morrowlife

Here are a bunch of hoodoos at Bryce National Park. Love them hoodoos. Actually, I think I just like to say the word. Hoodoo, hoodoo. Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam, taken a couple weeks ago at Bryce Canyon National Park, and part of my famous Vacation series. Hoodoo.

Wonders of WordPress. We’ve been busy, busy, busy. LRN16 and LRN17 got here on Wednesday morning and left this evening. We had a great visit! LRN4 made a long list of things she wanted them to work on with her, and they got here and got to work. They cooked for us (lots of really great food!), they cleaned a little bit, LRN17 rearranged our spice cabinets and pantries, LRN17 did a bit of touch-up painting in the dining room and laundry room, they helped work on a new valance for the kitchen window, and they generally worked like demons. It was great!

More than two months later – I just discovered this was never published. So I’m publishing it now without further comment. Enjoy!

Here’s a natural arch somewhere at Bryce Canyon National Park. Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam, taken at Bryce Canyon National Park a couple weeks ago, and part of my famous Vacation series.

Been a good couple of days.  We went to the doctor yesterday and were delighted to learn that LRN4’s white cell count has started going down. On Thursday, it was at about 50,000 cells/microliter. Monday, it was 32,000. Thats a huge relief and we’re feeling much more optimistic.

LRN16 and LRN17 get here tomorrow! They’ll be visiting us for two days, during which time they plan to cook us a bunch of food and do whatever other work LRN4 asks them to do. I suggested they work on my transmission, but LRN16 seemed a little too anxious to give it a try, so I withdrew the request. I’m really looking forward to their visit.

Fortunately for them, they won’t be needing to clean the house. I hired the cleaners on Saturday and they came for the first time on Monday. They’ll be here every other week for the foreseeable future. They did a beautiful job. As LRN9 said on the phone today, hiring a cleaning company may turn out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

Got the slide scanner and neck pillow I mentioned on Friday. LRN4 reports the neck pillow is working great, and I’ve already scanned about 125 slides. I’m not happy with the quality of the scans quite yet – very contrasty, very fuzzy, and generally of very low quality. I need to check the settings I’ve been using and see if there’s anything I can do to bring the quality up. Even so, it’s been really fun to see some of our old pictures again. Can’t wait to get all of them scanned. There are many hundreds.

And it’s late already, so I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity: shark-like attack otter!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s LRN4 standing in front of three little mini-mountains at Zion National Park. I believe this was the first place we stopped after we got into the super-private buses-only area. That’s the famous Morrowmobile there on the left. Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam, taken at Zion National Park, and part of my famous Vacation and Hiking series.

We walked about 50 feet. Which is about as much as LRN4 is doing right now. So it’s a hike. And it was a good one.

Pretty good couple of days. LRN4 finished day 5 of 10 chemo treatments today and she’s feeling pretty good. No news on the state of her blood. We’ll find that out on Monday. I’m not enjoying the wait.

Work. I submitted an update to the Common Core Classroom app today. Added the ability to delete notes. I had tried to avoid that because I kind of wanted the app to keep an audit trail for users. However, LRN31 convinced me that there’s a real need. What if a teacher enters bad information? The only way to fix it previously was to delete the student’s entire record and re-enter everything. Not a good solution. Now it’s fixed. Or at least it will be when the update gets reviewed and approved.

LRN2 and I installed a new blind over the sliding door. The original curtain turned out to be too much of a pain. It was a great temporary solution, but its useful life was over. So we bought a blind at Lowe’s a couple day ago and we installed it today. Looks great.

LRN4’s car has been in the shop for two weeks now. I wanted them to replace the battery. They replaced a whole bunch of other things and now they can’t get the electronics to work right. I’ve run out of patience. I may have to start getting legal advice.

Ordered a [amazon asin=B007VDN1PA&text=slide scanner] today. We have a ton of old slides and a few photographs that document our entire life before a few years ago when we got our first digital camera, and we want to be able to see and share those photos. So I ordered a scanner. It should come on Tuesday and then we can start the arduous process of scanning them all. I’m sure the end result will justify all the work.

Also, LRN4 got a [amazon asin=B00BOS9DKA&text=neck pillow]. She spends a lot of time in a chemo/transfusion chair these days and this will make that time a bit more comfortable. Totally worth it. Bonus: velvety cover!

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

See you on Monday.

Here’s LRN4 by the entrance to Zion National Park. Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam, taken at Zion National Park (duh!) last week, previously published on Facebook, and part of my famous Vacation series.

Wonders of WordPress today. Fewer updates than usual lately. Sorry about that, Loyal Readers. Life is moving at a breakneck pace. Not that that’s a particularly good thing right now.

LRN4 continues to maintain, but not prosper. As I write this, we’re sitting in the doctor’s clinic getting her fourth of ten chemo treatments. The good news is that she’s still tolerating the chemo well. The bad news is that it doesn’t seem to be working. Her white cell count is up again from Monday’s number, which was way up from the previous Monday’s. That’s not good news. We know this particular chemo drug is slow-acting, but we’re not sure whether it’s capable of acting quickly enough. The first time she took it, it immediately brought the bad cells down to zero, which it doesn’t seem to be doing this time. Options remain, but this is discouraging news.

LRN4 stopped taking Nexavar a couple of days ago. She reports that it was very literally sapping her will to live. We have no idea whether that will impede her eventual recovery, but we do know she feels much better already. The doctor is encouraging her to take it when she feels well enough to take it and to take as much as she feels she can.

So we’re still not prevailing in our struggle. We have moments that feel normal, which we treasure. We have moments of incredible sadness as we contemplate the possibility of LRN4 not making it. And we have moments of worry as we try to figure out what to do.

Work is going slowly again, as my Loyal Readers might imagine.  I’ve been working for a couple days on an update to the Common Core Classroom app.  I submitted an update a few days ago to fix the broken Classroom report and I’m now working on adding the ability to delete notes. After struggling for a couple days to do it the wrong way, I had a little consultation with LRN1, who suggested what we like to call “the right way.” Took about five minutes to get it working after that. Sheesh. Thank heaven for supergenius children.

Anyway. I expect to release the latest update within a day or two and then get back to full-time on the medical app. Or as close to full-time as I get these days.

I’m not keeping the house clean enough. I really need to spend at least half an hour or so a day on that. My current average is pretty much zero. LRN4 has started working on getting a cleaning service to come. If we can afford it, I’m good with that. We’ll know soon.

And that’s about it for today.  I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity: yobbish drunken seagull!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s a hoodoo at Bryce Canyon National Park. Before today I wasn’t quite sure what a hoodoo was. Well, there was this. But that’s a whole other kind of hoodoo. Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam, taken today at Bryce Canyon National Park, and part of my famous Vacation series.

This kind of hoodoo is a tall, thin rock. There are lots of them at Bryce Canyon National Park.

Had another good day today. As hinted above, we went to Bryce Canyon National Park (that’s the fourth mention in this post of Bryce Canyon National Park) (whoops, there’s the fifth). LRN4 felt pretty good all day, although she’s having a lot of trouble walking. So we didn’t walk all that much. But we did walk a little. And it was a nice day.

Spent some time in the afternoon working on graphics updates for my iPhone app. Oh, by the way, I’ve now sold 29 copies of the app. That’s as of yesterday. At $2.99 a copy, that’s $86.71. Of course, Apple keeps 30%, so I’ve made $60.70 so far. And they thought I wouldn’t be successful as an independent developer. I guess I showed them, huh? Huh?

Welcome to Loyal Reader Number 32 – Erica! Check out her name over there on the right. She commented today that she’s been reading for a while, but she didn’t know how to become a Loyal Reader. Well, Erica, the secret is that only I can authorize a new Loyal Reader. And my standards are exceptionally high. Let’s see . . . you have to be human (I’m flexible on that one) and you have to tell me you want to be a Loyal Reader. Those high standards are what’s keeping my Loyal Readership to a manageable level.

Anyway, welcome, Erica! You’re in!

LRN4 forgot her [amazon asin=B0083RNTOG&text=Coban] on this trip. What is Coban, you ask? It’s the kind of tape that sticks to itself but not anything else. She uses it to keep the plastic bag over her PICC line safely in place in the shower. It works great! The interesting thing is what it was invented for – wrapping race horses’ legs for . . . some reason or other. All I know is that race horses’ legs must be wrapped. So must PICC line owners’ arms. I’ve been keeping an eye out for livestock supply stores here in the wilds of Utah so we can buy some more, but so far I haven’t seen one. Maybe tomorrow.

Which leads me to wonder what we’re going to do tomorrow. I have no idea. Bryce canyon was fully visited in a day, so we don’t need to go back. There are a few other nearby parks and possibly other tourist attractions. I’m pretty sure LRN4 has something in mind, which is exactly what I want to do. Can’t wait!

One and a half more days of vacation. It’s going to be . . . wait for it . . . legendary!

And I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity: elite police goose!

See you tomorrow.