Boswell

I've had a pretty poor perception of Boswell Hospital for some years, mostly because my dad died in that hospital. Did anyone or anything at Boswell contribute to his death? I can't say for sure in a legal sense, but I do know that he had surgery in Boswell and then died a few days later, and whether there's any actual culpability or not, that's not the kind of thing you forgive readily.

But having said that, I have to say that the care I received from Boswell was first-rate and I find that I just can't hold a grudge against the hospital any more.

Actually, every part of the health care chain seemed to work extremely well, from the EMS crew to the Del Webb ER to the Boswell CV/SICU. Looking back on it, I have only one real complaint, that being that the barf bags were entirely inadequate to the task at hand and need serious enlarging.

Now it's up to me whether any of this bypassing and grafting means anything in the long run. I smoked for about 25 years prior to my heart attack, and always swore that I'd quit smoking when I noticed smoking affecting my health. I was always pretty heavy, and swore I'd lose weight and start exercising when I noticed health problems. Well, a heart attack and bypass surgery are pretty hard to miss as "health problems", so what I do propose to do about it now?

I haven't smoked since the morning of July 4th, and at this remove, the idea of copping a cigarette while having an actual heart attack seems pretty foolish, but there I was... I quit cold turkey, though being in a morphine and anesthetic haze for a day or two spared me the worse of the physical withdrawal symptoms. Now I just have the residual habit to deal with, the habit of wanting to smoke. Some days are better than others, but I'm now on Day 25 without a cigarette and I think I'm past the worst. I just keep reminding myself of how I felt on the side of the highway waiting for the ambulance to arrive.

More Catching Up

So where am I in my story? It's the evening of July fifth, I guess. My breathing tube it out and I've got an immense dressing on the front of my chest, and my right leg is wrapped up in so many Ace bandages I look like I'm trying out for a bit part in a movie about mummies. Sitting up felt better than lying down, at least for me. I found that sitting up in the chair and leaning over the mobile shelf unit actually felt better than lying down, and the nurses seemed just as happy to let me sit up. It was hard to actually get up, but once I was up and sitting, things seemed fine.

I was living in Tube City: catheter, two chest tubes, IVs in my arms, A-line in my wrist, IVs in my neck... Given this kind of limited mobility, I could either sit up or lie down, and sitting up felt better. My wife brought me a Harry Potter book to read, and my brother brought in some magazines, but I couldn't really read any of them. I was so zoned on anesthetic or morphine that I couldn't concentrate hard enough to read; I'd just look at the words for a few minutes before going under. I remember wanting to stay awake to talk to my visitors (because I quickly learned that when one is in the ICU, visitors are golden) but I just couldn't do it.

My normal pre-op breathing volume as measured by the spirometer was just under three liters. When I first tried to use the spirometer in the ICU, I could barely manage a half a wheezing liter. Gah! Why is that? Does the body decay that rapidly in surgery? Was my chest simply too sore and swollen for me to breath effectively? Were my lungs full of junk?

The next day I could get about a liter, and the nurses got me up and made me walk about the nurse's station. That was hard. My leg hurt, my chest hurt, and I was so completely out of breath I had to pause every eight or ten feet to rest for a few seconds. What a shabby performance! Still, at least I was up and walking around, and I passed rooms and saw people who weren't even doing as well as I was.

The first meal I remember was breakfast the day after the surgery, on the Sixth. I don't remember what I had, I just remember having breakfast in the abstract. I finished the fruit cup and the cup of coffee and the apple juice, but I don't think I touched much else. I wasn't very hungry at lunch either. It was some kind of sliced beef thing served with a roll, and Jean ended up eating most of it. (I would end up losing about 25 pounds during my hospital stay, though I have to be fair to Boswell and say that the food actually was pretty good. If I didn't eat much, it was because I just flat wasn't hungry, not because the foot was unpalatable.)

The next day was better. I managed to make five laps around the nurse's station, including a side trip down the hall to look out the window at the bushes and grass outside. I was up to a liter and a half on the spirometer, and the tubes were slowly coming out. I found the process of removing the chest tubes and the neck IVs exquisitely uncomfortable, especially since it turned out the neck IVs went all the way into my heart! But they hadn't taken the catheter out yet, because they were concerned about my blood pressure and were keeping me on diruetics, and they didn't want to force me to jump out of bed every twenty minutes to pee. So I sat, watched TV, chatted with my visitors, drained into my urine bag, and drooled every time they gave me morphine.

Eventually they managed to get my blood pressure regularized and they took the catheter out, and then it was off to Telemetry, freeing up my bed in the ICU. Telemetry was pretty nice. It's not as busy as the ICU and you have more spare time. In my case I had a double room to myself and I flitted from chair to chair until I found the most comfortable spot - the commode chair, as it happened. I also stood in front of the window and looked out a lot, because even standing was more comfortable than lying down.

And then, the next morning, a nurse helped me take a shower and I changed into pajamas that my wife brought up from home, and they cut me loose. My mom picked me up and drove me home, and by about noon on the eighth I was safely in my own bed, having just seen first-hand what $95,000 worth of medical treatment looks like.

Catching Up

I haven't posted anything for a while - most of July, actually, but there's a halfway decent reason for that.

I had a heart attack on the morning of July 4th. Opinion varies on how serious it was, but at the very minimum, I hew to the line that there's no such thing as a minor heart attack.

Oh heck, let's do the whole chronology, shall we?

It turned out that I'd been experiencing angina for a couple of weeks but didn't know what it was, or perhaps didn't want to know what it was. On the night of the third the angina was pretty intense, but again I either didn't realize what it was, or chose to pretend I wasn't having some kind of heart problem. Most of the time the ache would be gone in the morning, but on the morning of the fourth the pain was worse. Much worse. It actually woke me up at about five or six in the morning, and I knew it wasn't a muscle thing any more.

Nevertheless, I took a shower and put on clean clothes, and hoped for the best. The pain was fairly bad and it radiated all the way down to my left wrist, and then I got nauseated and threw up like a firehose. That was the final straw. Jean came out of the office to see what was wrong, I told her I had chest and arm pain, and she said "Hospital."

We started to drive to the hospital because we live out in the sticks, but as we drove Jean called 911 and found that there's actually an ambulance stationed in Wittmann! They advised us to pull off and wait, so that's what we did, stopping at milepost 130 of US Highway 60. The pain by then was becoming quite quite unbearable - on the hallowed 0 to 10 scale, we were approaching a Spinal Tap-esque 11, and the continued vomiting didn't help either. I actually thought I was dying and would have to be scraped up off the side of the highway like roadkill...

The ambulance arrived, and they gave me oxygen, nitroglycerine and morphine on the way to Del Webb Hospital. This treatment cut the pain level in half and removed the sense of impending death, so by the time I got into the ER at Del Webb I didn't feel too bad. I still had chest pain and had picked up a dandy nitroglycerine headache, but things seemed to be improving.

The Del Webb ER staff treated me further, including injecting some clot-busting medication into my abdomen and fitting me with IV nitroglycerine. Soon the chest and arm pain were gone, but I felt like I had a strand of barbed wire twisted around my head. Cripes does nitroglycerine give one headaches!

Then it was off to the Cath Lab. The Cath Lab is kind of an intense experience. You're sedated, but not out. It's about like napping through a TV show; sometimes you hear things from the TV show and sometimes you don't. I remember feeling the bright, warm flashes in my chest as they released the dye (and I remember being astonished at how rapidly the blood seemed to flow outward). I remember a lot of pressure and manipulation in my right groin. And most of all, I remember the cardiologist suddenly saying "This man needs to be in the ICU immediately."

Oh shit!

Suddenly I was wide awake and felt everything they did to me in the Cath Lab. Wide awake and scared. Presently they plugged the hole in my femoral artery and wheeled me back to the ER. What ensued was a medical blitzkrieg - I suddenly had no end of top-shelf medical types in my little ER room, telling me what they'd found and laying out my options. At least three and perhaps five blockages in my coronary arteries, one of them about 95% blocked. A pattern of enzymes that suggested that I'd had a heart attack but that the clot-busting drugs had successfully ended the MI.

So it was decided that I would be transported to Boswell for emergency coronary bypass surgery the next day. As I waited to be moved, I became hugely nauseated. I'm not sure why, if it was a reaction to drugs or stress or dye or the Cath Lab or what, but I threw up in the ER, I threw up in the ambulance, and I threw up in the ICU at Boswell. The barf bags were completely inadequate, by the way, being far too small for the job at hand, so I ended up throwing up on myself a fair amount.

Once they gave me something for the nausea, I felt pretty good. Good enough to go home, actually, but that wasn't how it was going to play. I spent the rest of the day being prepped. They ran an ultrasound on my legs to locate choice vein segments. They shaved my chest and leg. They kept pumping me full of drugs. They wouldn't let me eat or drink.

So at about 10:00 the next morning off I went. They'd given me a sedative so I didn't feel too anxious, but it's still a bit scary, being wheeled off to a procedure that has a small but non-zero possibility of stroke or death. I remember thinking that I wished the doctors had given my family some of the same sedative; I was scared, sure, but they looked more scared than I felt.

I remember nothing of surgery. The last thing I remember was being lowered onto the operating table, which to my surprise had a raised rim around the outside, like a drip pan. I was tempted to make a joke about making my own gravy but the next thing I knew, someone was telling me to cough. I kept trying but my throat hurt, and every now and then there would be a terrible wet sucking sound. Then I heard a voice say "He initiated five times" and then they were pulling some horrible corrugated thing out of my throat. I coughed, or did they vacuum me out? I don't remember.

I came to some time later when a couple of nurses were trying to get me out of bed. I was awake, sort of, and hurt, sort of, but looking back on it, I was drifting along under a nice overcast of morphine...

This is getting long, isn't it? To be continued!

Anniversary

It just struck me that this is my one-year blogging anniversary, more or less. Whee!

I haven't written much lately because I haven't really had the inclination. June wasn't a great month and I just didn't think there was any need to diddle my navel on a blog; navel-gazing is something best done in a swimming pool with a glass of wine, I think.

The Bad News

The bad news is that I am unemployed. At 27 years with the same company, I'm out on the sidewalk with my box of desk junk. I'm not going to say much about this until I've had time to think, explore my options, and find another job.

The Good News

The good news is that I don't miss my old job - the company had gone out of its way in the last year in particular to equip itself with square wheels and I don't miss the shaking. More good news is that jobs appear to be fairly thick on the ground, and my "secret network" seems to be working in my favor. And another piece of good news is that the box scraper I ordered arrived, and it works like gangbusters.

The Google Effect

This morning I did a search on Goggle for Ty Murray, a great rodeo rider and a man who often seems to be labeled the "King of Cowboys". I ran the search mostly because Ty and I both grew up in Phoenix and I was curious to see where he had gone to school and if he had ever competed out where I lived, south of Cashion.

But that's not what I'm writing about. As I was exploring the various links Google coughed up, I found one that led to a website operated by a group opposed to animal abuse and cruelty, and that in turn led to this group's allegations of massive, slope-browed, knuckle-dragging, gibbering cruelty at rodeos.

That's the Google Effect. You look for one thing, and end up somewhere entirely different.

I'm not here to defend Ty Murray, and I'm sure he neither wants nor needs me to even try. Nor am I here to defend rodeo in general, as it is my general policy to not go out of my way to defend any organization that has its own lawyers and PR firm.

But come on - when looking at professional bull riding, does the phrase "cruelty to animals" even mean anything? People should be more worried about "cruelty to cowboys". Just ask Valdiron de la Oliveira (among a great many others), or consult this link:

http://www.health.state.ok.us/Program/injury/updates/bullcns.html

There are legitimate cases of animal cruelty, no doubt, and things like canned hunts and dog-fights are utterly reprehensible. But if putting a 150-pound cowboy on the back of a 2000-pound bull qualifies as cruelty, then having to put up with self-righteous vegetarian propaganda also qualifies as cruelty.

The anti-cruelty group apparently invites cowboys to be zapped by cattle prods, and notes with snooty self-righteousness that none of the cowboys ever take them up on that offer. They should have been around when I was a teenager, because I'd estimate we spent at least five percent of our time chasing each other around with the cattle prod (we only had one, and the Holder of the Prod was king). Is the cattle prod unpleasant? Sure - and it'll motivate you to move along, no question about that. But I'd still rather take a zap from a cattle prod than eat asparagus, for whatever that's worth to you.

Box Scraper

Well, I finally ordered my six-foot box scraper from Northern Tool. I know there are a lot of companies I could have ordered it from, but I like Northern Tool, in part because I have an account there and don't have to type my address in every time!

Now here's the quasi-shameful sop to fashion: I really wanted a hinged-blade box scraper because I think they're more efficient in the long run, but I bought the fixed-blade box scraper because it was red and it matched my tractor! Criminy, next thing you know I'll be ordering red cowboy boots. (Realistically, I doubt I'll ever notice the difference in performance between a fixed-blade and hinged-blade box scraper, so why not get the red one?)

For what it's worth, let me plug for Northern Tool for just a moment. I'm not by any means a Northern Tool power shopper, but I've placed a few orders with them over the years and I've never had a complaint with them. I did have a complaint with some 12-volt utility lights I ordered, but the problem was with the manufacturer, not Northern Tool. At least I assume the problem was with the manufacturer. (Not to go too far afield here, but I found that the lights didn't work once I wired them up. Assuming I had a grounding problem, I hardwired the light directly across the terminals of a 12-volt battery just to make sure the lights worked. They didn't. I tested the lights with an ohmmeter and found a resistance that seemed to be in keeping with an intact filament - that is to say, it wasn't an open circuit - so I decided that maybe I was incorrect in assuming that the metal mount was the ground. So I hacksawed the back off one of the lights and verified that, indeed, the metal mount is the ground. But they still didn't work. So I got out my battery charger, which has a jump-starting mode, which works mainly by jacking up the output voltage by an awful lot (that's a technical term). I hooked the light up to the charger, flipped it to jump-start mode, and promptly smoked the filament. But at least it lit up, if only for a few hundred milliseconds. So I don't know what's up with the lights. And it doesn't matter.)

The point is that in six to ten days I'll have to figure out how to unload a 510-pound implement from the back of a delivery truck. My grampa used to have a handy gadget, a tripod made out of enormously long pieces of very heavy pipe with a chain hoist slung from the apex. It was homemade and of course nobody knew what its lifting capacity was, but I do know that it hefted some pretty heavy I-beams and dozer parts. I could use that tripod, I think. But lacking the tripod, I'm guessing that I'll make a platform out of bales of hay, chain the box scraper to the parked tractor, and have the truck driver drive out from under the scraper and let it land on the hay...

But I do wish I had that tripod.

After Memorial Day

I'm glad Memorial Day is over with.

For one thing, I get a little tired of all the war movies they dust off for Memorial Day. It's not that I don't honor the sacrifice of the men and women who were killed in the line of duty for our benefit - I just don't think much of most war movies, and somehow watching my favorite war movie, Das Boot, just doesn't seem like much of a way to celebrate Memorial Day (especially in view of the fact that my dad, a ordinary GI, crossed the Atlantic in a convoy that the guys in Das Boot would likely have loved to attack).

Most modern war movies are exceedingly graphic, full of blood and guts and suffering and personal crises and emotional breakdowns. Most older war movies are full of gooey, half-baked ideological smarm. For Memorial Day, the ideological smarm seems more appropriate, but there's a limit to how many times I can watch Bataan or Sands of Iwo Jima or even Battle Of The Bulge - I just can't seem to get enough of watching all those M24 Chaffees running around in the Ardennes portion of Southern California, but after a while the movie just wears me down.

The main reason I'm glad Memorial Day is over is that any time there is a holiday, I can't for the life of me figure out what day the garbage truck will come. It's now Friday and my garbage can is still stuffed, despite having been out on the street since Tuesday. It's as though Parks and Sons skipped the whole week!

And that's a pity, because I had Big Plans for an empty trash can this weekend. In the immortal words of Albus Dumbledore, "Alas. Earwax."

I'm a helpless list-maker, though I notice that this behavior mostly manifests itself at work and may represent nothing more than an easy way to kill twenty minutes. Every Thursday or Friday I jot down a quick list of things I want to accomplish over the weekend, and it all starts out so well. The list will look like this after a few minutes:

* Pull weeds in front yard
* Blow out garage with leaf blower
* Fix flat tire on tractor

But after another ten minutes, the list starts to look pretty daunting:

* Pull weeds in front yard
* Blow garage out with leaf blower
* Fix flat tire on tractor
* Revise homemade dozer blade for tractor
* Plant 23 bushes
* Repaint back yard fence
* Buy 19 tons of ABC and 90 bags of cement and a cement mixer
* Fix the old push lawnmower
* Find a place that sells size 14 EE boots
* Change oil in car, truck and both tractors
* Figure out why tractor headlights don't work
* Weld something

Give me another ten or fifteen minutes and the list turns into the Theater of the Absurd:

* Pull weeds in front yard
* Blow garage out with leaf blower
* Fix flat tire on tractor
* Revise homemade dozer blade for tractor
* Plant 23 bushes
* Repaint back yard fence
* Buy 19 tons of ABC and 90 bags of cement and a cement mixer
* Fix the old push lawnmower
* Find a place that sells size 14 EE boots
* Change oil in car, truck and both tractors
* Figure out why tractor headlights don't work
* Weld something
* Paint bedroom
* Take out carpet and install ceramic tile
* Dig a water retention basin and completely revise flood control scheme
* Rebuild draft control mechanism in the big tractor so it actually works
* Build a raised deck on the back patio
* Build a hay cover
* Build a tractor shed
* Plant 83 trees
* Solve world hunger
* Bring peace to the Middle East
* Cure the heartbreak of psoriasis
* Fix the imbalance of trade

But, seeing as my trash can didn't get dumped during the week, I guess I won't be getting to any of that.

Alas. Earwax.

Top Ten

Here's my list of the ten people I most want to simply go away and leave me in peace. They've all had their fifteen minutes of fame, none of them contribute anything to my life, and I'd like for them to lapse into comfortable (for me) obscurity.

1. Paris Hilton. Famous for being famous? I didn't think it was possible until she did it.

2. Britney Spears. I didn't like her music; I like her antics even less.

3. Nicole Richie. And your talent is what, exactly?

4. Howard Stern. Let me know when the punchline is coming; sometimes I forget to laugh.

5. Tom Cruise. Go jump on your own damn sofa and leave my TV alone.

6. Glenn Beck. Who is this guy anyway?

7. Adriana Costa. One more dose of celebrity-worship disguised as "entertainment news" and I'm truly going to vomit.

8. Lindsey Lohan. All the more proof I need that the "generation gap" is a really good idea.

9. Michael Jackson. 'Nuff said.

10. Angelina Jolie. Yeah, yeah, talent and beauty and all that, but come on, I can't eat a bowl of corn flakes without seeing her adopting another child.

And Another Thing!

While I'm ranting, let me rant about this:

I'm growing increasingly fatigued with the tendency of news websites like CNN to post videos of everything. I normally check the news when I'm eating lunch at work, and I (and my employer) would be just as happy to not have a bunch of stupid videos playing on my work computer. But it's getting hard to find actual text-based written news; everything is a video clip.

Is reading really that hard? AAARGH, see my previous rant, my desktop was just invaded by another one of those vile AOL popups! It's making me crazy!

But my point is that I prefer to read my news rather than listen to it, and I personally blame the YouTube generation for my increasingly inability to do so.

Car Audio Versus The Time Tunnel

Last Sunday my wife and I went to Fry's Electronics (we won't go to Best Buy any more) to look at stuff. We had no real agenda, but ended up in an aisle looking at MP3 players. Then someone decided that there was no time like the present to turn the audio system in the laughable "soundproof hut" up to 11. And of course they were playing rap of some sort, and they'd screwed with the equalizer so it was nothing but bass.

It was like being in the Time Tunnel! My innards were vibrating, everything on the shelves around us was buzzing and vibrating, and my brain simply shut down. Nope, too much deep bass, I'm shutting down, you're on your own. I fully expected portals to other dimensions to open around me and for the Master Chief from Halo II to suddenly appear.

There are several things I have to say about this. The first is this: what kind of moron goes into a store and turns the car audio system up to 11 and leaves it there for a couple of minutes? The second is this: what kind of mobile audio department manager would let it go on for two minutes? The third is this: how come, every time someone turns the demo car stereos up to 11, it's always rap? I bet if I popped a Vader CD in the system and turned it up to 11, they'd tear-gas me out of the soundproof hut in a matter of seconds. Or a George Strait CD. Somehow it's okay, even expected, for everyone in the store to have to suffer through the rap, but God forbid anyone should play any other kind of music.

"But it's popular," they whine. Oh, so because it's popular, common decency no longer applies?

Once we were in Best Buy looking for a portable stereo for some reason or another, and they were all tuned to some rap radio station (Power 92, I think, not that I frequent that particular frequency very often). So my wife and I methodically retuned every last one of them to the local ASU-operated radio station that plays classical music (KBAQ, for what it's worth). I hope it pissed someone off, I really do.

This Irritates Me

You know what irritates me? It irritates me that no matter what I try to do on my computer, every ninety seconds or so some stupid thing appears on my screen boasting that updates for this or that thing are ready and I should click in the bubble to get started.

And what's really frustrating is that it's almost all anti-virus software that does all this popping up!

Leave my desktop alone! Stop asking me stupid questions! Geez, this is almost worse than having to deal with viruses!

AOL is the worst. They've taken to popping up windows that apparently can't be unpopped; they just sit there hogging my screen like toadstools in the lawn. But AOL is guilty of more sins that just that; I find their habit of removing focus from what I'm doing utterly infuriating. I'll be typing something and all of a sudden AOL thinks I need to do something else, so they drag the focus away from the window I'm typing in and I have to click back on it - sometimes five or six times in a row. I tried to write AOL a nasty email about it, but they kept shifting focus away from the email editor and finally I had to go chew on nails before my head exploded.

But now I feel much better.

Russian ICBM

I read a news story today about the Russians announcing a new version of the Topol-M missile that can penetrate any defense system. I don't know about any defense system - nobody's ever tried to get an ICBM through to the Death Star, after all. But it is pretty easy to saturate and overload anti-ballistic missile systems, and an ICBM with MIRVs is a good way to get started.

But in another way, it's a development that doesn't mean anything. All it means, fundamentally, is that the Topol-M will be replacing the old (but quite large) SS-18 ICBM, which was already MIRV-capable, so it doesn't represent any new capability, just a replacement for an aging capability.

Had the new Topol-M variant been capable of depressed trajectories, or accurate FOBS, or had maneuverable RVs, I might sit up and take notice. But as it stands, it's just replacing an old MIRVed ICBM with a new MIRVed ICBM and doesn't seem to represent any radical new capability.

The only thing that seems close to being radically new is the ability to launch a MIRV-capable ICBM from a mobile launcher. It's an interesting gimmick, but I am of the mind that it is just a gimmick. It still seems to me that ballistic missile submarines armed with long-range SLBMs are still the ultimate deterrent and land-based systems exist mostly to buttress the egos of the honchos who run the Strategic Rocket Forces. (I read a lot about the necessity of maintaining the nuclear triad, but why? I think the nuclear triad is an idea that we need to revisit.)

But what do I know? I helped put a banana in a pina colada and produced a strange milkshake.

Homo Landfill

For those who know me only as a nerdy model builder-slash-electrical engineer type, I present this photograph of a Caterpillar D6C, which is almost identical to the machine I operated at the landfill when I was going to college. Add trash guards to the engine cowling, a large trash blade attachment to the top of the blade, and a two-shank ripper in place of the drawbar and it would be identical to the machine I operated.

I come by my love of heavy equipment honestly. My dad ran a dozer for most of his working life, and my grampa was a dozer operator from as far back as World War Two (though he never called himself a "dozer operator"; he preferred the term "catskinner"). Though my landfill job didn't pay terribly well and exposed me to extreme heat, noise, stink, dust and other hazards (like getting rotted mattresses bound up in the tracks) I still look back on this as the most satisfying job I ever had. I never, not even once, woke up and said "Oh crap, I have to go to work." Instead I literally bounded out of bed and said "Hot dog! I get to go run a dozer and crush stuff!"

Czech Potatoes

I don't speak Czech, and I admit that with some shame because I've always wanted to be fluent in some other language in addition to English, something Continental and vaguely high-falutin (as we say here in The Sticks). I'd be better off learning Spanish, which in Arizona isn't so much an exercise in stretching one's mind as almost a necessity (if only so I could order lunch in Filiberto's without having to use my hands. "A seven. I want a seven. Yes, seven.")

A few weeks ago I ordered some modeling stuff from a specialist company in the Czech Republic. The transaction was extremely satisfactory. He got his pile of koruna and I got my specialist space kits, and all pots were watered. The box was filled with crumpled newspapers, and I'm a sucker for reading newspapers that are used to fill boxes. I used to read a lot of Texas newspapers courtesy of Squadron Mail Order, but since they'd apparently switched to nondescript brown paper I find the coverage of doings in Texas wanting.

So I dug out the Czech newspaper and flipped through it. Here's where my inability to read Czech really becomes shameful, because there are stories I'd like to read. For example, "David Beckham je tvari firmy Gilette." I don't know what it means, but it sounds cool! Or "Evropsky sampionat vynese britskemy obchodu militardu liber". It comes with a photograph that appears to show Tony Blair and some unnamed gentleman scribbing graffitti on the sidewalk outside 10 Downing Street beneath the stern gaze of a British policeman. Wow! Our papers don't have anything like that! Or this small item from "Spojene staty", which I believe to be the United States: "Viceprezidentem Kerryho muze byt McCain". Say that again? The Vice-President is a ho who is considering biting McCain? That's fabulous!

The best part, though, is the ad from a grocery store. It looks just like an ad for an American grocery store, proving that some things really are universal. So what's for sale at the local Lidl grocery store?

Brambory! I think they're spuds, but there they are, brambory! And today 26 percent off! Or how about a nice anana, which seems to be a pineapple? Or a few bunches of lahudkova cibule, today 25 percent off, and a lovely accent to any salad? All this greenery got you down? How about a bottle of Vermouth (I kid you not) and a nap in a festive kempinkova zidle, better known as a lounge chair? (As an aside, I thought Kempinkova was married to Stalin at some point, but what do I know?) Here's a nice roomy stan, or tent, today only 888 koruna. Among its specifications are "pro 3 osoby", which may mean that one can only fit three assholes into it, but I'm just guessing. And finally, "panska dzinova kosile", 199 koruna each, and a bargain at twice the price I'm sure. What are they? Capri pants for men.

All this comes from the "Lidove Noviny" dated Sobota 29, kvetna 2004. If this means what I think it means, it means that the Czech company I ordered the stuff from has been stockpiling newspapers for going on three years.

It's fascinating. Now how much was that Rosetta Stone software again?

Model Kit Blog

I decided to post my kit reviews and other modeling hoohah on a seperate blog, viewable at:

http://kit-reviews.blogspot.com

Teethus No Geekaloid

It just struck me that I forgot to ask if I could keep my wisdom teeth after they were pulled.

Darn!

Probably not, though. They're probably considered "medical waste" these days and have to be incinerated or dissolved in acid or something...

How Did That Happen?

I was going through my collection of unbuilt kits the other day, looking for something fun to work on, and realized that somehow I had ended up with three 1/72nd scale Challenger I tank models. How did this happen? I don't even really like the Challenger all that much! I mean, it's a fine main battle tank and the British have no reason to be ashamed of it, but it's just not my favorite model. So how did I end up with three Challengers? I have no idea. I blame a twitchy mouse hand when I visit the Squadron on-line catalog, myself.

Ribbons of Shame

Here are some of my worst failings as a modeler, writ down so the world can cluck its tongue at me.

1. I rush when I'm close to finishing something. I lower my standards and accept unsatisfactory work because I'm almost done and I'm anticipating being done. I get a certain amount of satisfaction from finishing things, but that satisfaction is always tinged with a certain amount of shame because I know I didn't really finish, I just said I was finished. Some of you may know what I mean by that.

2. I etch at least one fingerprint into every model I build because I use too large a brush when I apply cement. I've gotten pretty good at sanding and polishing those fingerprints out, but it would be ever so much easier if I didn't do that in the first place.

3. Rather than definitively cleaning my airbrush, I will fight with and curse the thing all night because it's easier to snarl than to break the thing down and clean out the tiny flake of dried paint that's clogging the device. My Aztek works pretty well when it's clean, but when it isn't working well, I keep flogging it instead of stopping and cleaning it.

4. I lose on average one part per model. I've gotten pretty good at making replacements out of pieces of wire, plastic or putty, but it would be easier if I didn't do that.

5. I have some kind of problem, perhaps genetic, that makes me incapable of keeping a white model really white. It seems that no matter how often I wash my hands, white models develop a kind of grubby appearance. I estimate that at least 20% of the time I spend on the average Saturn V model is wasted polishing grubbiness out of the white paint. It's like my fingers exude a dark substance that no amount of washing will eliminate, and it's very frustrating.

6. I have trouble folding photoetched parts, perhaps because I don't have the right tools, perhaps because my technique sucks, or perhaps because I never learned to fold paper footballs in Junior High.

7. Some streak of Yankee thrift compells me to pour thinned paint back into the jar from whence it came. This is an evil habit because within a week or two the lacquer thinner turns the paint into a small olive drab hockey puck. Every time I do it I know I shouldn't, but the idea of throwing away a teaspoon or two of thinned paint gives me the jitters.

8. I cut myself a lot. I keep using knife blades beyond their "discard-by" date and get used to how they work dull, and then when I put a new blade in the knife, it goes through the part and a sizeable portion of my thumb.

9. I use my benchtop as a palette. I routinely dispense little dots of super glue onto my workbench and use pieces of wire or bitten-off sprue to transfer the glue to the model, but this leaves little puddles of sticky disaster on my workbench. I once glued by iPod to my bench by accidentally putting it right atop such a dot of super glue.

10. I always tell myself I should move my stash of decals to a cool, dark place for safe storage, but no. I leave them in a clear plastic bin out in my garage, where they are exposed to terrible temperature cycling and peak temperatures approaching 120 degrees during the day. I know that's not good for them, and I know that's why I spend so much quality time smearing decal film on cracked decals, but do I ever do anything about it? Pfft.

Bated Breath

Well, I finally went ahead and did it. I ordered the full detail and decal set for the 1/96th scale Apollo-Saturn V from New Ware in the Czech Republic, and now I can't wait to get my hands on it. It looks like an extremely comprehensive set indeed - you can find it here if you're interested:

http://mek.kosmo.cz/newware/

I found the experience of buying from New Ware very straightforward, considering that it was an international sale and their website doesn't allow direct credit card ordering. I used Paypal, and the process was simplicity itself. I sent them an email listing the products I was interested in, and within a day they had replied with an exact amount in Czech koruna. Once in Paypal, you just enter the email address of the recipient and the currency type (koruna) and the rest happens through the magic of computers.

I'm very pleased with New Ware thus far, and will post a further review when I get my greedy hands on the detail set.

I R Back

I am back, and in more ways than one!

For about the last month (give or take a week) I've been dealing with tooth pain. It started out as a dull ache that came and went, and I was content to let it do its thing. Yes, I know that tooth pain, unlike wine, does not improve with age, but I don't like going to the dentist and am prepared to pay up in the form of intermittent discomfort if that's the price of avoiding the Masked One's malign clutches. But the last week was murder. You know your teeth hurt when you sweat profusely even when you're sitting still. It got so bad I couldn't sit or lie down, so I wandered around the house night after night, unable to sleep or eat, gobbling Tylenol like M&Ms and working my way down that dreaded decision tree that leads, in the end, to the dentist's office.

I was at work Friday morning and simply couldn't take it any more - I had reached the point where I was starting to stab my fingers with pieces of wire in a despairing attempt to divert attention from my teeth. The worst part was that they all hurt, every last one of them, and I had nightmare visions of the dentist telling me "Right, you need 28 root canals." But by Friday noon I was ready for 28 root canals. I left work and drove to an emergency dental place that I remembered from the old days, and presently was told that both of my upper wisdom teeth had to come out.

There's something about the phrase "We need to pull your wisdom teeth" that makes one's blood run cold. And as I was there by myself, gas and sedatives weren't options. So with a strong feeling of impending doom I initialed the form that said "I agree to waive general anesthesia." So the guy shot me up, two shots on each side, let me sit and stew for about ten minutes, and then came in with the Vise-Grips. I would characterize his style as decisive and forceful, but mercifully swift. The left one came out hard, and with a sound as of someone breaking an entire head of celery inside my head. It also came out in pieces; he went in at least three times. The right one came out easier; it sounded more like a wet branch being slowly bent to the breaking point instead of celery being snapped. I think it came out in two pieces, but I'm not sure; by then I wasn't in full command of my faculties.

I found this all to be a fairly intense experience. I like to think I'm reasonably tough, but having my teeth being ripped out, and having to listen to it, left me sweating and trembling. I had to sit there for about ten minutes to regain my wits. It was a pity I'd left my iPod at work (I'm bad at leaving my iPod on my desk, a habit that I will one day rue). I think listening to "Dark Transmission" by Vader at maximum volume would have been a mercy, whatever one things of Polish death metal (and though I can't speak for Polish metal as a whole, I have to say that Vader is cracking good).

And then the story gets weird. You'd think that having wisdom teeth broken out of your skull would hurt like hell once the anesthetic wears off, but they didn't. My gums were a little tender and didn't like being prodded, but I didn't even need Tylenol, let alone the Vicodin prescription they gave me. I hung around work for a while, then went to my brother's house and played Heroscape till about ten, and really didn't have any pain at all. The next morning I woke up with no pain. As I write this it's about 36 hours since they were pulled out, and the only thing I feel is a vague discomfort in my gums that is about the same as the discomfort produced by eating a bowl of Cap'n Crunch cereal.

Well, that's my week. A week of intense and unrelenting agony, followed by such a blessed release from pain I almost felt like signing up to run in a marathon. Almost. Let's not get carried away.