morrowlife

Here’s LRN4 with LRN1 and LRN3 at the entrance to the conservatory at Longwood Gardens.  What a great place that is!  We miss going there already.  Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam and part of my famous Uncategorized series.

I’ll have to think of a new series, huh?

Lots going on.  LRN4 is now 13 days away from her stem cell transplant!  She’s feeling great right now.  Her last chemo pill was taken on the 15th, so there’s no poison in her body to speak of.  There are also very few white blood cells, of which probably not too many are non-cancerous.  Hence the transplant.

Melanie has been here for her physical already.  We believe she passed all the tests.  LRN4’s doctor did mention this morning that there’s about a 1% chance of LRN4 contracting Hepatitis C from the transplant, since Melanie has antibodies for that disease in her blood.  We think that’s a small enough risk to continue per plan.  LRN4 completed her final test on Wednesday, so all systems are go

Today is the first day in the official transplant countdown.  She starts on three days of pre-radiation medication that’s supposed to protect vulnerable tissues, such as her stomach lining and the inside of her mouth.  The medication might make her uncomfortable, but it’ll be worth it.  She gets five days’ worth of radiation, starting on Monday.  After that, it’s a day of high-dose chemo, a rest day, another day of high-dose chemo with a different drug, two rest days while she starts taking anti-rejection medication, and the transplant, which is scheduled for May 9.  Then she starts getting better!

In the meantime, life is pretty good here at the hospital.  We wish we were home, of course, but that day will come.  But we’re enjoying being together and relaxing.

Played bingo yesterday afternoon.  Unlike the previous time, we won a few games!  LRN4 got a much-needed t-shirt (looks great on her) and a hat, and I got a couple decks of cards to help while away the hours.  We had a nice time, and it was fun to win.

All the kids appear to be doing very well.  LRN1 is getting ready to move from Provo to the Bay Area.  He hasn’t been really happy in Utah this time, so I expect this move will be a good one for him.  LRN2, on the other hand, seems to be enjoying Provo/Orem just fine.  He’s started taking technical support calls at his new job and reports that it’s fun.

LRN3 and LRN15 just bought a new car yesterday!  It’s pretty much just an update of their old car, but it’s better in many ways, it’s brand new, and it’s cheaper than the old one.  So that’s all good.

LRN5 and non-Loyal-Reader Cliff are celebrating the release of Cliff’s band’s new album!  They put it on a Kickstarter-like service called Pledge Music and got enough pledges to produce it.  It’s a fascinating idea – the band is called Concourse in Atmosphere, and it consists of several musicians who recorded in their home locations across the world (including LRN3!) without ever getting together.  I’ve listened to some of the music and plan to get my download today.  Buy it, Loyal Readers!  It’s good music.

And I’m moving along just fine.  Haven’t really started doing much that will earn my keep, but I’m making a few noises in that direction.  I have a few irons in the fire and am trying to decide which of them deserves my attention and in what quantity.  I’d really like to be making money again a year from now, so I need to decide how to distribute my efforts between now and then to make that most likely to happen.  And also to make it most likely for me to enjoy what I’m doing.

I’ve started a project with my nephew John to complete the testing and do everything else necessary to market and sell a very useful medical program he has written.  Medical software isn’t exactly my main strength, but I think I can learn what I need to know in that area.  Software testing is definitely a strength for me, so I feel very confident that I can make a contribution there.  Software marketing and sales is another kind of new thing for me, but I think I can pick that up fairly well also.  Besides, John is doing a great deal of the marketing for me – he’s writing and presenting papers on the software and talking to colleagues about.  He has a fairly large group of people just waiting to buy the thing when it comes out.  He’s planning the official rollout at a conference next February, so I guess I’ll plan to attend and staff a booth there, if booths exist.  Need to talk to him about that and start making plans.

So far, that’s the project most likely to earn me a substantial amount of money in the near term.  In addition, I’m starting to lay the groundwork for some work with my brother LRN23.  He’s very active in the field of military flight simulation and thinks there might be some opportunity for us to collaborate in that area.  I’ve found time to make a first draft of a tool that reads the tags in TIFF files.  I’m not sure if he’ll find it useful, but it was a good intro to C# and .net programming for Windows, which is something I’ve not done any of.  I have several planned enhancements to the tool and we’ll see if anything interesting comes up in the future.

I’m also still hoping to get some iOS programming done, which is what I intended to do when I retired from LockMart.  It’s funny how quickly my efforts have turned in a different direction, but I certainly want to follow the money and opportunity.

And then there’s writing.  That’s something I can do here in the hospital, along with the programming.  Don’t have much writing on my plate, other than the blog and my daily family letters on LRN4’s status.  I’m planning an editorial calendar for my two company websites, though – businesscasualsoftware.com and spinfo.info.  One way to generate interest in your work is to provide interesting, useful content on your website.  So I want to do that.

Speaking of websites, I’m trying to decide whether to register another LLC and domain for the medical software business.  Tough decision.  I don’t want to dilute my efforts too much with two companies and three websites.  On the other hand, it might be better to have a business name that sounds more like a medical forensics company.  Still trying to figure that one out.  Any advice, Loyal Readers?

And that’s it for today.  My commitment is to write something daily, so I’m hoping to increase the frequency of these posts again.  Wish me luck!  I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity: long-jumping guinea pig!

See you on Monday.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 26th, 2013 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.