morrowlife

Here’s the spacecraft for my second ILS launch arriving at Baikonur in October, 2000. I was already there for my first launch, which took place a few days after this spacecraft arrived. It was summertime when we got to Baikonur – very hot and dry – and winter by the time we left – very, very cold. This picture was taken sometime in between. Great Art courtesy of my junky old first digital camera and part of my famous Machinery series.

Pretty good couple of days. We stopped giving LRN4 her Micafungin today. I still need to flush her lines daily, of course, but we’re saving a bunch of time now by giving her anti-fungal pills. Fortunately, I had saved our previous prescription, so we just dug it out of the Island of Lost Prescriptions and started using it again. LRN4’s feeling pretty good and doing very well. Her fever is gone now. She bought a really cool, really effective [amazon text=thermometer&asin=B004T6G550] today. I played with it for a while and like it a lot, including taking her temperature a few times. So I’m quite sure she’s back to normal. Thermometer: recommended.

Also took my own temperature several times. No fever. Thanks for asking.

By the way, I’m sure my Loyal Readers know that if they click through to Amazon from my blog and buy all their Christmas presents, I get a small kickback. Not that I’m encouraging anybody to do anything, of course. Not at all. Nope. I don’t even like money.

Got my app for LRN23 done tonight except for two things: the icons and testing the algorithms. Hopefully, that’ll get done in the next day or two and we can submit the app. Then I’m back to the medical app’s documentation, which needs to have its first draft completed by the end of this month. I also need to look at promotional materials for the February conference sometime this month. Plenty to do.

I really enjoy iOS programming. It just makes me feel good to develop an app and then see it work. And it’s even better when people actually download it, use it, and like it.

Speaking of which, my Common Core Classroom app has now been downloaded 87 times. That’s not a lot yet, but it’s a start. The great thing about iOS apps is that they just keep selling on their own. Of course, I’m working on doing some marketing, but it’s making a tiny bit of progress all on its own. Cool.

I’ve started listening to Christmas music! I love this time of year. We’re decorating the house tomorrow. Can’t wait.

And I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity: protesting sheep!

See you on Monday.

Here’s a hostage I’ve taken during the last few days. I know it doesn’t look much like a hostage, but it’s definitely doing the job. Turns out LRN1 left his beloved mouse here when he went home the other day. It also turns out he has my pneumatic wrench. So we reached an agreement – one mouse for one wrench. Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam, taken yesterday as proof of life during intensive negotiations, and part of my famous Machinery series.

I think I need to start an Electronics series. Any opinions, Loyal Readers?

Pretty good day today. LRN4 is doing well, although there are a few worrying signs. Mainly, she has a fever today. It’s apparently just over 100 degrees. She visited her doctor today. They took her temperature several times just to make sure the reading was accurate. It was. The doctor kind of shrugged his shoulders and said there’s really nothing to do about it until she starts showing some kind of other symptoms. He listened carefully to her lungs, of course, and did whatever else doctors do. So we’re watching and waiting, just like we are with a hundred other things.

In other LRN4 news, we have reservations to go to Houston to do the evaluation for the new clinical trial. We’ll be there for four days, starting on the 16th of this month. After that, we’ll see. Our doctor here told LRN4 today that the doctor conducting this trial is the premier FLT3 specialist in the world, which sounds pretty good to us. We have a lot of hopes pinned on this thing right now.

LRN4 has to be off of chemo for two weeks before the clinical trial, so they discontinued those treatments today for the time being. They need to keep a close eye on her white cell count while we wait.

On a sad note, LRN3 went home yesterday evening. The whole family is now gone. We had such a great time having everybody here and it’s sad that it’s over, possibly not to be repeated for a very long time. At least we have our memories. And I have LRN1’s mouse.

I’ve been working on the iPhone app for LRN23 some more today. I made some major changes to the previous version. It’s currently working on the iPad only; I’ll get the mods made to the iPhone version tomorrow. I’m having fun working on the app. It’s pretty simple conceptually, but it’s always a challenge to make everything work just right and look just right. I think this will be a nice app when it’s done.

For various reasons, I decided to reinstall Windows on my Bootcamp drive yesterday. Spent a very large part of the day accomplishing that, and then I spent some time today getting the medical app working on it again. I’ll get back to my documentation efforts on that program tomorrow. I registered (and paid a whole lot of money) for the February conference in Seattle where we plan to introduce the application. We have a 10×10 booth in the exhibition hall. Now all we need is the final product (scheduled to be completed by the end of this month), documentation and training materials (scheduled to be completed during January), promotional materials for the conference (January also), and the ability to take people’s money, including collecting sales tax and amending my business license accordingly. Lots to do, but I’m excited about it.

LRN2 and I took my beloved pickup to the upholstery shop today to have its driver’s seat cushion recovered. Sadly, the guy there got the wrong material for it, so he has delayed it until Saturday. Hopefully, the right thing will come in by then. This has been a bit of a slow process.

And it’s late, so I’ll end here for the day. I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity: rock-eating dog!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s a rocket emerging from the assembly building at Baikonur. It’s on its way to the launch pad.  Great Art courtesy of . . . umm . . . some old low-res digital camera, taken by me in June 2001 at Baikonur, Kazakhstan, and part of my famous Architecture and Machinery series.

Yeah, there’s some architecture in this picture. Pretty rickety-looking architecture at that. There were some terrible buildings there. But the clean rooms were very, very clean. Really.

Very good several days since my last post. Sadly, most of the Loyal Readers have now gone home. LRN5 and family left on Saturday afternoon and LRN1 and girlfriend left this afternoon. LRN3 is out tomorrow night. Boo hoo! I miss everybody already. We had a great time.

Didn’t do too much this weekend. Had a great Thanksgiving with just the ten of us here at the house. We went to LRN31’s house on Friday evening for family bingo and snacks. Had fun there. The kids went out on the town a couple times, we jacuzzified a time or two, we ate a ton of great food, the kids all played about a million video games, and we generally enjoyed being together.

LRN4 is doing pretty well. She got a bunch of blood on Sunday, so her counts were really good today. Her white cell count is down to 0.2, which is very good. And she’s been feeling pretty good. She did a ton of work all week and lived to tell the tale. So there’s that. We’re getting very serious about a clinical trial at MD Anderson Medical Center in Houston. We plan to go there for a consultation later this month, if everything works out. Full of hope over this.

We got a couple of new games and some DVDs from LRN8 a few days ago. What a nice Thanksgiving present! And we never receive Thanksgiving presents. Of course, we never give them either. She sent us four [amazon text=Disney dog movies&asin=B008H6GHLU], a game called [amazon text=5 Second Rule&asin=B003BLQG6M], and one more game called [amazon text=Spot It&asin=B0039S7NO6]. Thanks, LRN8! They’re all a ton of fun.

Didn’t do any Black Friday shopping this year. I really didn’t want to face those crowds. A few of our guests went but nobody seemed to find any really great deals anyway. And I don’t care. I’m sick of Black Friday. It’s stupid and it has turned violent at Walmarts all over the country. Time to put it out of its misery, thus ending our misery.

And that’s about it for today. I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity: lion-impersonating dog!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s a band that no longer exists.  Clifford informed me a couple days ago that The Brewing Company ceased to exist about three weeks ago. The world is a poorer place for it. Fortunately, The Clifford Brown Trio has stepped in to take its place. So there’s that. Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam (the old version), taken right after a performance in April, 2011, and part of my famous Event series.

Happy Thanksgiving tomorrow! I’m looking forward to the day.

LRN4 spent the day at the hospital and the doctor’s office today – a total of about 15 hours, in fact. She started out at the hospital getting a couple units of red cells. Then she went to her doctor’s office for today’s chemo treatment. While she was there, they checked her blood and decided she needed some platelets, which had originally been scheduled for Sunday (and I suspect she’ll need more on Sunday too). Unfortunately, the transfusion people at the hospital were going home early today, so she had to go to the emergency room for the platelets. That ended up taking about eight hours. Very unfortunate.

On a positive note, LRN5 spent the day with her. So they had a nice time together. A nice, long time together. No chemo tomorrow, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Should be very pleasant.

I went over to the LBIL’s house late this afternoon to help him start setting up his little Christmas village. We barely made a dent into it, but we had a nice time. I’ll be back over there again during the next couple of days to continue the work.

LRN3 and I went to Costco and bought some new non-prescription drugs for LRN4 this morning. We were going to buy some rolls and sour cream there, but the store was so crowded and the checkout line was so long that we decided to take our business to Walmart. They were fairly crowded too, but we were able to quickly grab the couple of things we needed and check out at the self-service checkout stand. Much better situation.

I miss our old Costco’s self-checkout. It was a lot faster. I also miss the option to buy snack bar items at the checkout. I have no idea why they won’t do that here. I mentioned it to a checker once, and she got really nasty with me over it. Very strange. Also very, very bad customer service. Unbelievably bad, in fact. She was exceptionally rude and nasty about the whole thing.

LRN3 and I dropped in on the upholstery shop that’s scheduled to fix my beloved pickup’s torn seat. They had ordered the upholstery fabric several weeks ago and had never called me to tell me it was in. It turns out he was waiting for me to drop by, I guess. We’re scheduled to have it done next Wednesday. I’m looking forward to the seat looking right again.

Several of our group spent time cooking stuff for tomorrow late this evening after LRN4 and LRN5 got back. There’s still a whole lot to get done tomorrow morning. Hopefully, everything will get done on time. If not, I guess it won’t get done.

LRN23 should be in Las Vegas by now. He’ll be dropping by for dinner tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing him. Thanks for coming all the way out here, LRN23!

And that’s about it for today. I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity: dog-based lion!

See you tomorrow.

Here are the insides of an old steam shovel. Well, it’s actually an old electric shovel. But who’s counting? Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam, taken at the old mining museum in Cedar City, Utah, and part of my famous Machinery and Vacation series.

Pretty great couple of days. All the kids and their significant others are here, except LRN15, who is sorely missed. But we’re having a great time anyway, in spite of our deep sorrow at her absence. Hopefully, she’s having a restful and productive week.

We went to the Ethel M chocolate factory last night to see their cactus garden-based Christmas light display.  It was really beautiful, kind of surprisingly. We stopped in the gift shop for a cup of hot chocolate and then took their self-serve factory tour. Which was also interesting. Stayed quite a while watching the factory workers work. Dance, monkey, dance!

Today, all the male members of the family, including the Loyal Brother-in-law, went shooting. The females were invited but all declined. I guess we’re just not that much fun. But we had a great time. the LBIL took us to an outdoor range down in Boulder City. it was uncrowded and very nice. They have the range divided into several bunker-like areas, so you get your own little mini-range. It was great to have just the six of us there. LRN3 has extensive firing range experience, so he was our safety officer.

I brought my .22 and .25 pistols and my .22 rifle.  The LBIL brought his .22 and 9mm pistols and another .22 rifle. We all got in just about as much shooting as we wanted and had a great time together. Then we had lunch at Roberto’s and came home. Fun.

LRN4 is doing pretty well today. She’s getting red blood cells tomorrow and platelets on Sunday. Her stamina is very good, she’s looking great, and all’s well. We’re looking at an opportunity to go to MD Anderson hospital in Houston for a new clinical trial. Stay tuned for future developments. We really don’t want to go to Houston (too far from home), but we do want LRN4 to get well. We really want that.

The kids have been using our Wii quite a bit since they all got here. LRN3 brought a bunch of GameCube games and a couple of controllers with him and Mario Kart continues to be a big hit. Nobody seems to want to play our Wii Sports games. Those Mario Brothers really know what they’re doing.

No work today or yesterday. I guess I’m on vacation. I’m okay with that.  I did have a brief conversation with LRN23 today about the new app. I guess that counts as work, no? I might think about it again tomorrow too.

And that’s about it for tonight.  I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food violence news: ice cream truck knife fight!

See you tomorrow.