morrowlife

Here’s the teahouse in the hospital’s Japanese garden, featured in Tuesday’s post.  Now doesn’t that look like a great place to relax on a beautiful Los Angeles summer afternoon?  Or morning?  Early evening would be even better, but they close the garden too early, alas.  It’s also closed on weekends.  Sigh.  Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam, taken at the City of Hope, and part of my famous Garden series.

LRN4 had her transplant today!  It went perfectly and she’s feeling fine.  Now the healing begins.  Her doctor told us things have been going so well that it’s not impossible to think we’ll be out of the hospital three weeks from now.  As opposed to his previous prediction of four weeks.  We’ll take every week we can get.  We’re natural-born Village People!

In a freak occurrence, it rained pretty hard this afternoon.  Very dark clouds suddenly appeared and it started pouring with fairly frequent lightning strikes.  Kind of strange for around here, although it was nothing like we used to see in Pennsylvania.  For one thing, the hospital didn’t catch on fire.  No complaints there.

Got a flat tire on the way home last night – picked up a nail or something right before I got to Betsy & Bob’s house (hereafter referred to as Betsy & Bob’s Bed & Breakfast, or B&B’s B&B).  The tire went down overnight.  I tried to get Bob’s (very good) compressor hooked up to a (non-functional) tire inflator.  After that failed, I called Ford’s emergency road service number.  They got somebody out in about half an hour.  He re-inflated the tire for me, after which I immediately went to the tire store Betsy had recommended.  They got me right in, fixed and balanced the tire, and had me out of there with another half an hour.  Sweet!  Everything seems fine now.

And that’s it for today – one of the best days of my life!  I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking (and possibly related to Tuesday’s news) food violence news: sucker-punching Cheez-It thief!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s the Japanese garden here at the City of Hope.  Looks like a great place to sit, relax, and heal.  We’ll be there in a month or so.  They have huge koi in that pond, and they give away fish food.  I like it.  Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam and part of my famous Garden series.

Rough day for LRN4 today until about 5:00 or so.  She slept for most of the day until then, which was a very good thing.  On our “hit by a truck” continuum (Smart Car, minivan, or Mack truck), she was at the minivan level in the early afternoon.  By this evening, she’s back to Smart Car.  That’s a good thing too.

LRN4’s sisters Melanie and LRN29 (why isn’t Melanie a Loyal Reader?!) were here this morning.  LRN4 simply couldn’t stay awake to visit with them, so they left a bit early.  Sorry about that, sisters!  LRN4 will be entertaining for visitors again very soon.  We were kind of expecting a visit from our niece Marcie this evening, but that doesn’t appear to be happening.  Maybe she heard from her mom that we were a bit boring today.

So LRN4’s day T-2 is over!  She’s doing great.  I can’t wait to get the transplant done on Thursday and get LRN4 healing up.  There’s a bit more hell to go through before we get to heaven.  She can do it.

And I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food violence news: Cheez-It assault!

See you tomorrow.

Here are some pretty flowers growing on a fence at the rose garden here at the hospital  Very interesting pattern on those blooms!  Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam and part of my famous Garden series.

If I’d had a zoom lens, this picture might have been a bit prettier, but it’ll have to do as-is.  One of the interesting things about using a phone as your main camera is learning how to work around its limitations.  And someday I plan to do that.

A pretty good couple of days have gone by.  As I write this, LRN4 is about an hour away from starting her final radiation treatment. It’s hard to believe how quickly the week has gone by.  She’s in good health and excellent spirits – she continues to do amazingly well in the face of intense treatment that brings other people to their knees, metaphorically speaking.  She’s amazing.

Next up, extremely-high-dose chemo on Saturday and Monday, and the transplant on Thursday.  Woo hoo!

Nothing else going on.  I’m feeling very frustrated with my ability to do anything productive in the flight simulation database world.  I’m trying to build a simple tool and keep coming up against both the new language/IDE/API learning curve and the extremely poorly documented library API interfaces I’m trying to work with.  Very frustrating indeed.  It makes me want to just chuck everything and go back to iPhone programming.  However, experience suggests that I usually feel this way right before I finally “get it” on such things.  So I’m sticking with it a while longer.  But these are tough days right now.  Pity me, Loyal Readers.

I’m also kind of just stumbling forward without a coherent business plan right now.  That may be okay for now, but I eventually need to figure out how I plan to make my living with this stuff.  I’ve been on my own for three months now and expected to be working productively by now.  However, LRN4’s sickness is taking the top spot on my priority list, which is exactly where it ought to be.  I’ll give myself another month or two to get things figured out and moving forward smartly.  By then, we’ll be in the Village and free for at least five days a week, so things should be a lot calmer.  LRN4 will still be top priority, but her needs will be fairly simple by then.  I’ll be doing the cooking, cleaning, and laundry, but that doesn’t take much time (especially in a one-room studio apartment, and I believe the hospital people actually clean the place and wash the sheets and towels while we’re in the village) and it can be a welcome break from development work.  So I’m looking forward to that.

I’m also really looking forward to being in the same place as LRN4 all day every day.  Really, really looking forward to it.  It’s funny – even though we’re together about 12 hours a day, I still really miss her.

And that’s it for today.  I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food violence news: hollandaise spill injury!

See you on Monday.