Linda and Alice did indeed make their way to the re-nion (excuse weird spelling – note post problem below) last night, and seemed to have had a great time. They sat up after returning from the big event, and twittered about classmates, many of whom Linda has known since grammar school.
I thought it interesting to hear how two very bright and accomplished women talked about their former classmates. Life’s accomplishments may have taken a back seat to other considerations, much to my surprise. There’s a brunch this morning that I’ll be going to… I’ll check and see what the men are talking about…
So Cassie and I walked just about a half a mile this Sunday morning, more than doubling yesterday’s distance. Woo hoo!
The really good news is that edema is down, and balance is back. I’m very weak, but my 56-year-old reflex against falling is back, and that makes a huge difference (vs. 2 weeks ago). But of course this gets a bit crazy. The left side is a bit weaker than the right, so I’m using a cane for balance.
After a half-mile, the weakness asssymetry causes the back to ache, something the physical therapist has warned me about. I don’t need a back problem on top of edema and steroid myopathy. So now I have to dig out the rehab sheet for assymetrical exercises appropriate to my current trim, and try to get each side back, without creating a new problem. Thus the challenge of all these miserable side effects… oh, well… onward…
Linda has a class party this weekend. I’m using ‘party’ here because if I use the proper, more descriptive word ‘re-nion’ (if I drop only one letter, the post works), I get a permissions error from Apache (probably actually something Wordpress is doing) when I post the entry. What up with that?
Anyway, Ms. Hubbard had previously expressed no desire to attend this affair. Then friend Alice Carrott flew in from Kansas City, Michael Rosenberg from Raleigh-Durham and (local) Barb Slaton got hooked in. Suddenly it’s party time around here.
So, this morning I rose a bit early for a Saturday, walked Cassie for the first time in 3 weeks (making double the walking distance I did yesterday, short as that was) before watering the garden. Then I prepped and cooked breakfast for 7: mimosas, blueberry pancakes and cooked-to-order omelettes (all turned out on the mighty Dacor range’s griddle plate, which I don’t often have an opportunity to use). Came out pretty well, IMHO. I was pretty tired by the end of breakfast, but happy to be having a life again…
It’s real, it would seem. Not just my fogged brain…
90 degrees almost, by the time I finished up a long week’s work efforts to the extent I could, took a walk (part of rehab therapy) and got into the garden for a little work (ditto). We put the pole beans in, got stakes ready for the tomato vines and watered a thirsty-looking bunch of plants.
My muscles are very weak, and it’s almost laughable how hard it is to do simple chores, but c’est la vie. One goal at a time. If we keep at it, the muscles will come back, we’ll get slowly stronger and life willl come back a bit at a time.It’s like you get your car back from the shop, and it only does 35 MPH now… gotta keep working on it…
Most folks wouldn’t see 3 days back at work as a big deal, but I’m a happy guy. I even managed to walk back to the train station today (don’t ask how long it took)! I did almost completely collapse once I got home from the train, thanks to work, the walk, no nap opportunity and the chemo-induced fatigue, but I’m declaring victory and moving on. Life is good…
So we’ve flagged a bit in our paperlesss project, especially scannning in every document that comes through the mail et al., OCRing it in Adobe Acrobat and storing it in YEP, the very nice PDF browser for Mac (though I did a little catch-up tonight). YEP has new features at rev. 1.6: and I’m thinking about how I might want to make some changes.
Our current YEP collection runs on a G4 mini, and has some 1400 documents. I found nearly everything I needed for our taxes this year, the only missing items being things I hadn’t scannned. Now, I’m considering scanning all of my medical paperwork – bills, diagnoses et al. – it’s a huge set of files. YEP’s new feature – no file import, it just recognizes PDFs wherever they are in the file system – makes that an intriguing possibility.
I could buy inexpensive USB storage, spend the time to run alll the paper through the ScanSnap and Acrobat and be done. I might also move YEP to the Intel Core Duo for more horsepower, and figure out how to get our Canon multi-purpose device (it has a batch scannner built in and that rarity – a Mac Twain driver – so it works with Acrobat and YEP) into the act, along with the ScanSnap.
I’m also wondering if it makes sense to put documents into annual folders: 20006, 2007 and so on. The PDF scans are on the big side because of the bitmap data, but the numbers of documents – in the hundreds or low thousands – is reasonable in computer terms. And maybe I should do more hand taggging of documents: I rely on Acrobat’s OCR and YEP’s use of Apple’s Spotlight to make docs findable (and less of a chore to handle). We may have to do a little nerdly poking this weekend…
Cassie and I spent about 20 minutes in the garden this mornig, drinking coffee and, I’m pleased to say, putting in 20-some lettuce plants. I usually doze for a half-hour after spouse Linda hits the road on her 4-mile jog, but it’s getting lighter in the morning, so today I got up with her.
By the time I made coffeee, fed the dog, got the papers and breakfast, it was light enough to make our way: the garden thermometers – both digital and analog – were reporting a brisk 42 degrees and the effort to plant the red and green leaf lettuce seedlings in an alternating pattern kept the chill off. So now, only the pole beans need to go in. I’m feeling dumb I didn’t pick up some yellow wax beans while I was at the nursery…
Have to admit I was pretty tired (we’re at peak fatigue/low red cell count after chemo) by the time I got off the 4:25 CalTrain in Menlo this evening, but it was great to be out of the house and back to work today (despite 45-minute AM Caltrain delays this morning). Almost my whole day was spent in meetings: but it was good to see and interact with colleagues. Back to work again tomorrow, and we may actually get stuff done…