. It can also attach to a plate that slides under the seat cushion. The gooseneck is flexible (duh), swings out of the way, and is attached to a telescoping rod for height adjustment. The cup holder part snaps onto the end of the gooseneck. Designed for use on a boat, it's self-leveling, so tilting my chair back doesn't dump the contents of the cup in my face. It's no uglier than the rest of my power chair, in fact, it kind of blends in. And it's sturdy. It may just be a cupholder, but this puts the durable in durable medical equipment.

Although in my past-tense day job I've been through lots of software development cycles, this is my first experience with hardware development so I don't know if you'd call this a prototype, or an alpha, or a beta, or what. Anyway, I expect software and hardware development are similar in that having the first example be perfect in every way would:

be a miracle, and
take all the fun out of it

So, yeah. I'm having to take back what I said about engineers being impervious to user feedback. TinMan and Scarecrow have already been modifying the attachment bracket, so installation and removal will be quicker. The gooseneck needs to be able to support more weight without sagging (hence the tasteful and stylish lightweight plastic cup in the photo, a relic of the days when Tuffy, who is now 20, could order from the kids' menu in a restaurant). The self-leveling cupholder is a brilliant idea, but it turns out, in practice, that you want more control over the position and angle of the cup than this allows. I expect this batch of fixes is only the first of many rounds of tweaks and adjustments.

But you know, for now, I can drink (from a lightweight cup) without pestering anybody for help. Scarecrow doesn't have to keep handing me my drink at meals. And the utilitarian design, far from detracting from its appeal, makes me feel like Doc Ock. How cool is that?

TinMan said he could build a better cupholder than the one I had. And he was right.

Enablers Needed

2010-08-30T17:00:00.000-07:00

The wheelchair guy has figured out what bits I need to install a head array control on my power chair, and my insurance company has graciously granted the regal okey-dokey. My coinsurance is 20%, and they'll let me pay half now, and half at installation. So we're good, right?

So, yeah. There's that 20%, and 20% of the lift, and 20% of the lung vac... But here's the thing. 20% of a big number can still be a pretty big number. Especially if there are dollar signs attached.

And what is it going to get me? For now, I would be able to drive my monster robo-chair more-or-less safely, and adjust the seat without help. I would be able to get out of the house, without leaving a trail of devastation and chaos in my wake. At least, not all the time. That would be cool. But for how long? We would be throwing a significant chunk of change at a solution for a progressive disease. Another run with the Red Queen. If I knew I would be able to use it for a year, say, it would be easier to commit. For six months? Maybe. For only a month or two of enhanced mobility, it probably wouldn't be worth it. And, of course, there's no way to know.

it's not like I can't think of other things to do with that money besides pouring it down the MS rathole. Assuming that MS always has first priority when allocating family resources just seems wrong to me.

But it would be cool to walk through the park across the street with Scarecrow and the dogs. It would be very cool.

Balancing Act

2010-08-27T16:42:00.000-07:00

Balancing my checkbook is a job I find myself saving for a time when I need to feel like I have control over something. When I can't do anything about anything else, I can balance my checkbook. I can be totally obsessive about chasing down that three cent discrepancy. I can make the numbers line up. This is something I can do.

On my retirement income this is not a task for the faint of heart, mind. Like watching a train wreck, it can really get my heart racing. When I still had my day job, I could be reasonably confident that the balance, when I got to the bottom of the page, would be positive. Now it's somewhat more exciting. The number at the bottom of the page is another thing I can't entirely control, but whatever its value, I can sure as heck make sure the bank thinks it's the same as I do.

I need to balance my checkbook.

Forever Young

2010-08-23T17:06:00.000-07:00

Why don't you ever hear anybody lamenting the fact that middle age is wasted on the middle-aged?

I just finished reading Best Love, Rosie by Nuala O'Faolain, a wonderful Irish writer with the coolest name I've ever heard. It's about a woman trying to figure out middle age. Being about there myself, it got me thinking.

I remember being startled the first time I heard a woman my age refer to herself as middle-aged. Wait... she's the same age I am. If she's middle-aged, that would mean... Really? Middle-aged? Me? How can this be?

I still feel young, which is clearly at odds with reality, and getting odder all the time. People must think of me as old. I've got gray hair, and creaky joints. I'm quadri-frackin'-plegic, for criminy sake. But I still think of myself as young. When does the inside catch up with the outside? Does it ever?

I don't think I'm particularly phobic about the prospect of getting old. I don't agonize over every line and wrinkle. In fact, I can't remember when I last looked in a mirror. I don't dye my hair. I wish I could do a lot of things that I can no longer do, but that's more an MS thing than a getting old thing.

I remember my grandmother saying, in her Yiddish accent, 'I'm getting younger and younger, every day.' I never really knew what she meant by that.

I still don't.

Letting Go

2010-08-18T15:30:00.000-07:00

This is the ad I posted on craigslist:

Vintage Raleigh Alyeska Touring Bike

Classic loaded touring bike, purchased new in 1988. It has been greatly loved, gently ridden, and well cared for. After sitting for a while it needs new tires and general maintenance, but otherwise is in excellent condition. Includes cateye cyclocomputer, two water bottle holders.

Specs:
Color - Bordeaux/Rose
Frame Size - 21"
Frame - 555 chrome moly double-butted main tubes
Frame/Drop-outs - Forged vertical
Fork - High tensile, forged end, low rider braze-on
Handlebar - Kusuki WPR-B randonneur style
Stem - Kusuki "WIN" AH
Seatpost - Alloy micro-adjust
Crankset - S.R. Triple one-piece forged alloy. Detachable alloy rings 50/45/32 -- 170mm
Freewheel - 14-30 -- 6 speed -- gold
Hubs - Sansin RE-50, large flange alloy. Q.R -- sealed, 36° front, 40° rear
Gearing - 18 speed -- 29 to 96
Front Derailleur - Shimano Z206
Rear Derailleur - Shimano Z505GS
Shifter - Shimano Z408 down tube braze-on
Brakes - Dia-compe 960/161 gum hoods, alloy cantilever
Rims - Araya SP-30 27 x 1 1/4 alloy, 36° front, 40° rear
Tires - 27 x 1 1/4 skin wall
Pedals - S.R. SP 154, alloy quill type
Grips - Grab On foam

There's no point keeping it. It's not like I'm going to be able to ride it anymore, and it doesn't fit Tuffy. But still.

I bought it when I lived in Michigan. Lansing is a great place to ride a bike. In five minutes you're out of town, on country roads. No traffic to speak of. No hills. Of course, you've got to like cornfields. We had plenty of destinations. There was the ice cream store in DeWitt, the Quality Dairy in Mason, the dairy store at MSU, the place in Wacousta that made killer shakes and meatball sandwiches. No wonder I never lost any weight riding that darned bike.

Tuffy went for her first bike ride when she was four months old, riding in a car seat strapped into a Cannondale bike trailer. (She was born in the middle of December; we didn't get decent riding weather until April.) Scarecrow pulled the trailer and I rode behind, watching a little hand or foot appear above the edge of the car seat. Scarecrow was a much stronger rider than I, but that trailer was the great equalizer. Pack it with stuff for a weekend camping trip, and I could keep up, no problem.

Several people have responded to the ad. There are a lot of bicyclists in Seattle, and it's a pretty cool old bike. Somebody will take it.

But I will be sorry to see it go.

Everybody's an Engineer

2010-08-12T16:46:00.000-07:00

I know a lot of engineers. My dad's an engineer. My brother was an auto mechanic, and is now an electrician, so is an engineer in a practical sense. I worked with more software developers than I can remember. Some of my best friends are engineers. (Scarecrow is not an engineer. Might this be significant?) If there is one personality trait that engineers share, it's that they're never happier than when they've got something to build. Whether it's a machine or a software program, tell them, "I need something that will do XYZ...", and they're off.

After my post the other day about trying to find a no-hands beverage holder, I wasn't surprised to find that a lot of people were surprised that there weren't very many off-the-shelf choices available. What surprised me was the number of people who suggested something that might work.

Scarecrow's brother (I'll call him TinMan), was on the phone that very afternoon. TinMan is an engineer, for real. He designs and manufactures large machines. He has a machine shop, and a son who is an engineering student, conveniently home from college for the summer. His son is, as yet, blissfully ignorant of the project his dad has in mind for him. TinMan asked Scarecrow to send photos of my chair, so he could decide how a cupholder might best be attached. They discussed at length the best way to hold a cup. He says he can come up with something better than what I've got.

For as long as I can remember, my mom found the solutions my dad designed and built for household problems to be a seriously mixed blessing. Missile guidance systems are one thing; an indoor clothesline is something entirely else. While they generally performed the task for which they were intended, the execution was frequently not at all what my mom had in mind. Whatever the problem, my dad was always pretty sure that his solution was the best way to solve it. He was not real receptive to what we would call "user input." I thought it was just my dad, but I've since come to believe it's an engineer thing.

When TinMan says he can design and build a better hands-free beverage holder that I've got now, I believe him. He's a talented guy, with a lot of resources at his disposal. And I appreciate the heck out of the fact that he's even interested in having a go at it. And he reads this blog so I can't say anything bad about him even if I wanted to, which I don't. I'll leave him to do his engineer thing, and I won't try to tell him how it should be done. He wouldn't listen anyway. He's an engineer.

He'll come up with something that works better than the yellow plastic baby bottle holder I've got now, for sure. It is, after all, a pretty low bar. As durable medical equipment goes, it wasn't very. It already broke.

Lost Post

2010-08-11T16:43:00.000-07:00

We lost our Internet connection for a while yesterday afternoon. The idiot who lives next door to us was doing some ill-advised excavation in front of his house. He had a contractor out there moving around a bunch of dirt and some really big rocks, and cutting a drain in our shared driveway. It wasn't actually his property he was working on. Part of it is ours, part is a utility easement along the street, and part belongs to the neighbor on the other side, who was already pretty cranky about this project. I don't know what-all he managed to break, but there were a bunch of utility trucks parked out there and flaggers directing traffic and a bunch of people trying to put everything back together. Since he didn't get a permit, the city is not too happy about this development. This is all going to cost him some serious money. I take some comfort (I think the word is schadenfreude) from the fact that the idiot next door has caused himself a great deal of grief. It couldn't happen to a nicer guy. But in the meantime, our Internet connection was down.

No 'net.

You don't realize how much you expect it to be there, until it's not. No 'net. No e-mail. No phone, since our home phone is VoIP. No IM, which is the way I usually let Scarecrow know I need some help, even if he's just in the next room. We don't have a TV, but no streaming movies from Netflix. I've got some real paper books, and a couple of e-books on my laptop, but no browsing the library online. The Greyhound Pets newsletter is on Google docs, so I can't work on that. I can't balance my checkbook, because I can't get to the bank's webpage. I can't update my blog. Why do I all of a sudden want to update my blog?

So I wrote a blog post, figuring I'd publish it when we got our Internet connection back. I shut my laptop down without saving it, and I forget what I wrote. I'm sure it was brilliant, just brilliant, but now it's gone.

But we've got our Internet connection back. Maybe I'll balance my checkbook.

Gotta Want It

2010-08-06T15:37:00.000-07:00

There have been times in my life when I knew that pursuing a particular course of action would invite ridicule, and test my capacity to endure public humiliation. Sometimes I did it anyway. If I wanted it bad enough.

An example that comes painfully to mind was competing in obedience trials with a Gordon setter. Although Gordons are lovely dogs, people looking for an obedience prospect don't typically choose one, for good reason. It's not that they're stupid. They've just been bred to have, how shall we say?, an independent turn of mind. In consequence, commands are likely to be perceived as suggestions. Instant and unquestioning obedience will never be at the top of their list of priorities. That's just the way they are. I knew that.

On top of this, the individual at the center of this story was a born clown. She was never happier than when she was the center of attention. She loved to make people laugh. You can imagine where this is going, and that's pretty much the way it went. Her interpretation of commands issued when she had the show ring all to herself were amazingly creative and, I admit, pretty darned funny, although it took me a while to appreciate the humor. She collected a devoted gallery of spectators who could be counted on to show up at ringside to see what she would come up with this time. She eventually earned an obedience title, even ranking among the top 10 Gordons in obedience in the nation that year, although it might only have been the top seven or eight, since I'm not sure there were 10 Gordons competing in obedience that year because most people know better than to try this. In the pursuit of this goal, I learned that my capacity for public humiliation is greater than I ever imagined. Gotta want it.

I don't remember when I last could pick up a cup and drink out of it like a normal person. It was that long ago. I'm almost getting used to drinking everything with a straw. Coffee, hot as well as iced. Wine. Beer. Scotch. But a straw only solves part of the problem. A drink with a straw is still no use to me unless it's sitting on a table where I can reach it by bending over (a maneuver of which I suspect Emily Post would never approve), or there's somebody to hold it for me. What I wanted was a way to drink wherever I happened to be, without having to pester anybody for help. Preferably without creating a spectacle, although I can do spectacle, if need be.

I didn't expect it to be that hard. I am not, after all, the first quadriplegic on the planet. I wasn't surprised that the bountiful array of cupholders available for walkers or wheelchairs generally assume the user can extract the cup from the holder and convey it to the user's mouth. Most people can, but that's not what I need. We could rig something with a mic stand and boom, but I was hoping to find something a little more portable. I eventually located only two commercially-available devices that would attach to my chair or a table and hold a drink where I could get to it. Only one looked like it might work for me.

This particular example of assistive technology was intended to clamp onto a stroller or crib and hold a baby bottle, hence the Fisher-Price color scheme. So much for being inconspicuous. There was no choice of color. The plastic clamp is about as sturdy as it appears in the picture, which is to say, not very. It can support maybe 12 ounces of liquid in a lightweight cup. My 16-oz double-wall stainless steel insulated coffee cup with a full load of coffee is definitely not happenin'. It's huge and bright yellow and looks like, well, like a baby bottle holder. But it works. Scarecrow can load it up and go about his business, and I can drink whenever I want. I had forgotten how cool that was. If it makes my ginormous black Robo-monster power chair look even more ridiculous than it did before, Ch. MacTyke's Heartbreaker CD showed me I can deal with worse than that. Way worse than that.

In Patrick's immortal words, "Freedom is always fashionable." You've just gotta want it.

Vacation. ish.

2010-07-31T16:00:00.000-07:00

We are on day five of a vacation. Of sorts.

I'm having a little trouble figuring out how to do it. Used to be, we'd take a couple of weeks and go someplace. First, we'd have to find a time when Scarecrow and I could both take off of work, and Tuffy would be out of school. Some years, it seemed like trying to find this chunk of time was like solving an n-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. We'd usually be camping, of one style or another, or going up to Scarecrow's family's cottage in northern Ontario, which is like camping except with a roof and it takes a lot longer to sweep the dust and mouse poop out of the cottage than it does to set up a tent. Or we'd go visit family somewhere, which is not like camping and we'd have to be nice. Before we left there'd be planning and organizing and packing, then there would be places to go and people to meet and things to do. And then we would come home.

This is different. For Scarecrow you could call it a staycation, or more precisely a FixStuffAroundTheHousecation because he's got a list of stuff to fix that he will never live long enough to finish even if he works from sun up to sun down and finally goes back to work to get some rest. For me, particularly since I no longer have a day job and still can't really steer my power chair well enough to go anyplace, it's not much different than any other time except if the weather's nice I can sit out in the backyard instead of being cooped up in one office or another. So I'm doing what I always do, which is nothing much. If I'm not doing anything, why would I need a vacation from doing it? And what would I do instead?

So I guess I feel like I should be doing something different from what I usually do, but I don't know what that would be. If life is like being on permanent vacation, who am I to complain?

Mighty Hunters

2010-07-19T10:19:00.000-07:00

Note to local squirrels: whippets are really fast.

Note to whippets: squirrels bite.

PS to note to whippets: if you get past the bitey part, squirrels make a noise kind of like a squeaky toy.

PPS to note to whippets: the squeaker doesn't last very long.

Publish or Perish

2010-07-15T15:27:00.000-07:00

Sometimes (like now) I find myself trying to come up with a blog post just because it seems like it's time. It's been a while since the last one. I don't have anything in particular to go on about. It just seems like it's time. Why is that, I wonder?

I don't have to do this. It's not like my livelihood depends on it, or there is information only I can convey, or anybody cares whether I write anything or not. I'm not trying to amuse or educate or entertain an audience because, aside from a handful of blogger buddies, I don't have one. My day-to-day routine is no more interesting than anybody else's. I don't confront and surmount, or fail to surmount, heroic challenges. I can't share deep philosophical insights, because I don't have any. I don't know the solution to anyone else's problems. Everyone around here knows what the weather has been like, and nobody else cares. I don't need the discipline of writing everyday. Been there, done that. Sometimes I'm just doing it for me, because trying to write about a thing can be a good way to sort through what I really think about it. I get that. But is there any point in trying to scratch together a post when I really don't have anything in mind to write about?

For the past, oh, 30 years or so, I've always had a deadline. Always. Sometimes more than one. While it's never been literally Publish or Perish, it has usually been Publish or Something Really Bad Is Going to Happen. There has always been a date by which I had to have something ready to publish. It's not always imminent, huge, looming, taking precedence over everything else, blotting out the sun. But it's always been there.

Now it's kind of fun to not post anything, because I don't have to.

Sometimes sitting down and writing just because I ought to turns up some unexpected things.

Today it didn't.

Feeding the Mosquitoes

2010-07-09T15:16:00.000-07:00

An entomology grad student and amateur photographer I once knew had a photograph on his office wall, a close-up of a female mosquito dining on what was obviously a human arm, the blood she had already ingested clearly visible through her translucent abdomen.

People seeing the photo for the first time always had the same response:

"Whose arm was that?"

Who in their right mind would stick their arm into a cage full of hungry mosquitoes, and sit still while one drank her fill?

Another time, Scarecrow and I were up at his family's cottage in northern Ontario. Against my better judgment, we took a canoe out on the lake at sunset.

"They're flying around, but they're not biting," he said.

"They're not biting you. I'm getting lightheaded," I replied.

When we bought our house I thought it would be nice that it was across the street from a park. There was even a paved path through the park, so I could roll along when Scarecrow took the dogs for a walk. Perhaps I should have given a little more thought to what the name Swamp Creek might imply about a park.

After a relentlessly gloomy spring, we're finally expecting a weekend of sunshine and blue sky. I'm looking forward to spending as much of it as I can out in the yard. This is not without risk, you understand, particularly in the evening. It's an interesting experience to watch a mosquito land on your person and begin tanking up, and not be able to do anything about it.

But what the heck. Live dangerously. It will be worth it.

Welcome to Jurassic Park

2010-07-08T13:40:00.000-07:00

Whenever I think about using a patient lift, I see the scene in Jurassic Park where they've got a cow in a sling, and they're lowering it into the dinosaur pen.

Some of the adaptations I've had to make to accommodate advancing MS-related disability have been fairly easy for me. Not physically, or financially, necessarily, but emotionally; acknowledging that it was a step I needed to take. Cane? Manual wheelchair? Adaptive driving controls? No problem. Makes life easier. Voice recognition software? Sounds kind of cool. Other adaptations, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, I fought tooth and nail, long past the point where a reasonable person would've given in. Nothing rational, I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Letting someone help me eat? Sorry, no. Power wheelchair? No. No way. Don't want to go there.

Patient lift?

The rehab medicine guy wrote me a prescription for a lift the first time I saw him, over a year ago. I took it, thought "Yeah, yeah, whatever, I'm not even close to needing this," and stashed it someplace. Last time I saw him, he wrote me another one. As much as I'd like to lose this one too, I need to get real. Before we can realistically expect anyone to provide home care backup or respite for Scarecrow, we need to have a lift.

If Scarecrow and Tuffy hadn't been wrestlers, we would've had to resort to this long ago. They're both strong, fit, and know how to move another person around. Even so, as Scarecrow has had to provide more and more of the muscle power, the antics involved in transfers and getting dressed have evolved from a fairly conventional stand and pivot to a series of bizarre contortions that I can't reasonably expect anyone else to manage. It's getting harder and harder for Scarecrow to do it. It's not safe.

So, the lift. We're there. It's time.

Talk about adding insult to injury, I not only have to accept adaptive equipment I really really really never wanted to use, I have to go through the hellish process involved in procuring durable medical equipment to get it. I'm still trying to get a head array control for my power chair, for criminy sake. Not happy. Not even a little bit. Don't tell me how lucky I am to have insurance that will cover most of the cost. I'm not ready to look on the bright side. I need to be crabby for a little while. Don't tell me it's my fault for having put it off so long. I'm not ready to be reasonable.

Welcome to Jurassic Park.

Are You Listening to Me?

2010-06-30T16:16:00.000-07:00

On the way home yesterday, there was a piece on NPR about a blogger who asked what you might say to your 20-year-old self, if you had the chance. One of those If I Knew Then What I Know Now sorts of things. As a topic for a blog post, it sounds kind of intriguing. Also self-indulgent, self-absorbed, all about me... what's not to like? Totally my kind of thing.

Not that I think there's anything I could say that would make a dent in my 20-year-old self's hard head. I was a stubborn, self-centered, not particularly likable control freak. If there was something I wanted, I would do whatever it took to make it happen, even if it meant running roughshod over other people. I had no social skills to speak of. What can you say to a person like that?

I know she won't listen. But for what it's worth:

Most of the things you wake up at three o'clock in the morning worrying about will never happen. If there's nothing you can do about it, right then, go back to sleep. Preemptive worrying is a waste of time.
You do not need a man in your life. Fortunately the men you have been/will be involved with are all good people; you'll be lucky that way. They are just not right for you. Fear of being alone is not a solid basis for a partnership. Learn to be by yourself and like it.
You will never in a million years imagine the kind of guy you will eventually wind up with. Never in a million years. You'll be lucky to have him, for sure. He's just not what you would expect. Ever.
You're not fat. The women in your mother's family, back to the flood, have big butts. There's nothing you can do about it.
It's OK to be goal-oriented. A certain amount of determination is not a bad thing. That doesn't mean you have to be such a little s#!t about it.
If there are things you really want to do, do them while you can. I'm just sayin'.
You don't control nearly as much as you think you do. I know it's hard to let go. Believe me, I do. Try asking yourself, "500 years from now, what will it matter?"

That's enough for now, but I'm not through with you. We'll come back to this. Are you listening to me?

Greyhound Gig

2010-06-25T15:55:00.000-07:00

One of the things on my list of Things to Do After I Retire was to volunteer for something. It seemed like a good idea. Isn't that what everybody says they're going to do after they retire? One ought to make a contribution somehow, oughtn't one, even if one isn't paid for it? The trick would be finding something I can actually do.

The obvious victim was Greyhound Pets, Inc. Scarecrow and I have volunteered with this group since we adopted our first retired racer in 1997, but haven't been as active lately as we used to be. We used to host regular meet-and-greets at local pet supply stores and a nearby shopping center, and I can't do that very well anymore. We played music for their annual adoption fair, and I can't do that anymore at all. Their current webmaster has everything under control, thankyouverymuch. I wouldn't be much help at the kennel. It was not entirely clear to me what I could do, volunteer-wise.

As it turns out, GPI needs a newsletter editor.

Hey, I can do that!

Ironically, since we lost our last greyhound a couple of months ago, I'm editing The Bark. I don't think I'm overcommitted. Due to budgetary constraints, it only comes out twice a year and it's only 16 pages long. There are three people working on it. The next issue doesn't come out until November. It's not a high-stress job. I can do this.

It's kind of nice to have a deadline again.

The Lung Vac

2010-06-24T14:22:00.000-07:00

Seems like I've had a flurry of doctor appointments lately. Two weeks ago, I checked in with the rehab medicine guy. Since I was whining about being short of breath, he referred me to a guy in the pulmonary clinic. I expected it would be a total waste of everybody's time; they would listen to my chest, decide I didn't have pneumonia or asthma, and send me on my way. The rehab guy allowed as how that might be the case, but said he was referring me to somebody with a particular interest in neuromuscular disorders. I was pretty sure they wouldn't find anything wrong, and if they did, there wouldn't be anything they could do about it. But I went.

So last week I show up at the pulmonary clinic. After some puffing and blowing, they tell me my lung capacity is about 50% of normal, and ask if I have any trouble coughing. Well, yeah, as it happens, I do. Giving in to my penchant for overstatement (hyperbole is the best thing ever!), I tell them I'm afraid if I ever get a respiratory infection, I'm toast. So they make me an appointment with a respiratory therapist.

So on Monday I see the respiratory therapist. After some more puffing and blowing, he tells me if I ever get a respiratory infection, I'm toast. Somehow it's more disquieting, coming from him. He gives me a thing that looks like a purple balloon with a hose, and takes Scarecrow and me through some exercises that he describes as range of motion for the lungs. Then he pulls up a machine that is basically a vacuum cleaner with a mask attached. It blows air into your lungs, then sucks it out. It feels... weird. It sounds like, well, like a vacuum cleaner.

The dogs are going to hate this.

Summer Solstice

2010-06-21T14:38:00.000-07:00

Celebrating summer solstice today, the longest day of the year. The longest chilly, grey, dreary, gloomy day of the year.

Don't get me wrong. I love living in a place where it starts to get light at 4:30 in the morning this time of year, and isn't really dark until almost 10 at night. I love living in a place that's green all year round, and ferns grow wild. I realize that the flipside of these things is that you get about 15 minutes of daylight in the dead of winter, and it rains a lot. I realize there is a price to be paid. But really, even in Seattle, by mid-June a glimpse of blue sky at some point during the day ought not be a remarkable occurrence. This year, it is. A friend referred to it as June-uary.

So, today is the first day of summer. I'm ready.

Time Flies...

2010-06-18T15:18:00.000-07:00

One year ago today was my last day of gainful employment.

It's not an anniversary to celebrate. I wasn't ready to retire. Although my job wasn't my passion -- I was a tech writer, for Pete's sake -- it was interesting, challenging, and I was good at it. It accounted for much of my self image, provided most of my social interactions, and was a reliable source of nerdy techie toys. And, of course, there was the paycheck.

Sometimes I think I should've thrown in the towel sooner than I did. Other times I wonder how I managed to hang on so long.

Other than the significant and painful drop in income, I expected the transition from working to not to be more painful than it was. Since I was already working in a remote, empty office at Bob's Books and Day Care Center, the only difference in my day-to-day routine was that I didn't do any work. Every morning the realization that I don't have to actually accomplish anything still comes as a real relief. I still feel guilty about not having to do any work, and about feeling relieved that I don't have to do any work.

At first, I spent a lot of time getting disentangled from my former day job, and getting disability insurance and SSDI set up. Since then, I'm afraid I've been lamentably indolent. I have made no inroads on the lists of things I thought I would do after I retired. I expected to be bored, but I haven't been. Perhaps I'm just easily amused.

They say time flies when you're having fun. I must be having fun.