Direction Connection

Today at closing, the attorney actually said “Wow” when he saw my credit score.

Josie has had some health adventures recently. On a Sunday at the end of June, I spied a lump on her left forearm elbow; it seemed to be cyst-like, so I took her to the vet the following Monday. The vet agreed that it looked like a cyst, but took some cell samples and looked at them anyway. She thought the cell samples didn’t look quite right, so she sent them off to be analyzed. That Friday I learned that the cells were indicative of a soft-tissue cancer, either hemangiopericytoma or fibrosarcoma. The “good” news was that either one of these types of cancer is typically locally invasive, meaning that it’s a cancer that doesn’t like to migrate to other body parts, except after it’s been around for a while (this is my loose interpretation).

The vet said that a definitive diagnosis could not be made based on the cytology results, and that Josie could have surgery to biopsy the lump. She said that I could just get the lump removed (which likely would require a skin graft to preserve her range of motion due to the lump’s location on her elbow) or amputate the leg entirely. I was initially extremely opposed to amputation, but throughout that day and the next day, Rebecca and I did some research. It seems like three-legged dogs do really well–they’re certainly able to balance with only three legs (we’ve even found stories about some dogs who can get along with only two legs), and they have no body image, so that’s not an issue.

This past Tuesday, we went to the NC State Veterinary Teaching Hospital in Raleigh, and discussed our options. I had thought that if they could do a biopsy without putting her under general anasthesia, I’d do that and then make a decision about amputation based on the histopathology results. But I learned on Tuesday that they needed to put her under regardless of whether they did a regular old (tissue sample only) biopsy or an excisional biopsy, so I figured since that was the case, I’d have the excisional biopsy (there was a price difference between the two, but it wasn’t enough of a difference to persuade me one way or another). Also, the surgeon who examined her said that there was enough skin to work with that they wouldn’t need to do a skin graft. They took her blood on Tuesday to make sure nothing was out of whack prior to surgery, and all looked good, so we were a go for surgery on Wednesday.

After providing a detailed explanation of Josie’s severe separation anxiety to both staff members we met with on Tuesday, I took Josie in yesterday morning for her surgery. They were going to try to get her in early in the day so that she could definitely go home that night, so I expected a call around mid-day to let me know how she was doing post-surgery. Instead, I had a bit of a scare when the fourth-year resident on the case called around mid-day to tell me that there was a “suspicious nodule” that appeared when they x-rayed her lungs to be sure there were no metastases prior to the surgery. She asked if they could do a fluoroscopy (live x-ray) to get a better look. The price was miniscule compared to the overall bill I was expecting for the day, so I said to go ahead. Then I freaked out for about 25 minutes, IMed Rebecca to let her know what was going on, and practically broke down when a former supervisor asked how my dog was. Then the resident called me back and said they weren’t able to find the suspicious nodule on fluoroscopy, so it must have been a shadow or something.

Finally, I got a call around 4:00 to tell me that Josie was out of surgery and starting to wake up. The resident said the surgery was really quick, and that the surgeon’s gross assessment was that it was cancerous (which we already kinda knew, based on the cytology), and that we’d probably need to follow-up with Oncology to discuss the next steps after we got the histopathology results in a few days. She told me we could pick Josie up around 7:30, then called me back at 5:30 to say that Josie was doing so well, we could pick her up anytime.

She’s home now, with a shaved front left arm and wearing a positively demeaning cone collar, but other than that, she seems to feel fine (by the way, she felt completely fine prior to surgery too–she clearly had not begun to feel any of the effects of the cancer by the time we caught it). At this very moment, she is obviously having interesting doggie dreams because she is making her super-cute “whoop-whoop-whoop” noise. She limps a bit whenever the pain medication starts to wear off, but I don’t anticipate that she’ll have a limp after she heals further.

Next steps? We don’t know. I’m not too keen on radiation. It’s expensive, requires frequent vet visits, and does not have as high of a “cure rate” as amputation (also, um, she’s a dog…). Amputation may seem drastic, but it’s less expensive, requires only one initial multiple day, heavily-sedated hospital stay, and prevents recurrence at the initial site (because the initial site is no longer there), thereby reducing the risk of metastasis. At this point, that’s where I think we’re going…but probably no earlier than August.

Oh, and did I mention we close on our house this afternoon? Yeah, it’s been a busy week. The movers come on Monday. Yikes!

Now that we’ve officially cleared the final hurdles to close on our house this week, we decided to allow ourselves to go shopping for “house stuff”. We went to Bed, Bath, and Beyond on Saturday, and to Southern Season and Kitchenworks on Sunday. Here’s the rundown of purchases:

• Yet another cutting board that Rebecca simply needed to have (it’s somehow made of paper, or something). We now own seven cutting boards.
• A magnetic knife strip for the new place (we’re leaving the ones we bought several months ago at our rental house, because we’d rather do that than fill in the holes from screwing them into the wall).
• Battery-operated LED lights for inside of our new closets.
• Set of six fairly basic coasters.
• A toaster oven to replace the toaster I bought in April 2005 that for some inexplicable reason now does not work very well.
• A fried-egg sized frying pan (for Melissa).
• Popsicle molds (for Josie–we filled them with beef broth and put chew sticks in them. She loves them!).
• Two brew-in-mug tea cups (and some loose leaf tea).
•  A butter bell (see www.butterbell.com).

I know it probably seems like we went a little bit nuts, but the list of items we didn’t buy but really wanted is even longer! Here’s a sample of the items we restrained ourselves from buying:

• Wine glasses.
• Bath towels, hand towels, and washcloths.
• A ginger grater.
• New placemats and cloth napkins.
• New kitchen towels.
• An Oxo salad spinner (it has a brake).
• An immersion blender (Southern Season was out, or I’m sure we would have bought it).
• A pot clip to hold cooking utensils suspended above the pot.
• A microplane.
• More knives (for Rebecca).
• More All-Clad pans (for Rebecca).
• A cookie sheet or something else metallic that we can hang up and use to store our magnetic spice containers.
• Silicone cupcake pan (or bread loaf pan, or just about anything else baking-related that’s silicone–for Melissa).
• Outdoor recliner (for Melissa).

Oh, and I’m sure there’s more. I think we showed remarkable restraint!

I would love to be checking my email right now, but unfortunately, I can’t. That’s because the folks at google mail (”gmail”) simply cannot seem to get their act together these days. Often when I try log onto my account, I get either a cutesy littel “Oops” message or the following message:

We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors. You won’t be able to log in while these errors last, but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.

Please try logging in to your account again in a few minutes.

Yeah, right. A few minutes. Sure, I’ve tried that. For about a half hour. In the past when this has happened, I’ve tried emailing the gmail people once I finally am able to log on, so that I can tell them just how much their product sucks. They sent me a lovely little email that basically said, yep, we were having a problem, but it appears to be fixed now. But let us know if it happens again. Super. So now I imagine I’m supposed to save the gmail customer support email address in my hotmail account so I can email the gmail people from hotmail, because if my gmail isn’t working at the time, that’s really the only way I’m going to be able to contact them, isn’t it?

Rebecca just emailed the gmail customer support people, copying my hotmail account so that they can get in touch with me to rectify the problem. Which begs the question: Why don’t I just migrate my email life back to hotmail and forget gmail ever existed? The bells and whistles of gmail are nice, sure, but only if the basic email functionality actually WORKS. Which it doesn’t right now. So what’s the point?

The bottom line: Can the bells and whistles, gmail, and just develop an email interface that actually does what it’s supposed to do–allow users to log on and send and receive messages.

We went to see Pilobolus at the American Dance Festival at Duke University last night with our friends Molly and Susanne. (Here’s the program.) I don’t know much about dance, so our conversation afterwards was somewhat limited to “wasn’t it amazing when …” and “that was so impressive when they …” and “that one with the chairs was unbelievable,” and I found myself wishing that my sister was there to offer her movement thoughts. She was responsible for my last modern dance excursion, when our family went to see Alvin Ailey at Christmas time in NYC, for free, because my sister is cool like that. Anyway, my point: if you have a chance to see them, you should.

It’s been established that Melissa is the more voracious reader of the two of us — I’d be embarassed to calculate the ratio of the books she’s read since we started dating to the books I’ve read since we got together, and avid readers of the blog will note that she is the only one who ever updates the “Now Reading” section. However, a month or so ago we made a trip to The Regulator, a Durham independent bookstore, and I bought a bunch of books in hopes of improving my numbers. Right now I’m in the midst of Special Topics in Calamity Physics, which I bought because the cover looked cool and the title was neat and I think I’d heard of it somewhere, and I am already three quarters of the way through it, and this is impressive! After I finish, I know that Melissa wants me to read I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe, because she is dying to have someone to talk to about it, and I have discouraged her from talking about it so far, because I don’t want her to ruin it for me. I like Tom Wolfe, a lot — I remember snagging The Right Stuff from my parents’ bookshelf when I was young, and then reading it again when I was older, and I also enjoyed A Man in Full and Hooking Up, a book of short stories. The bad news for Melissa is that, before I’m done with Special Topics in Calamity Physics, I am likely to receive two other books I ordered — Ambient Findability and Everything is Miscellaneous. These are non-fiction books, which I know Melissa secretly frowns upon for leisure reading; worse, they are geeky books, and so we will see how I negotiate this delicate situation.

After spending lots of weekends at home, we planned a few weekend getaways for May. The trips occurred on consecutive weekends, but they couldn’t have been more different.

First, we went to the Lake Eden Arts Festival (LEAF). It’s a music and dance festival held twice yearly in Black Mountain, NC. I hadn’t been to LEAF in nearly 5 years, and was excited to go back, particularly because Rebecca had never been there before. We had a really good time camping, listening to good music, contra-dancing, kayaking, and eating bad-for-us festival food. We even bought some jewelry and a hammock that was made by Mayan Indians on the Yucatan Peninsula (or something like that–and yes, I know there’s supposed to be an accent on the second a in Yucatan, but I’m not up to figuring out how to add diacratic marks in WordPress). Now we just need a house where we can set it up (more on that later).

We went back to work for three days, and then headed out to Las Vegas on Wednesday night, to attend the wedding of a long-time friend of Rebecca’s. We arrived at the Luxor very late on Wednesday night (12:30 Las Vegas time, which was 3:30 am East Coast time), where the nice man behind the check-in counter “upgraded” us to a nicer room than what we had reserved. Instead of a room in the pyramid (which is the main part of the hotel, where the casinos are), he set us up in the tower. This ended up being fine (and perhaps preferable in some ways to the room we’d reserved), although he gave us a smoking room with two double beds instead of a King bed. I’m sure he assumed we’d prefer two beds to one, but he could have asked…

In addition to attending the wedding and reception, we saw the Blue Man Group at the Venetian, had some good food, and gambled. I decided that my relationship with money does not support a true gambling habit, so I spent (notice that I did not say “lost,” although that is essentially the truth) $20 on one day and $25 on another day. I played slot machines and video roulette, and I wasn’t very lucky, probably because I didn’t play  very “riskily.” Rebecca dropped a whole lot more than that at the craps tables (I’m convinced she knows the total on some level of her brain, but she’s clearly not dwelling on it).  She demonstrated good beginner’s luck at both craps and video roulette, but enjoyed playing so much that she didn’t leave with money in her pocket.

So those were our May trips. We have more tentatively planned for later in the summer. These likely will include the Blue Ridge Parkway, New York, Cleveland, and Asheville. I’ll also be traveling to Portland, OR (via New York) to see my brother and his family. Note: We will visit Ft. Collins after my sister-in-law has my first little nephew, but probably not until the fall.

Well, in addition to Rebecca’s recent gardening craze, we’ve also gotten quite into birdfeeders lately. There’s this local feed and seed, which has pet food and gardening stuff, as well as lots of birdfeeders, birdseed, and suet. So we got a birdfeeder. And a suet cage. The birds loved the feeder, which we installed by hanging it from a tree using a bungee cord, to discourage the squirrels. The squirrels were delayed, but not deterred. They loved the birdseed–and the suet–they weren’t particularly picky. So Rebecca bought a thistle feeder (really small seed that the squirrels either aren’t interested in or can’t get to because the holes on the feeder are so small they only accommodate beak). She also bought a feeder that suction cups to our window, which she thought would keep the squirrels away because there’s no way they can climb to it.

I was really disappointed that the first feeder had become the Squirrel’s (I’m convinced there’s only one, very evil, squirrel, but Rebecca insists that there are multiple squirrels) domain. So I began googling, and googling, and googling. And I found-a-ha!-the perfect solution! Add cayenne pepper to the birdseed, and the squirrels will stay away (apparently, the birds don’t notice it). So we did. And Rebecca was lucky enough actually to see the Squirrel discover the cayenne pepper. She said it immediately dropped to the ground and began rubbing its face into the grass while she laughed sadistically–I mean, hysterically.

Satisfied that we finally had the squirrels outsmarted, we left for a weekend getaway (more on that later). When we returned, we found the first birdfeeder (the one to which we’d added the cayenne pepper) lying on the ground. The Squirrel had actually gnawed through the cord it hung from (which was connected to the bungee cord)! I now refer to this particular incident as the Revenge of the Squirrel. We haven’t yet fixed it. We think we need to get a small chain, or perhaps coat a new cord with cayenne pepper?

Who would have thought the Squirrel could be so crafty? Or so acrobatic? It’s crazy watching it practically hang upside down to jump onto the birdfeeders, or head-butt the window birdfeeder so the little trays will pop out of it and spill all over the ground. We have a few choice nicknames for the little…bugger, but they’re not appropriate for our blog.

It’s a long story that starts at the farmers market and ends with unexpected mulching, but I think it’s best just told in pictures.

This is what the flower bed in our front yard looked like after I spontaneously decided to weed it. As usual, we neglected to take a true “before” picture, so you can’t see all the junk that I pulled out of it. I disturbed an ant nest and found lots of other critters while I was at it. I may have also killed the rose bush our landlords planted, we’ll see.

This is what it looked like after we planted things:

We bought the plants at Barnes Supply Company, which is a feed & seed store that’s less than a mile from our house. We get our pet food there too, and the Josie-dog always likes to tag along because they give her even more biscuits than I do. We actually made two trips there yesterday — the first to buy herb seedlings to plant (my attempts at seeding them myself failed yet again), and the second, post-mulching, to buy flowers for the flower bed and a birdfeeder for outside the office window.

I hadn’t intended to mulch, you see, much like I hadn’t intended to weed, but our very nice neighbor saw us working and came over and offered us mulch from a pile he has in his back yard from getting some trees cut down. Melissa did the shoveling and I dislodged the mulch with a hoe, and we used the trusty wagon to haul it from his yard to ours.

[We first spotted the wagon at the Atlanta Pride festival, being pulled by a woman in a gaggle of lesbians, and it was love at first sight. It has since been dubbed the lesbian wagon. Every time we use it, we get to make use of a new feature, it seems — yesterday’s feature was the sides that swing down. If you line the wagon with a tarp, fill it with mulch, take it to the place that needs mulching, and then swing down the sides, the mulch sort of falls out like magic, and it is exciting. We do know that we could also use a wheelbarrow for this purpose, but it would diminish the joy.]

Anyway, here are some of the flowers and herbs that we planted. The herbs I can identify; the flowers I picked based on how pretty I thought they were, with no regard to whether they would actually grow, let alone thrive, in the setting I’ve chosen for them, so I’m afraid you’re on your own for figuring out what they are.

Thyme

Parsley

Flowers & herbs in planters

?

Some kind of heather

Not sure but it looks good with the marigolds

Birdfeeder; bird came separately

OK, now that we are really and truly very near the end of Buffy, we need to replenish our Netflix queue. I noticed tonight that we had only one movie in our queue, and it was not even one that sounds particularly interesting to me. So I raided the queues of my only two Netflix “friends,” Julie and Ange. Now I am up to five movies. Help! Does anyone out there want to be our Netflix “friend”?