morrowlife

Here’s the Detroit zoo. Not exactly all of the Detroit zoo, of course. But it is a sign. Bears and giraffes and great apes, oh my! Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam (the old 3G exclusive iPhone-cam, that is), taken during a vacation to Detroit in June 2011, and part of my famous Vacation series.

I’m not going with my famous Statue series on this one. Even I have standards. A sign is not a statue. Well, I guess it could happen, assuming the sign maker is a true artiste. Okay, what the heck. Also part of my famous Statue series. And while I’m at it, the sign does mention a train and food service, so it’s part of my famous Train and Food series too. But that’s it.

Been a good couple of days since I last posted. LRN4 is now three days into her current ten-day round of chemo and we’re hopeful for continued improvement. She’s feeling great. As of Monday, her white cell count was still at 0.8, so we’re hoping this round drops it even lower. She has upped her Nexavar intake to two pills a day and she’s doing just fine with that quantity. So things are going very well.

I’m still worried about my beloved pickup. As I may have mentioned before, it runs very rough for the first minute or so after startup when it’s been sitting for three or four days. There’s no smoke and no check engine light. I decided to call the shop that installed the new engine and discovered that they’re no longer in business. Fortunately, I believe my engine warranty is good at other shops. Need to dig it out of the file cabinet and check. My current theory is that there’s a slow coolant leak into one of the cylinders, which is a very bad thing indeed. It could be something else, but I’m struggling to guess what that might be. Very, very bad.

I have an 1.5 terabyte external drive made by Seagate. It works perfectly with a PC, but not at all with a Mac. I’ve been struggling with it for years. After doing some internet research, I discovered that Seagate external drives have some circuitry that automatically shuts the drive off after 10 or 15 minutes of non-use. This seems to work fine on a PC, but it makes a Mac eject the disk every time. Seagate has released two or three different attempts to make the drive play nicely with a Mac, but none of them work. How can the drive manufacturer not be able to figure out how to disable or override that feature? Well, they can’t. It turns out the only solution is to buy a different enclosure, [amazon text=which I did&asin=B0065DUJ0C]. The price was great and reviews were at least decent. It came today. Installation of the drive was simple and very quick, and it has been working perfectly so far. Finally, that drive appears to be reliable. Note to self – no more Seagate drives. Ever.

LRN4’s chemo/doctor visit appointment is at 7:45 tomorrow morning, so that’s it for tonight. I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food violence news: whipped cream assault!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s LRN3 dining at Rubio’s in Los Angeles on the First of June this year. That was some good food. Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam and part of my famous Food series.

LRN3 is in the picture because he came to visit us while we were at the City of Hope. Which was very kind of him. Also it was a very nice visit. We hope for a repeat before too much longer. In fact, we hope LRN3 and LRN15 move to Las Vegas before too much longer. Keep saving that money, Loyal Readers!

Pretty good couple of days. Few days, to be exact. Not a whole lot is new with LRN4. She’s been off of Nexavar for a few days now and she’s feeling much better. Not totally well yet, of course, but much better. She’s starting it back up on Saturday, which represents a couple of extra chemo-free days given to us by our doctor this morning.

By the way, we’re still in Las Vegas. Our one-day trip back to Los Angeles was delayed from today to next Monday. Our doctor there isn’t in the office today, so he asked us to come next week instead. So we went to see our Las Vegas doctor today. He said LRN4 is doing pretty well and sent her to the emergency room for platelets. Which we expected. If we can’t get them scheduled ahead of time on a Monday or a Wednesday here, we have to go to the emergency room.

She decided to drive over there herself this time. Fortunately, she felt strong enough to do that today. I needed to stay home to supervise the drywall guys, who came to do a bit of warranty work. It appears that they did a nice job. Our home warranty expires next week, so we’ve been scurrying around getting things done. Fortunately, there has been very little that needed doing. We’re quite impressed with the quality of the materials and workmanship that went into making this house. I can’t complain, but sometimes I still do.

Any Loyal Reader who got the Joe Walsh quote earns a gold star. Any Loyal Reader who even knows who Joe Walsh is gets another gold star.

Not a lot of news on the work front. My renewed startup on the PC program is going a bit slowly. We’ll get there, but it’s a slow start. Again.

On the iOS front, I have sold five copies of the new app! That’s fifteen whole bucks. Well, not quite. Apple keeps 30%. So I’ve made twelve bucks! I also have a couple of bugs to fix already. Sigh. Need to get that done tomorrow, probably.

Also need to get the Mini fixed tomorrow. Again. It was in the shop last week, but they failed to detect a problem with the battery. I fear it may be bad. LRN2 will help me get down there and back. Also need to fix LRN2’s air conditioning – we’re pretty sure it’s a bad relay in a box under the hood. It costs a few hundred dollars to get it fixed at a Ford dealer. You can buy the box online for about $150 or used for maybe $50. Or you can order a replacement relay for under $2, open the box, and replace it yourself. That’s the route we’re going.

Oh, by the way, it cost us about $10 to get the part shipped to us, so it wasn’t quite as cheap as it seems. But it’s still a whole lot cheaper than all the alternatives. Also, the used part is likely to be just as bad as the original one. So the $50 option isn’t really viable.

And then we need to get LRN2’s car smogged and registered. Lots to do.

And that’s about it for tonight. I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity: attack stork!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s an . . . interesting little delicacy: fermented mudfish. In rice! Looks like somebody grabbed one of the jars already. Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam taken at the very nifty Filipino grocery store very close to our house, and part of my famous Food and Las Vegas series.

Actually, I’m sure fermented mudfish is very . . . umm . . . relatively . . . umm . . . sort of good. Although the Wikipedia article on the stuff doesn’t really sound all that encouraging either. Best to leave it on the list of things not to try anytime soon.

Pretty good day. LRN4 was feeling reasonably chipper, although I think she maybe overdid things a bit. She’s pretty exhausted by tonight. I’ll try to make sure she gets plenty of rest tomorrow. Not that she really wants it, but she really needs it.

I’m feeling pretty optimistic for the future. I think we have a pretty fair chance of getting LRN4 into a remission that will last for a while. Of course, the odds aren’t really on our side right now, but they’re actually very good for a cancer patient and LRN4 has the strength and endurance to make it, and I think that’s half the battle. When you give up, you’re done.

I upgraded both my iPhone and my iPad to iOS 7 today. It still hasn’t been released, so I’ll refrain from giving a review here, but I will say that it’s a significant change. Just like everybody says. When I first got an iPad, I spent the first couple of days thinking I had just wasted $500, but I gradually started using it more and more often and it fairly quickly became a beloved constant companion. I think iOS 7 will do the same. Except for one built-in app. I hate that one and think it’s a horrible step backwards from the original. I’ll let you know later which one that is. For now, I just hate it. But I’m starting to like everything else.

Started working on the medical app today. I put together a website for it late yesterday evening. Have a look and tell me what I can improve. I humbly ask because I sincerely wish to improve. After a Google Plus chat with my partner John, we got it to compile again on my machine. I’ll start wringing it out as much as I can tomorrow. We have documentation to write, testing to do, conference participation to reserve, how to take payment to figure out, and probably a thousand other things to think about. I think it’ll be a serious full-time job from now until its release date on February.

I got a new thumb drive yesterday – the [amazon asin=B003DTLWHU&text=Tuff ‘N Tiny 16 GB] model. I love it so far. Highly recommended. The occasion was that we thought we had lost the USB drive in LRN4’s car, so I gave her one of mine and ordered a replacement. She found her old one today. Oh well, you can’t have too many thumb drives, I always say.

Today was 9/11. Like a lot of people, I thought today about what I was doing that day twelve years ago. I was at work outside the beltway in Washington, DC. We didn’t leave early that day, but when I finally went home, it was eerie. We were apparently the only company idiotic enough to stay at work that day (thanks, Phil, you idiot!) and the roads were deserted. I traveled south on the beltway from work and got on I-95 south. I was driving my Miata with the top down, so I had a pretty good 180 degree view of the sky. Shortly after getting on I-95, I saw Air Force One with an F16 on each wing flying over at just a couple thousand feet. I don’t know if President Bush wanted to view the damage to the Pentagon from above or what, because Andrews Air Force Base is nowhere near where that plane was, but there it was. The only passenger airplane in American airspace that afternoon.

I didn’t know anybody killed at the Pentagon that day, but I did know people who lost friends. That was a grim day. I hope we’ll honor the memory of the people who were killed that day by doing everything we can to make sure it never happens again, but also by remaining proudly, defiantly free. Personally, I think the pendulum has swung too far in the security direction. We need to correct that.

And I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food violence news: french fry-related tomahawk/crossbow standoff!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s LRN4’s partially-eaten Labor Day 2013 breakfast. I think that was the best waffle recipe I’ve ever tried. They were light, fluffy, and delicious. On the downside, they were made with yeast and required an hour to rise. But it was worth it. Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam, taken on Monday morning, and part of my famous Food and Las Vegas series.

Oh, and check out that nice little pile of pills there hiding behind the [amazon asin=B00CHUK8IA&text=Cool Whip]. She’s taking them by the handful these days.

No posts for a few days. I hope my Loyal Readers haven’t been too worried about us. I’ve just been working on my app. LRN4 is doing fairly well. She appears to have stopped losing weight since she stopped taking all the chemo drugs. For a few days, anyway.

Let’s see, the last post was on Wednesday. On Thursday, we went to the City of Hope for LRN4’s bone marrow biopsy and to see our doctor there. The visit went well and the biopsy was less painful than the last couple have been. We got the news on Friday that while the leukemic cells have been greatly reduced, they’re not completely gone yet, so we’re moving forward with another round of chemo this week. LRN4 had the first dose this morning. She went off the Nexavar on Thursday as well, but is back on it today, albeit at half the previous dosage. It’s kind of doing brutal things to her, but it just might save her life, so we’re sticking with it. Don’t know when she can quit that one again. The good news about this week’s chemo is that the leukemia is sufficiently weakened that the California doc decided to shorten the course from ten down to five days. We’ll take any break we can get.

The extreme weight loss has made LRN4 pretty weak, a bit unsteady on her feet, and kind of shaky. We’re exploring opportunities to help her gain the weight back, including the dreaded Ensure and/or Boost products. She’s been very reluctant to take those because she hates how they taste, but we’re kind of running out of options. She really needs to get as much strength back as she can. So we got three different samples today and she’ll start trying them out tomorrow.

Otherwise, all systems are go, our spirits are relatively high, and we’re pressing forward regardless.

LRN2 is home! He hitched a ride with LRN4’s brother and his wife, who came to visit us on Friday. They stayed until Sunday morning, along with LRN29 and her husband. So all four siblings were here. It was a fun visit.

But my favorite part of all that is that LRN2 is here. He’s looking really good and sounding really good. We’re working on some medical care for him and hoping to improve his employment prospects again. There’s something out there for him – I’m sure of that. Welcome home, LRN2!

I’m really making progress on the app. There are still several bugs and a couple of features I need to add before it ships, but it’s getting really close. I’d say it’s definitely beta quality now and rapidly approaching releasability. LRN31 has provided extremely helpful feedback and is evangelizing the app among her teaching friends. Thanks, LRN31! You’re definitely getting a free copy when it’s released.

And it’s quite late yet again, so I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity: lock-picking cockatoo!

See you tomorrow.