Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to the lovely and talented quadrivium!!!! Have a great one!!!

Done yesterday

( done 20090220 )

All in all a pretty good day; I think my mood baseline has definitely moved up. Even having to do an extra dressing change for Colleen, just before going to bed, didn't faze me.

It was a productive day, too. I topped off the morning by chording out "Riverheart". At work, I finished writing the tech reports and got them all copied into the destination directory; it'll take only a few hours next week to gather the abstracts and titles and get numbers assigned. And I finally got the Y.D.'s phone upgraded to unlimited texting, so that'll help a lot. She's paying the $20/month for it.

 

As it turns out, the hardest thing about doing these daily updates is figuring out how I feel about things, which is what people have said they really want to know. For most of my life, I've tried hard not to have feelings, or at least not to be aware of them. This is all very new. Just bolding the lines I "feel good about" is a major step for me.

(10:57) I'm going to try to pay more attention to my feelings about things as they happen, and add a line starting with "!" to record them. This will sometimes require recording external events as well as things I've done. Boldface for "things I feel good about" can still be added after the fact.

Colleen: Fistula IV

So,... Colleen's fistula opened up again last night, releasing a trickle of blood and pus from what we think is an abcess. She'd been having severe pain in that area for most of the week, so neither of us was particularly surprised. As with the previous incident, there doesn't seem to be any connection with the intestine anymore, so it's not too worrisome.

I packed it and slapped a new dressing on, then did the same this morning (doing a somewhat better job of taping it so that it won't leak). She'll call Kaiser when she gets up. She needs to do that anyway, because she's nearly out of Percoset. Though the pain and redness were a lot less this morning than they were last night.

One reason for the lack of urgency is that her surgery is scheduled for Thursday morning. Another is that this is the third time it's re-opened, so we know the drill. Note that the Remicade doesn't appear to be helping with this, though it may be having an effect elsewhere.

Note the new tag, colleen-200902. The previous one, colleen-200901, has been retired.

Micro-review: A Girl's Guide to Dating a Geek

Last night I finished reading A Girl's Guide to Dating a Geek by Omi M. Inouye. It would have been a disappointing experience if I'd actually expected it to be worth reading. Fortunately for my future as an author of self-help books for geeks and their partners, it was every bit as lame an attempt at humor as I expected it to be.

The fact that it appears to be self-published is a tip-off.

I'm not going to go into detail; quite frankly it isn't worth the time. I did find it quite inspiring, in the same way that a badly-designed user interface, broken website, or ugly but expensive piece of furniture is inspiring: Even I can do better than that!

Back to The River!

Today at random

The weather stayed clear up until evening -- it's a good thing I got my walk in early, even if it was only 45 minutes or so.

We had dinner out at Black Angus with the kids. It'll be the last times we do that until Consonance, most likely.

We stopped at Barnes and Noble on the way home; there was a bewildering array of self-help and psychology books, including Therapy for Dummies. I didn't get any: I have a couple in the queue, and I have no way of knowing what's likely to be useful and what's crap. Recommendations?

Looking at the Five Things meme, I realized that I'd have a difficult time coming up with five things to ask about for most of the people on my friends list. Other people seem to be just the opposite: they have an easy time coming up with things to ask about, but a hard time answering. OK... I can just barely wrap my head around that, but it doesn't really surprise me.