February 8, 2003

  • Cold, Water and Sugar


    For the last few days, I've felt like I've been freezing. The weather's been cool, but not enough to explain my symptoms. Delia says she's heard there's a flu going around with the symptoms of chills. I had my flu shot, but this one might have slipped past it. Anyway, I've been turning the heat on and wearing extra clothing ... and I still felt cold.

    I've also been retaining water. My weight is up slightly as a result. My blood sugar has been up, too, but for a much longer period. I've had to increase my dosage of Lantus (insulin) and the amount of exercise I do, and I was still getting high readings in the mornings when I measured my fasting blood sugar levels.

    We decided to spend Thursday at the Zoo. Well, after Delia's appointment with radiology for her mammogram. Then Cathy had to pick up her car from the shop in El Cajon, never a rapid process and the results weren't completely satisfactory, which slowed our departure even more. It was early afternoon when we got to the Zoo.

    Delia and I get into the Zoo free with our membership. We had four certificates, one to get Cathy in free and one for each of us to ride the bus. The bus is an all day event: first you take the tour, then you can hop the express bus at any time the rest of the day to get places fast. Between the bus, the motorized speed ramps and the skyway, you can cover a good part of the zoo in a day. We still did a good bit of walking, uncomfortable for me after the opening of the abscess under the nail of my left big toe.

    Then we went out for dinner. I washed down a decent sirloin with a pair of 22 ounce beers. For a while I felt warm again. Then my body started dumping water. The cold settled in after a few hours, though.

    Yesterday I was still cold and my sugar was still high but I continued dumping water all day. This morning I didn't feel quite so cold and my blood sugar was 86, very low. I felt a bit tired but nothing worse.

February 2, 2003

  • Gone


    So that troubled time continued, woe
    that never stopped, steady affliction
    for Halfdane's son, too hard an ordeal.
    There was panic after dark, people endured
    raids in the night, riven by the terror.

    Beowulf, p. 15, Seamus Heaney

    There is always risk.

    Walking can be risky. I walked up two steps a few days ago, fell and banged my knee. It still hurts.

    Driving can be risky. Cathy took a curve too fast on New Years Day and lost control, damaging her car. Yesterday she was on her way to return her rental car, stopped at a stop sign, almost started up but thought better of it when she saw how fast a truck was bearing down on her, then got rammed from behind by a driver who thought both of them could have beaten the truck. The other car actually drove up over the rear end of Cathy's rental car and ended up beside her.

    Some activities are unforgiving. Skateboarding is one, there is a very long list that includes driving high performance motorcycles and race cars, and all forms of flying are near the top of the list. Travelling outside of the atmosphere, whether under water or into space, are also high on the list.

    High risk activities often bring high rewards. Sometimes just defying the odds is the reward.

    Achilles died at his prime. Agamemnon lived well past his prime and died a bitter old man.

January 31, 2003

  • Metaphors Be With You


    I have a friend named Richard Lederer who teaches classes, writes books and makes puns. Don't ever start a pun war with him -- you'll lose on the basis of both quantity and quality, the latter including the worst as well as the best. Richard is a gamester whose primary weapon is words.

    The class he taught at Oasis today, "Why You Say It", was mostly about metaphors ... although everything was fair game. For example, "naked as a blue jay ..." is truncated, the part that gets left off being: "... that's had its feathers clipped." But it got truncated so long ago that the part that doesn't get mentioned has been almost lost and forgotten, making the part we remember seem strange and meaningless.

    Classes by this noted verbivore attract intelligent people, most of them smarter than me. Some of them are crazier than me, too, and almost all have a lot more money than I do, but that's a different story. Among those I know, I noticed a psychologist, a physicist that I used to work for and a geologist couple that I used to attend writing classes with. About the only area where I have any edge at all is with computers and the Internet, and they are catching up rapidly. They asked some brilliant questions about our language, both during class and at the lunch session that followed, giving Richard the chance to come up with some highly entertaining answers.

    Richard is not above bragging about his kids. He was sporting yet another gold watch they won for him at one of their poker tournaments, this one being decorated with a golden horseshoe. His son recently won over $354,000 in a big poker tournament and one of his daughters was recently recognized as the top female poker player in the world.

    High stakes poker is a strange world. Betting has a rythm or music to it. Sometimes the expert will raise on a poor hand, not to bluff but to keep others at the table from raising and minimize his loss.

    In buckhorn poker, one player had a knife that had a handle made from a deer antler placed in front of him and that player had to start the betting without looking at his cards. After the play of the hand, he would pass the buck, the knife, to the next player, who would have to start betting with the same disadvantage. In Las Vegas they replaced the knife (too tempting, perhaps) with an oversized silver dollar, which they continued to call the buck.

    When playing "Jacks or Better," often several rounds would be dealt and the ante made repeatedly before somebody could make the initial bet, so that a substantial amount accumulated in the Jackpot even before the first bet.

    And so on.

    Richard has a radio program on PBS on Saturday and Sunday, at least in San Diego and, I think, Michigan. Some state that starts with an "M", but I'm pretty sure it wasn't Montana. He also appears on television sometimes.

    I just thought I'd get out the word.

  • Weblog Comments


    Spot the Cat invited us to comment on why we write these Weblog entries. Several people have accepted her invitation, giving their reasons for pouring their creative energies into producing these essays. In reading over several of them today I became aware that there is a close relationship between the Weblog entry itself (which I dislike calling a 'blog' because it sounds a bit obscene) and the comments others leave. Yes, there is some value to the eprops, comparable to little gold stars from your teacher, but it seems to be a minor force in motivating people to continue to produce Weblog entries, where comments, especially favorable ones, are a strong force.

    Comments are feedback. They let you know that somebody has read what you wrote. They may indicate whether or not what you wrote was understood, or appreciated. Exchanges of favorable comments creates a feeling of community.

    I'm going to try an experiment. I have found someone very intelligent who seems to be underappreciated. Her entries tend to be long and scholarly, appropriate for a student at Harvard, but they are sometimes difficult to read because she has been having difficult times.

    Her most recent entry is atypical, consisting of just two words, each one followed by a period, a total of seven letters. She had hinted in recent entries that she was on the verge of disaster. My interpretation of her entry is that disaster has struck, so if you feel up to it, drop in on The Queen of Leaves, look over some of her recent remarks and leave a supporting comment.

January 29, 2003

  • She Has Returned Safely


    I got to the airport at the scheduled time, parked and started across the street from the airport baggage area. Delia emerged while I was waiting for the light to change. She said my timing was perfect.

    She is disappointed to have once more left her native land and her family to return to this, her other family. She has been on the phone since arriving.

January 28, 2003

  • Abscess


    Well, that's what the podiatrist, Dr. T, called it. The space under the toenail on the big toe of my left foot, probably the result of yet another fungus.

    He had already started removing toenail when he announced his diagnosis. At one point he remarked that the abscess was full of clear fluid. He started in the middle of the nail at the front and removed a "v" shaped piece, in chunks, almost all the way back to the back of the nail. In all, he removed about a third of the nail. It was bleeding freely when he finished.

    It sounds like torture, doesn't it? Having a large part of a toenail removed, snip by snip. I didn't feel a thing until later, when I tried walking.

    You see, I also suffer from diabetic peripheral neuropathy: the nerves to both of my big toes are dead. This causes me balance problems, so that I cannot practice Tai Chi ... and sometimes I walk like I'm drunk because of my poor balance.

    But some days it's a blessing.

January 25, 2003

  • Corned Beef Hash


    Last night I made corned beef. It had potatoes, onions, carrots, whole cloves of garlic; no extra salt, no pepper, no extra spices. It was good, simple fare.

    Today, while Cathy was at work, I chopped up three jalapeño peppers and started them frying, then chopped up and added some of each of the leftover ingredients from the dinner last night. Nothing more was added. I just heated it all until everything was warm, since it was all already cooked. It made a good lunch.

    When Cathy got home and we were eating dinner (a prefab pizza to which I had added jalapeños and whole garlics), I told her about my lunch. She asked if I had used up all of the leftover meat and veggies. I'm sure that she was aware there was about two pounds of meat left and a tremendous amount of veggies. Together we had consumed somewhat less than half of what I had prepared for dinner that night. How she expected me to have been able to finish off all that was left is beyond me.

    There is enough left for a good, healthy meal for the two of us.

    We had a tasty claret wine with our pizza, one bottle of a case that came in the mail today.

    Cathy has taken to ordering wine by the case through the Internet. She plans to store it in the basement, letting it mature for a couple of years to improve the taste. Tonight's wine was pretty good without aging.

    Each month we get a two bottle shipment, a sample of currently available wines. They are sometimes pretty good but rarely worth aging. That is, they are wines blended to be shipped at the peak of their taste. It isn't worth getting a case of something that will start to go flat in a year or two. Cathy does better on the basis of description alone. But she was shocked a couple of nights ago when she came across a wine selling for over $700 per bottle, over $8,000 per case. That's a bit out of our league.

    When the wine was delivered, Rocky went berserk. He acted as if he wanted to attack the delivery guy ... until I opened the door. Then he shut up. By then the guy was back in his brown truck, so I had to shout my thanks. Cathy told me that Rocky once tried to bite the delivery guy's pants when I wasn't there. He knows better than to try it when I'm there.

    Anyway, there are now two cases of wine sitting in the living room for me to take down to the basement before Delia comes back this week. Maybe I'll do it tomorrow, or maybe Wednesday.

January 24, 2003

  • Cathy's Eye


    I took Cathy back to Dr. Yoo on Wednesday for a follow-up examination. He found her free of infection and 99% improved. Her vision is about back to normal. She has to continue using the antibiotic drops for the full seven day period and she shouldn't use her contact lenses until a full month has passed, but she is basically well now.

  • Annual Physical


    Yesterday was the scheduled date for my annual physical examination. The appointed time was 11:00 but on Tuesday evening I found a message on the answering machine asking me to arrive at 10:30. I actually arrived at 10:20. Apparently they had some unexpected problems. The doctor, Dr. G, was unable to see me until 11:00.

    I had seen my endocrinologist, Dr. F, two weeks previously, and he had done a battery of blood chemistry on me, as usual. I time the visits so that the results of any lab work will get from one doctor to the other by the time I arrive, but it never happens. This time Dr. F had been so happy with my cholesterol (150) that he had sent me a copy of that page of the lab report and I was able to give it to Dr. G. They work in the same building, running the same tests on the same patient, yet I always have to fight to establish communications between them.

    Okay, I had gained weight during November and December which I had mostly shed already. No new problems, except that I had fallen and banged up my right knee on Tuesday. It didn't hurt on Wednesday but hurt and had an egg-side swelling when I went in for the exam on Thursday. Dr. G thought I might have split a membrane and might be accumulating fluid on the knee. He sent me off for X-rays. After his examination and the X-ray technician banging my knee on the metal table and on his film holders, my knee developed some really serious pains. They are mostly gone now, though.

    As usual, Dr. G wants me to have a treadmill test. I may actually do it this time. It has been about ten years since the last one. He also wants me to talk to Dr. F about a gastric bypass. He can't authorize it himself, nor can he suggest it to Dr. F, the specialist who can authorize it, but he thinks that having my stomach sewed shut enough to drastically reduce its capacity might cause me to lose enough weight to get off of medication completely. I indicated that I would think about it. I may spend months -- or even years -- thinking about it.

    There were no big surprises.

January 21, 2003

  • The Paws That Blind


    Actually, the paw that blinds.

    At 9:30 this morning, Rocky scraped his recently trimmed nail across Cathy's right eye, leaving a scratch 2 mm long by 1.5 mm wide. If you look at the cornea as a clock face, the scratch runs just below and to the right of center, roughly from the numeral eight to about half way between the two and the three, slightly arched like a rainbow, bridge or mustache. At least that is the picture drawn by Dr. Yoo, who examined her this afternoon.

    When the cornea is damaged, the usual procedure is to cover it for a few days ... except when the damage was done with a talon, fingernail, toenail or claw. There is too much risk of infection with such scratches. So Cathy has to irrigate her damaged eye with a strong antibiotic every two hours that she is awake (but she doesn't have to wake from sleep to dose herself). She also has drops to relax and dilate the eye, reducing the inflamation, which she is allowed to use twice daily.

    The initial danger is infection. If that can be avoided, the secondary danger is scarring. With luck, any scarring will be minor enough not to require surgery or to prevent Cathy resuming the use of her contact lenses in the distant future -- she won't be allowed to use them until a month after the doctor is sure all danger is past.

    So Cathy is relaxing in a darkened room, staring at the ceiling, suffering.