Category Archives: Personal posts

If you could only see

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While on my way to Coolidge today I was flipping through the radio stations looking for one that didn’t have a commercial on. That is usually a fruitless effort as there seems to be some sort of FCC rule that they all go on commercial break at the same time, that or the stations do it on purpose since you are less likely to switch the station if they are all on commercial break. I got no idea.

Imagine my surprise to find that there was actually a song playing on Mix 96.9 the best mix of the ’80’s, ’90’s and today. It happened to be the Whitesnake song Here I Go Again, which I was a huge fan of back in the day. I cranked the radio up to 28 (that is not an exaggeration. For some reason these new-fangled stereos don’t think 10 is a high enough number), which is about as far as I can get it without it turning into a horrible, crackling cacophony.

I only caught the last minute or so of the song; just long enough to do some of the worst karaoke you would ever care to hear, but thankfully won’t have to. While the radio went to commercial I found myself thinking of the time I was in when that song was popular. I was thinking about those awkward days of High School, trying to fit in with the “cool kids”, but still too young to realize that the “cool kids” were really just doing their best to fit in as well.

I thought about all of those times when I was really in love, for sure this time, only to be let down a week later when some guy with a cooler car came along. Here I Go Again would be forever in my tape deck, “’cause I know what it means to walk along this lonely street of dreams.” It was usually replaced fairly quickly with Is This Love?, since the average lifespan of any relationship or lack thereof seem to be inexplicably linked.

I suppose I should be thankful that my memory (everyone’s?) has a way sugar-coating a lot of the time I spent being on the wrong end of a relationship. Well that’s not true, I still remember it with crystal clarity but time has faded the emotion of it. I can now listen to all of those old songs and think of nothing but happy memories, well mostly anyway. I still have a song that runs through my head on occasion that makes me sad; it’s more just a melody with the only line being “Your greatest legacy is the song that I can’t write”. A song that I have tried, many times, to write in memory of my father, but can’t complete, probably never will.

When the radio finally came out of commercial break I was instantly torn from that time in my life to a time much more recent.

After my parents divorced I made a decision that I wasn’t going to get married, so when I began living with my wife girlfriend back in 1997 (I am pretty sure on that) I didn’t think much about it. It’s not that I didn’t love her, didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with her, more that I just didn’t think I needed a piece of paper to prove my love for her. I guess it was about more than the piece of paper though. We did get married of course, and still are. Our fifth wedding anniversary is coming up later this month.

So, as I was listening to, and singing along with, Tonic’s song If You Could Only See, I was taken back to that time. A time that is also pretty far back, but a time that still has a lot of emotion. All good emotion.

The thing about that song is that I really don’t know what exactly it was intended to mean. I know what it means to me, what I have made it mean to me, but the actual lyrics don’t really mesh with what it has become to me. To me it is an anthem singing the praise of my love for my wife, that is all that really matters I suppose.

The song was still in my head as I came into the house today, and as such I did a little thing that I do from time to time. It is a silly little thing that I do, I just look in my wallet to make sure that it is still there. She gave it to me so many years ago, you see, long before we got married. Being the sap that I am I have kept it in my wallet ever since. So from time to time, though usually when I am feeling down, I take it out and look at it, it is amazing how much better it can make me feel. While it is nothing of any value, it is the most precious thing that she has given me.

It has become a bit tattered over the years (something that the scan of it doesn’t really show), but it still means as much to me as it did the day she gave it to me. I am not sure if she knew that it would become so important to me, but I suppose we all put different sentimental values on all the things around us. To me this is everything.

Usually I look at it, then the song comes to mind. Today I heard the song and the card came to mind. But that was good, it has been far too long since I have taken it out just to look at it. Far too long since I have had the line “If you could only see how blue her eyes can be when she says she loves me” stuck in my head.

Really, how often can you look at something so simple and feel like the luckiest man on earth?

“If you could only see the way she loves me, Then maybe you would understand”.

Daddy needs a new shirt

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Sometimes I just remember things. Often they are good things, sometimes they are bad things, sometimes they are funny things. No matter what kind of thing it is that I happen to remember, I generally remember it fondly, regardless of whether it seemed so at the time. Such seems to be the case with life. Every memory has played some role in making me who I am today, so I guess I should just embrace them. And share them with you.

The year was 1987. I was in the seventh grade. I was nerdy even by seventh grade standards. I had to do something to try to pull the focus away from my nerdiness, and sports was what I chose. I had played football throughout the sixth grade, and went on to play again in the seventh grade, but I had never wrestled or played basketball, both of which I gave a try in the seventh grade.

Wrestling is one sport that I really don’t think I was cut out for. While I was pretty good at faking the theatrical moves I had seen on Friday night wrestling, it turns out that I really sucked at actual wrestling. When I joined the team I was automatically the best in my weight class, since I was the only one in my weight class, that meant that I would have to represent the school in that weight class at every event ( I never actually made it to a single meet ). It was only a week or so into practice that I simply gave up on the sport. I had to spar with a guy that was in the weight class below me, since there was no one else in my class, and he pinned me in less than five seconds. He wasn’t even the best in his weight class either. Knowing that I would have to face the best guy in the weight class at every meet pretty much sealed it for me, I was not a wrestler. I quit the team, and I am not ashamed of it, relieved is more accurate.

I didn’t take to basketball very well either, but I didn’t give up. When I started playing the only thing I knew about the game was that you had to make the ball go through the hoop. I didn’t know the rules about traveling, key violations, I didn’t know anything, but I kept at it. I never got good at though.

Our coach had a really cruel thing that he did at the end of each practice; He would make us run lines (run to quarter court and touch the line, then run back to the baseline, then to half court, then to the baseline, then to three quarter court, then to baseline, then to opposite baseline and back to baseline) then call a player’s name. That player had to shoot a free throw. If he made the free throw we were done running lines, if he missed we did another set. I dreaded the times when he would call my name.

Some of the guys on the team were really good at shooting free throws; Paul Lakin, Chris Schofield, Brandon (can’t remember his last name), and a couple of guys whose faces I remember but their names are long forgotten. They could probably make it seventy percent of the time or better, which was really pretty good considering we were all only twelve or thirteen. When they would get the call it usually meant that we wouldn’t have to run many lines. When my name came up, not so much.

I was far and away the worst shot on the team, not just for free throws either, I just outright sucked at the game. I usually knew when it was going to be my name called, as the coach would call me only if we had twenty minutes or so of practice time left, since he knew I would probably never make it. Indeed, there were a couple of times where he had to call on someone else after we had run a dozen or so sets of lines since I had yet to make it and the parents were already showing up to pick up their kids. I was just that bad a shot.

In the entire season (which was capped by a first round tournament loss; A loss where the coach never substituted for the starting five guys, leaving the other six or eight of us on the bench the entire game. That is horrible coaching at a level when the game is more for fun than competition) I actually only made one basket. I was probably only in each game for two minutes or so anyway, even then it was just long enough to let another guy get a drink or something. When I was in one of the games I happened to be standing near the basket when a guy with the ball approached me. I stripped the ball from him and took off down the court. I was so concerned with not making an ass of myself that I was concentrating more on the floor and the ball than what was in front of me, I sure didn’t want to doink it out of bounds off of my own foot. I only looked up when my entire team, the crowd, the majority of the other team -hell the entire world, really- screamed “shoot it”. I looked up to see the backboard directly above and I was still moving forward, soon to be out of bounds. I threw that sucker up into the air with all the force my wimpy little arms could muster. Then I started heading for the bench.

It was almost surreal the cheer that I heard when the ball actually went in. I don’t know if there really was a cheer or if I imagined it, either way it doesn’t really matter. I had finally made a basket, my only one ever in competitive basketball. The coach motioned for me to go back on defense, something he had never really done, made a motion towards me that is. I fell back on defense right next to our cheerleading squad, where Angie Ross gave me a huge thumbs up (she was a girl who it seems had a bit of a crush on me at the time). With a head about the size Jupiter I took my position next to the key; where I was promptly burned by a guy about 1/3 my size in a moment that he probably remembers as fondly as I remember my only basket. Yes, I really sucked at basketball… Good times.

Our basketball team had some pretty ugly uniforms. It’s not that they didn’t match, more that they matched at some point but through years of neglect had managed to make it so they covered every conceivable hue of the color green. Our other jerseys were white with green lettering, but didn’t have the same numbers on them, since many had been lost over the years. The coach wanted us to have something that matched when we went onto the court, and had worked out a deal with a t-shirt shop called “The Put-on”, where we would each get a t-shirt with the team logo on the front and our first initial and last name on the back. The price for these beauties was $5.

Without going into a lot of detail here, I will just say that we didn’t have the $5 to spend on such things as basketball t-shirts when we were more concerned with making sure we had food and other such necessities. My mother assured me that she could come up with the money but I really didn’t want to burden her with that, especially since she had to buy me a special pair of shoes to play with (we played on the High School court, had to have non-marking soles and couldn’t be street shoes). I really wanted to get that shirt myself.

By some coincidence there was a fundraiser going on at the school where you had to get people to give you money for some annoying little fuzzy balls (no, seriously. They all had little eye-balls, some were dressed up with hats or glasses and stuff. They were roughly the size of a quarter, only spherical). I got people to shell out money for the little fuzzy balls, but not nearly as much as the other kids (since their parents would always take a few to start them off). Thankfully I had all that I needed to be a part of the assembly contest regarding the little fuzzy fuckers.

(Honestly my memory of exactly how that worked is a bit fuzzy. It might have been that we got the little fuzzy balls for so much money in donations, as I remember a lot of kids were collecting them. I know that I never had any, or maybe I did have some but had to trade them in to participate in the contest. I don’t know, it really is fuzzy. I know that it involved donations and fuzzy balls, and it all ended with the contest during the assembly).

The contest, of course, was all about basketball. The way the contest worked was that for each x number of dollars you raised you got one shot. Shoot a lay-in and you win $1 in cold, hard cash. Free throw for $5, top of the key was 10, three-point line was 15, that circle just outside of half court was 20 and half court was 50. I remember only two shots from the whole contest, one of them was because a guy actually hit the half court shot and the crowd went apeshit. The other one was my own.

I stood there at the free throw line, staring at the $5 bill laying on the ground in front of me (no shit, they actually had the money laying on the court and you got to pick it up if you made the shot). I had seen people bounce the ball a couple of times before taking the shot so that is what I did. I wasn’t really concentrating much on the shot, I was wondering if I would be able to grab the money and make it to the door without being caught. Better judgment eventually won out. I looked at the basket for a few seconds wondering why it was so hard to put the damn ball into it. Then, without an ounce of preparation, I hucked the ball at the basket (hucked isn’t really the word for it, but I can’t find a verb that accurately describes the motion that I used to propel the ball so ‘huck’ will have to do).

Much to my amazement, as well as the rest of the entire student body, the ball actually went in. I stood there dazed for a minute, probably literally, then grabbed the money and ran… Directly to the coach, who was sitting in the front row of the bleachers. I gave him that $5 with a sense of accomplishment that I don’t remember ever having felt before. I actually won something!

When the t-shirts arrived I was the happiest kid on earth, well, until I looked at the back and saw that they had mistakenly put “B. Burgess” on it. The coach covered the little bar to make it look like a ‘D’, but the damage was already done. Even though I got a replacement shirt within a week, everyone on the team called me Bonnie for the remainder of the season. But you know what? I really didn’t care. They all bought their shirts, I had to win mine.

Who knew?

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I am 31 years old, less than six months from 32. It turns out that while I have never worn glasses I may have needed them for a lot of those 31 years.

I have never had an actual eye exam, the closest I ever have had is one of those things they do in grade school where you have to tell them which way the “E” is pointing on the chart. I haven’t even had one of those since I was in the seventh grade, and I cheated on that one to make sure I wouldn’t have to get glasses. Yes, I cheated on an eye exam, how sad is that.

It was really their fault that I cheated on the exam though. They lined all of the kids up against the wall right next to the chart, then had us go up to the line and read off the symbols one by one. Even though I was the third or fourth kid to go I already had the chart memorized. I was therefore able to skate right through the test without really even looking at the chart. I can’t honestly say whether or not I was able to make out the symbols since I knew what order they were in; When you know that letter is an “E” your eyes see an “E”.

Even the charts that they have hanging in the optometrists office are kind of a scam. Tell me if this looks familiar:
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

E 
 
 
 
 
 

F P 
 
  
  

T O Z  
  
  

L P E D  
 
  

P E C F D 
    

E D F C Z P 
    

F E L O P Z D 
  

(You will have to alter the distance you stand from your monitor for this to work for personal eye exam purposes.) Yes, the chart is the same in every office. No, I didn’t know it all from memory, I had to look up the last two lines on google. Granted they don’t use this as the basis for what kind of vision correction you require, but they do use it as a general guide to how poor your vision is. Also they have numerous charts that they show you when you are actually getting an eye exam.

I had an eye exam last Monday for the first time ever. So how poor was my vision? I was only able to make it through the first five lines, the ones that I have memorized, mind you. Then Mr. Doctor Dude put that big, fancy machine on my head and, wow, holy bejeezes, I could see! And that was him just guessing where the little machine needed to be, twenty minutes of tweaking and I was able to read the fine print on lawyers commercials from thirty yards (just kidding, NO ONE has vision that good).

I kind of figured that I needed glasses, that is why I went to a local guy where I knew they would take a few days to arrive: I didn’t want to walk in with (what I thought was) normal vision only to walk out with glasses. I wanted to have a bit of time to get used to the idea of it. As the week passed I found myself thinking that maybe my eyes were just tired or blurry when I had the exam, my eyes were just fine. Until I actually tried the glasses on. Yep, that was when I knew that I really needed the damn things. Who knew?

I suppose it is sort of like an epiphany to everyone when they finally get vision correction: Trees have outlines, they don’t just blur into the sky; The road should be a road all the way to the horizon, not just an increasingly blurry black stripe; It is possible to read the license plate of the car in front of you from a couple of car lengths back; It is really amazing all the little things that I am noticing while sporting these marvelous glasses.

I really wonder though if my vision has been getting worse at such a slow pace that I never noticed it, or if I have always had bad vision and never knew it. I can’t remember ever wanting to look at things for the sake of seeing what they looked like. I am sure that I did it as a child, but did I actually see the detail? I really don’t know.

How I wish I would have done this years ago.

The ultimate weight loss program?

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It has been three full weeks since I have drank a beer. I have found that even the smell of it is a bit repulsive, but I guess it always has been, I know that I hated the taste of it the first time I tried it. It took a lot of drinking it to get to the point where I found it drinkable, even longer to get to the point where I became a bit of a snob about the taste of it, longer still to get to the point where I didn’t give a damn about the taste so long as it was beer. What a horrible existence that was.

The type of beer that I drank had 100 calories and 5 carbs per twelve ounce serving. I drank between twelve and eighteen of them a day. That means that if I ate nothing at all I was consuming between 1,200 and 1,800 calories a day, with between 60 and 90 carbs (I have never put much stock into carb counting as a factor in weight gain or loss though, I am merely putting it her for facts sake). Of course I did eat though, a stick of jerky when I got home for 360 calories, then usually chimichangas, usually three, for a total of 1,050 calories, plus I always topped them with a generous portion of grated cheese, I don’t know how many calories that added but I am sure it was a couple hundred at least. So I was on a 2,800 to 3,300 calorie a day diet. That is a lot of calories.

My diet for the last three weeks has been nearly exactly the same. I still have a beef jerky snack and still eat chimichangas. I no longer top the chimichangas with cheese, or maybe once a week I do. Also sometimes I have two of them and sometimes I have three, depending on how hungry I feel. Even at that my caloric intake has gone from the 2,800-3,300 range all the way down to the 1,000-1350 range. Yes, I have been taking in about one-third the calories I did previously for the last three weeks. It certainly shows.

I have lost 25 pounds in the past 21 days. When I quit drinking I weighed 195 pounds, now I am just under 170. This is the least I have weighed since I was 19 years old. My slimmest in twelve full years. That is pretty amazing. My pants and belt are far too big for me now, forcing me to punch additional holes in the belt to keep the pants up. The pants also bunch up when I tighten the belt, as they are at least two or three inches larger than my waistline. The ultimate weight loss plan indeed.

Unfortunately I don’t think that it is necessarily healthy for me to be losing weight so quickly. I can’t put my finger on why it would be bad for me, per se, but I do often begin to get quite light-headed towards the end of a long shift at work. I nearly passed out today, likely would have at least fallen down were it not for a handy bench to grab onto. I think I need to start eating a second meal. Not having breakfast or lunch sure leaves me feeling pretty drained by the time I have a jerky snack after work.

I hope I can get something worked out where I can continue to shed pounds without feeling so physically exhausted all the time. Perhaps a granola bar or a piece of fruit in the morning would do the trick.

Completely as an afterthought, I never liked to weigh myself when I was drinking. I know that it was because I knew that the number was just going up. I weighed myself once a month at best. Now I am weighing myself on a daily basis, mostly because I was waiting for/anticipating the day when the little dial stopped short of 170. Hell, if I was to wipe the dust off of the scale I might lose an additional pound.

Shedding demons

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I quit drinking recently. Something that I had tried and failed to do many times before. During the first couple of days of this attempt I wrote down some of my thoughts. Here they are.

Saturday Jan. 07

While I am sure that I have mentioned that I like to drink beer, I am pretty sure that I failed to mention to what extent that goes. I drink beer every day, and I am not capable of drinking only one or two; I continue drinking until the beer is gone or I pass out, whichever comes first. Most would probably say that this puts me into the category of being a serious alcoholic, which isn’t exactly true since I never go to the meetings with anonymous people. I do have quite a serious drinking problem though, and as is always the case I continually deny that fact.

I am sure there are checklist type quizzes I could take to tell me whether or not I am an alcoholic but I don’t need to. The fact that I try to justify my drinking by saying things like, “It has never caused me to miss work” is proof enough. While it is true that I have never missed work because of my drinking, that is about the only thing that I haven’t missed because of it. A few notable examples of what I have missed being things like, say, the last decade of my life, five years of marriage, numerous events that I should have attended with my wife, the list could go on forever. Alcohol is destroying my life and I know it, I have known it for a long time but have been powerless to do anything about it.

I don’t put much stock into the idea that alcoholism is a disease. If this is a disease it is one that I willingly subjected myself to, and one that it took many years to incubate into the out-of-control condition it has become. I used to be able to control the alcohol, now the alcohol controls me. It is rather a helpless feeling.

Quitting drinking is pretty easy in concept, all I have to do is not open that can of beer, not drink that can of beer, but I can’t do it. The alcohol calls to me, my body shakes and trembles awaiting the depressant qualities of the liquor. I think to myself “Perhaps if I have just one, just to calm my nerves, what could it hurt?”, the next thing I know I am completely drunk wondering where the day went. I tell myself that tomorrow will be the day that I don’t drink but when I wake up it is today, and today I end up drinking. In this sense tomorrow really never comes. A cycle that I can’t seem to break.

No more!

I would like to say that I had some great emergence of will power to help me try to quit, that would be a lie. I am not sure if I would ever have even tried to quit drinking for my own sake. Quitting would be very good for my health of course, I just don’t think I could have ever tried to wrestle the demon without some external motivation. Finding out how badly my drinking was hurting my wife was a pretty powerful motivator.

Overcoming a drug addiction is one of the most difficult things a person can ever try to do. I have tried many times to quit drinking and to quit smoking, all attempts have failed. I am not trying to fool myself into believing that this attempt will be any different, but I have taken a different approach. I am not telling myself that I will never drink again, instead I am telling myself that I will not drink today. If I can just make it through today then I will have the chance to make the decision again tomorrow, but when tomorrow comes it will be today, and I have already made the decision for today, right? It is actually a bit more difficult than that, but you get the gist of it.

It has been two days since I have had a beer. That might not seem very impressive but considering that is the longest I have gone without a beer in about a decade I am considering it a victory. I am really wishing I had one right now though, and I have some in the room next to me. Oddly I think that is making it easier for me to fight the desire. I know that the beer is available if the desire becomes overwhelming, which seems to keep the desire from becoming overwhelming. It is like I am tricking the part of my brain that needs the beer into not needing the beer since I have the beer if I need it -which doesn’t make a damn bit of sense, but it is my brain and I know how to trick it-.

Aside from the trembling (more so than usual) the other adverse effect from not drinking was exactly the one I thought I would have: sleeping. My eyes can be as heavy as bricks but my mind, being so used to the daily depressant, is still wide awake. I am sure that within a few days this will get easier, as my body gets used to not having the alcohol administered to it on a daily basis, but the last two nights have just been a lot of tossing and turning.

Sunday Jan. 8

Another sleepless night. I turned off the television at about a quarter after one in the morning then stared at the alarm clock for about three hours before deciding to go read a little bit. Got back into bed at about 4:30 and stared at the clock until I dozed off at about 5, only to be awakened by the barking of my neighbors dog a half an hour later. (totally as an aside. Don’t you just hate the first month after Christmas, lots of kids got puppies that they absolutely loved…For about two weeks. Now all you can hear at night is the sound of the puppies barking as they are locked outside and forgotten. A couple more weeks and the sound will die down as the dogs end up in local animal shelters. One should never give a child a live animal as a gift, it really is animal cruelty). Asleep again sometime shortly after six. Woke up again shortly after seven, this time for good. Once the sun starts to rise I find it nearly impossible to sleep.

I did a bit of research into this and found this website: http://alcoholism.about.com/cs/health/a/blacer030816.htm . It says exactly what I thought it would say, almost verbatim. I am only one of the many people who really began drinking (at least daily) as a sleep aid. Of course it led to dependency, how could it not? Over time it would take more and more to relax me to the point that I could fall asleep, until I was eventually passing out instead of sleeping. Now I am dealing with the fallout of being self-medicated for so long. One unfortunate thing in that article is that it says many recovering alcoholics continue to have sleeping problems for more than a year after giving up alcohol, that is not a welcome prospect.

I have been trying to keep my caffeine consumption as low as possible over the last few days, but since I drink diet coke that is not an easy thing to do. The only caffeine free diet soda I could find in town was 7up, I have been drinking that in the evenings to try to make sure I don’t have a buzz when I am attempting to sleep. Honestly though, that stuff doesn’t taste very good. Not that any diet soda really does. Add to that the fact that each time I get up to use the restroom or whatever during the night I take a quick drink of soda, Diet Coke, and it is easy to understand where at least some of the sleeping difficulty is coming from.

This morning I went to the grocery store in Coolidge and bought one of every kind of caffeine free diet soda they had on the shelf, I am not even kidding. I brought home diet orange crush, caffeine free diet coke, diet a&w root beer, diet squirt, diet mug root beer, diet 7up, and three different flavors of sparkling water. Surely one of these will be to my liking. I am not entirely sure if I should try to give up caffeine completely at the same time as I am giving up alcohol, but if I could just not have any caffeine in the afternoon it would surely be a step in the right direction.

As for how I am actually feeling it is still hard to say. I think my body feels better, I am certainly eating more, or at least more often but in smaller quantities. The effects on my mind have been pretty immediate though. I am thinking more clearly now, even though I feel so fatigued from lack of sleep, than I have in as long as I can remember. My hands are not trembling as bad as usual. And I am actually typing quickly sober, that is something that I used to never be able to accomplish until I had downed at least a couple. I am in pretty good spirits so far, hopefully I can keep them that way.

I quit writing about it after that because it just kept reminding me that I am supposed to be drinking, not the best idea when I was trying to quit. I can tell you though that the most difficult day was the 5th day. I don’t know why but I needed a drink so bad I felt like I might actually die without it. With no way to fight the desire I just went to bed and tried to sleep, of course I didn’t sleep at all. I did stare at the alarm clock until the morning though and by then the desire had passed.

It has now been 8 days since I gave up drinking. I find that I hardly even think about it now, and when I do it is more of a “a beer would be nice” type thought, opposed to the “must drink or perish!” commands my mind had been making for the last decade. I think I may have subdued the demon this time, yet I know that if I ever take a single drink it will likely lead me back to the hell I was in before. So, success for now.

I should also note that I have just about completely given up caffeine as well. It turns out that staying up late getting horribly drunk makes your body desire caffeine in the morning. With the alcohol out of the equation I don’t really have a need for it any more. Since the fridge is loaded up with nothing but caffeine free soda I haven’t had a caffeinated beverage in three days. Let me tell you though, Diet Squirt tastes like a carbonated grapefruit, that shit is foul.

With that it seems that smoking is now my only vice, a vice that I am keeping for myself, at least for now. I don’t think I could handle giving up all my vices in a two week span.

You load sixteen tons…

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The best part of my job is that no two days are ever the same. Sure everyone makes that same claim, but in my case it is totally true. I am a butcher, in theory, but I have to do all of the stocking of the milk, beer, perishables, and just whatever the hell happens to come into the store. That is just in the first couple of hours that I am there though, after that it can get interesting.

When I first started working there, back in 1994, whenever something would go wrong with plumbing/electrical/you-name-it, they would call someone to come and fix it. Now I am that someone. I have learned a lot of skills during my time at this job, skills that will likely make it a lot easier for me to find another job should I go looking for one. I never knew that I was an electrician, or a plumber, or a building contractor until, I actually had the project in front of me. My logic was pretty simple: If someone with an 8th grade education can do it, I can do it also. Because “I am good enough, I am smart enough, and dog gone it people like me” (no offense if you don’t get the humorous intent of the quote).

In my years working where I do I have taught myself the major aspects of various trades. I can now lay down tile (ranging from the do-it-yourself peel-and-stick, through the industrial grade that must be glued down, all the way to the ceramic, which is extremely expensive but a very good investment as you will never have to replace it.), I can troubleshoot electrical circuits in structures that were wired up at least a couple of decades before my birth, I have become quite proficient at finding and eliminating the sources of leaking roofs, I can replace water lines without a problem (though I only replace with PVC or CPVC since I don’t actually have a torch and the flux that copper would require. Although I did have to borrow a torch to do a copper line one time since building codes do not allow pvc connections behind walls. That is a long story though), yes, I have learned a lot while working where I do, mostly self taught.

The culmination of my self-taught abilities came a couple of weeks ago. There was a vacant rental house that the boss wanted fixed up, but he figured I could do all the work. He was right. I will skip over the minutiae of broken faucets and the such and get to the meat of this one, I had to install laminate flooring (Pergo. Google it if you care, I am not going to link to it). That is some tough shit to put down. While it is true that it just snaps together, what they don’t tell you (the installation instructions tell you but you have already committed yourself to it at that point) is that there has to be a quarter inch space between the flooring and the wall at all times, to allow for expansion and contraction of the flooring. That is probably all well and good in new homes, you know the ones, they are easily identified by their straight walls, standard door moldings and the such. In a house that is as old as the one I was working in none of those things exist.

This description will be horribly confusing, but bear with me. I had to lay the flooring down in a house that had walls and corners about as square as an overhead view of the border between the U.S. and Mexico. There was existing “trim molding” that actually went below the level of the floor (which I could not use for finish molding since it would leave the underside of the flooring completely exposed to the elements, or so the Home Depot guy told me), the existing “trim molding” stopped about an inch before every door, went back to the level of the wall, had a quarter-round molding (vertical), then hit the door jamb. The door transitions were hard.

It took me about an hour to lay 200 square feet of this flooring: It took me about 20 hours to lay the 30 square feet for the 7 doorways and two carpet transitions. I still had to leave the quarter inch gap around all of the transitions (where the doors are), but was able to cover all of the rest of the gaps with molding. Even the housing inspector (that is the guy that comes in to check out the house prior to sale to make sure that the home will be around by the time the mortgage is paid off) didn’t notice the small gaps at the doorways. It is only a quarter of an inch.

So I learned a brand new skill today: I can now haul dirt.

The basement of the place I work is quite cavernous, thousands of square feet. The foundation is extremely visible and made of nothing but huge stones and mortar. Problem is someone decided to mud over the foundation and make it into a living area (I have no idea how long ago that was, but I would guess decades). The mud that they slapped over the enormous rocks has long since turned to sand, which is now filling up the basement. It is nearly knee deep at the corners and along the wall, while being only a light dusting (say an inch and a half) near the center. I have to clean it out.

Dirt is heavy.

I spent three hours down in the basement today doing nothing other than moving out that dirt. I had a helper so that we could do double the damage in the same amount of time. We each filled two buckets, five gallon buckets, before taking them out to the street. Each bucket weighed in excess of fifty pounds, we carried them out two at a time (four at a time since there were two of us). That makes it to be 200 pounds each time we carried them out. I would guess that we only did 25 trips to get the dirt cleaned out, which sucks since I titled the post about sixteen tons and we only did about 2.5 tons. Of course the sixteen ton song is about shoveling, not what we had to do.

Every full bucket of sand has to make it to the street. That trek, from where we were in the basement, was about 200 feet to the stairs, the thirteen stairs, 30 feet to the door, and an additional 250 feet after that. Dumping the pails was taking about five minutes every time, but we were to sweeping near the end so I guess I didn’t really have to work all that hard.

On the upside, I get to do it again tomorrow! We only managed to clear one wall today, there are many more to be taken care of.

Seriously, Kids, stay in school.

Thanksgiving time

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Thanksgiving is the one holiday that I have really never understood. Most of the holidays that we celebrate here in the U.S. are based on mythology that goes back to long before Christianity. Chrsitmas is celebrated because some ancient cult had a festival at the winter solstice, it was sort of absorbed into Christianity as the day of the birth of Christ, as well as some jolly fellow in a red suit. I don’t know why Christmas was scheduled a few days after the solstice,my best guess is that they (by they I am meaning the church in ancient times) wanted to give contemporary cults time to celebrate their tradition, while training their children in both… Bam!, Christmas is born (whether Christ was born anywhere near that time is a hot topic for Religious Scholars, doesn’t matter a bit to me though).

Mythology is where the average U.S. citizen would place the Gods that the people of ancient Greece or Rome believed in. Add a couple of hundreds of years and I bet the Religious Scholars will be laughing about Christianity, then place it squarely in the Mythology category.

There are many holidays that don’t celebrate any religious right (unless you consider secretaries Holy), but Thanksgiving has to be the most obscure of them all.

Thanksgiving is purported to be an annual feast that marks the day that the Native Americans invited the new settlers over for a grand supper. Wild Turkey was involved (whether that was the animal or the drink I certainly don’t know). Next thing you know the Native Americans are being slaughtered to near extinction.

That is not a Holiday. How does that though process go? Let us all celebrate the day that the Native Americans invited us to a huge feast, then we killed them by the thousands, raped their wives and daughters, forced them to move more and more west, until they (the ones who didn’t fight back) were eventually nicely stored in concentration camps reservations. Yeah! Let’s celebrate that! Hell, nobody had anything to do in November anyway.

Thanksgiving has transformed itself a bit over the years. It has become more of a yearly family reunion than a celebration. It is one out of two Holidays, that I can think of, that you really have to be at. Doctors, Surgeons, anyone in the emergency medicine line of work really, Firefighters (though they are likely on call), and 24-hour convenience mart employees have to work that day, the rest of us really have to go to the November family reunion.

I long for those days.

Thanksgiving, for myself and most of the relatives on my wife’s side of the family, is going to be a day spent at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix. The Mother-in-law is still there. She had an additional surgery on Monday (to reinforce one of the bones in her upper arm), there is no way that she is going to be out of the hospital by Thursday. It is extremely important that everyone is there, not because she might die ( fear of imminent death has been resolved long ago), but because she needs to know that we are all willing her to overcome the issues ( some call it praying, but when it gets right down to it God created the cancer, therefore God has the cure, right? I put a lot more faith in my ability to just wish it away, hmm., I guess I am religious).

What is really, truly, sad is that I would likely have never written this post if my Mother-in-law had not been in the hospital. I have no doubt that the hospital’s Thanksgiving meal is going to suck, but I am going to be there eating it anyway. I guess now is the time that I should be thankful that I am not the one in the hospital.

What are you thankful for?

Bionic woman: first edition

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The Mother-in-law underwent the first (well first and second technically) of what is turning out to be a hell of a lot of surgeries on her bones this morning. It is sort of looking like the basic goal is to replace every bit of bone with metal of one type or another, well not quite, seems that way sometimes though.

The surgery that was done today added a steel rod that runs the length of the inside of one of her femurs, as well as completely replacing the hip on the opposite side. To think that they were able to do all that at the same time, get it done in only a few hours, and have her back to a normal hospital room in less than eight hours just blows my mind. Medical technology sure has advanced in the last couple of decades.

The surgery went well enough that they are going to take her in for additional bone surgery on Wednesday. The additional surgery is going to be adding more rods to her arm/shoulder region. See, the doctor thinks that she is going to be actually walking again within a week or two, but with the aid of a walker, and wants to sturdy up her upper body so that she doesn’t break an arm when she first tries to use it. I guess I should just trust the doctor. Hell, he put a rod in her leg and replaced her hip in only a couple of hours, though he had set aside five hours in case there were major complications (which, thankfully did not happen). He seems to know what he is doing.

I still haven’t quite wrapped my mind around the whole situation with her bones; She has cancer in her neck and the hip that they replaced, yet, there has been no mention of cancer anywhere else in her bones. Why is it that the bones that don’t have any cancer in them have also been deteriorated to such a point that they are needing to be reinforced? I think I am going to go read up on cancer of the bones after I finish this post just to gain a bit of understanding.

So another radiation treatment for the neck cancer today, surgery on her arm/shoulder Wednesday, a re-evaluation of her other arm likely between now and then to see if it needs any work done on it, she has a pretty full schedule in front of her. After seeing her yesterday I have been in much better spirits about the situation, but I can’t help but think this is a hell of a lot of surgery to be going through in such a short time. I certainly want her to get well as quickly as possible, and I am sure that the doctor wouldn’t be doing anything that was not in her best interests (the whole Hippocratic oath thing), not to mention that the last thing I would want to see is her going through one major surgery, rehabilitating for a couple of months, going through another major surgery, rehabilitating for a couple of months…and on… After Wednesday she is going to have a piece of metal in every one of her limbs (I think), that seems like a hell of a lot of rehabilitating to do all at the same time.

The first step towards turning my Mother-in-law into a real life bionic woman was successful and I truly hope that the rest of the steps will go just as well.

Medical update

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It has been almost a week since my Mother-in-law was admitted to St. Jospephs. There are at least some facts to draw on at this point. The cancer that is traveling throughout her body seems to have originated in one of her breasts (and how ironic is it that my wife has been doing the breast cancer walk every year to fund research on breast cancer?). Her neck is still in pretty bad shape, and she has a broken hip on top of all of that.

They started to radiate the cancer in her neck a couple of days ago, evidently that is all going well. I am happy to know that. They are actually going to do a hip replacement surgery on her Monday morning, then take her to another radiation treatment that afternoon. I am happy to see that they are doing everything so quickly, yet I wonder how quickly it all should go.

I know that hip and knee replacement surgery is pretty standard stuff at this point, but I wonder how able someone would be to recover from a hip replacement, while undergoing radiation to kill cancer. I suppose they wouldn’t be doing the hip replacement if they didn’t think it was completely safe, I must just acknowledge that the doctors know a lot more than I do.

I am finding an up side to the whole situation though. I don’t really think the doctors would be doing a hip replacement surgery on her if they thought the cancer she has would be immediately fatal. I really doubt that they would be replacing the hip were they not sure that she could walk away from this whole ordeal (pun sort of intended) with only a bunch of scars and a new hip. The cancer in the breast, lung, hip (likely will be removed with the addition of a new hip), were not the biggest issue. The cancer in her neck was the most pressing issue.

The cancer in her neck has been responding pretty well to the radiation. Whatever that means. Well enough that they are going to radiate her neck again only hours after she gets her whole hip replaced. The marvels of modern technology.

I am going to spend a couple hours with the Mother-in-law tomorrow, before she goes into surgery on Monday. While there will be little that I can do other than simply be there, I bet I can make her laugh a few times. I don’t know if laughter will actually help her, but it will do volumes of good for me. High spirits are often the only thing you have going for you.

A cry for help

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I have been a bit lacking in my blogging over the last few days. The truth is that there is one post that I really want/need to write, in fact I have written it several times only to delete it. Talking about myself and my own minor medical problems isn’t much of an issue for me, but when I try to talk about other people (medical problems or not) I am always left wondering how much I should say, how I should say it, how sensitive or technical I should write it, etc. I am just gonna try to throw this down off the cuff, as such it will likely be deleted before it makes it from my mind to your eyes, but I just have to try. There will be no links. If it actually makes it all the way to posting I will likely go back and add them later.

My Mother in Law has been having problems with her hip for at least a year. She has been to several local doctors who all diagnosed it as osteoarthritis. She has been taking over the counter supplements to battle the problem, but it wasn’t getting any better, in fact it was getting worse. Over the last week or so she wasn’t even able to hold her head upright for more than a few seconds without enormous amonts of pain. Just how bad it had become came to light just this Monday, after a chiropractor, of all people, ordered an X-ray. She left the chiropractor’s office in an ambulance. It was bad.

Thankfully she was taken to the emergency room at St. Joseph’s Hospital (far and away the best in the state), where my Father in Law, my wife, my Brother in law and his girlfriend, two of her (the mother in law’s) best friends and myself waited anxiously for any news. The first that I heard, prior to getting to the hospital, was that she had a broken neck. If only it had been something so minor…

The Hospital went on to do a bunch of tests on her, MRI, CT Scan, multiple X-rays, something is horribly wrong with her spine. Her neck needed to be stabilized, and I thought that she was going to be going into surgery for that right away. Alas, they can’t just start cutting on her until they know exactly what the source of the problem is, else they could do more harm than good. So it was that they just doped her to high heaven and held her in intensive care unit at the Barrow neurological Institute to await results of a biopsy. That was all on Monday.

Details were hazy on Tuesday, everyone was a bit too emotional to retain and repeat facts. Moving on.

Wednesday brought the news that no one ever wants to hear. A single word that can devastate any family: Cancer. Not just a little bit of cancer, she has it in lots of places. There is cancer in her neck, which is obviously the most important one, cancer in one of her breasts, cancer in one of her hips, a ‘shadow’ of cancer in one of her lungs, and another ‘shadow’ of it on one of her legs. I honestly just don’t know what to think. The oncologist is waiting for the results of the biopsy before starting treatment, I suppose that is a good call. But if you have cancer in five distinctly different regions of your body, isn’t that the point where you can rule out the cancer being benign?

The only good thing to take from the Oncologist is that he thinks that the ‘shadows’ of cancer are not really that big of a deal. Detecting those early enough might make it so that they can be treated before she loses the ability to breathe and the such. The neck is the worst problem right now, as the cancerous cells are the only thing keeping her spine in line. Were the cancer to respond a bit too well to the treatment (I assume radiation), a simple turn of her head could severe her spinal chord. She is in a bionic neck brace to prevent anything like that from happening.

The Oncologist thinks that she will actually be able to leave the hospital at some point, yet have to come back (daily? weekly?) for treatment. I think that is a pretty good sign. At the same time I am thinking that the human body is about an intricate a device as you will ever find; what works for one might not work for another. I hope and pray (I don’t really have a religion but I am praying anyway) that she is going to be okay. At the same time I know that you don’t really get over cancer, at least not when it is infecting your actual bones -you can only take out so many bones-.

Posts may begin to dwindle even more around here as I try to help my wife deal with what is happening to her Mother. I know there is nothing that I can personally do (like donate a kidney or something), but I have to do my best to make sure my wife is not an emotional wreck the whole time. That is a pretty tough task when the wife just keeps asking the same question, “She’s going to be okay, right?”, and there is no way to answer that question.

If you are reading this (regardless of religion), can you go ahead and just wish/hope/pray that she gets better. She is only 52, and she is a wonderful artist. She needs a few more decades down here…