morrowlife

Here’s a customized manhole cover.  I’m displaying this in honor of LRN2’s birthday!  He’s a fan of Steam-powered games, you know.  This Great Art is humbly submitted as my entry for their new logo design.  Not that they’re looking for one, of course.  Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam, taken here at the City of Hope, and part of my famous Machinery series.

Happy birthday to LRN2!  He’s no longer a teenager.  In fact, there are no more teenagers left in our little family and there will never be another.  That’s kind of a bittersweet thing, actually.  It was wonderful watching the kids grow and mature.  There’s more growth to watch in the future, of course, but a milestone has been passed.

However, there are grandchildren – not only LRN12, but also whatever others may come along.  And I certainly hope there will eventually be more.  Although LRN12 is pretty great on her own.

Wonders of WordPress today, by the way.  It’s actually Saturday evening as I write this.  I got busy and forgot.  What was I busy with?  Why, celebrating LRN2’s birthday, of course!  Well, no, not really.  We talked with him today and swapped some congratulatory texts and emails.  But that was about it.  He and LRN1 did some celebrating themselves – they tell me they went to see the recent [amazon asin=B00AZMFK3K&text=Star Trek Movie] at their local dollar theater.  They both said it was good.  I’ll have to check it out when it comes around for free.

LRN2 also reported an enjoyable birthday dinner with his maternal grandparents.  Thanks, maternal grandparents!

Otherwise, it’s been a good day.  LRN4 continues to do well.  As of Saturday night, she’s completed 8 of 10 chemo treatments.  Her stomach is doing well.  She continues to lose a kilogram or so of weight pretty much every day.  We don’t consider this to be a good thing.  Significant muscle loss happened during previous rounds of chemo and had been finally noticeably improving just before her relapse.  So we’re pretty sure it’s happening again.  The encouraging thing is that we know it will come back, eventually.

LRN4 also reports that her fingertips are getting more red and painful.  Not good.  We’ll talk to our doctor about it on Monday – I think she can make it until then.  If not, we have options.

We sent away to our insurance company’s mail-order pharmacy for some of LRN4 prescriptions today.  Our insurance gives very good coverage for prescriptions from local pharmacies for the first three months.  After that, the prices go way up if you don’t start using their mail-order service.  Now’s our time for that.  The one little complication is that we keep having changes made and I wouldn’t like to waste too much money on expensive prescriptions that we end up only needing for a few days.  Fortunately, the total price of the four 90-day prescriptions I ordered today is less than $6.50.  So we’ll be okay on those no matter what, I think.

My work progress has actually picked up quite a bit, I’m delighted to report.  I gave the project some additional thought and realized I had added a level of complication that simply wasn’t necessary.  So I took that out, had a bit of a consultation session with LRN1 to figure out how to unbreak a thing or two I had broken, and I’m back in business.  There are still lots of functionality issues to address, but the iPad version is working well enough for LRN31 to do some beta testing, just to see if it does what she had hoped.  I might be able to rope in a few other beta testers soon as well – principally LRN8, if she’s interested.  I’ll contact LRN31 on Sunday to start going through the work needed to sign her up.

Oh, I also have the iPhone version of the app about 60% functional!  That implementation is much easier to do, being less complex visually, so I expect to have it fully functional by Monday – or at least equally functional to the iPad version, anyway.  I’m taking Sunday off and will work on my cryptography class instead.

Did I mention that LRN1 has a new job?  Well, he does.  He’s joining a small iOS and Android development firm in Denver.  He starts in a little bit more than a week.  I’m really excited for him – I’m sure he’ll love Denver and I’m also pretty sure he’ll love the job.  It’s a very small company, so he’ll get a lot of visibility.  I’m sure he’ll thrive there.

The response to my video mentioned a couple days ago has been fairly large.  Unfortunately, I took my blank DVDs home when we overnighted in Las Vegas last weekend, but I can get more.  So for those Loyal Readers who are coming here soon, I’ll get something burned before you get here.  For others, I’ll probably do it when we get home.  Don’t expect much – it’s just a whole bunch of photos including LRN4 – great ones, good ones, bad ones, sharp ones, fuzzy ones, etc. – and some music.  I didn’t even do the Ken Burns effect.  Although I guess I could modify it to try that.  Might work on that.  Might not.  I kind of like what I have now.

Anyway.  We ran out today for a tiny bit of shopping.  I got a couple pairs of jeans, LRN4 got some shoes, and I got my very own [amazon asin=B007X5RERW&text=power squid]!  I’ve wanted one of those things for years.  They’re way better than a power strip (of which I seemingly have dozens) because you can use every outlet, no matter how big your wall warts are.  LRN4 noticed it on one of the junk tables at Ross for only about ten bucks.  Its packaging was a bit torn in one spot, which possibly explains the low, low price, but the squid itself is cosmetically perfect and presumably functionally perfect as well.  I’ll plug it in soon and make sure.  In any case, I’m inordinately excited to have it.

We’ve been so frustrated with the terrible, horrible, unreliable Wifi service here at the hospital that we decided to go to the local public library for a couple hours today, just for their free Wifi.  As a bonus, they have actual tables that both of us can sit at and use our computers and even have a reference book or two open at the same time.  Their Wifi is kind of slow, but it didn’t constantly disconnect us for 5-20 minutes at a time, so the experiment was a great success.  We’ll be going back.  Besides, it’s also kind of good to get out of the house to work every once in a while.  At home, we have an office we can use for working and a living room, bedroom, exercise room, kitchen, dining room, garage, and yard we can use for everything else.  Here, not so much.  So it’s nice to have someplace else to go.

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

See you on Monday.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 9th, 2013 at 10:46 pm and is filed under machinery. 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.