This Cat Is Not Dead

Rikkus

But it was a close thing.

This is Rikkus.  He's the "foreclosure cat" we rescued a few years ago, when his owners moved away and left him behind.  We found out he had a microchip, but it was to the Seattle shelter he'd been adopted from in 1998, and his owners nevr updated the chip's records from that shelter address.  We think he might have originally belonged to an older person who passed away, and while the younger generation took him in initially, when they encountered their own troubles Rikkus became an option, not an obligation.

We don't know what his original name was.  "Rikkus" is the word for "lion" in the invented language our housemate Tabbi uses for her online persona and writing.  He was informally known as "Stalker Cat", because when our friend and back fence neighbor Anne was alive, he'd come up to the patio door or bedroom window ledge and get Anne's cats Aliera and Sethra all flustered and upset.  (We took in Aliera and Sethra when Anne died, so now they're actually all living in the same house.  They've never been friendly, but they don't fight or throw hissy-fits.)

Rikkus was a big ol' guy, fairly stocky under long black fur.  When he was still a street cat, he pretty much owned the street.  But about a year ago, he started losing weight, fairly drastically, and getting stiff and slow-moving.  Blood tests showed hyperthyroidism, so he's been on meds for that for about a half year.

But he's continued to decline, eating poorly and getting gaunt.  Recent developments included pulling out chunks of fur, treating the litter box as an option, and throwing up a lot of what he reluctantly ate.  He was being a pretty miserable kitty.

So we'd been thinking that it might be time to have Rikkus put to sleep, and made an appointment for earlier this morning to have it done.

Rikkus has never been an enthusiastic pill-taker, to put it mildly, and I didn't see any overwhelming need to continue his meds for the last few days before his final appointment.  So I stopped giving him the hyperthyroidism meds.

And... he began to improve.  He started eating again (and in decent amounts) and keeping it down, he seems to have stopped pulling out fur, and he's been using the litter box again.  He also seems more alert and engaged.

This made me wonder if the meds he'd been taking might actually have been part of the problem.  When I checked online for hypothroidism (underactive thyroid), the list of symptoms were almost a complete match for what Rikkus had been showing.

So it seems possible that he's been getting too high a dose of the hyperthyroidism meds.  I consulted the vet, and we'll try cutting back on that dosage and see how he does.  (Also start giving him something to try and help with his stiff and creaky old joints.)

I'm frankly relieved to be able to give him a reprieve.   Losing Tia and Gremlin -- bam! bam! -- one after the other was hard enough.  I really don't want Undulant Fever to be "All dead cats, all the time."  (I have visions of walking down the street and having people shouting "It's that guy with the Dead Cat Blog!  QUICK!  HIDE THE KITTENS!")

Died On The 4th Of July: Gremlin, 2000-2011

We have lost another of our cats.

Losing Gremlin was harder than Tia.  Hilde and I are both compulsive cat-lovers, but Gremlin was definitely a "favorite son" among the herd.

He was also the only non-rescue cat.  Hilde used to breed Siamese, for several years before she and I got together, until the combination of rheumatoid arthritis, becoming a parent, and a divorce forced Hilde to close the cattery.  But she's always had at least one pure-bred Siamese as a pet since then (and a fair number of our rescue cats have been part-Siamese).

Hilde likes Siamese because they tend to have a strong personality.  Gremlin took that trait and double-downed on it.  He got his name when the cattery we were negotiating with, back in 2000, sent a photo of a Siamese kitten with hu-u-u-u-uge ears and a wicked expression, causing me to exclaim "It's a gremlin!"

(Yet one more proof that you should be careful what you name your cats.  Sometimes they live up to it.)

Gremlin was a cat for whom rules, guidelines and acceptable behavior were optional.  Counters and tabletops were one more roadway.  He was usually the smallest cat in the household, and at the same time the almost-alpha cat of the pack.  (He could have probably been the alpha cat, but he didn't have any interest in leadership, being much more into the "instant and unquestioning obedience to my slightest whim" thing.)  But he was also the cat who would spend hours on Hilde's lap, and snuggle up to her legs in bed at night.

Gremlin's final illness was unexpected and sudden.  Late Saturday night, June 25th, our housemate Tabbi called out "I think Gremlin's choking!"  I found him on the dining room floor, frantic and making retching motions, head and jaws extended, as if something was blocking his airway.  When I tried to hold him, he bit one of my fingers deeply, something he'd never done before.  (There'd been a few "play bites" over the years, but this one went deep, nearly to the bone.)  I grabbed our cat carrier and had Tabbi and James, one of our other housemates, get Gremlin into it while I threw some clothes on, grabbed the loaded carrier from them, ran out to the car, and sped off to the closest Emergency Animal Clinic.

"sped" is not an exaggeration.  I've had the Outlander up to 80 mph on the freeway occasionally, but this was the first time I've ever driven 80 mph on city streets.  Gremlin thrashed and made strangled throat noises during the ten-minute dash, but the noises slowed, then stopped about a half-mile away from the clinic.

How bad off was he?  Bad enough that the emergency vet's first notation on the medical chart was "DOA".  Chest compressions and oxygen got Gremlin breathing again.

While x-rays were taken and bloodwork done, I tried to think what might have caused Gremlin's choking.  Eventually I realized that he'd been occasionally acting, for about the previous week, like he was trying to cough up a hairball.  (Gremlin never coughed up the type of Big-Momma, "Oh my God!  What IS that thing?" hairballs our long-haired cats sometimes produce, but he'd bring up an occasional thin, streamlined version.)  He'd also acted like he was getting the beginnings of a head cold.  With hindsight, these might actually have been the early symptoms of whatever was causing his respiratory distress.

Which was uncertain.  X-rays showed no actual blockage in the air way, and the lungs looked pretty clear.  He'd been placed in an oxygen cage, and had recovered dramatically, regaining consciousness and alertness.  Throughout the night, the oxygen ration was stepped down to normal levels, and the vet thought Gremlin able to go home Sunday morning, to be followed up on by his regular veterinarian on Monday.

Except Sunday night was a repeat of Saturday night, but catching the early choking signs soon enough to get Gremlin back to the Emergency Clinic and the oxygen cage while still conscious.  An internal medicine specialist performed an ultrasound and endoscopy the next morning, and drew some fluid from the lung for further testing.  The fluid in the lung was not a good sign, and Gremlin was started on an antibiotic and bronchodilator while the fluid samples were being tested.  This time Gremlin was kept until Wednesday morning, when he again seemed to be okay without oxygen.

At least until late Thursday night/early Friday morning, when he went into the scary HEY!-CHOKING-TO-DEATH-HERE! behavior for a third time.  This time I was at work, and it was James who got to make the mad dash to the Emergency Clinic.  (Thank you, James.)

Back to the oxygen cage.  By this point, we were waiting for the final test results from the fluid samples.  The fluid and mucuous in Gremlin's lung did NOT appear to be coming from a bacterial infection, we knew by this point.  One of the alternate possibilities raised by the internist was Valley Fever, and it was that test we were waiting for the results on.

In the meantime, Gremlin became a full-time occupant of the oxygen cage, and despite medication, seemed to slowly be getting worse.  When the door would be opened for cleaning or feeding or visits, and regular air replaced the oxygen-rich environment, he'd start showing beginning signs of distress within a few minutes.  He never got weaned back to regular air this time.  (Part of this may have been because after three episodes of choking and agonal gasping and straining to breath, the internal stress and strain he'd gone through would have been like being in a bad fistfight with your own insides.)  The fluid in his lungs did not improve under the antibiotic treatment.

The Valley Fever test came back negative.  At this point, the internist thought there were two possibilities: Gremlin might have aspirated something foreign into his lung, or there might be cancer.  In either case, surgery to remove the affected part of the lung would be the next step.

And that was when Hilde and I had to make a decision.  I thought it was most likely the cancer diagnosis was the correct one.  (The first visit's emergency vet had raised cancer as a possibility.)  So even if Gremlin survived the lung surgery and rallied back to health, there was a possibility the cancer had metatasized elsewhere in the body and the surgery would only be a delaying tactic, not a cure.

And there was another factor, the factor no one likes to think about.  Gremlin's medical bills had already cost nearly $8,000.  Surgery and aftercare would be at least another $5,000.  We would have maxed out our primary credit card and had to move to using a second one, something I'd never had to do before.  And there was a significant possibility that all those extra efforts and expenses wouldn't save Gremlin, or save him only temporarily.

That's something you don't want to think about.  It's something you don't want to have to think about.  Thinking about it gives you feelings of guilt, of betraying your beloved pet.  You don't want to be "reasonable".  You don't want to be "pragmatic".  You want the financial costs to be irrelevant, to not be a factor in your decisions.  But there's a point when those costs become so overwhelming that they have to become a factor.

So we made the decision, to stop Gremlin's treatment and have him put to sleep.  This was tough, and made tougher because, just so long as he stayed in that oxygen cage, he didn't seem sick.  He was active, and alert, and annoyed that he was being kept in a strange place and in a cage.  (That was another factor to consider: Even if we could afford to continue paying hundreds of dollars a day to keep him in that oxygen cage, how did it feel to Gremlin to go from having a territory of several thousand square feet to being restricted to one of less than a square yard?

We were put into one of the examination rooms, where the doctor brought Gremlin to us a few minutes later.  We gave him petting and chin-critches and held him for a little while, until he began to show early signs of having to work at drawing breath.  I held Gremlin in my arms while the doctor put the syringe's contents into the injection port in Gremlin's front leg, and then he was gone.

We had Gremlin cremated, and the box with his ashes is on top of the A/V cabinet in our family room.  We've always buried our pets before, but it's gotten harder to go through that again, especially after burying Tia just a month or so before Gremlin's illness.  (And it's probably not going to be too much longer before Rikkus, the frail old man of our cat herd, passes on.)

I'm not a believer in Heaven or Hell for humans, but I'd like to think there's a Heaven for cats, where the food and water dishes fill themselves, where you can actually catch that damned red dot, and where there's always a sunbeam to sleep in.

Requiescas in pace et in amore.

Testing, Testing

I'm seeing if this Bloggeroid app lets me make posts from my cell phone.

posted from Bloggeroid

A Few Adjustments

Tweaking the layout and design of the blog just a bit.  Not sure I like the font for the main text, may change it again later.

More posts to come, eventually.  Probably subjects: Dieting, job-hunting (I'm still employed, but trying to find something/somewhere else), and Those Darn Gorillas!

Coming Soon To A Planet Near You

.

*knock knock*

"Who's there?"

"The Rap-Rapture!"

So I hear this Rapture thing is supposed to be happening tomorrow, when God lets down the velvet rope and the celestial doormen let the people on their list into Heaven, leaving the rest of us standing out on a cold sidewalk, in the rain, with dogshit on our shoes.  Or something like that. 

But that's okay, because the people who believe in the Rapture most strongly seem like people I really wouldn't enjoy spending time with.  Apparently, God loves suck-ups.

Oh, wait a minute, though!  Aren't you also supposed to qualify for Rapturing if you're a really really really nice person?

Well, I've always tried to be a nice person.  Or, at least, not-an-asshole.  I don't think the super-nice people get a choice when the Rapture happens, though.  It's just *snatch*, *whoosh*, and there you are in Heaven, surrounded by crowds of annoying people, forever.  What if I've been just nice enough in my life that God includes me on his to-be-Raptured list?  I don't think I really want that, thanks.

I'm not even sure Heaven has cable.  (I mean, hey, Game of Thrones is only halfway thru its first season!) 

I think I need to run out and steal some candy from a baby or something.  I need to pile up some Sin Points pronto.

The Daily Train Wreck

[The first part of this, before my night at the sleep lab, was drafted back on April 24th.  I added an update today, May 14th.]

I've referred to my sleep patterns as a "train wreck" before, but it's gotten worse the last few months. There are a number of reasons for this.

I don't sleep a continuous eight-hour stretch, but in scattered shorter sections, which only rarely add up to that recommended eight.

I can't really blame too much of this on working graveyard shifts, midnight to 8:00 AM, five nights a week. Lots of people work graveyard, and arrange their lives to where they sleep soundly during the day.

But that daytime period is also standard business hours for most people, and sometimes you have to be up and awake to take care of business. Doctor's appointments, phone calls, shopping, etc. So I can usually depend on staying up after getting home from work, or having to get up after a few hours sleep, at least two or three days out of those five.

There are also my other jobs, beside the one that actually pays. As Hilde's become progressively more disabled over the years, I've had to take on more and more of her care-giving, of being her hands and feet. That usually runs about five to six hours per day, and those are hours that really can't be cut back on. (I love my wife like crazy, but I hate her disease.)

(We have Tabbi living with us, who takes care of Hilde while I'm at work, but considering the pittance we pay her -- a babysitter would get paid more -- I'd feel guilty asking her to take on more work.)

In amongst all that, my third job is struggling to get things done, to keep up with paperwork and housekeeping, with shopping and yardwork. And the only category where it seems I can cut back on to make time for everything is by cutting back on sleep. Which leaves me in a walking fog half the time I'm up, which means I don't get as much done in that waking time as I would if properly rested, which means I end up trying to stay awake longer to try and get enough done, which means... well, just Google "diminishing returns".

(Which all makes writing my fourth job, at best.  I suppose for a fourth job, I've done pretty well, but it help explains why I haven't finished or sold a story for over four years.)

A few weeks ago, I took a treadmill stress test. This happened to be at the end of a workweek, so I'd only had about 20 hours sleep the previous five days. (That was less than usual, but not by much.) Have you ever ("Keep your eyes open, Mr. Arthurs!") started to fall asleep ("Keep your eyes open!") on a treadmill?  That kinda goes beyond "walking fog" into "situational narcolepsy".

(You might wonder, how do I ever manage to drive a car without falling asleep at the wheel?  Because my doctor's aware of my sleep pattern, or lack of same, and prescribes Provigil, an anti-drowsy drug that turns off the "sleepy" switch in your brain for a few hours.  I try to take it at times when I'll be able to drop into bed after it wears off, so it doesn't keep me awake in bed.)

In all, I'm kinda feeling like there are no good options to improve this situation.  I'd like to be able to ditch the outside job, but we still need that to stay in a positive cash-flow status.  I can't cut back on the time spent with Hilde, or on the time spent handling the day to day tasks of living; I barely keep up as it is... and far too often I'm not keeping up.

Except for sleep, the only place where I could cut back is the time I spend on the Internet... and I'm reluctant to do that as well.  I browse about a half-dozen blogs daily, and about another dozen less frequently; I check my email; I check my bank account and pay most of my bills online.   I try to keep my online time to 90 minutes or less daily (not always successfully, I admit).  But if I gave up those social aspects of being online, I'd feel like there wasn't much of me left.  Gaining extra time for not-fun stuff isn't a trade-off I want to make.

I'm having a sleep study done at the end of this week, but I don't really expect too much out of it. I had one done about five years ago, which came back with completely normal results.  Probably because having that sleep lab was one of the rare times when I was able to get an uninterrupted eight hours of sleep.  If they really want to test my typical sleep period, they'd wake me up a few hours in, have me perform a variety of tasks for a few hours, then have me get back into bed and try to go back to sleep again. 

(That's another thing:  Sometimes I can be bone-tired, barely staying on my feet, but when I get back into bed, sometimes I lay there for hours before I actually get back to sleep.  This is incredibly frustrating, to say the least.)

- - - - -

Update, May 14th:  Somewhat to my surprise, the results from my night all wired up at the sleep lab were... informative.

I originally went to the sleep lab, not because of my broken sleep patterns and overall lack of sleep, but because there had been scattered occasions when, first laying down to go to sleep, I would suddenly be unable to take in a breath.  It was as if the autonomic breathing impulses were suddenly turned off.  Kinda alarming.  But when I'd react by rolling over from my back to my side, I could suddenly breathe again.  This wasn't common enough to be considered an emergency -- it happened about five or six times over about a two-month period -- but often enough to be of concern.  I described it to my regular doctor as "It's kinda like what sleep apnea is supposed to be like, only without the sleeping part." 

To make sure I didn't have a tumor or growth starting in my throat, my doctor first sent me to an ENT specialist , where I got to watch a scope-on-a-rope send back images from my sinuses down to the top of my esophagus, with normal results.  After that came the appointment with the sleep lab.

This time the results were not "completely normal".  The results showed I was having the scattered stops in breathing during my sleep as well.  Overall, I was diagnosed as having mild sleep apnea; however, whenever I was on my back that night, instead of on my side, the number of incidents-per-hour jumped, from about half-a-dozen to over forty.

The recommendation was for me to start using one of those CPAP machines while sleeping, where a breathing mask over your face keeps a continuoous pressure in your airway, preventing it from closing during an apnea incident.

However, the data shows that a lot of people prescribed CPAP machines have trouble using them regularly, or stop using them after a few months.  So I'm trying "Positional Therapy" first, arranging things where one spends sleep on their side, instead of on their back.  The basic methods are to either block oneself in, or to wear a snug t-shirt that has tennis balls or other obstructions sewn into pockets along the spine.  One keeps you on your side, the other wakes you up if you roll onto your back.

Since getting the results, I've been sleeping with Big Kitty, an extra-large stuffed animal which has doubled as a body pillow in the past, behind my back at night.  (I've also bought a "Sidesleeper" pillow, shaped with an extension along the back, but it just arrived yesterday and I haven't used it enough to say how well it works yet.) Staying on  my side doesn't solve everything, but there does seem to be some improvement, waking up feeling better rested and with a bit more energy during the day.

It would probably also help to lose those thirty excess pounds I've picked up over the last five or six years.  Getting back to exercising regularly would help with that, and it would really help if I stopped snacking and "grazing" so much.  (But it's hard to resist the siren call of the Doritos, or the "yip-yip-yip!" of the Cheez-It herds as they roll across the plains.)

Tia, our Ghost Cat, 1997-2011

Tia, in a rare public moment

We came back from spending Saturday at LepreCon, one of the local conventions, and were starting to get ready for bed.  Part of the checklist for that is giving some of our cats a few kitty treats.  Which is when we realized that Tia, our older Ragdoll mix, not only hadn't come out for her treats, but hadn't come out the night before as well, and possibly longer.

Tia (short for Tiamet) has always been our "ghost cat", very much a solitaire who didn't interact much with the other cats and who was extremely shy about people in general and especially when there were strangers in the house.  We've had friends who've visited dozens of times, over years, who would finally get a glimpse of Tia and ask, "Oh, did you get a new cat?"  Until the last few years, when she got a little more outgoing, she'd spend almost all of her time in one room, our bedroom.  So it wasn't at all unusual -- in fact, the default -- to not see Tia.  When we realized she hadn't been seen at all for several days, our fear was that she might have slipped out the back screen door -- we've had people going back and forth to the backyard more often than usual the last few days -- even though that would have been extremely unusual for her. (Except for watching an occasional episode of Bird TV, she showed little interest in the outdoors.)

But we found her under our bed.  Our mattress is on a multi-drawer pedestal, which most of the time means the bed is effctively a solid block.  But if you get down on the floor and wiggle and shimmy around like an urban spelunker/contortionist, there's a crawlspace under the headboard (the headboard is a bookshelf attached to the top rim of the bed itself; we are so predictable) that leads to an area under the bed between the drawers on each side.  A quiet, private place.

Tabbi, who's younger and far more limber than me, was able to bring Tia out.  Tia was very dehydrated, thin, and obviously in distress.

This was a shock, because while Tia is actually our oldest cat, adopted from a rescue organization in 1997, she's always been exceptionally healthy.  Our next oldest, Rikkus, the "foreclosure cat" we rescued after his owners abandoned him a few years ago, was born in 1998 and has become a frail, slow-moving old man who'll sometimes sit on the floor and stare at you until you pick him up and put him in the high spot he wants to go.  Tia...?  Except for routine vaccinations and the bad case of ringworm she had when we adopted her, I don't think Tia has ever had to have a vet visit in her entire fourteen years. It was only a couple of weeks ago she was trying to catch a laser pointer's red dot.

This happened past midnight on a weekend.  So I drove her to the closest Emergency Animal Clinic, rather than waiting a day and a half for our regular vet's office to be open.  Findings: Besides the dehydration, Tia had an irregular heartbeat, her blood oxygen was poor, and she was very, very anemic.  The doctor's prognosis was pessimistic; aggressive treatment might bring some improvement, but even with that, the odds of Tia dying before Monday morning were probably over 50%.

And that was just to treat the current crisis; it didn't address the original, unknown, cause of Tia's sudden downslide.

(Speculation: Tia might have had a slow-growing tumor that didn't produce obvious symptoms until it caused internal bleeding, leading to the severe anemia leading to the heart problems leading to all the rest.)

It was a hard decision.  But after talking with Hilde on the phone, we finally decided euthanasia was the best choice.  The vet had already installed an injection port during the critical care after Tia first arrived at the clinic, so there wasn't the ignominy of a final needlestick.   I petted her while the injection went in, and she went quietly and quickly (and with, I suspect, relief).

Tabbi and James, one of our other housemates, dug a hole in the side yard and buried Tia for us.  We've lived in this house for over 25 years, so there are about another four or five cats buried over there from years past.  It doesn't get any easier.

I said that Tia didn't interact often with the other cats.  Oddly, though, she seemed to love our Welsh Cardigan Corgi, Madame Mim.  When Mim would be laying on the floor in the bedroom, Tia would sometimes come up and start washing Mim's face and ears, and doing the head-butt PURR-PURR-PURR thing.  ("Tia," I sometimes told her, "you are a traitor to your own species.")  Mim, to her credit, would lay there and take the washing and loving without objection, albeit always with a horribly embarassed expression on her face.

The Ethics of Earworming

Ever hear a song on the radio or wherever, that sticks in your head and just won't stop? That's an earworm.

The quality, or lack of, isn't particularly relevant to the, umm, earworminess of a particular piece of music.  Recent case in point: Rebecca Black's "Friday", which (so I've heard) is pretty unforgettable, no matter how desperate you are to do so.

But sometimes the earworm can come from a good piece of music.

Hilde and I, when there's nothing we want to watch on tv, sometimes turn the channel to one of the "Golden Oldies" music channels as background noise.  The 1960's had a lot of suckitude, but it had a lot of great music.

But even great music, after the third or fourth day of having it play in the back of your head, gets a little... wearying.

They (the ubiquitous "They") say the best way to get rid of an earworm is to share it with someone else.  So:

The main reason "Have I The Right" makes such a strong earworm is the especially strong beat.  In the original recording, besides Honey Lantree's drumming (one of the few female drummers in rock), the rest of the band was foot-stomping on wooden stairs, and the tambourine was being beaten, not by the player's hand, but directly onto the microphone.  The resulting triple-threat THUMPA-THUMPA-THUMPA gets right into one's midbrain; your heartrate speeds up and adrenaline starts to flow.  This is a great piece of "stay-awake" music.

Latest LoL

One of my recent contributions to Historic Lols got picked for the front page there, and has picked up about 270 votes so far:

*Coff* *Hack* *Wheeze*

Today's strip from Sinfest pretty much nails how my last few days have been.  (Well, except that when I'm fighting giant spiders with a sword, I'm generally not wearing a cute little blouse-and-skirt outfit.)

A new twist to this latest flu, mega-cold, or whatever it is, is that the associated fever and inflammation seems to have set off a reoccurrence of the hip bursitis I had about five years ago, on top of all the other symptoms. Not fun. Not fun at all. I don't like to take narcotic pain-killers except as a last resort; for this, I ended up taking T-3's (Tylenol with codeine).

I happened to have an appointment with an ENT doctor on Friday, for unrelated reasons, but he prescribed antibiotics for the crud I was having, and there's been vast improvement since then. I'll probably be back at work tonight.

A Fistful of Panthers



(via Flickr Commons, a 1968 photo from the Amsterdam Zoo.)



A Death In The Family, Part 2

On Thursday I got the news that Tom McGril, my stepdad (he and my mother had been together for about ten years), had died. Unlike the death of Hilde's brother Greg, this wasn't unexpected; Tom had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and given a six month prognosis about five-and-a-half months ago. Still, hard to hear, especially coming on top of Greg's death last week.

Tom and Mom met when Tom was recovering from hip surgery, and hired Mom (she was living in the same trailer park community) as a caregiver until he (literally) got back on his feet. Things developed, they moved in together, and eventually got married.

Tom was a good guy, who reminded me a lot of my father (who passed away in 1980) and made life better for Mom while they were together. He was also an accomplished painter, who was still giving classes when Mom met him. (He'd stopped painting in recent years, having lost enough fine control to feel he could continue. That was a loss.)

I'm of mixed mind about Tom's death from cancer. Yes, it gave time to make some preparations and planning, but the last couple of months of Tom's life varied from Pretty Bad to Really, Really Bad. Greg's death, shocking and unexpected as it was to his family and friends, at least meant that Greg went quickly and relatively painlessly. (And it also, speaking pragmatically, saved the expense of a long drawn-out illness. Tom's care and treatment over the last months means Mom is left with little in the way of savings anymore.)

(I also want to give a shout-out to my brother Denny and his wife Debbie - especially Debbie - for extraordinary expenditures of time and energy caring for, arranging care for, transporting to medical appointments, etc, for both Tom and my Mom these last months.)

A Death In The Family

Hilde's brother, my brother-in-law, Greg Hildebrand, died unexpectedly last night.

Apparent cause was a heart attack.  He'd complained of aches in his shoulders and back, and went to bed early, about 9:00.  When his wife Deb checked on him about a half-hour later, he was non-responsive.  She called 911, and he went into full cardiac arrest in the ambulance and couldn't be revived.

Totally unexpected.  There's no family history of cardiac problems; the Hildebrands almost invariably die of various abdominal cancers, and at a considerably older age.  (He was 57.)  Greg had been losing weight and reducing his blood pressure in recent months, so to all appearances he was getting fitter.

We'd been over to Greg & Deb's Friday night, and there were no signs of what would happen 24 hours later.

Hilde's being hit pretty hard by this.  Greg was her only sibling, and he was seven years younger than her; she'd more or less helped raise Greg while her mother worked to support the family.  With all of Hilde's health problems, she never expected to outlive her brother.

Besides Deb, his wife, he leaves behind his two daughters, Lea and Gwen, from his first marriage, and a lot of friends.

He was a pretty good guy.  (If I tried to say he was a saint, he'd have guffawed.)  He was always there for family and friends.   Our politics tended to be pretty far apart a lot of the time, but he was always good-natured about it.  I'm going to miss him.

(Just for the record, I should point out that Hilde's brother, Greg Hildebrand, should not be confused with the fantasy artist Greg Hildebrandt.  It's happened a time or two.)

Google Gets Its Priorities Straight

Google, in its practice of having special logos for special days, celebrates Wil Eisner's 94th birthday:

A little music to pass the time until I write a real post.

I've had a number of posts I've wanted to write in recent weeks, but have been extraordinarily busy (and "ordinarily busy" is already pretty hectic). Maybe later.

In the meantime, a little music. Hilde and I first heard "Concerto Antico" on our local classical station, KBAQ, while driving to a doctor's appointment, and liked it enough to check the station's playlist after we got home and identify the work. This YouTube video of the work's first section also coordinates music and images nicely. Enjoy.

Nouveau Robotica

Artist Chris Kawagiwa has been producing a very cool series of "Nouveau Robotica" works. Think of them as high-tech Mucha.

Gallery of the full set can be found here.

Nothing To Do With Today's News, Nope.

A Tea Partier went to the movie theater.

He didn't like the movie. So he shouted, "THIS MOVIE SUCKS! SOMEONE SHOULD BURN THIS THEATER DOWN!"

But nobody burned the theater down. A week later the Tea Partier went back to the theater and watched a different movie.

He didn't like that movie either. So he shouted, "THIS MOVIE SUCKS! SOMEONE SHOULD BURN THIS THEATER DOWN!" again.

But nobody burned the theater down. So he kept going back to watch other movies. He was a pretty crabby old guy -- he'd yell "Get off my lawn, you spic!" at the guy he'd hired off a street corner to mow his lawn, that's how crabby he was -- and since John Wayne and Ronald Reagan were both dead, there weren't really any movies he liked anymore, so every time he went to the theater. . . "THIS MOVIE SUCKS! SOMEONE SHOULD BURN THIS THEATER DOWN!"

Then one day he went to the theater, only to find the parking lot crowded with police cars and ambulances, and a line of blanket-covered corpses laid out on the asphalt. The theater building was in flames, its walls collapsing inward, showers of sparks climbing into the sky.

Someone had burned the theater down.

"Oh, my god! This is horrible! Horrible!" the Tea Partier cried in anguish. "Now I have to find a different theater to go to!"

It's 2011

Still no jetpack, dammit.

2010 passed away quietly at midnight, and 2011 snuck into the room just as quietly.

This in spite of some varieties of fireworks having been made legal in the State of Arizona, and Glendale being one of the few cities that didn't institute their own local ban in response.  (Glendale allows them, but only on private property.)  Probably because the varieties allowed are only the sissy-foo-foo types that sit on the ground and shoot off a feeble shower of sparks.  Because what good are fireworks if you can't use them to blow a few fingers off or an eye out, or set an entire neighborhood ablaze?

My resolutions?  Pretty much the same as previous years.  Lose weight, reduce debt, try to write more.

I'm actually pretty good at reducing debt.  It's just that by the time I've reduced the old debt, new debt has come along.  Besides recovering from the cash-flow imbalance while off work these last few months, and the medical costs that weren't covered by insurance, it looks like we'll have some major dental expenses to deal with in 2011.  (My insurance is generally pretty good -- it's paid about 90% of the cost for shoulder surgery and the subsequent physical therapy -- but the dental coverage is feeble.)

As for the writing:  I have no idea if I'm going to write fiction again.  It's been over four years since my last completed story (there have been ocasional fragments since then), and that was a story far too autobiographical and not safe to market until at least several people have passed away.  The drive, the at-least-occasional fire in the mind that produced earlier stories, doesn't seem to be there anymore.  (Possibly it was because I finally wrote that too-autobiographical story, which I'd been wanting to do -- and skittering away from -- for thirty years.)  If I write fiction again, it will be by means of perspiration, rather than the mostly-inspiration stories I've done until now.  Craft, rather than art.  (Am I a craftsman?  I don't know.)

In the meantime, I've put together a bibliography of my published fiction.  There's a new link to that page over in the sidebar.  Rather slight, for that long a time, but there are stories in that list I'm proud of, so hey.

And there are stories I wrote before that last one, good enough I should try to get them out to markets again; I think they'd sell, if they just hit the right editor at the right time.  There are a few that don't seem to be marketable, or marketable enough; I might go ahead and put them online here.

And I'll continue to post here with the occasional comment or news, of course, leavened appropriately with snark or outrage. Bcause I am snarkish and outrageous, that's why.

Christmas Snowpocalypse -- the view from sunny Arizona

Here in Arizona, I had to brave temperatures in the 70's while running errands earlier today.  Life is tough.

But I've been looking at pictures from the big blizzard that's been dumping snow on the Northeast states.  That's some pretty cold-looking stuff you got there, people!

A photo gallery at Talking Points Memo led me to Dan Nguyen's Flickr set from New York City, which has some particularly nice shots.  This is my favorite, of Union Square:



Union Square - New York Snowstorm Blizzard 2010

 I like the sense of calm in this photo, at a location that would normally be filled with traffic moving in all directions.  The emptiness of the vista, the lack of vehicles and the wonderful old buildings (the snow-haze gives the buildings a layered effect not unlike that seen in Chinese mountain landscapes), make it almost seem like one has dropped a century back in time.  (Just put your thumb over that McDonald's sneaking in on the left edge.)

UPDATE: Here are a few more outstanding photos I've found on Flickr.  One that could be titled "New Yorkers Are Crazy" by O62, and a lovely self-portrait with snow by esparist.

One Word

Via Jay Lake, Daniel Abraham is having a discussion on story vs. sentence in fiction over on his Live Journal blog; Part of the discussion has been about how a story can change when the choice of words is changed.

As it happens, I can give an example where one word, being changed, changed a story:

One of my own stories, "Angel's Blood", published in Heaven Sent (ed. by Pete Crowther, DAW [US] and Signet Creed [UK] 1995).

The Big Reveal in that story came in the following sentence:

"There is war in Heaven, and God is losing."

For whatever reason (it showed up in the galleys without explanation), Crowther decided to change that to this:

"There is war in Heaven, and the angels are losing."

I think that both versions are effective stories. But they're not the same story.

- - - - -

In that same discussion, Daniel brought up the loss of accessibility to written language over time, as the language of later generations changes in usage and meaning, gaining new vocabulary as well as losing the old.  Chaucer and Shakespeare were brought up as examples (outliers?) whose work is still read today because of their sheer strength of story, rather than their now-difficult language.

Language-change is only part of that, however.  Culture as a whole changes over time.  So there's less and less overlap between the culture of Chaucer's or Shakespeare's time and that of a reader fifity or a hundred or five hundrd years removed.  The context is lost.

So, in the context (*ahem*) of reading classical literature, to better understand that literature one needs to learn at least some of the historical context.  For that, things like annotated editions are useful.  But then your understanding of that context is dependent on the understanding and style (their own word-choices) of the annotations' author.  So ideally, the author of such an annotation would be a capable historian, linguist, archaeologist, anthropologist AND author.  And even then, your own brain is getting only a second-generation xerox of that author's understanding.

So it shouldn't really be a surprise that "popular culture" is, well, popular.  There's a "common context" that the reader can share, being a resident of the same culture the author of a modern work lives in.  The context of a work of classical fiction has become an uncommon context.

I think this may be why "historical mysteries" are popular.  The context of the historical period used for the mystery may be uncommon, but the meta-elements of mystery and detective fiction are part of the "common context" an average reader will be familiar with.  That gives the reader sufficient grounding in a work to give the author a chance to present the historical and cultural context clearly enough to give the reader a grounding in that aspect as well.

Conversely, even in a modern work, context can be relative. Why is fiction from other countries rarely popular in the US? I suspect it's because the cultural context is different enough to become part of the "uncommon context" I've mentioned above. Off the top of my head, it seems that the further away from the US (or the UK) a work of fiction originates, the less likely it is to gain a readership here.

And this can even apply to modern works supposedly set in a culture common to the average reader.  Back in my early 20's, I found myself reading Roommates by Elsie Lee.  Lee was a romance writer whose readership overlapped to some extent with SF readers.  (I think I first saw her work mentioned by Juanita Coulson in YANDRO, though I may be misremembering.)  At any rate, I came across and read the book.

I'm pretty sure I was not the audience for that book.  I was a young, socially awkward, inexperienced (worrying about getting laid wasn't a big concern back then; my state of general despair was more about just getting a date!).   And when I read Roommates, I was pretty thoroughly aghastified.  The lead characters in Roommates were... "husband-hunters" is the best term I can come up with.  To become someone's wife was the #1 goal in their lives.

I didn't have the context to understand those characters, or to sympathize with them.  To me, Roommates wasn't a romance novel, it was a horror novel.

(The website where I found the cover image, Fantastic Fiction, also quoted the backcover blurb to Roommates: "They were roommates happily sharing expenses and men, secrets and strategies, until they discovered the real meaning of womanhood--and love."  And underneath that was a "Similar Works By Other Authors" section.  The work cited as similar was Oath Of Fealty, by Elizabth Moon.   Wait, what?)

On the Subject of Beards, With Visual Aids

I'll be going back to work in early January, having recovered from shoulder surgery sufficiently. Which means I'll have to once again shave off the beard I've been growing back these last few months, and which I prefer to have.

A lot of people have said I look younger without the beard. I think they're wrong, but it's actually a matter of how good you look, not how young you look. Here's a piece of evidence to that effect:


The Most Interesting Man In The World

 Not convinced?  Okay, how about this?





with beard





without beard



I trust I've made my point.

Naughty or Nice?

Moonwalking Zombies of 1921



found on MagazineArt.org



A Questionable Christmas

Every Christmas season, there come along various seasonal items that make you stop short and say, "What?  Really?"  Here's a couple.  (I'll probably add more as I come across them.)

From the Toscano catalog, the Christmas Yeti ornament:

And from a Park Seed email, something to do with those overgrown, woody okra pods from your garden:

Every nativity needs a dragon, doesn't it?

You might think someone thinks dragons are just too damn cute to leave out of a Nativity.  But this particular setup was put together by someone basing it on the Book of Revelations, rather than the earlier parts of the New Testament.  That sounds like a fun family to be part of.

The Paris Exhibition on Flickr

I've been reading The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt.  Very good book, but I was especially struck by the section set in and during the Paris Exhibition of 1900 (think World's Fair), with lush descriptions of the buildings and exhibits.

Thought to take a look on the Flickr Commons pages to see if there were photos from the Exhibition.  Turned out there was not only a set of photos, it was a big set (271 photos), and they were even in color! (Hand-colored, but still....)

The full set here.

Two-Fer Teapots!

I occasionally browse around for teapot competitions online.  These are usually for ceramic artists, working within the constraints of teapot design; sometimes those constraints are stretched way-y-y-y beyond what one expects, and the results can be astonishing.

Saddleback College in California has an annual competition along those lines, and past years have produced fine work.  Alas, for 2010, Saddleback decided that rather than a gallery with individual photos of each entry, they'd only post a PDF of the winning entries and honorable mentions.

But wait!  Browsing a bit more, I came across this gallery from a teapot-themed competition/benefit-auction held by the AAW.  That's the American Association of Woodturners.  All those teapots are made of wood (or wood-like materials; one is made from corrugated cardboard).  Woodworking is another area of interest to me, so, hey!, I get two-for-one pleasure from these.  Here are several examples:

Some or most of the AAW teapots are purely decorative (I'd imagine you'd need to coat the interior with a food-safe varnish or polyurethane to actually brew tea in them).  Some are more than obvious about being purely art pieces, like this one, and especially this delicate little number.

And then there's the piece shown below, by artist Binh Pho, made of maple and decorated with glass beads, pearls, and 14k gold; detail photo here:

Yowsa!

Latest LOL

Gary Farber reminds us that there aren't enough cats on the Internet. So:

The Way To A King's Stomach?

Browsing the selections over at the Science Fiction Book Club, a two-book combo selection popped up:



The Way of Kings/Best of the Year Cookbook Recipes



O-kayyyyyy....  

I'm scratching my head, wondering how someone made the decision that a Big Fat Fantasy and a recipe collection have sufficient appeal to each other's audience to be offered as a set?

Publishers work in mysterious ways....



Look, Ma! No Sling!

I had my first follow-up appointment with my shoulder surgeon on Monday. The good news is that he told me to start leaving the sling off my arm.

The bad news is he thought I should have a better range of motion at this point, so he wanted the sling dumped to let the arm move around more and get more flexible.

Yes, I have been wearing the sling pretty much 24/7 since the surgery, because that's what I was told to do. The first month following surgery, other than the passive therapy when the therapist moves the arm around while I try to keep it limp, was supposed to give the incision a chance to heal, and not to stress the sutures and repairs to the rotator cuff.

But the second month (as in, now) is when I'm supposed to get more active with the arm, including home-based exercises to stretch the shoulder as well as more-physical appointments with the PT people.

I'm kinda happy to have the sling off. "Kinda", because I still have to be careful not to overextend or overuse the left arm, and because it does ache some just from being out loose. But I can use that arm a bit more than before, with care, and I appreciate that. (Typing one-handed has been, umm, dreary.)

The stretching exercises started today. I figured they'd probably hurt. I was right. (I was saying "Owch! Owch! Oooch! Owch!" when another patient in another room gave a sharp, loud scream from thir own therapy. "Hey, someone's having a worse day than I am," I said. It's very, very bad of me, but that made me feel a bit better about the whole thing.)

Besides the appointments for physical therapy, I'm supposed to do the stretching exercises at home two or three times a day, using a stick and a set of pulleys to help push and pull the arm past it's comfort zone and into larger extensions. This hurts, too, but it does help get the range of motion slowly back to normal. (Right now I can only raise that left arm up to about shoulder level without an assist from the stick or pulleys. That's not sufficient, so I need to do the exercises, regardless of how much they hurt.)

After a month of stretching and extending the range of motion, the third month will be when I start working on getting that arm's strength back, because between not being able to use it fully before the surgery and not being able to use it pretty much at all since the surgery, the strength on that arm is pretty much punked out. Something tells me that's probably going to hurt too.

New Face, Same As The Old Face

I've complained before (bitterly, with much rending of sackcloth and angst-ridden wandering about fog-shrouded moors) about having had to shave off my beard -- my awesome, AWESOME beard! -- when I hired on as a security guard a few years ago.

Being off work for the next several months following the rotator cuff surgery, I've taken the opportunity to let the beard grow back.  After four weeks, we're at this stage:


Past the skeazy-bum stage and starting to fill in nicely.  Could even use a light trim on the lower edge of the moustache.  This is much more what my real face looks like.

Sure is grumpy lookin', though, isn't he?  That's probably because I know I'll have to shave it all off again in a few months.

Cacoeidechthineologism* of the Day

In the news: the word "refudiate", coined (or perhaps "misstruck" is the appropriate word) by Sarah Palin in a Twitter post, has been chosen as the new "word of the year" to be included in the latest edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary.

Divorced from its source, the word refudiate isn't all the worst neologism ever. But it's not all that good, either. It's a pretty simple and obvious cojoining of two words into one, but doesn't really add any new nuance or meaning to the original words. If someone coined it deliberately, I'd give them a C- grade.

The question is whether this was a neologism -- the coining of a new word -- by Sarah Palin (whose rhetorical skills are, shall we say in the politest of tones, rudimentary), or simply a malapropism -- a garbling of either "refute" or "repudiate". If the latter, should points be taken off and the grade lowered?

(Data point: When it was pointed out that "refudiate" was a non-existent word, Palin revised her Twitter post to replace "refudiate" with "refute"... which was an inaccurate use of that word.)

In any event, when there are so many more creative and useful neologisms around, I find the OAD choosing "refudiate" above other, better, words to be utterly indenstible.


*"cacoeidechthineologism" comes from here

Killing Mrs. Kimble -- life as a one-armed man

Three weeks since my rotator cuff surgery, and my left arm into a sling for almost 24/7 over the next few months.

The goal of keeping the arm immobilized is to let the torn end of the rotator cuff tissue grow a firm reattachment to the bone it's been screwed and tacked to. This takes a while, and putting stress on or trying to use those shoulder muscles too early runs the risk of tearing those fresh connections loose and resetting everything to zero.

In one regard, I'm glad for the sling. Its presence requires me to be aware of my surroundings, and try to NOT use that shoulder. Not just to let it heal, but because moving it too far friggin' hurts.

It's difficult to remember to just let the arm hang and be supported by the sling. My natural bent is to keep my arms slightly tensed and ready to move around. When the arm aches, it also tends to make me tense up the mucles on that side.

So I've been trying to keep pain meds balanced to where I don't ache too much, but also not so doped up that I'm fuzzy-headed. Mostly large doses of Tylenol, backed up with occasional Vicodan. Works fairly well, except for sleeping.

I've found that a Vicodan with the usual bedtime pills lets me get to sleep fairly easily, but that I tend to wake up after about four hours. Having laid flat on my back all that time (I usually shift around while sleeping,mostly on my side), the shoulder has stiffened up and is now really really aching. Even with extra pain meds, it's difficult to get back to sleep and I frequently lay there for hours, "squirrel-caging" in my head, before falling asleep again. (If I do at all.)

This is annoying. I had thought that being off work for several months would at least mean I'd be able to have a semi-normal sleep pattern, with sufficient hours, instead of the trainwreck (chunks and pieces of sleep scattered over the landscape of the day) sleep I can't seem to escape while working a graveyard-shift job.

I'm trying several things to improve my sleep. Different combos of meds, including anti-anxiety stuff to help stop the squirrel-caging, and arranging pillows to raise my upper body at an angle, instead of flat on the mattress. (This last seems to have helped.)

The sharp intense pain after surgery has mostly faded, except when the range of motion is being tested during physical therapy. Instead, deep and long-lasting aches, sometimes for hours, sometimes just in brief but intense occurences. Not necessarily around the shoulder, either; sometimes I'll get "referred pain" down my arm, or back on the shoulderblade, and once in a while I'll actually get an ache in my right arm, which is confusing.

I've been having physical therapy three times a week. This is currently passive therapy, where the therapist moves your arm around while you try and keep the arm completely limp and relaxed. Not easy to do.

Coping with day-to-day things: mixed. I'm not completely one-armed; I can use my left-hand fingers to help manipulate stuff. I just have to be careful to try and keep any hand movements from being strong enough to tighten up the shoulder muscles. Keeping the forearm snugged against my chest helps with that.

Pants: I can work the zipper up on jeans, but that waistband button? *ahem* So Ive been sticking to sweatpants and gym shorts, with elastic and/or drawstring waists.

Shirts: I mentioned in an earlier post that I picked up some snap-buttoned shirts at Good Will that can be buttoned up one-handed. What I didn't mention is that for some reason snap-buttoned shirts tend to be made from one particular style of fabric. So for the first time in my life I've been wearing plaid. PLAID! I'M WEARING PLAID! AIIIIEEEE!!! THE HORROR, THE HORROR!

Between the baggy old sweatpants, the dorkmeister plaid shirts, and the fact I've been letting my beard grow back in while off work, I've been doing a pretty good job of generating that "crazy old homeless guy" mystique that people find so fascinating and appealing.

Kitchen stuff. I can cope with a fair amount. One thing that caught me up was trying to use a can-opener; those almost all require two hands to operate. I found a OneTouch battery-powered can opener that can be used to open cans one-handed... once you've opened the battery compartment and put batteries in, a task that requires two hands.

Medication that comes in those blister packs that are so difficult to get into even two-handed? Jeezus. Prop and brace upright, then attack carefully with sharp scissors. Be prepared to curse.

So a lot of stuff I can kludge or improvise my way around, without having to ask anyone for help. That, asking for help, even when it's appropriate or necessary, is something I've always had trouble doing. So the most frustrating thing about this recovery period has been being unable to drive, and having to ask Tabbi to drive Hilde and me around. I also hadn't realized how often and casually, when out driving, I could add to or rearrange how many stops and errands I made.

I'm coping. But I'll be very glad when this is all over.

A Halloween LOL-lection

With Halloween upcoming, I thought I'd skim my LOLcat creations for appropriate entries. Feel free to re-use!

Back Home

My rotator cuff surgery went well on Wednesday, spent overnight in hospital, came home Thursday afternoon. Went to first PT session Friday; future PT will be about three times a week over the next two to three months.

Surgery site still fairly painful; trying to find the right balance between painkillers and having a semi-functional brain. Alternating Vicodan with extra-strength Tylenol about every three to four hours does a fairly good job on that.

I'll have about a two-inch scar on my shoulder when the incision is completely healed, which means I won't be able to get away with telling people about being attacked by a shark and beating the shark to death with an alligator. Damn.

Learning to cope one-handed: Some things easier than expected, some things not so easy. Some useful tips here.

Meanwhile, normal life refuses to sit back in a recliner with a bowl of chips and a big Pepsi and watch TV for the next three months. Got called last night, with the news that my mother -- who's been having her own, more serious, health problems the last few months -- took a sharp turn for the worse. Still waiting for test results to try and get a firm idea of what's going on, but it doesn't sound good, and the word "hospice" has been bandied about.

If you get an email that supposedly comes from me, but has a blank subject line . . .

. . . delete it without opening or reading.

My system seems to have been hacked, and fake emails from "me" have been going to people on my contacts list, containing links to penis-pills sites and worse. (Such as malware sites that will try and infect YOUR computer too.)

The good news is that the malware isn't smart enough to generate a fake subject line to go with the fake email.

So, Rule of Thumb in this instance is: If an email is lacking a subject line, delete it unread.

My standard security software (Trend Micro) didn't catch the bugger whenever it got into my system (*grump* *grump* *grumpety-poo*), so I'm curently running additional software to try to find and remove the culprit.

When the Revolution comes, and the triumphant mobs thrust me into my rightful position as Semi-Benevolent World Dictator, hackers will be executed in slow, cruel and appropriate ways.

UPDATE 10/23/10: The additional software I ran reported my system as clean, but it didn't report actually finding or removing anything. But nothing new in the line of fake emails has been reported to me, and nothing I've supposedly sent to myself (I got some of those too) has shown up in my email queue, for the last several days, so -- fingers crossed -- hopefully the problem has been eliminated. Still wish I knew where the problem originated, though.

Upcoming Surgery, and other news

I've noted in the last several posts my problems with my left shoulder following a bad fall on a wet kitchen floor at the end of August. The problems haven't been getting better, but worse: my range of motion with that arm is getting less, and the pains are getting stronger and sharper.

So I finally got an MRI on that shoulder last week, and it found what I'd been afraid it would find: a rotator cuff tear.

Most rotator cuff injuries and tears take place on the upper part of the rotator cuff. Mine's on the front of the rotator cuff, a more unusual situation, and harder to repair. (Also harder to diagnose, which is why I wasn't sent for an MRI earlier.) The surgeon has told me that while he prefers to do most rotator cuff surgeries arthroscopically, in my case he thinks it better to do an open surgery, laying the shoulder open to go in.

That will mean at least one night in the hospital. Surgery's curently scheduled for October 20th, next Wednesday.

The last time I was in the hospital for surgery was forty years ago, and I wasn't thrilled by the experience. But I'm a lot more anxious about the recovery period. I've been told that the left arm will need to be used not at all for the first month post-surgery. In the second month, it can be moved, but only in passive therapy where a therapist moves it around. Only in the third month will I be able to start doing some resistance exercises to build arm strength back up again.

I'll essentially have only one arm for about three months. (Oh, and the surgeon told me I shouldn't drive during recovery, either.)

When you're the primary caregiver for a disabled spouse, and have been helping her with... well, almost everything... for years, this is not good news. In fact, this situation -- ending up disabled or out-of-commission myself, and unable to care for Hilde -- has always been just about my biggest source-material for nightmares.

The good news is that we've had a charming young woman, Tabbi, living with us for several years, who acts as backup caregiver for Hilde when I'm at work or running errands. So she'll be able to take up a lot of the slack once I'm unable to do the heavy lifting I usually do. But that will put a big crimp in her own activities, which I'll feel guilty about (because I'm really good at that sort of neurotic navel-gazing).

On top of needing the surgery in the first place, the long recovery period will also mean I'll be off work for those three months. Hilde and I will still have her disability income and my Postal Service retirement check each month, but the lack of those security-job paychecks will mean we'll be running into red-ink territory each month I'm off. (I have some disability coverage through my insurance, but it won't kick in until after the first sixty days off work.) So I'll be having a financial ouchie as well as a physical one.

I've been trying to practice living one-handed before I go into surgery. One of the things I found is that it takes a long-g-g-g time to button a shirt one-handed. So I went down to the local Good Will store and picked up some snap-button shirts to use during recovery. I may also pick up some suspenders, to avoid having to try and thread a belt thru belt-loops, even if suspenders make a person look like a grumpy old guy. (Oh, wait! I am a Grumpy Old Guy....)

One piece of good news comes out of all this: Being off work for three months means I'll be able to grow my beard back! WOO-HOO!

- - - - -

In other news, last week the Phoenix area had a fairly spectacular storm, including heavy -- and large -- hail. "Golf-ball size" hailstones were reported widely, with some baseball-sized hail in a few areas. Lots of broken windows and damaged roofs across the city, though fortunately not in our neighborhood. (The hail here was heavy enough to set off the car alarm, though.)

I took a picture of one of the hailstones that fell here. This isn't the largest -- others were about half again as big -- but this one was in easy reach:

From Sling To Linger

The shoulder injury I reported in my last post, from four weeks ago, seems to have been more damaging and long-lasting than I first thought. Although the inital pain, over the entire shoulder area, faded off over a few days...

...I was still left with pain in several smaller areas, sometime sharp and intense, sometimes deep and lingering (like a bad bruise, except bruises get better). If pain could be seen, my shoulder would have a dull glowering reddish area most of the time, with occasional bright sparks and flashes.

Been to physical therapy, but if there's been any improvement, it's so marginal that I'm not sure it isn't wishful thinking.

My doctor's initial "You don't have a torn rotator cuff," has now become, "Well, maybe you have a small tear in your rotator cuff." I'm scheduled for an MRI next week, and a consult with an orthopedic specialist.

I'm hoping this doesn't end up with surgery, because I've been told the recovery from that would involve immobilizing my arm for weeks, and strongly restricting its use for months. At the present, I can still use the left arm at about two-thirds of its normal range of motion, inside a tolerable pain range. Push it too far in certain directions (I try very hard to avoid putting my hand behind my back) and I find myself suddenly making very interesting squeaking noises.

But the shoulder is a drag. It slows me down, it distracts me, and it makes me grumpy and irritable. (Okay, more grumpy, and more irritable, than usual.)

It's one of the reasons this is the first post in a month. (That's also because I've been trying to Get Things Done, with partial success. But I need that shoulder working right, dammit!)