Ouch

Okay, so the anesthetic was incredibly smooth - just dozed off and woke up with amazing clarity. No grogginess or headache.
Turns out the big thing is getting pumped pull of air.
Damn! I've spent the past four hours dealing with savage gas pains and cramping and doing my level best to equalize internal pressures.
The doc found and removed three polyps and sent them off for routine biopsy. I get the results in his office Dec. 6.
Another hour or two and I ought a feel reasonably normal again.

Empty and waiting

It's 5:51 a.m. and I'm scheduled for a colonoscopy in a couple of hours - the first since 1968.
I spent yesterday flushing out the pipes with a liquid diet and a couple of doses of an industrial strength laxative. I suppose I should be hungry this morning, but I'm not.
This is not my idea of a good time and I will be deliriously happy to be done with it.
Maria is taking the day off to be with me for the procedure - I'll need a driver to bring me home since they'll wig me out with drugs. That's something they didn't do 38 years ago. I'm supposed to see this as an improvement, but the desire to remain conscious and in control is pretty strong and I'm not eager to relinquish it.
Friends and even strangers tell me this is no big deal and they're probably right. We shall see.

Adios, Clint

Went to the funeral home visitation last evening for Clint Husted.
I was pleased to see his wife had placed a floral arrangement, including his motorcycle boots and Schuberth helmet on the casket.
There were still bugs on the helmet - the mark of a true BMW rider.
Lots of people there - we stood in line for 90 minutes to express our condolences to Lynnette.
I was pleased to see that the video slideshow of Clint's life included this photo I shot a few years ago in Brown County, Ind. That's Clint on the left and Rich Nathan on the right.
We went to dinner afterward with seven other club members at a restaurant run by the nephew of our club friend Dominick. It's an extremely upscale Mexican place with fabulous food and spectacular presentation. They make fresh guacamole at your table and mix some of the best margaritas I've had.
Unfortunately, Friday night is salsa dancing night and we also got a waiter whose brain imploded when we asked him to calculate separate checks. Forty-five minutes later, Dom siezed control of the situation and declared he'd pay the tab and let us know what our share was by e-mail.
I stuffed myself stupid and slept so poorly that I was in no shape to ride or drive to the funeral which is going on at this moment.

What First Amendment?

At the request of my wife, there will be no further references to her children, her ex or any controversy attached to them in this blog.
Maybe it's time to start a new blog elsewhere with names changed to protect the guilty.

Grrrrrrrr

I'm really disgusted with Blogger.
I recently changed over to the beta version and now can't upload photos from my cell phone.
Don't be surprised if you see me move to another blog hosting service.

McMistake

I had to drive to Lafayette to deliver a set of wedding photo CDs and stopped at McDonald's for lunch.
I ordered a Filet-o-Fish sandwich and a medium drink.
What I got was a F-o-F bun with tartar sauce and cheese around a spicy chicken patty.
Tasted odd, but not horrible.

Sad day

This is the second consecutive day of cold November rain, made even more depressing by the news that Clint Husted, a BMW Club member somewhat younger than I, dropped dead yesterday with a heart attack.
Clint wasn't a close friend and I don't recall ever riding with him, but we socialized at club events and rallies, so he was certainly more than an acquaintance. He had recently taken a buy-out and early retirement from General Motors which begs the question whether there was a connection between ending a career and ending a life.
It's certainly not unusual for guys to die within six months of retiring.
Retirement ranks high in the Life Event Stress Scale, well ahead of sex difficulties, the death of a close friend and a change in residence.
He seemed to be focused on the future. On Sept. 22, he responded to a (retired teacher) club member's e-mail teasing that questioned his usefulness and compentence with, "I can assure you that my teaching skills plus supporting individuals in saving money is still greatly appreciated. I am not like some retired teachers who have receded to the depths of watching daily TV, plus being prodded to clean the house."
I have no idea what other stressors were piling up on Clint over the past year to aggravate what I can only suppose was an undiagnosed heart problem.
Looking back at the year following my mother's death and my early retirement, I certainly had my share of stress points:
Death of close family member - 63
Retirement - 45
Marriage - 50
Change in financial status - 38
Mortgage or loan over $10,000 - 31
Change in residence - 20
Total - 247
A score of 150-299 means medium susceptibility to stress-related illness. Anything over 300 means you're really fucked up and are headed for trouble.
Reviewing the last 12 months of my life, I have to really search for any points at all, so I guess that's encouraging.
Clint's widow Lynnette is at the funeral home in Noblesville as I type these words, so we should have the memorial service information soon. The funeral and burial will be in his home state of Michigan, so I don't expect the club will be asked to provide any kind of motorcycle escort here in Indiana.
Anyway, it's a damned shame he had to check out so early.

Skipping and Shuffling

I'd been withholding my classical music xikkwxruib from my iPod because I didn't want to have the third movement of Beethoven's 6th Symphony pop up between the Seeds and Miles Davis or get the Gyuto Monks chanting on the heels of Beck or Neil Sedaka when I have the iPod on shuffle, which is most of the time.
Then today I noticed the option in iTunes track Info, letting me designate a track or an album to be skipped while shuffling.
Hot damn!
Now I can include everything - maybe even my three CDs of sound effects - and segregate out the stuff I don't want showing up in the shuffle rotation.
Seems like I find a new reason to be impressed with the folks at Apple every day that I use that amazing little device.
So now I have something like 6,400 tracks, plus a whole bunch of podcasts and a smattering of music videos and other videos.
The podcast lineup is constantly changing, since iTunes keeps me current on a day-to-day basis.
So now it's gotten to the point that I feel naked if I leave home without it. All this for a gizmo that I was certain, six months ago, that I neither needed nor wanted.
Thanks again, Sean, Steve and Maria. You hit a home run with this birthday gift.

O, frabjous day!

TechTV, the glorious cable/satellite geek network that got bought and killed by the greedy idiots at Comcast, is coming back in an updated internet form.
Undotv.com should be up and running sometime in mid-January with all of the old stalwarts, including Leo Laporte and Chris Pirillo.
I've been getting my geek fix via the various Leo Laporte podcasts, but this will be much better.

Short book report

Cool book about the iPod phenomenon.

Oh say, can you see?

Maria spent much of yesterday hunched over her new Bernina sewing machine and tensely complaining there isn't enough light in her sewing room. She's in what is arguably the brightest room in the house with lots of windows and a southeastern exposure with a three-bulb overhead light fixture and a built-in light in her Bernina.
I recognized the complaint as a symptom of presbyopia - the inability of the eye to focus properly on nearby objects, which is a common occurrence in middle-age.
Maria has good vision and has never worn glasses. Her last eye exam was about 13 years ago when she was 30. At that time, her eye doc told her she'd probably need reading glasses when she turned 40.
I've worn glasses or contact lenses since the third grade, so it's no big deal for me, but she was loathe to surrender to the fact that it was time for some vision correction.
So on the way to the Meijer store for our weekly grocery run last night, I explained why people who need reading glasses initially complain that there isn't enough light to see closeup stuff.
There is a phenomenon in photography called depth-of-field. When you close down the aperture on a camera lens, i.e., make the light hole smaller, it makes the light waves more coherent and sharpens the image of objects in front of and behind the point where the lens is focused. The same thing happens with the human eye. When you increase the light intensity, the iris closes tighter and the depth-of-field increases, making closeup objects appear sharper than they did before.
You can get by with adding light for awhile, but eventually you have to turn to reading glasses.
So I suggested we cruise by the pharmacy area of Meijer last night so Maria could try on some reading glasses and see if they helped.
It was, to say the least, an eye-opener for her. The first pair she tried had a magnification factor of 1.75 and she was startled at how much sharper fine print appeared. She tried various lens strengths and finally settled back on the 1.75.
She wore them to do a bit of sewing last night with good results, but refused to take the plastic tag off - keeping her options open to return them (refusing to completely accept the inevitable conclusion that she needs them).
She still has the tag on this morning, but I predict it'll be gone by tonight.
Here's a photo of her taking to her daughter on the phone, eyes closed because she gets disoriented looking at distant objects.


30 minutes later: the tag is gone.

Easy come, easy go...

This post is long overdue. So long overdue that I've lost most of my regular readers.
After all, why check a blog that seemingly never gets updated.
So here's the update.
Since we sold our rental property we've been taking care of lots of things that we put off for lack of ready cash.
We threw about $1,800 at our two cars - timing belt for the del Sol and catalytic converter for the Subaru; got Maria's wedding ring repaired (fractured baguette); replaced the waterlogged and ripped 6-year-old hot tub cover and added a mechanical cover lifter; replaced the cabinet-mounted microwave that died about six months ago; bought Maria an 80GB iPod; added a Nikon 18-70mm lens to the inventory, painted the front porch, got a proper desktop docking station for my Treo 700p; and bought a new Mr. Coffee coffee maker to replace the one that was prone to leaks and spills.
Still to buy: a new work computer (mine is six years old and makes photo editing more of a chore than it should be), and a Nikon D200 for Maria.
The bulk of the proceeds are sitting in a six-month CD while we draft a master plan to rip out the deteriorating wood deck behind the house and raze the two ramshackle garages. In their place, we plan a fenced patio and a proper two-car, two-motorcycle garage with an upstairs skylighted photo studio and offices.

Happy Birthday, Sean

My son Sean is 39 today.
His wife Ruth organized a collaborative gift with me, his mom and his brother Steve.
Together, we came up with enough money for a really good acoustic guitar.
Sean called to thank me this afternoon and it was clear that he was surprised and overwhelmed.
Mission accomplished.

M&M's what?

Hoping to save me from a diabetic coma, my wife took the leftover Halloween candy - mostly mini Reese* cups - to work with her.
But when she called me in to edit copy and do some other work, I found the cache and attacked it greedily. I also found a bunch of trick-or-treat-size packages of those colorful little chocolate candies that melt in your mouth, not in your hand.
As I ripped one open, my eyes fell upon an apostrophe that I never before noticed.
The name on the package is "M&M's."
What?
How can this be? All sentient writers of the English language know that you don't form the plural of anything with an apostrophe.
What the package designer has done, then, is to declared that the contents of the package belong to "M&M." Which begs the question: M&M's what? Little sugar-shelled chocolate candies?

I was stunned and somewhat chagrined that I'd never noticed this before.
So I fired up Google to find out what, if anything, the Ms stand for in M&M.
I seemed to remember the Mars family - the folks who gave us Snickers, Three Musketeers, Milky Way and Mars bars - was involved in it and I was right.
Forrest Mars left his father's successful candy business and struck out on his own, working for a time for Nestle and Tobler in Europe. Some people belive he got the idea for his new candy from sugar-coated chocolate pellets given soldiers in the Spanish Civil War. At any rate, he patented the idea in March, 1941. He did a deal with Bruce Murrie (the other M and a son of Hershey exec William Murrie) that got him access to Hershey's stock of chocolate. World War II was on and chocolate was rationed with Hershey having the enviable position of being the choclatier to the U.S. military.
After the war, Mars bought Murrie out, but kept the M&M name on the product.
Mars died on July 1, 1999, at the age of 95. At the time of his death, his estimated net worth of $4 billion, according to Forbes magazine, made him one of the richest people in the U.S.; his sons, Forrest Mars, Jr. and John Mars are now executives with the company and also said to be worth $4 billion each, along with his daughter, Jacqueline Mars Vogel. Based in Hackettstown, N.J., M&M/Mars employs 30,000 people worldwide with sales of more than $20 billion per year.
But I still can't get over that damned apostrophe.

*And it makes me crazy to hear morons like the counter workers at Dairy Queen prounounce it "Reesy" or "Reesie" cups. Have they never heard of anyone named Reese? Where the last "e" is silent?

Happy Birthday, Steve

Thirty-six years ago tonight, I found myself a father for the second time.
My son Steve was born in Coleman Hospital in Indianapolis on Halloween, 1970.
He took his daughter Lisa trick-or-treating tonight. She's 2½ and was dressed as a kitty.
When I called to wish him a happy birthday a few minutes ago, he said Lisa was deep into her trick-or-treat candy.
"One of her pupils is more dialated than the other," he joked.
Here's a photo from Halloween, 1974 - Steve's fourth birthday and a week before Sean's seventh birthday.

New Who

Endless Wire, the first Who album in more than 20 years, was released today.
Got it on Itunes.

Strange vacation

This time last week we were bearing down on a cheap hotel near the geographic center of the United States in north central Kansas, hauling ass for the Colorado high country.
We arrived at our friends' place in Alma - the highest town in the United States - Monday afternoon for what we expected would be a week-long visit.
But an intense attack of altitude sickness, aggravated by a powerful low pressure system and the threat of a paralyzing blizzard sent us scurrying out of the mountains Wednesday morning.
We did, however, get to visit our friends at the Colorado Mountain Hat Co. in Fairplay where Maria got measured for a very sassy cowgirl hat that just might show up here sometime after Christmas.
We'd also considered the Texas gulf coast and the New England fall foliage as vacation destinations, but it turned out that last week was a crappy time to vacation anywhere but maybe the Pacific Northwest.
Since Maria's vacation days are precious, she was very unhappy about having to abort our mountain sabatical. She was slightly pacified when we noticed a billboard for the Quilter's Harvest quilt store in Higginsville, Mo., along I-70 east of Kansas City. We exited the interstate and found the store where she loaded up on some great fabric that was on sale. So it wasn't a complete wash-out.
Here's a photo of Maria rooting through the bolts of cloth.
I was also able to turn the quilt store ladies onto a fabulous cache of local quilts at the Ray County Museum in Richmond, Mo., just up the road from them, that had previously escaped their notice. I discovered the place while on a Jesse James country tour for RoadBike Magazine about five years ago.
We arrived home about midnight Thursday.
Maria's son Austin had been house/dog-sitting for us and was getting bored since his girlfriend got grounded for being late to school Tuesday morning because she was hanging out here and also because he got downsized out of his pet shop job.
Losing the low-paying pet shop gig is actually a great thing because it forces him to get unstuck and find a better-paying job as a prerequsite to getting out of his dad and stepmother's house and on his own.
Me, I'm just happy to have found a sixpack of Hofbraü Maibok beer at Kahn's Liquors in Carmel. It's a wonderful German bock beer with a fabulous rich taste and a kick like a mule.
And now I'm going downstairs to get another.

Breakfast

At a cafe on the east edge of Norton, Kans.

We're off

We're pulling things together in preparation for a long-overdue trip to the Colorado Rockies.
Maria and I indulged in new Columbia parkas yesterday - mine came with an iPod pocket and a set of headphones in little collar pouches - so we're ready to go looking for winter before it comes to Indiana.
It's still a few minutes before sunrise, but we haven't packed a thing. I took our external hard drive and our photo CD archive over to Maria's parents last night for safekeeping and Maria's son Austin will be here through the week to care for the dogs.
Maria's never taken U.S. 24 across Kansas and eastern Colorado, so I plan to take that route instead of our usual I-70 bullet run.
Well, I must be off.
I will, of course, post from the road.

Can you believe it?

There's only one electrical outlet situated for easy laptop use at Barnes & Noble.
And it's handy to just one table in the cafe.
And it's being used by an Asian Purdue University student who's sitting there grinning at his screen.
I'm down to 21 percent battery, so my photo editing is at a standstill until I can access some AC power.
******************************
I flopped down in an armchair with a couple of Photoshop how-to books and my iPod and by the time I was through paging through the books, the kid was gone.
I quickly pounced on the table and outlet and, as it turned out, it wasn't a moment too soon. The kid came strolling back and seemed startled to see "his" spot taken. Apparently he has a more robust battery in his laptop because he was able to set up at another table and work.
I hunkered down with our most recent set of wedding photos - 1,700+ images - and winnowed them down to 800 and change for posting to our pay-per-print site for friends and relatives of the bridal couple to see and buy.
I'll give them another go-through tonight and try to get the remainder posted.
On the vacation front, it appears that Austin will honor his commitment to house/dog-sit for us, so we're scrambling to get things together for a Saturday departure.
The del Sol came out of the shop with a new timing belt, oil and lube and balanced and rotated tires for about $600. The timing belt is supposed to get changed every 60,000 miles. I had 189,500 miles on my original timing belt, so I figure I've saved $1,200 on timing belts over the life of the car.
The Subaru Forester, which is our traveling car, goes into the shop Friday afternoon for a new catalytic converter.
I can't image being ready to leave by Saturday morning, but we shall see.
Unless the sky falls, in the form of a blizzard in the plains, our destination is sunny Colorado.