morrowlife

Here’s Shannon dancing with a statue of some revolutionary American guy. She was so fun. Great Art courtesy of Scott’s old Kodak digital camera, taken by Scott during our Independence Hall tour right before we moved away from Pennsylvania the first time, and part of my famous Shannon and Statue series.

Greetings from Cabo San Lucas! I had a nice day today.

But let’s start the story from the beginning. I left home in my beloved pickup at about 8:30 Saturday morning. It was supposed to be a terrible rainy day in Los Angeles and points east, but I got about 10 drops of water on my windshield the whole way. Traffic moved quickly and the truck ran perfectly. The lines to check in at the Long Beach terminal were long, but they moved at a reasonable pace and I got on board the ship in due time.

While I was in the terminal building (the old Spruce Goose dome, incidentally), the thunderstorm finally let loose and really raged for a little while. I heard later that it got pretty hard to get around for a while there.

Anyway. My balcony cabin was already ready for me. It’s really nice and feels possibly a bit bigger than the inside cabins Shannon and I have had on all our previous cruises. Other than Disney, that is. We had Mark and Andy with us on that cruise and the cabin was plenty big for all four of us.

Anyway. I walked around the ship a while, avoiding the residual light rain. It’s a pretty standard cruise ship – not as big as others we’ve been on but still big enough. I think it carries about 2200 passengers and 900 crew. So it didn’t take too long to explore. I spent some time hanging around on my balcony, which I enjoyed very much and continue to enjoy. I’m not sure Shannon would have liked it as much as I do. She hated to feel cold and her threshold for coldness was a bit lower than mine, so she wouldn’t have wanted to be out there while we were at sea. So I wouldn’t have been there because I didn’t want to be by myself. So the balcony is a great idea for me now but might not have been so great before. I do like having the sun wake me up in the morning, though, even if I’m not outside.

All of Saturday was pretty cloudy with slightly rough seas. Nothing like what we’ve seen on a couple other cruises, but you could definitely feel the ship rolling. I was walking outside on the promenade deck Saturday night and saw my first stars, so it didn’t take us an extremely long time to get out of the rainy weather. By Sunday morning, it was beautiful out.

We spent Sunday at sea. I enjoyed the day but didn’t really do all that much. I chatted with people over meals (I had their sea day brunch early and then again at lunchtime) and enjoyed the company. Otherwise, it was pretty much just me. I wandered a little and ended up spending a lot of the day on my balcony and otherwise relaxing. I enjoyed the alone time. There was a short period of intense loneliness and missing how the trip would have been with Shannon. Sunday was the one-month anniversary of her death and I needed to grieve some more. See yesterday’s blog post.

I have a nice group of people at the dinner table. They’re all single and they all seem nice. I like them, but I’m also intensely aware when I’m with them that I’m now part of the misfit group. I’m no longer part of a couple as far as things like that are concerned, and I don’t like that feeling. But such is my new life. I will learn to adapt and I will find friends who are nice, normal people. But probably not on this cruise. Although I really do like the people I eat dinner with. Sorry to say negative things about them. But adult singles aren’t the same as couples. They just aren’t.

This morning, we arrived in Cabo. I sat on the balcony as the ship approached and anchored. The view was pretty. After a while, I got on a tender and went ashore for my scuba diving excursion. It was fun! It was also exhausting. I’m so sore this evening I feel like I can hardly move. So we were underwater just long enough, I guess. There were three of us assigned to follow a guy named Sharif – a couple and me. The guy got in the water and really struggled for a while. I guess he just couldn’t get used to the scuba equipment. After about five minutes, he surfaced and went back to the ship. His wife and I finished up the trip. There were a lot of very interesting ships, some rocks and coral, a very large eel holed up in a rock crevice, and lots and lots of sand. It was beautiful and unique and I’m really glad I did it. I was able to breathe comfortably and get around well. All in all, it was a fun trip. I’m not sure I’m interested in taking up scuba diving, though. If I could do it in Cabo all the time, I might like it. I’m not sure that other places would be as beautiful. Also, I don’t want to be this sore that often.

Spent the afternoon in my cabin and on the balcony. I watched the sun go down and the lights come up on shore. It was beautiful. The day was warm, the water was extremely comfortable in a wetsuit, and the sunset was peaceful and cathartic.

I feel almost guilty enjoying myself so soon after Shannon’s death. I know that’s what she would want me to do, though, so I’m trying. There’s plenty of mourning going on too. After dinner tonight, I walked on the promenade deck like we used to do on our cruises and just talked to her as if she was here. It was heartbreaking because she can’t talk back to me, but it also gave me a chance to vocalize so many of the things I’ve been thinking. Being widowed is hard. It is just hard. I hope I have the strength to get through it without cracking. I don’t think I have much choice, do I?

Tomorrow, we’re back in Cabo. I’m going to the beach. Must remember the sunscreen – there are a lot of red people on the ship today and I don’t want to be one of them tomorrow. I hope to be a little less sore tomorrow night than I am tonight. Wish me luck, Loyal Readers!

And I’ll end with this exciting Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity: drug store-invading duck!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s Mark with a Zoltar machine. That’s Mark there on the right, with Zoltar on the left. Of course, having his name printed directly over his head is something of a giveaway. Maybe Mark should consider getting a sign like that one. Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam, taken in Boulder city mere moments before the Atomic Missile photo featured on Tuesday, and part of my famous Electronics, Machinery, and Statue series.

I nearly called Mark LRN2 in that first paragraph there. That’s a difficult habit to get out of. Once you get a shtick going, it’s hard to change direction.

By the way, you can have a Zoltar machine too! Or maybe go [amazon text=a bit cheaper&asin=B000NOOZ1S].

Lots of news around here. Yesterday afternoon, I got thoroughly disgusted when our lung doctor refused to perform a test that our oncologist told us Shannon needed. It’s the bronchoscopy they’ve schedule two times before and called off both times at the last moment. The guy said he won’t do it because her platelets are too low. Which is ludicrous because her body is incapable of creating platelets, as I mentioned. She needs that test because, while she’s doing much better than before, she’s no longer really improving and she can’t get free of the oxygen. She also can’t get free of the hospital.

So I got unhappy and decided it was time to go to the City of Hope. Shannon agreed and I started making the arrangements. Our Nevada oncologist agrees that it’s a good time to transfer her. Our California oncologist agrees and has been wanting us to transfer her since he found out. And our internal disease specialist’s partner visited us this afternoon and told us he absolutely agrees that we need to go. Without wanting to say anything negative about the wonderful people at the hospital here, they just don’t have enough experience with stem cell transplant patients and their special needs. At this point, we need to get with the experts. So we’re going.

Shannon called me early this morning and let me know they told her she was being transferred today. She I scrambled around and drained the jacuzzi, changed the sheets on our bed, finished folding Shannon’s laundry and got some extra clothes out for her, got gas in the Taurus, and packed a suitcase for myself to last for anywhere from three days to five months. I loaded it all in the car, along with Shannon’s pills and a dirty clothes basket, and headed to the hospital to await Shannon’s air ambulance departure. And . . . she didn’t go. There’s not a bed available at the City of Hope yet. It’ll happen within a few days, of course. But why did I believe them when they told me we were leaving? Sorry.

I should have done what we did last time this happened. That time, I kept living a normal life until they told her it was time to go. Then I went home, got ready as described above, and drove to Los Angeles. In my defense, I thought they had told her it was time to go.

Anyway, we’re going soon.

No work was accomplished today in all the confusion. Spoke with my mother and both of my brothers today. Everybody seems to be doing fine and they’re all excited for us to keep moving forward. Chris was going to come visit us for the weekend, so that’s canceled, unfortunately. Maybe another time soon.

And there’s not much else on my mind right now, so I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity: rental chicken!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s a bunch of black pillars. With water running down them. Standing in a pool of water. Also dripping water all over the sidewalk. They were really cool. And look, there’s a building belonging to my alma mater there in the background! Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam, taken today during our nice long walk, and part of my famous Garden and Statue series.

Yeah, I know it doesn’t look like a garden. Let’s call it a sculpture garden.

It was a very pleasant walk, by the way. We went through the park containing these pillars and then a few blocks down the street. On the way back, we stopped at Whataburger for lunch. Yum! It was really nice to get outside for a while and it was very pleasant just to be together. Also, it was a warm, sunny day!

We went to see the transplant doctor at 11:00 this morning. As predicted, there wasn’t really anything for us to learn. He believes a second stem cell transplant is our best bet at this point, even though it’s a relatively low probability thing. They’re willing to do it here, of course, but we asked if they had anything to offer that we can’t find at the City of Hope. They don’t. So unless our doctor at the CoH can’t get it approved by his committee, we’ll go back to California for transplant round two.

Oh, we did learn one thing today. The reason the DLI transplant isn’t an option for us is that the success rate for AML patients is negligible. That’s a pretty clear explanation, as far as I’m concerned.

We’re going back to see doctor number one early tomorrow morning for the review of the preliminary bone marrow biopsy results. Again, I don’t expect any surprises.

After the early morning visit, we have all the live long day to do . . . something. We don’t know what. We have to check out of the hotel by 11:00 in the morning and our flight out isn’t until 10:30 PM. So there’s a lot of time to kill. We still don’t know how we’ll kill it, but something will happen. I’m just happy to be together.

We had dinner tonight at Longhorn Steakhouse, one of LRN9’s company’s restaurants. In fact, we used the gift card he gave us last Christmas. The food and service were great and the price was certainly right. Thanks, LRN9! Highly recommended.

By the way, you can’t buy Darden gift certificates from Amazon. You can get them for just about any other national restaurant chain. What’s up with that, Amazon and/or Darden? I wanted to include a link here.

And it’s way past time bedtime. I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity: watch parakeet!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s a plant in our backyard, full of tiny purple flowers. Beautiful. Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam, taken five days ago, and part of my famous Garden, Las Vegas, and Statue series.

Note the extremely attractive turtle statue there in the background, given to us by LRN5 for our garden in Lardville. We think it looks even better here in the desert. Thanks, LRN5! When we see our turtle, we think of you.

LRN4’s health is pretty much the same as it was two days ago. That’s a good thing. We visited her doctor today. He reported that her white cell count is back up to 0.7. That’s okay, though. She got a bunch of transfusions yesterday, which might have had an effect, and cell counting is apparently an inexact science anyway. So we’re not worrying about small stuff like that anymore. We have enough big things to worry about.

Got a tiny bit of work done today. Didn’t work on my user’s manual, as I did the last couple of days. Instead, I got two of my websites set up to automatically publish their blog posts on Facebook. Took a little bit of figuring out, but now I know how to do it. It works great! I’m waiting for LRN4 to decide whether she wants her blog set up to do the same thing.

Just finished reading [amazon text=Johnny Carson&asin=0544217624], by Henry Bushkin. Bushkin was Carson’s attorney for several years. Carson was a great talent but kind of a lousy person, if Bushkin is to be believed. It was kind of depressing – I loved Johnny Carson and I was so sad to find out what a troubled person he was. The saddest part was the end – Johnny Carson died alone. After alienating everyone who ever meant anything to him and who ever cared about him, he had nobody left.

Next book up: [amazon text=Snow Crash&asin=0553380958], by Neal Stephenson. LRN2 recommended it as an interesting example of the bleak cyberpunk genre. So far, he’s right. I’m only a couple chapters into it, I’m usually not much of a fiction lover, and I’m definitely not a science fiction lover (cyberpunk appears to be fairly close to science fiction, if you ask me), but I’m enjoying it.

Next one after that: [amazon text=The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy&asin=0345453743], by Douglas Adams. Yes, it’s old, but I’ve never read it.  I did enjoy [amazon text=the movie&asin=B000A283AW], though.

Next one after that: [amazon text=The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1&asin=0520267192], by … umm … Mark Twain. Volume 2 will come after that.

Got all those books as ebooks from the library. I’m also working on a few marketing books right now, but I’ll describe them in detail at a later date. At least I have a plan.

Anyway. Nothing much else new today, so I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food violence news: quiche standoff!

See you tomorrow.

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.