The cancer card

Image by sgtret via Flickr

If the blog entries have been sparse and few between, we are going to pull the cancer card.
Starting with the discovery of a lump in the neck the day before thanksgiving and up to last week I have gone through a roller coaster of emotions. “Could be cancer, could be something else.” This was the phrase that put a damper on getting treatment started.  The next was “Could be lymphoma, could be carcinoma.”

Where we are now is it could be only aggressive or it could be aggressive combined with slow growing.  To determine that a sample of the bone in my hip needs to be taken tomorrow. 

The chemotherapy begins on Thursday.  We’re expecting blizzard like conditions on Wednesday.  My son was born during a blizzard, so I will take that as a good sign.

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LiveJournal Tags: cancer

Publishing to a Blog from Google Docs.

Publishing to a blog from Google Docs.

The bavatuesdays blog has a detailed instruction on how to publish a blog entry through Google Docs.

One of my very few resolutions for this year is to save more of my docs in Google Docs due to a recent

brush with the ominous BSoD on my main laptop.  Of course I am backing up all over the place on to
other media, but that media is corruptible as well.

I tried this in may with the Blogger service with mixed results.  This time we will
make use of the Square Space namesake for the Famous Grazing Blogs

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That Was a Quick Ten Years

Image via Wikipedia

As I recall the 1960’s, they took forever.  Starting with Eisenhower still President and ending with his VP, Nixon as the same, everything in between seemed so full of moment, as narrated by Walter Cronkite.

A visit to the Newseum in Washington, D.C. last summer brought to focus how we were and now are presented with what is happening in the world.  Back then the filter was huge.  The networks had only forty or so minutes to tell us about what had happened in the last twenty-four hours. Then we went to the newspapers for details and Time and Life for the color photos.

This morning, before my shower and tea, I knew about a drone attack in Pakistan, bridge curve deaths in San Francisco/Oakland and saw pictures of New Year’s celebration around the world.  I heard about the New Years Honours in the UK and New Zealand and the death of a philanthropist phrama heiress.

When I bring up Thunderbird, my email will tell me much more about what the intimate and commercial connections to me think I should know.

And then there is Facebook and Twitter. Before and after midnight last night, I was communicating with friends and acquaintances from Juneau to London, from New Zeeland to Manhattan. 

I watched the first day of the year unfold through them from the fireworks on the South Island, to Sydney, New Delhi, Cape Town, Paris, London, Boston, New York, Philadelphia and then went to bed.  Midnight is no longer so singular when you watch it happen over and over again.

And now we’re off with the kids to see Avatar. (We already saw Sherlock Holmes and loved it.)

Happy New Year, all!

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17:47 Tomorrow

Image by sgtret via Flickr

It isn’t quite winter yet. That begins tomorrow at 17:47 UTC. (That’s 5:47 PM in London.)

However, it would appear Winter decided to send a calling card prior to arriving. I look out the second story window of my office down onto the driveway where my car should be parked and see a pile of snow with an antennae protruding from it like a sapling freshly broken from the soil.

To avoid going out to clear the two or so feet of snow atop the car, I thought it would be a good time to make a long neglected blog entry.

If you look out of the other side of the house you can see the relatively useless swimming pool. To this day, I do not understand the logic of having a swimming pool in northern New England.&; They cost a fortune to run and are good for three months, max.

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http://www.mvtimes.com/webcam/beach-road.php#webcam 

At Eight PM Last Night

Image by sgtret via Flickr

In my youth I had an image of where I would be so many decades later, meaning at my age now.  I saw myself sitting in a high backed easy chair, by a fire, across from the missus, reading a good book.

That vision came to me last night as I sat at my laptop in one room, reading Twitter on Brizzly. The missus was downstairs in her home office reading the New York Times while my son was at his desk, on his Apple reading heaven-knows-what.

This is not the image from the past because none of these things, laptops, NYT.com or Apple Computers existed back then.  Okay, way back then.

So, young people, as you sit and envision where you’ll be and what you will be doing in forty or fifty years, fahgetaboutit! It doesn’t exist yet.

Enjoy the now and the stuff that makes the now, time.
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LiveJournal Tags: Future

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If You Give a Homeowner a Dumpster…

If you are a parent, you probably have read the children's book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. 

We need to replace a damaged front door, frame and all.  For that purpose we rented a dumpster.  The door was fixed in a few days but we have the dumpster until Monday.

If you give a homeowner a dumpster, it is amazing how much stuff you suddenly feel needs to be expelled from the house.  Stuff you thought you were "storing" for future use.

All the chairs with the broken this and that, the boxes with half used this and that, the pumps that used to work and all of the other stuff that people asked if they could put there, but are no longer around to bring it away.

There is still room in the box and it is only Sunday.  Hmmmm.

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LiveJournal Tags: Renovation

On This Day of the Dead

Image via Wikipedia

This is the day we remember those who have left us over the past year.

We have Memorial Day and Veterans Day and Pearl Harbor Day and September 11 to remember the monumental tragedies of war and terror. Today we remember the people around us, who lived and died living what some call the normal life.

We visited Battleship Cove in Fall River, Massachusetts yesterday.  There are monuments to that same Pearl Harbor Day, to the Cuban Missile Crisis and to September 11th as well. 

What I found most touching were the looped videos being played at each station showing interviews of those who once sat in the same chair when the ships were in harms way.

Whether these people are alive now or dead, these videos serve as their ghosts. 

They don’t speak of heroism, but of their daily attempt to to live normal lives while on a ship where over two thousand men slept stacked deck to overhead and side by side with a volume of explosive death whose job it was for them to deliver to other people who too were attempting to maintain their normal lives living on similar vessels or crunched into lava tunnels defending islands they were commanded to steal only a few years earlier.

When we visited the Alamo, as we walked around the quite church surrounded by highways and warehouses; we saw the room where Jim Bowie was bayoneted. I wondered then how a modern war interview with combatants from both sides would have played. Did the Mexicans see this as a pursuit of terrorists from another country? Did the Texicans see this as their struggle to break free from a greater military power determined to crush the spirit of freedom they so recently won from what they saw as another dictatorial foreign invader?

What would videos of the normal people on both sides, thrust into this short usurpation/revolution say? Would they complain of the close quarters, the long walks, the noise of the cannon, the poor cooking skills on both sides?

Then I think of a the forlorn picture of a Pakistani musician in Boston.com’s recent Big Picture spread of the current conflict.  When you look at that sad and confused face, was he thinking of lines of battle, strategy for the supremacy of one mode of living over another?  Or was he thinking of the seven children that he needs to feed, of the instruments he needed to earn a living left behind, of the gigs he would miss?

While all of this continues, I hope we can still maintain this illusion of living normal lives.  It is the only way to survive.

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LiveJournal Tags: Day of the Dead

Rising Early on a Saturday Twixt Seasons

It was almost a year ago when I took this photo in Croton-on-Hudson, NY.  The weather was the same, but the country certainly wasn’t.

On that day the ascendant party in power was full of hope and the defeated party was licking the wounds of a sounding defeat.

On this day it feels like 1859 and 1932 combined with the hysterical talking head of the media feeding on the paranoiac or just worrisome feelings of the mob. In both of the years mentioned, journalist did the same touting the people in power were going to bring about the ruin of the nation by not following the policies of the defeated party, the party, when in power, was the real cause of the awful state of things.

It’s like handing a man a half-full bucket of water, pushing him into a burning building and blaming the destruction of the structure on his inability to save it with the water in the bucket.

The prize recently announced in Norway is a reward for despite having been handed that bucket, and that wave if incredibly biased media mumbo-jumbo, the man can still smile and say lets build a new, better house on the ruins.  

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LiveJournal Tags: Norway