a lot of catch uppin to do…

I really don’t like starting out the week with a huge inbox of unanswered email and stacks of other undone things awaiting me, but that’s exactly the fix I find myself in right now. The price I pay for being out of town at a conference for a week. More about that later…

First, a Blaine update… as I was getting ready to go to the airport to fly to San Francisco for the Web 2.0 conference, naturally Blaine’s health needed tending to… Lately, his always swollen left foot has become much more swollen. No matter what we do, no matter how much he wears his special sock, it it’s gotten worse. So the morning I was getting ready to leave for the airport, I contacted one of his doctors who said he should be seen right away because it could be deep vein thrombosis. Yikes!!

My dilemma: do I just cancel my trip and go into uber mom mode I’ve been in for the past 28 years? or do I hope for the best and trust others to get the care Blaine needs? Painful and hard decision. Ric, of course, immediately stepped up to the plate and dropped what he was doing and took Blaine to an appointment within a couple of hours. And Francesca, bless her sweet soul, decided to go with them… she even went in for the vascular ultrasound with him. So I went to the airport.

The long and the short of it is this: they found a pulse in his foot, and movement in the arteries (not what it should be, but movement!)… no real explanation for why it is more swollen, but the doctor says she is ordering physical therapy on it and gave a prescription for a pressure stocking.

But then Fran and I started thinking: this whole thing started RIGHT AFTER Blaine started wearing a pressure stocking… could it be that it is somehow blocking off the flow above his foot? Kind of an interesting coincidence!! So we decided to let him go without the stocking for a while to see what happens. And keep his foot as elevated as possible. And we’re still waiting for the PT to happen…

Blaine also experienced a kind of Tri-Met meltddown this week, but more on that later. Every story I tell turns out to take so long, I run out of time. So I concede there is a backlog and that I have a lot of catch uppin to do…

Another busy week…

So glad it’s Friday… time to catch my breath after a very busy week, mostly because of doings at work. We had a big meeting yesterday with a bunch of very brainy geeks: Ethan and Lew from Grass Commons in Eugene (who have been developing connectipedia for MMT) and Troy and Michael, who flew up from San Jose to help us incorporate DataPlace into connectipedia.

We are working steadily and sometimes frantically to prepare for the public launch on June 11th. Wish us luck!!

I also participated in a panel at the Open Source Summit at Innotech yesterday. I was part of the Open Source for the Public Sector, representing nonprofit use of OSS. It was fun and I learned a lot from the other panelists.

I’m getting ready to go to San Francisco next week for the Web 2.0 expo to look for ideas about the next exciting thing we might do along those lines at MMT. (Yes, before we finish the last exciting thing…that’s just the way the world works!)

It’s a harsh transition back to working full time. Kinda worried about that because I’m still taking naps to keep my energy level high enough. So we’ll see…

I’ve been taking a quilt class on Tuesday evenings for the past two weeks… I’ll show you my project in my next post…

not geeky enough…

sure wish i could figure out how to have individual blog posts show up under categories in the right side menu… guess i’m not geeky enough. or not patient enough. or maybe both.

WSBG reviews The Radical Center by Ted Halstead & Michael Lind AND The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford

This was one of WSBG’s read-two-books-at-once months. We gave ourselves a lot of pages and ground to cover.

We all enjoyed reading Radical Center. (The book is basically about how the two traditional political parties in the U.S. haven’t kept up with all the change we have experienced in the last couple of decades, especially in technology, so they have become more or less irrelevant and are incapable of dealing with the major challenges we face. The authors then go on to lay out several radical proposals to put things right, e.g., a consumption tax, universal health care, big changes in social security, etc.) It gave us a lot of things to talk about, especially in the areas of health care (e.g, the damage that is done to people by having a health care system that is nearly completely tied to one’s employment), social security, government services, taxation, and so forth. I think, despite what some may call our left-leaning ways, we all felt a lot of it made a lot of sense. We felt less hopeful, however, that the U.S. will actually adopt these rational changes in the near term.

We didn’t look quite as kindly on The Undercover Economist. I wondered if my experience was tainted by having read Radical Center first, with its very logical and orderly outline and discussion of its subject matter. The Economist felt more like a stream of consciousness exercise, and we found it hard to follow, or even care that much… The cover blurb promised to demystify the ways money works in the world…and reveal “all the dirty little secrets of dollars and cents.” Okay it revealed quite a few and had a lot of interesting tidbits: E.g., did you know that computer companies often purposely slow down or disable functions in the the “lite” versions of their hardware and software in order to justify the high price of the “professional” version.

But it had no real center (radical or not!), and wound all around and up and down and in and out a little too much for our taste. Here’s a thought: Tim Harford is a columnist for the Financial Times. Maybe this is a collection of his columns, and that’s why it seems so all over the place.

Maybe that’s what the New York Times meant when it called this “a book to savor.” Intake of breath! WSBG doesn’t have time to savor its books! What kind of book group do you think we are?!? We don’t dawdle…we plough through those pages! We may be small, but this is a take-no-prisoners, rather unforgiving book group!!

Personally, I think I should try reading it again in a few months. But I doubt we’ll find any other WSBG members doing so. I think they liked it even less than I did.

this just in:

When I was at the Portland rally for Barack Obama, I took a few photos with my iPhone… I emailed one to a local person who was making a photo collage at headquarters, and it just appeared on a website! See it here.

My future as a photog  is more than assured now! :-p

P.S. Gawd, it’s embarrassing to see how little it takes to get me excited these days… I should have sent this one I call “and the crowd goes wild!” although it was more like me losing my grip… now if i can just figure out how to make this photo be rightside up…

what a week!

Where to begin??  Perhaps I should try to organize by topic…

1.  Blaine

Through the continued navigation of the personal care bureaucracy, we ended up with some very good news: rather than slightly over 1 hour of personal care per day, it turns out Blaine qualifies for a bit over 3 hours of care per day, five days a week.  I still feel like I am in a dream and I will wake up and find out it’s not really true.  If it is true, this is revolutionary!  It means Francesca could provide more than just daily bowel care and a load of laundry a day.  It means she can help him get organized, keep up with his paperwork, help navigate all the bureaucracies that remain, monitor his equipment/supplies/medications, help him make a weekly meal plan, skin and foot care, etc. etc. etc.  

Do you realize what this means?????  Well, of course, first it means I still don’t believe it.  After nearly 30 years of caregiving, to have this kind of assistance seems too good to be true.  Marie’s next goal:  start to believe it and don’t immediately switch into anxiety mode about when it will be taken away.  Let it mean life is good!

After continued reminders and re-reminders and cajoling and pleading, the medical equipment place finally actually placed the order for the new seat cushion to replace the one that caused Blaine’s latest pressure sore.  Have almost completely lost confidence in them.  Realize daily nagging might be necessary from now on to get them to take action, as in submit the durned order already.  What?  Don’t they want to sell stuff?  Isn’t that how they make their living?  I just don’t get it!

2.  Marie’s health

Okay, so this was a week that my health got almost as much attention as Blaine’s.  I got one of those dreaded “suspicious mass” letters following my mammogram the week before, and was directed to make an appointment for a repeat mammogram and an ultrasound.  At first I wasn’t really that worried because I know that there are lots of false positives in mammograms and everybody seems to err on the side of caution these days (thank goodness). But since I was told to make appointments for both a mammogram and an ultrasound, I figured that couldn’t be too good.  It must look more suspicious than usual.  And then, in my quiet moments, I had to admit that all breast cancer stories likely begin with that letter, so once in a while it occurred to me that this could be the first day of a new way of life for a while.

My mammogram had been particularly painful this time.  More than I could ever remember.  When I left, I felt I had been tortured and texted Ric that we needed to meet at our local favorite dining spot for dinner so I could have a drink… and I NEVER do that. Well, hardly ever…

So when I went in this Thursday, I was a little worried, but did my best to keep a positive attitude.  The tests began with a pelvic ultrasound (because I’ve had polyps in all my colonoscopies, the doctor told me this is a necessary test because some people with a family history of colon cancer also have higher rates of ovarian cancer).  So I left work and arrived at the clinic with an uncomfortably full bladder.  To distract myself while waiting, I read an old celebrity fluff magazine…something about whether Katie Holmes is her own person or a robot controlled by Tom Cruise.  Sorry, can’t remember the conclusion…

Anyway, the pelvic ultrasound was pretty rough, kept trying to imagine myself at Mt. Bachelor in the poster tacked to the ceiling above me.  So happy when it was over and I could pee.  Whew…

Then on to the mammogram… this time it didn’t hurt nearly as much.  Was it the different technique in the person operating the machine?  Not sure… Anyway, she took a photo of my right breast, took it to the radiologist, who ordered another view.  She took that one, took it to him.  He wanted yet another.  By this time, I figure my breast will be glowing in the dark for the next month…

The radiologist examined the third picture and said I was all clear.  They had been unable to produce the same “suspicious mass” no matter what they did…  so it must have been one of those things that happens on a mammogram sometime. Cool with me!

So I came home and collapsed on the couch, sleeping through the local and national news… Ric got home and I could tell he had been more worried than he had let on (as had I), so we spent the evening snuggled with our pups in front of the big tv, our favorite place lately.

3.  Work

Getting back in the groove more as I go into the office more days a week now, prepping for returning to full time the week of April 21.  I get a lot of work done at home, but definitely don’t feel as connected to the people I work with, which is not a good thing.

The best news is that I walked to work one day, and biked to work another day.  Nearly  froze my ass off in the morning stretch of the bike ride, but the return trip was under a gloriously sunny sky.  Replenishing my vitamin D stores.  But holy carp, did my butt and entire body hurt!!  

4. Life:

Highlight of the past week was going to the Bruce Springsteen concert last Friday night… So love seeing someone my age still rockin the night away!  He’s the boss and always will be.  And his new music is wonderful… at least as good as the older stuff I love so much.  That’s a photo from my iphone above.

The best part was that all three of us got to sit together.  Usually, one person gets to sit next to Blaine in the wheelchair section, while the third person has to sit elsewhere.  Somehow, someway Ric arranged to get three tickets together.  It was so much fun for all of us to be together… And I just couldn’t sit still during Born to Run and Dancing in the Dark…

Feeling increasingly calmer, much less stressed.  Loving my hubby and son and pups.  Need to allow myself to be here now, not worry so much about tomorrow.