Musable

I spent the day today Getting Things Done. This is an important and necessary kind of day, especially after being reduced to virtually nothing productive for three days in a row.

First up, the ENT who did my surgery. It’s amazing to think about it now, but this July will be the fourth year out from my surgery. I still do not have full mobility in my left arm and neck (and probably never will), the scars and lack of muscle on that side are quite clear even from a cursory glance (and always will be), and my mouth and tongue are still very sensistive to things like spicy food (whether that will change seems to depend on who I ask).  At first, I was seeing him once a month. That went to every other month, then to every four months, and after today’s visit is now at a six month spread. That’s progress! Everything looks fine, no lumps or anything else that can be seen or felt either in my mouth or in my neck.  It’s probably about time for another PET scan over with the oncology folks, since it’s been a bit since the last one.

Next stop: the accountant, to drop off the various papers and the backup file from our accounting software so they can get my taxes going. The past four years have all been extension years because of the various things that have been going on, from buying out the business partner to dealing with the medical issues. This year, though, we’re aiming for no extension. Corporate taxes are due on March 15, and I’d like to be signing off at that time to take this off the to-do list.

From there, it was off to the NOC. Here’s a tip: if you do not know how to check the amount of memory that is in your server, it’s probably not a wise idea to request that the memory be “increased to 2 gigs” unless you are absolutely sure that it doesn’t already have two gigs of memory - or, in this case, already have three gigs of memory. Because when I scrape the back of my hand and tear off a dime sized piece of skin when removing the cover from the server to have a look - as I was silly and violated the first rule of the tech world (”Never trust what the user says.”) - I’ll be cursing you up and down as I head for the first aid kit.

Finally, off to the grocery store to pick up a couple of things and my antibiotic prescription (from the dentist for the root canals, since the mouth is a festering pit of bacteria). And home once more, to finally have something to eat and get back to work. I was feeling better Thursday, but today I really did feel back to myself.

And this final item will come as a surprise to some people: I had no coffee at all from Monday afternoon to Friday morning, due to the gastro problems. My own personal detox, I suppose, although I imagine there are better ways to go about it. I’ve found that the antibiotics are not making coffee drinking a pleasant experience anyway, as they are reacting badly with one another and giving me heartburn.

Another root canal. One of the rather unfortunate side effects of having your head blasted with radiation, I’m afraid. By the time I’m finished, I’ll probably have an entire mouth full of root canals and crowns. The procedures are quite painful, and not because of the root canals themselves (although those are painful while they’re being done): rather, the pain is in my jaw and the connective tissue in my mouth from having to open as widely as possible so they can work at the back of my mouth. They had someone training today, as well - how lucky was she to get to assist on my appointment? Two hours and fifteen minutes later, part one of the procedure was done. Canals found, drilled, filled. Next time we get to do the remainder of the buildup, and then the attempts begin to get an impression of a crown. On the plus side, the vicodin knocks the aftereffect pain down to manageable levels and after about three or four days, things are back to as normal as they can be.

This morning it was 18 degrees when I left the house, with ice all over the car. There are reasons I don’t live up north. This is one of them. I checked out the new pea sprouts, and they appear to have made it through - atleast, they were all standing, frozen - but the beans didn’t like the hard cold snap at all and I didn’t see a single sprout left. Luckily, I have a large bag of bean seed, since my uncle requested some, and we want to do a lot of canning of beans and peas this spring before the weather gets too hot and it’s time to yank them out. Tonight, with any luck, will be the final freeze of the season, and work can begin in earnest outside. The flats return to the great outdoors tomorrow and will stay there, basking in the glory and heat of the sunshine.

Several of the heirloom tomatoes have sprouted, but I can already see one that has snapped at the base of the stem. Since they’re inside, there is no real reason for that to happen, and I’m afraid that some of these varieties don’t want to work for me here. That’s fine: I’ll just replace them with somthing else. This weekend, it will be time to pull the original pea sets and take some photos of what’s going on out there in the garden. The brussels have little sprouts on their stems, and about time, at that. There should be some broccoli for harvest, and the garlics will be coming into the end of their season, ready for pulling and hanging.

We are coming up on spring, and that means spring cleaning - of the cages at the NOC. I forced the boy to come along for the ride, and we pulled out a dozen old servers and old hard drives that need to be destroyed. My goal for the weekend: scavenge the servers for spare parts, replace the drives in a couple that are fine but need larger drives and more memory, and get the dead/replaced drives ready to go to that big bit bucket in the sky.

What a life. We still need to go through some of the cheesemaking projects we have planned. We did a round of mozzarella, which was quite delicious, and worth another round for our homemade pizzas. Next up, some simpler items, like cottage cheese (we made this in my AP Chemistry class, back in the day, and I recall only myself and a couple of others were willing to eat it) and ricotta. Then, some more ambitious plans, like our own cheddar, with a homemade cheese press. That’s going to be something, and yet another experiement to document for the blog here. I wouldn’t mind trying some parmesan, too. Eventually, our raw milk supplier will be able to provide some more milk, or we’ll just go get some elsewhere, because mom found an old fashioned butter churn that we’re anxious to try. Plus, that milk will be better for cheesemaking than the ultra-pasteurized stuff in most cases.

Gonna be a good year for all these sorts of things. I can feel it. And I don’t think that’s just the pain meds talking, either.

On (yet another) visit to the dentist today - another root canal, yay - I saw these signs:

From a church: “If I’m ok and your ok then why did Jesus die on the cross?”

Beyond what I see as the lack of logic behind the question, did you run out of apostrophes and misplace that other letter e in your collection? Maybe you should pass the plate at your next service.

From a swimming pool place:

“Summers on it’s way”

Four words.  Very simple. Is it so difficult to get it right?

By the way, if anyone happens to stumble across this blog looking for cancer-related information, especially for oral cancer, let me make this recommendation: find yourself a dentist who knows something about oncology as it relates to dental health. Make sure you get your dental work done BEFORE you go in for surgery or radiation/chemo. If you have wisdom teeth that need to come out, get them out - hell, even if they don’t need to come out, get them out. While you’re going through treatment, to avoid the rather hideous issues with trismus that I have since no one apaprently deemed it important enough to stress that this should be done, make sure you do some stretching of your mouth throughout, even though you aren’t likely to be eating or drinking much by mouth. It may be painful, especially when the burns start showing up on your face and neck and any movement hurts, but do it anyway: hop yourself up on the pain meds and do the stretching. It will be worth it after treatment when you’re able to fully open your mouth instead of having a very limited opening that makes eating diffcult and dental work (and you’ll need dental work, trust me: the lack of salivary function is hateful to oral health) a frustrating, time-consuming, and very painful event. If I had to do it over, I would have a) found my current dentist first, rather than getting a cursory review from my previous dentist who  deemed everything “ok” and left me with two impacted wisdom teeth, one of which is now starting to appear through the ripped skin at the back of my mouth and which will be incredibly tedious to address should it need any work, and b) done daily and frequent stretching exercises to keep my jaw muscles from contracting and the scar tissue from building up to the point where my opening is extremely limited at 18-20 millimeters. Know how limited that is? Put your thumb between your teeth, so the nail points either to the left or right, depending on which hand you’re using. That’s how far I can open my mouth. Don’t end up like this.

I know, it’s been awhile. But the summer months are filled top to bottom with work, both on the ranch and at the company.

A typical day begins at around 5:30. The dogs, all of whom sleep with me, start rustling around, and Newton - a creature of habit - has to go out. So, we all get up, I let the dogs out, check their food and water, check Gandalf’s food and water, grab some tea, and sit down to look over what’s going on: sort some helpdesk tickets, kill off spam, pull up the weather report, see if we have any servers inbound that will need to be set up, and so on.

Then, it’s outside to check on everything that’s growing out there: harvest whatever is ready, watch for bugs and damage that might indicate there are critters to deal with, pull weeds, see if any of the existing plants have given everything they have and need to be pulled, plan out the next rotation of seedlings, get everything watered and/or fertilized (seabird guano for the corn - very high in nitrogen).

Inside, it’s now about time for lunch and a review of what’s going on with the business again: most tickets, a bite to eat, some coffee, and a cooldown from outside. The NOC is a good place to be during the heat of the day if there’s something that needs to be done there. Otherwise, more work, then…

Back outside for more weed pulling, more watering for the things that really need it (cukes, watermelons in particular), making trellises for anything that needs it, planning for the things that will need support down the road, checking the flats to see what has popped up.

On days like today, I might have some bread dough going, which needs to be kneaded, risen, shaped, proofed, and then baked - that will bring me in and out during the day. At times, there’s a special request (cookies, my brother asks, as they head out to my aunt’s place). Usually, I’m also planning and making dinner at the tail end of the day as well. On any given day, there may also be a trip to the doctor or dentist in there somewhere. I’ve been visiting the dentist quite a bit, as oral cancer and the associated treatments are hellish on the teeth. That’s one of the reasons many oral cancer patients simply have their teeth pulled before they start treatment. The aftereffects are horrid, and when you consider that people like me can barely open their mouths afterwards, you can imagine having a dentist and an assistant trying to do anything inside that limited space. So far, I’ve had several root canals, replaced fillings, filled new cavities, already have a couple of crowns with a couple more on the way, and in general should probably just set up a cot at the dentist’s office to save time.

In the evening, more work: maintenance items, handling the occasional ticket, heading off to the NOC for setups if I didn’t get to them during the day. If mom happens to be gone, at dusk it’s also time to round up the chickens and make sure they’re in the coop, ready to bed down for the night.

My days ends somewhere between midnight and 3 AM, at which time it’s off for a nap. Then we start all over again a few hours later.

Most days, I’d say, are fairly normal, happy days, and no douchebags puncture things by being…well, douchebags. The worst are those who take zero responsibility for anything: like the ass who requested that we transfer a domain in. We told him it would have to be unlocked, and never received a followup from him that he’d unlocked it and it was ready to transfer. Fast forward a year: now he’s bitching at us because the domain is expired. Well, we tell him - nicely, I might add - you need to go renew it at the existing location because it was never transferred. He quotes our own ticket responses to us, for some reason, as if a) we don’t have access to them already or b) it says anything other than it says, and then follows up a couple of days later with a pompous directive that we are “hereby informed” that their account is terminated effective immediately, when a simple “please cancel” will do. The topper? We’re apparently nasty and have poor service because we didn’t read his mind, and we’re not to “grace” him with any further replies. No problem: into the filters you go, just to make sure that no mail ever is received from you (and sets off the autoack for the helpdesk) and that no mail ever goes out from here to you. But we’d like to thank you for demonstrating why techs everywhere wind up despising people.

I don’t recall people being total jackasses when I was younger, and I certainly don’t recall the sheer level of ducking responsibility that seems to invade just about every human being these days. When we screw up, at least we have the decency to say so, and then fix whatever it is. When it’s something as stupid as a domain that you didn’t bother to follow through on that you’re being idiotic about now, I’m going to have a hard time finding any sympathy and I’m certainly not shouldering your failure for you. I try not to rant about work on ye olde blog here, but it slips out from time to time. Apologies to my handful of readers.

As long as I’m ranting though, I have to make a comment about one of these Nutrisystem commercials that annoys me to no end. It’s the one with Jillian Barberie, the one wearing so much eye makeup she looks like a raccoon. She’s blathering on about the things she loves, like football. A football is tossed to her, and she catches it. “Football,” she says, tucking the ball under her arm. “How many girls could do that?

That little piece pisses me off. Every girl I know could catch a softly tossed football. A lot of them can catch one that’s being thrown at them while running a pattern and while being defended by the other team. This ties in with Nutrisystem’s pimping out of all those retired football players, I suppose, and is apparently supposed to appeal to some rundown housewife in Podunk, IA, who never played sports at all when she was younger, but damn, could they be more condescending about the implication that girls just can’t do that stuff?

Pictures of stuff coming, promise. Food, garden, chickens. For real.

Last year’s corn experiment was derailed by various things, including either a dog or a deer crashing through the plot. We’ll be redoing that plot again this year, but decided to also try a little experiment.

These frames were set and then seeded on April 20. The photo above is from May 4. So far, so good. These frames were placed in an area where I had planted watermelon and canteloupe last year. We didn’t get anything from those plantings, although there were several watermelons that showed up to get chewed by the ants. We left the fruits and the plants to die off in that area, because as everyone who reads this knows, the soil can use all the help it can get.

Given that, I expected to see some volunteer watermelons show up this year. What I did not expect was to count 41 of them between the frames, and two in the frame above - how they got there, I’ll never know. Most or all of these will need to be relocated, as we’ll need the space between the frames to walk. What we’ll do with all this watermelon, assuming any of it comes in, I don’t know, but I’m sure the people and the animals around here (including the chickens) will take care of a good portion of it.

I’ve also decided to plant part of the front of the property in corn. We’re going to till up a plot in the front and put in a variety called maple sweet. It’s also highly likely that we’ll be putting frames around the front of the property. This all occurred to me as I was cutting the grass at the road side of the property, and before I ran out of gas in the tractor along the fenceline. I don’t mind using the tractor to mow, but growing cool stuff to eat is much more fun and if we ever go the CSA route - something we’ve been discussing more seriously than “one day, we should…” - we’ll have areas already started to hold more goodies.

Going to be a busy season around here. I’m already thinking ahead to winter (greenhouse, wiring the barn for seeding racks, keeping the chickens warm, and so on) and next year (bees, hopefully). I’m also thinking about tomorrow, which will find me at the dentist having two crowns put in my face. No doubt I will not be as chipper as usual after that particular activity, although I hope to be in minor enough pain that I can single line trellis the sungold tomatoes, which are beginning to fruit and need a bit of support.

Life on Lazy Dog Ranch.

My cat is dying.

She’s been dying for awhile, of course, just as we all are at our own varying speeds.

Her time is simply coming to an end sooner than that same end is coming for the rest of us.

For now, she occasionally gets outside to sun her old bones, but mostly she sleeps. She eats a little here and there, drinks a bit from time to time, but not much and not a lot. She’s still affectionate, and her motor still runs harder and louder than you’d expect from such a small cat.

And she still has her buddies to keep her company until she’s finally ready to move on.

OK, so it isn’t -4F here like it was at Lambeau Sunday night. It’s still cold to someone like me. I don’t like the cold and never have, which made our living in the northern reaches of the country interesting when I was younger. Then, it was just an annoyance because I’m a summer kind of gal. These days it’s actually annoying and painful, because while I’ve never had much bodyfat, since the whole cancer dance, my bodyfat is even lower than it was. A nice problem to have, no?

No.

When the weather cools off and the days only go into the 50s with the nights somewhere in the 30s, my feet never seem to be warm. My hands are cold all the time, making for interesting typing on the computer, and while everyone else is fine in a sweatshirt to combat what to them is a chill, I have a shirt, a flannel shirt, and two pairs of socks on, with my heater going under my desk to try and warm my feet. Going outside on a day like today in particular is rather heinous, as it was also very windy out there. I know my little cat (the one with the wrap around her waist in the photos) feels the same way, since she herself has a tumor that can’t be removed as she’s too old to be put under and she’s dropped down to virtually no bodyfat as well. She spends her days either in the window with the sunlight concentrated on her small frame, or curled up, leaning right against the other heater near my desk.

But I know that soon enough, my kind of temperatures will return, the sun will be out instead of taking the day off as it has this past week, and we’ll have colorful things growing out in the garden and yard. I may still get chilled when I come back in since everyone else likes the inside temp at around 72 (too chilly for me), but at least outside, my bones will be warm again. I can’t wait for summer.

That is a partial quote from this article. The full quote:

“We know who gets head and neck cancer — people who smoke and drink a lot and tend to be at an older age. The problem is that it’s sometimes difficult to diagnose until it’s at its late stages and difficult to treat and cure,” researcher Dr. Joseph Califano of the Johns Hopkins department of head and neck surgery said in a phone interview.”

I’d say it’s even more difficult to diagnose in people who don’t actually smoke, don’t drink a lot, and who are not of an older age. I’m all for things like this where a large number of people who potentially be aided, and all for making known the primary causes of this sort of cancer. But it also pisses me off a little bit: this is exactly the reason the first question I get from people is “Are you a smoker?” and the reason some of them look at me as if they don’t believe me when I tell them I am not and never was.

Once again, here we are at the end of one year and the beginning of another. Once again, it will be time for people to make a list of resolutions the cynic in me says they will never keep. Ironically, although I have never really been prone to making such lists, I had started one the other day, and one of the items on that list was to be less cynical about people and their motives. Another is to be calmer in the face of abject stupidity - I suspect that these two actually go hand in hand. Years ago - and this is many years, since it was two exes ago - I had a fairly profound interest in Zen Buddhism. Not to the extent that I am a particularly spiritual person. I am not. I am also not a religious person, much to the dismay of my sister, who is, and who finally settled on Catholicism as her religion of choice. Most of my interest in this is for the human factor, and to me it’s a lot like any other stress-reducing pursuit. As I was reviewing the past couple of years and all the assorted activities that have occurred, I told myself it would be worth my while to take up that interest again, and so I have. I expect this will help immensely in dealing with the people we have to deal with every day, and also help with the anxiety that every day brings as a result of that one singular day when the biopsy came back positive and the snowball that developed from there.

I also told myself that getting back out in the yard and working around the property will help, both physically and mentally. Getting the greenhouse built - what, you didn’t know that was planned? - will enable some experimentation with growing things out of season, inasmuch as anything really is out of season down here. This is Florida, after all. Plus, I’ve decided to take up another hobby: soap and candle making. Not very complicated (or, rather, only as complicated as you make it), relaxing, and in the end, a useful product, all of which satisfies both the left and right brain requirements. Who knows, that might be another side to the business here as well, but we’ll need a snappy name for it. My lack of sleep combined with one side of that (the soapmaking) may bring about echoes of something else entirely, but I think leaving out the underground fighting and general mayhem won’t be a real issue to overcome.

With all of that, plus two additional brands to finally launch, 2008 should be very active indeed. Here’s hoping it will also be happy, prosperous, safe, and healthy for everyone.

“Where are yooooouuuuuu?” asks one of my loyal, even if slightly deranged, handful of readers.

Well.

I’ve been busy with work-related stuff, trying to get some things done for the end of the year. I’ve also been dealing with a couple of the absolutely, without a doubt, unquestionably dumbest, rudest people I have ever had the misfortune of encountering. Let’s face it, if you call me by something other than my own name, when my name is in the dozens of ticket responses you’ve received, including the very one you’re quoting, then you are indeed a rude jackass. If you also can’t read plain English and suggest that we’re lying about something, you’re just ratcheting down our already low opinion of you. By the way: if your domain expires, and you don’t notice the fact that it doesn’t go anywhere for three entire months, don’t whine to us about how important it was to you, and that you were “busy” getting married and working. I’ve been dealing with cancer-related crap for over two years now, and I’m guessing that my employees, the state, and the feds wouldn’t accept that as an excuse if I neglected to pay them or file paperwork because I was “busy”.

In any case, I finally unloaded the camera the other day, and was shocked to discover about 500 pictures on the thing. That’s a lot of review and selective editing to be done. First, though, the goal is to complete the rollout of our gift to our clients before Santa shoves his butt down the chimney (what? no chimney?) so I can move on to other things. And since it’s just me on the job today - everyone else is at the football game or off having other fun - and since it’s quiet, I’m hoping to use today to bang out quite a number of things on my todo list, if only to see if there’s any hope of shrinking that before the new year rolls around.

Hope everyone is well and enjoying their holiday. Be safe, be well, be happy.