I enjoyed the coloring books for Christmas and am enjoying all my colored pencils, but I am obsessed with ink. It is all your fault Chris!!! you and your fountain pens.
I am pestering Chris with letters, writing siblings I have never written before, seeking pen pals online. I am writing in my journal and writing nonsense and making perfect circles and practicing letters and tossing used up paper in the trash. It is addictive. Every evening I want nothing more than to sit and write.
I have wanted to color for a while but couldn’t till I got my thumb fixed. Now that it is fixed, I am coloring and enjoying it so much that for this Christmas Eve, everybody gets a color book! And, you must give the book with one page carefully beautifully colored. And, just in case you color the best page in the book, scan the page you color before you color it so if the recipient really wants that page, they can print it. Actually, you could bring your scan here and I could print it on cardstock.
So, the theme is coloring books.
Welcome to the drawing Aleah!
Rather than make a new post or tack on a comment, I am revising the main list.
I just drew for Aleah, thinking if it worked out right she could trade names with whoever she drew. It worked out.
Luke has Chris
Nelia has Joseph
Joseph has Christina
Ramona has Aleah
Chris has Luke
Christina has Ramona
Aleah has Nelia
And for the regular Christmas gift,
Luke has Christina
Nelia has Ramona
Joseph has Chris
Ramona has Luke
Chris has Nelia
Christina has Joseph
OK with everyone?
Ramona and I talked and agree that it would be best to have Christmas here this year since Luke probably won’t yet be completely mobile. We are good with any day. Is it better to do it before or after the day? Of course, it’s early days yet so we don’t have to decide the date right now.
OK with everyone?
An afterthought… Chris and Christina, would you like to include Donavan and Aleah in Christmas Eve? I can redraw names.
Well, it’s official. We close on Tuesday. It will probably take a while to completely move in, but we will soon be living on the land. I am really looking forward to living closer to you both and looking forward to looking out my windows and seeing grass and trees instead of houses, but I think we are crazy. I guess we will get moved in eventually, but it is going to take me forever to get things done. Then I can putter around there as well as I can putter around here.
Every now and then I run across some documentation that has an amusing element, side story, or something a bit beyond the usual.
This one came up a while back and I’ve gone back and read it a few times when I needed a laugh. It’s the last bit…
Command: steal-file
only valid way to move a file from another account into the current account.
This physically moves a file to the current master dictionary from another master dictionary.
“steal-file” prompts for the account name and requires “sys2” privileges. It also requires that the
user invoking “steal-file” is not protected against updating the file at any level, master dictionary,
file level dictionary, or data file level.
After “stealing” a file, the former owner has no reference to it, not even visitation rights. He or she
can get visitation rights by building a “q-pointer” to where the file moved, or by referencing it via a
“file path”.
Maybe I’m the only one that finds it funny; that’s ok. Makes me wonder about who wrote it though, and if anyone else reviewing the documentation noticed.
Several months ago, this crossed my desk at work – https://pages.18f.gov/content-guide/voice-and-tone/
It’s a style guide – a really nicely done one – with one particular page on defining one’s organizational ‘voice’.
But it got me thinking. What is my personal voice?
Our voice is our unique personality. Just as you can identify your best friend in a crowd as soon as you hear her distinctive laugh, you can use a person’s voice to identify a piece of writing even if you haven’t seen the byline. A well-crafted voice communicates personality and values — it’s a distilled representation of an author.
It seemed like it would be a good exercise – a psychology profile, more than anything – to try to define my own voice.
And I’m kinda stuck.
We are done with radiation.
We are done with treatment. With everything. We are DONE. Well, there’s a day surgery in a few weeks to remove the chemo port. But it is good to think that we are done. 🙂
All the tests have been positive – good enough that they’ve started us on a 6-month check up schedule right off the bat.
So, till August, we get to live our regular lives.
Well.
As everyone knows, Mileva has been having trouble for some time. She had slowly worsening kidney issues diagnosed back in North Carolina, which I think accelerated due to age and the stress of a new alpha cat and a baby in the household.
She was also having issues with arthritis, and of course the stress of having her food moved around all the time as we tried to find ways to keep Eleanor out of it.
So we’ve known her time was coming.
This morning she started vomiting blood. Not huge amounts, and it stopped and she seemed fine … but cats are going to seem fine for as long as they can fake it. It was enough of a sign for me that things were worsening for her to that ‘quality of life’ point.
So we had her put down today.
I hate it, and I hate that it was necessary. As one always does. But I sincerely believe it was the right thing to do and the right time to do it.
I miss her, of course, and tonight is going to be especially hard (we didn’t have a cuddle every night, but night time was cuddle time when we could).
Mileva’s last portrait
We are over half way. Through the chemo, at least.
After the chemo we have a month of radiation. But before the chemo we had a month of diagnostic tests, so sure – we’re half way there.
There are several hopeful signs.
Most importantly, they did a PET scan and it came back very good. It didn’t find any overt signs of cancer, and just one potentially suspicious looking node around the area where all the hot spots were previously, and it’s much smaller than anything they found before.
On a scale of 1-5, we were given a 2. The dr says that 1 and 2 are both highly favorable.
Joseph has been having some numbness in his extremities and some fine dexterity issues following chemo – the results from the PET are good enough that the dr halved the chemo drug that usually causes those side effects. It’s 4 days after chemo, and the numbness is only barely present (this is when it would be peaking). So good there, too.
The other good thing is the white blood cell count. We had seen his levels drop so precipitously after each treatment – it was something the previous clinic delayed treatment for. Two treatments ago, his white blood cell count started at 1.9 (“low” is under 4; normal is 4.5 to 10) and the dr just said to go ahead with the chemo. We were concerned that his levels would reach ‘cannot be measured’ territory – 0.0001 or something. But his levels before this round were steady at 1.9. Like this is the sustainable low, and it isn’t going to crash down too much lower than that.
It’s still terribly low as we continue through the heart of cold season. But is is comforting to think that there is a immune system there, even if it’s getting pretty beat up right now.
At the Austin Zen Center there are tea and snacks available after the Saturday Dharma Talk. The other day the ‘snack’ came from Voodoo Doughnut. Voodoo Doughnut is open from Wednesday to Sunday – 24 hours a day, but they close on Sunday when they sell out. Since doughnuts do have a shelf life, they do like a bakery does: ‘day old’ doughnuts are available (really just ~8-12 hours old) if you are there to catch the deals. Maybe they aren’t as fresh, but the price reduction can make it worth doing.
Or, if you’re like me, and feel like being a bit silly and don’t have a clue about what any of them are going to taste like… Well, I went in hoping to catch a deal. The deals come in two forms: A box of random doughnuts for 6 dollars, or a bucket for 10 dollars. They were all out of boxed doughnuts. But…
So. Many. Doughnuts. Yep, we’re going to make ourselves sick if we’re not careful here.
They did have a few buckets. So I bought one. (it was either that or a simple dozen for 10.00 ) Oh, and that bucket – it isn’t empty. Mostly empty, but there’s still a dozen or so doughnuts in there. Bottom ones got a bit more smashed up than the rest, but that’s expected.
Sometimes the kids have a contest over who gets which doughnut (‘but I wanted the one with the pink sprinkles, not the chocolate sprinkles!’). Not an issue today. I think I broke the barrier between ‘rare treat’ and ‘unlimited resource’. I’ll be trying these and figuring out which ones are worth re-trying fresh and which ones I’ll pass on in the future. Like that pink one – Daughter said those were ‘too sweet’. I haven’t tried it yet, but that’s impressive when she doesn’t want to finish even the 1/4 piece of donut.
Oh, and I also bought a fresh doughnut. No Joke: it’s the Cock’n’Balls.
Yes, it is cream filled.
Regular doughnut provided for scale. To quote Christina: “Oh. It’s bigger than the pictures online make it look” And really, the jokes just write themselves here.
Here’s the plan:
We’ll all gather in New Braunfels on Christmas Day. The idea is to all gather at noon, but that’s flexible. Whenever everyone is here is when we’ll start.
Food is going to be open grazing, not any formal sit-down meal. We’ll get something to eat before starting in on presents, and we’ll bring desserts out after presents, but other than those obvious outlines it will be pretty relaxed.
As far as eating, here’s what we have:
Nelia: veggies and fruits, pumpkin cheesecake
Christina: rolls, dessert item tbd
Ramona: meat & cheeses, punch/juice, cookies tbd
If I’ve forgotten some major food group, let me know. Or feel free to just bring it along. It’s all good.