Brain Dump

Hi random reader! Since it's been ages since my last post, this is a brain dump to get me kinda-sorta caught up.

• Dad just finished round 6 or so of his chemotherapy and he's doing swimmingly. The tumor has decreased dramatically, and with ongoing drug tweaking, he's doing much better. Getting off the steroids has been challenging, so he still looks puffy. He's grumpy about doing his PT exercises, so it takes some hounding to get him to do them.
  
• Mom still continues to be a champ through all Dad's treatments. It's awesome indeed how she's risen to the challenge.
• Susie has a full-time job - or rather jobs! She landed two part time jobs with the Durham Public Schools doing ESL teaching - one at a high-school, one elementary. Other than the fact that I never really see her when she's not sleeping or planning for classes, it's great to have a gainfully employed wife.
  
• Bonnie just start 6th grade. Major eeep! with that one. She loves it and is doing great so far. She's such a great kid.
  
• I signed up to run the Disney Marathon in 2008 with Team In Training, the fundraising arm of the Leukemia and Lymphoma society. The $3,500 fundrasing goal is a little daunting, but I'm working on it! Please contribute!!
• Relatedly, it's great to be back training again, this time in an organized program with group support and organized runs with folks at my training level. Hopefully when I get done, I'll be able to do the Godiva Saturday morning runs without being rock-solid DFL.
  
• Susie's bailed on ILP, entirely because the new job is consuming her every waking moment. I certainly can't say I'm disappointed about that one.
• I'm in the midst of a few days off to finish some home projects. The Green room storage is taking forever to finish, probably because a) I'm designing details as I go, and b) it's just a *little* over-engineered.
  
• I found the long-lost gasket for the moped carburetor. Hopefully that'll stop the leak and get it ridable again.
• I continue to not have as much time as I want to spend on packtopia. Sandi has taken the project and run with it, and we recently re-jigged ownership percentages. I have mixed feelings about how this has gone and where the project is now. Live and learn.
• My boss is leaving for greener pastures. He's one of the reasons I was excited to take the job I have - to learn from him. That leave is as a group without an ACIO for a while. I'm just worried that they're going to wait until he leaves and break us up and rearrange us. That'd suck. Time will tell on this one. Meanwhile, I'm working my butt off to rebuild relations with all our key customers that have languished.
• With no thanks to the deer that live near us, I got 8 tomatoes off our 5 plants this year. The deer were far worse this year than ever before. I'm wondering if the drought has them looking harder for food now? At any rate, I wish they'd stay the heck out of my garden.
• My brother and his family moved to Raleigh over the Summer. It's great having them closer.
• Susie had a kick-butt trip to El Salvador this Summer as a church mission trip building houses for Habitat for Humanity.
  

More to follow, including a longer post on Team In Training and what's going on with that. It's nice to be back!

Chemo Day 1

Email from Mom:

1 bottle down, 4 to go

Today is day 1 of Temodar chemotherapy for Dad.

Technorati tags: brain tumor

More Tumor Stories

When I bailed and posted the last post, I wasn't nearly where I wanted to be in the story. I'm working to get the rest out here, in fits and spurts, as soon as I can. I want to get these stories out of my head before I forget them.

When we last left off, Dad was in the hospital bed at New Hanover Medical in Wilmington, being not the person who I've always known him to be. First, a little about how I came to be there: From the Tuesday fall, to the frantic message at work (Your Mom called, and said your Dad has fallen and she can't get him up. She's waiting for the ambulance now.) I bailed on work (with their support: Go, take care of your family. Things are fine here.) scrounged a car from buddy and coworker Sheri (thanks for the Jeep!) and headed towards Wilmington. After what seemed like an eternity (why is it so difficult to get a doctor by to talk to you in the hospital?) one of the New Hanover neurosurgeons stopped by to talk to us. It might have been my otherwise frantic frame of mind at the moment, but I was completely turned off by his noncommittal attitude about the plan of care for my Dad. I convinced Mom and Wayne that getting Dad to Duke was the way to go, and that I knew who to talk to to keep things moving. Around then, when I was the most like a chicken with his head cut off, I talked to Becky Kitzmiller, one of my best nursing buddies at Duke. It probably would have been Iain, but he was on Spring Break vacation with his family, and was challenging to get in touch with. Becky was my first touch point of sanity. She talked to me about tumors and typical plans of care and what to expect from nursing and MD staff, and how to make sure things went as smoothly and quickly as possible. Mostly it was useful to have a medically smart friend to talk to.

Other folks I'm grateful to:

• Lovely wife Susie, for supporting me through this and asking really good questions.
• Brother Wayne for being a killer partner in supporting Mom and making things happen.
• Iain (again) for giving me the freedom to be gone from work and take care of family.
• My Dev team for keeping things running smoothly.
• The nursing team at New Hanover Regional Medical. They rocked.

Technorati tags: brain tumor, family

Not the Same Person

My Dad isn't the same person he was 2 and a half weeks ago. Two and a half weeks ago he was the same person who raised me, albeit older, had just returned from a cruise celebrating (a year late) his 50th wedding anniversary (go Mom & Dad!), putzing around their new house and finishing up all those tiny little projects that never seem to go away. Sometime the weekend of 2/24, he seemed a little confused, and when Mom asked him who his kids were, he said Wayne (ding! one point for Dad!) and Ray (bzzzt! try again!). Off to the doctors, where x-rays and various other forms of electromagnetic radiation were beamed through his body, left us with the diagnosis that he'd had a stroke. A stroke doesn't seem *so* bad, right? It happens, it's over, and you recover from where the stroke left you. Well, it didn't stop. He kept declining, getting more and more confused, and started showing physical impariments (foot dragging, eye drooping, etc.) and the diagnosis was official changed from stroke to brain tumor last Friday. At first I thought this was a good thing - I mean they can cure brain tumors... right? Now I'm not nearly so sure. On the ct/mri's it's progressed from 2 to about 4cm in two weeks. His decline has continued until he couldn't stand up anymore, and was admitted to New Hanover Hospital yesterday.

I am a Marathoner

After discovering sometime in August, 2006 that the 2007 Disney Marathon was ON my 40th birthday, I had to register. I mean, how could I not?

I started training, building slowly, as I wasn't doing any running beyond hashing. Over the fall, I ran a couple times during the week, and did long runs pretty regularly on weekends. Hashing fell by the wayside as I got way too paranoid about hurting myself in some foolish, ankle-twisting way. I ended up doing a modified version of the Jeff Galloway program I found online. Another Galloway idea that I embraced was the run/walk intervals. It made the distances a lot more possible than they would have been for me, doing them at a 2-minute run / 1-minute walk pace. My longest training run before the marathon was 18 miles, and it was about a month before the big race.

We flew to Disney World for the big weekend, and due to a foolish bit of procrastination on my part, ended up having to stay off Disney property. (Dearest Susie and her HotWire prowess to the rescue!) We did a couple of light park days, because we were at Disney World! I mean, how could I not have. :-) We covered the new rides since last time: Mission Space, Soarin', the Everest coaster, and a bunch of the old favorites. I miss going as frequently as I used to.

My buddy Jan and her husband Shane and their son came over from Largo to help watch Bon and cheer us on. They saved our bacon, and without them we wouldn't have been able to bring Bon along.

Okay, more on the actual race, including pictures, in the next post.

Why Don't We Do It In Our Sleeves? - Google Video

Happy New Year, gentle reader!!!

It's been MONTHS since I've posted, and the first thing I'm going to post is this:
Why Don't We Do It In Our Sleeves? - Google Video
- a public service annoucement.

Enjoy!
-Bill

On my way to Portland Again!

I'm lucky enough to get to come to Portland, Oregon for OSCON again this year. Last year's was a blast, and I'm looking forward to blogging both the geeky side (at my newish professional blog) and the adventurous, fun side here.

I'm trying to get a visit in with Van's Aircraft (I *SO* want an RV-10). I've got a hash to go to Monday night, if I can get a ride to/from it. I've got a car for a whole day so I can go explore (although I've been forbidden to go to (link) Bagby on my own). I sent a resume off to a hiring firm in Portland looking for a development team manager with Ruby on Rails experience. In short, there lots of non-OSCON related fun to be had!!

-Bill

Portland

Tilly and the Wall!

Hello, gentle reader. It's time for another in my very infrequent series of concert reports!!

Last night at Cat's Cradle I saw one of the best shows I've seen in a long time. Headliner band was Tilly and the Wall, and they were the biggest, happiest musical surprise I've had in a while. They've got great girl harmonies (from Neely and Kiana) like the Donna's, only more upbeat. They've got a tap-dance precussionists (Jamie) who must be seen (and heard) to be believed. The guitarist (Derek) added in a different vocal range (his solo vocals sound notably like Coner Oberst of Bright Eyes) and great guitar work. And the keyboard guy (Nick) played well and, despite his tendency to always stay out of the limelight, actually spoke on the mic long enough last night to get a beer. Good man. The start of their set was plagued with microphone and patch problems - I think they strung 3 new microphones and 4 new cables during the first 5 songs of their set. Kudos to Dan (their sound / tech guy) for handling it all so well. I won't do the set detail here, partly because I didn't know any of their songs well enough to id them during the show, but suffice to say that the place was pretty well packed with a happy crowd that was singing and dancing along and more thana few knew the words to all the songs. Great band. Go see them if you get the chance.

The mid-liner band in the show was DeVotchKa who played a high-energy set of quirky, international-inspired music. It's hard not to get at least a little cranked listening to their stuff, and they have the hottest sousaphone player I've ever seen. Their music is definately worth a listen. First opening band was David Dondero. I only caught the last few songs of his set, but he had good guitar talents and an expressive voice. His songs seemed a little gloomy and down, and I was a little disappointed when after he offered to play one more song, he picked up his stuff and left the stage.

Tags: music, Tilly and the Wall

Rebuilt a Carburetor

I have a 1995 Tomos Targa moped (like the one at the left, only mine is white with burgundy bits) that Kris bought me many years ago. I drove it work regularly for a while, then after I moved further away from work I parked it in the garden shed and have ignored it for more than a few years.

With gas prices hovering around $3 a gallon I got motivated to find a more economical way to get to work, so (with the prompting from Susie) it was time to revive the moped. I dug it out of the shed, washed the grime off, and started figuring out the mechanical problems.

I had to destroy the gas cap lock to get it off. It, and the inside top of the tank was pretty badly rusted. The 5 year old gas was the color of Coke. The carb was in as bad a shape as the tank. What gas was there had dried up over time and gummed up the works pretty severely. After a few hours of carb cleaner, lacquer thinner, acetone and elbow grease the carb is all clean and clear.

This is sort of a first - I've never redone a carburetor before and, despite me being paranoid about permanently breaking things, it went surprisingly well. Of course I don't know if it runs yet - time will tell after I get all the other stuff going - but I took on something that I had doubts about doing and did a pretty decent job at doing it.

Next projects on the moped are to acid etch the tank rust, and free up the reverse-kick starter. The gearbox oil is probably going to need changing too. This all wouldn't have been necessary if I'd either drained all the gas out before I stored is for such a long time or if I'd just start it and run it every few months.

-Bill

On being Baptist

I'm a self-proclaimed Christian-Deist (the Deist thing is a recent refinement from just "Christian" and I'm still grappling with what this means.). This being the case, it's been tough finding a church home that some part of didn't seem disconnected or awkward or just wrong. The music at this one would be great, but there'd be no freedom to think differently from the "right way"; this one had more freedom, but the people were aloof and there was no music program and, well the list goes on. I'd kind of accepted that I should find the best compromise of what I wanted and make the best of it. That said, it is with great surprise that I tell you that Susie and I just recently joined a Baptist church. After being ticked at the Southern Baptists (with their too-conservative ways and Jerry Fallwell and ) for so many years, I had written them off.

I was raised in a begnign, middle-class Baptist church, and generally, because of my parent's low level of involvement in the church, I never saw the operational side of Baptism. I went primarily to Sunday school, and did youth group stuff, but seldom went to actual Sunday services and had no clue about how the church was run. It was only in the last 10 years did I really start to get a handle on how Baptists differ from Methodists, Presbyterian and Catholics. Baptists seem unique in that they have a bottom-up governance system. That is, each church is entitled to establish their own beliefs. There are lots of conservative Baptist churches out there that adhere closely to the Southern Baptist guidelines. But not every Baptist church does. Thanks to Kris (my lovely ex-wife) and Jim, we found one that very happily doesn't.

Watts Street Baptist Church is that place. They've got a great community of folks who are very accepting, and open to discussions about (literally!) everything, even when your views don't necessarily match those of the majority. The music program rocks, with everything from great sacred music to spirituals to more contemporary pieces. The outreach opportunities range from intra-church to neighborhood, city, national and international. Ways to get involved are too numerous to list. Kids opportunity abound. The congregation is warm and accepting and made us feel instantly at home. It's gay and lesbian friendly in a way that I didn't think was possible for a Baptist church. Wednesday-night suppers are a great chance to eat and socialize with folks on a more casual basis that you typically see them on Sundays, with some great program times afterwards. Lifting a quote from their home page:

Watts Street Baptist Church is an inclusive ecumenical congregation uniting prayer, learning, and social justice in the context of a vibrant community.

That sums them up perfectly. It's great to be home.

(Coming soon, I'll cover the passionate, democratic process that was our first congrational meeting.)

-Bill

Tags: religion, Baptists

Family Oral History

On the tails of reading about Robert Scoble's family tragedy, I ran across this site:
Family Oral History Using Digital Tools. This is one of those things I've been meaning to do for forever, but Mother's Day and Robert's stories have prompted me into action on. I'll keep you all posted on the results of my efforts.

-Bill

Geek speech

I am a geek. This morning I turned that theme into a 6 minute 9 second icebreaker talk before my local Toastmasters club. Remarkably enough, I think I did a pretty good job with it. Of course, I was jittery and nervous as it was my first speech, and of course I talked WAY too fast. But feedback was positive, and since I'm my own worse critic by far, I think it went alright.