Work is getting odder, but the refrigerator is in, my mom’s eye seems OK, and soon it won’t be 100°F. It was only in the mid-90’s today, but the next two days are going to be over 100°F. We don’t need that up here in Oregon. Maybe nobody needs it.
Had a nice chat with a man from Belgium yesterday on my “old” radio and that just makes me want to finish my new radio all the more. I should have the parts tomorrow. They keep shorting me on parts in my kit. Can’t be perfect, I suppose.
My ma had cataract surgery yesterday. The paperwork told her to show up at 7:30AM and that the surgery would take 3 hours. At 11:30AM I called the hospital and they told me she was just going in, and it would be another couple of hours. They told us that they’d called us about it last week and we should have called them back.
The doctors offices have a new trick: they call you after 5PM (sometimes as late as 6:30PM) and tell you to call back during office hours. So, if you’re a few feet away from the phone and let the answering machine (or your confused father) pick up the phone, you can’t call them back for up to three days, if they call you after 5PM on a Friday night. For me, that’s asking me to forget.
I have to take my ma back to the doctor today, but so far, so good.
The joys of getting old. I had two beers and a scotch yesterday, and not all in one sitting. I think they were spread out over about four hours. I had a beer celebrating the retrieval of data out of a dead computer, then a late lunch down in the grand metropolis of Scappoose, Oregon, and finally had a scotch while we tried to download data from a bullet chronograph into a laptop.
That led to a nice migraine headache. Another hobby down the tubes. My liver will probably be happy for it. I wonder if they’re giving me Anabuse instead of Gleevec.
There really isn’t much else going on during the summer doldrums. The woman I was pretending was my girlfriend (we had lunch once in a while, nothing more) is traveling the country and then is off to India for a couple of months. The attractive women at the gym have quit coming now that it’s so darn hot out. And you’d think there would be more attractive women working downtown.
There’s a modelling agency across the street from where I work and we can see in their window. The kids I work with find it quite interesting, but I finally decided it isn’t all that much fun looking at teenage girls with eating disorders. It beats looking at the 400lb guy that also works there. He likes lifting his shirt and scratching his huge belly and you should see him eat a sandwich. I should say, “You should see him INHALE a sandwich.” It’s all quite disturbing. I think he could eat a couple of the models and still be hungry.
As an Oregonian, I see about two weeks of 90+ degree weather a year. And both of those weeks I’m miserable. Tomorrow is supposed to be 93°F. Yeesh.
I sure hope they’re right about the 79°F day on Sunday.
The only other interesting thing is that I have to do this weekend is buy a new refrigerator. Ours is only 17 years old and it’s already ready for the scrap heap. It’s not nearly as cold as it should be, and we even cleaned the coils (the easy fix). According to a repair company, 10 years is about all you can expect.
Sears, here I come!
So I guess I could describe this week as hot and muggy with little sleep happening. Last night, I some miscreants pulled into the driveway at 2:30AM and started honking. I’m assuming it was the kids I chased off a few weeks back. That’s life for you.
I’ve been trying all week to make a contact on my new radio. Someone finally heard me tonight, but his signal faded in the middle of the contact and I lost him. Well, that was the best I’ve done so far.
It’s been so hot that the gym is crowded later in the evening. That makes sense, since everyone is waiting for it to cool off. I found out that hearing a woman say, “And the chart was in the shape of Mount Olympus and represented the projected sales goals,” makes her very unattractive in my eyes. Funny, huh?
I guess the samples they didn’t lose let them see that I had a “complete cytogenetic response.” They still have to do some PCR on my blood to make sure things are OK at the molecular level. The poke in the hip wasn’t so useless after all.
Every day I have to endure the flirting of my co-worker with the girl who works at Java Man Coffee. For a guy who doesn’t have any romance in his life (me), it’s sort of like putting up with drunk people when you’re sober. Today I got to look at pictures of a Cambodian engagement party while he did his flirting so it wasn’t so bad. But I did see her writing on his hand.
“Aha!” I thought, “A phone number!”
She even told him, “Don’t wash that hand.”
When we got outside, I noticed all that she was draw a picture of a coffee cup on his hand. Heh.
Tuesday I worked a little late. It was less than 2 hours, but that put me off of my scheduled plan to hit the gym and impede the serious weight lifters. I thought I’d hit the pharmacy, since I’d called in a prescription on Friday, and another at 8AM on Tuesday. Well, here it was, 8PM, and I was told that my prescriptions weren’t ready. The pharmacist hadn’t gotten to them and I’d have to wait 30-45 minutes. Well, that meant no working out.
Today I got a call from my doctor’s office. The people at OHSU (who I lovingly refer to as “those effing bastards who didn’t let me into medical school and who think they’re so effing smart”) lost my bone marrow aspiration. Although they finally found the aspirate, I have to go in for a blood draw early Monday morning because the bone marrow aspirate was too effing old by the time they found it. I went through an incredibly painful and expensive process where they take a HUGE NEEDLE and shove it INTO MY BONE and they lose the sample?
This leads to two questions:
So, really, I’m not as upset as you’d think. I also think I get to pay for the lost sample, the useless but painful aspiration that created the lost sample, and probably for the labwork that was scheduled but not done on the lost sample.
Great, it’s 11:33PM and I just got a phone call where the person on the other end of the line was crying and wouldn’t talk. Let’s see, my last girlfriend dumped ME, and that was almost three years ago. I can’t imagine that it wasn’t a wrong number.
Got an email from a woman telling me she thinks I’m hot. I’m sure it’s not spam. She said she met me at a party, and I haven’t been to a party in, well, months. And then there was gibberish.
Well, it beats having the email telling me my penis is too small. As I’ve always said, I’m not worried about the length, I’m worried about the frequency of use.
TMI, I’m sure.
My fancy ham radio kit is almost finished!
But instead of staying in the basement all weekend, I had a bone marrow aspiration, a visit from an old grade school friend, breakfast with Greg, a beer with Megan(!), and the fireworks to watch. Oh, and I ran the wood chipper all this afternoon.
So now I’m too tired to finish the thing. I only have to mount the speaker, and I’m done. But, wait, I still have the 100W amplifier, the SSB adapter, and the 60M adapter to build. It’ll be another week or more before it’s all done.
I didn’t think bone marrow aspiration vs. a biopsy (core sample) would make a lot of difference, but I think it doesn’t hurt as much. We get to see just how good the fancy drugs work.
My boss pointed out that some people think blogs are self-important ramblings and probably shouldn’t exist. Well, tough. I have a web server, I set it up, and I can put whatever I want on it. I’m not sending you spam, I’m not forcing you to come to my web site, and sure I’m just talking crap but I think one of the amendments to the U.S. Constitution allows U.S. citizens to talk crap. Don’t like it? Read something else. Find some internet porn. Turn off the computer and take a walk.
So this is my page, and some people read it. And sometimes friends will come by and see how I’m doing. (I’m doing well, thank you for asking. Hay fever is acting up a bit, but I think everyone is having that problem this year.)
I got my fancy ham radio kit today so I’ll be hiding in the basement for a couple of days putting it togethter. Yet another thing to make me incredibly attractive to women.
That doesn’t quite make up for the monthly fees, but what the heck.
I was going to mention something else, but after paying my VISA bill, I can’t remember what it was. Got an email saying my radio shipped, but that’s all I can think of and that isn’t what I was going to mention. I think I’m going to hit the hay early or at least lie there and read a book.
See how weird it gets when I don’t get my daily Wigu fix?
I have plenty of cuts and scrapes from where the chipper took the branches and spit them out at me, but the biggest injury I have, a big blood-blister on my thumb, is from jamming my thumb into a door latch striker plate as I was trying to take my sweaty shirt off after using the wood chipper.
The chipper gummed up and stopped working. I bet my neighbors are happy about that. Chippers are loud.