Get those tests, people.
At times I’ve heaved a heavy sigh at my doc’s insisting on another mammogram—like, what could go wrong? Well, that did. After years of clean tests, I got the prize. Small, thanks to my doc’s insistence on me keeping schedule….and probably only a lumpectomy. Genetically unrelated to the colon cancer I beat. So THAT is very good to know. Only the size of a pencil eraser and undetectable by other than the scan.
So I know what *I’m* doing for the holidays. I’m only lacking an MRI (next week) before they set a date for surgery, and there’ll be a (slight ouch) recovery period.
And another PET scan and yet one more MRI for my OTHER doc—I tell you, I get away with nothing. She’ll have that test and me back in her office possibly the week I get surgery for the lump…which I hope will be minor. Modern science—wonderful only if we use it! And I am using it!
Anyway, we are doing ok. My cardiac doc asked me if I had any trouble climbing stairs, because having anaethetic is like climbing two flights of stairs when it comes to stress…nope. I informed him that I CAN actually run—and I can, but its dangerous to do because of the neuropathy (and a tendency to mistake where my feet are)—but I can, all the same. Pretty good for my age.
And it rather well threw me off my writing for a bit, but I’m getting back to it. And Jane, as ever, is my rock. She’s taking good care of me, or will, when we’re in that period when she has to. She’s worked hard getting the house in shape, really in shape, after all that’s happened to make that a hard job.
Snowtires are on the car. The mystery car glitch traced down to a short in the dome light. The weather is turning. The pond is put to bed. The surviving bonsai are all in for the winter, with grow lights. I now know not to trust them to Spokane weather, no matter how I’m told that it’s ok….
Finity is a young cat now, and we’re trying to teach them all the ‘talking buttons,’ —look up cat buttons on the internet, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
CJ – Prague, OK had a 5.1 earthquake Friday night around 11:25. I felt it up in Tulsa and it was felt as far away as Wichita. WX Channel link follows with an interesting radar pattern in OKC.
https://weather.com/news/trending/video/this-was-spotted-on-radar-shortly-after-oklahoma-earthquake
One of my people used to live in OK; I’ll mention the earthquake to her. Are there normal faults in that area, or was it something like fracking?
I think we have to bet on extractive processes, though intriguingly the New Madrid “failed rift zone” fault isn’t all that far away.
And if New Madrid goes, Tulsa will likely not exist.
First one I’ve felt and I’ve been here 50 years. There are occasional smaller ones I believe. I’m not sure if there is any fracking in the area.
Aparently it’s the season for earthquakes, One in Hawaii and one in California today.
Philipines too.
The larger Hawaii one interrupted a staff meeting that morning; just a fast jolt and tremor. We had 2 mountains between the epicenter and us so it wasn’t bad, but it probably alarmed the people on that side of the Big Island. One of my staff felt an even smaller aftershock this morning.
For those of us with astronomical interests, shortly after dark I noticed the crescent moon in the west, glancing out a window. A couple hours later I noticed what must be Jupiter out the same window. In a couple days we should have a nice conjunction of the two, if one is in a location to see it. Likely not here in the rainy corner of the continent’s edge.
DH’s father gave us a huge pair of Celestron binoculars for Christmas (honestly, they wouldn’t have been out of place on the bridge of a WWII destroyer.) After a lot of argument — why don’t they put assembly instructions with the ‘matching’ tripod? — we got the binocs onto the tripod and our first target was the crescent Moon. The mountains on the terminator cast fascinating shadows! Neither the binoculars, being huge and heavy and unwieldy, nor the tripod, which didn’t allow for more than about 45 degrees tilt up from horizontal, are truly made for star watching, though 🙁
Back in the 80s, I was lucky enough to find a place where I could get a pair of Celestron binoculars on sale. 7x50s – not small – with a case, and high–quality optics. I don’t take them birding, because *oof* they’re heavy, but I’ve done astronomy with them.
Well it’s more than a couple days later, but as we said back in the day, “What goes around, comes around.” This evening I saw it happening again, with the moon less than a day past, east of, Jupiter. It finally wasn’t raining.
Hey, CJ! We are planning to go to TX in pursuit of another solar eclipse in April (Yeah, TX wasn’t our first choice, but most of the other options were worse, at least as far as weather goes.) I was re-reading your account of when you and Jane and the cats went to Idaho in 2017 for the last total eclipse. At that time you said you would try to see this one as well. Is that still an option for you and Jane, or is it off the table now?
BCS, at last report, lives in Texas, Houston area. We are going to see if we can track him down, although he has had an ongoing streak of bad luck for the last several years and my contact information is likely out of date.
Anything going on at Facebook? I don’t partake, never will. And I’ll just leave it at that.
Yes, CJ posts a lot on FaceBook, sometimes daily life (she & Jane are back on their weight-loss “Bear” diet of salmon, nuts & berries/some veg); a bit of house building of a nifty-sounding greenhouse/sunroom in the garden. She had been posting a daily reading of the US Constitution… and continues with a fair amount of strong political feelings re. one US presidential candidate. Notably with her health: she is recovering from the radiation (not chemo, I believe) therapy after her brief & caught early/controllable surgery for early stage breast cancer… and is daily regaining her memory & understanding of the novel she & Jane had been working on. She had been complaining how her memory turned to mush during the cancer treatment but exhaulting as she remembers chunks of her plot intentions. She plans to start writing again soon when she regains full comprehension of what she & Jane were doing/intend to do in the book. …And cats are doing fine.
Oh, it’s much easier than THAT to find one’s memory no longer reliable! And you remind me to make an appointment to see Natasha, my oncologist (not Russian, Indian, a good second guess), for an MBL followup for next month.
“Chemo brain” is real – I had it, though not too bad. But I’m still getting back to whatever normal should be, in a lot of ways. At least my brain mostly works…
(Yeah, radiation. It was an experience. They did a foam-in-place pillow to get me in the correct position. Doesn’t take long per shot, but it’s a lot of “shots” – I had 20.)
Anaesthesia brain is also real. It takes about a week for my brain to do a hard reboot and install the OS.
Checking in after a while. Sorry to hear that you’re going thru more health issues. As an 81 year old prostate cancer “survivor” myself I know the dance only too well. In the UK they seem to duck a general anaesthetic whenever they can and use spinal block. Can’t say I enjoyed the sawing and banging noises when they fixed my knees, nor the actual surgeon’s TV screen view when they did my TURP (look it up), but they all worked out OK. I keep losing all-time favourite authors – Doris Lessing and John le Carre the most recent. Down to one now. Stick around for a bit.
I had a different procedure, minimally invasive, “Rezum”, to the same effect. My “provider” was a “young man in a hurry” with a generally incompetent staff and (also) did not provide sufficient anesthesia, so I nearly passed out from the pain, but (eventually) I walked out. And I refused ALL followup treatment from him! It was effective enough though.
It’s been a while since CJ posted here; I know she’s busy, and the site is still ‘active’, but it’s starting to feel like an afterthought, compared to her other social media sites. I know at least 2 other regular posters here who don’t have (and probably never will have) a Facebook account, or any other social media account. She’s not required to cater to us; I do appreciate everyone who follows her elsewhere, then brings those snippets back for us.
I’ll try to copy or summarize some of CJ’s Facebook posts where—yes, she is very active. I’ve been extremely busy myself recently (yes, Chrondrite, I’m doing this comment on my phone from the Boston subway while heading home from work at about 8:00pm) and tend to be skimming Facebook and CJ’s posts there around 11:00 at night when I have no brainpower left to figure out summarizing.
Hmmm… the Boston subway (it’s the notorious Orange line, for those of you who may remember hearing of the subway car bursting into flames over a river a summer or so ago) is stalled about 1 minute away from the final stop and where I get off and walk home to my dinner! They haven’t told us why yet… ah, we’re moving now. Bye folks!
I won’t, no. I think Facebook is evil.
CJ & Jane have embarked on the adventure of adding a sun-room to their place, the construction of which started a couple weeks ago. Here’s her Facebook post from tonight on the progress. Good thing tge rebar has been covered as she tripped and did a face-plant, as I remember it, last week:
“We are getting floor! …well….slab….
The sunroom is no more plastic and rebar gridwork. The concrete has done down. A honkin’ great cement mixer is in the drive, and wheelbarrows of mix are going up to the construction.
By tomorrow we will be able to walk on it. It’s a mix really full of coarse gravel, so it’s a lot solid before the ‘setting’ starts. No more tripping hazard. There’ll be the upright structure to hold the glass. There’ll be doors — 2 —sliding. There’ll be an amputation of the eaves where the join with the sunroom happens, and tomorrow we will have the floor delivered. Not that we two haven’t installed floors over all the house—we’re thinking fondly of getting these guys to take on the floor installation. Clicklock is dead easy to install fast, but there’s still trim and edges to cut, which is just flat work, and we’re both too full of aches and pains since our multiple surgeries to really take kindly to a lot of fitting and fussing, square as most of it is. I hope they’re willing. If not, we’ll cope.”
And, the post I had meant to copy for CJ’s Facebook page, but it took me a while to locate it (turns out it was April 28th she did it):
“Alliance Rising—book one. Book two, ALLIANCE UNBOUND, was supposed to have been out last year, but my health got in the way, and Betsy Wollheim, most excellent of editors, held it back and gave us time.
I rejoice to say—Jane and I just sent in the copyedits, the cover is done, and the book will be forthcoming in schedule—this time FOR SURE. ALLIANCE UNBOUND IS COMING!!”
Hope your anniversary was special. ReadyGuy and I wish you all the best. I sent an email to your site but figured you were too busy to answer. Anyway, many happy revolutions around the sun for you and Jane.
Idly checking to make sure comments on the site are still up.
chrondite, I see your comment and I raise you one.
Yes, any news from FB?
CJ’s most recent FaceBook posts are angry, analytic posts discussing scary ramifications of the US Supreme Court decisions of the past few days. I’ll take a look in a bit to see if there are more updates on her & Jane’s lives, house & cats.in a bit
Completely understandable and shared, but I don’t think SCOTUS had a great deal of choice given the fractious political climate these days. Things work a LOT smoother when people will just try to get along together! Thanks. I’ll check back; as if I don’t regularly…
Occasionally I try to see CJ’s Facebook posts even though I don’t have an account, but the ones open to public viewing haven’t updated for several months.
Yesterday, CJ posted on FaceBook “Interesting morning. Jane [Fancher], my writing partner—never had read 40,000 in Gehenna. She finally got around to it, and we had a lengthy and rather intricate discussion over a book so long ago for me that I’ve forgotten many of the details—as to what I meant, all those years ago—
A real unusual walk down memory lane, in probably the most alien world I ever concocted, more alien than, say Serpent’s Reach, which is pretty well so. But Gehenna still gives me some strange and evocative images. I began recalling questions and answers—really weird experience, encountering that world again.”
…And another intriguing Facebook post a couple of hours ago by CJ on her books, in this case “Cuckoo’s Egg” which I remember finding quite interesting:
“Jane’s now moved on to Cuckoo’s Egg, which is another of the anomalous books that saw the light of day because Don Wollheim took chances.
Cuckoo’s Egg was perilous all the way along its creation.
First—I got bitten on the foot by a fiddleback spider, had a reaction—and the docs put me on a heavy dose of Medrol. A stimulant.
Bigtime.
I was writing at the time—starting a book, outlining. And when I got hit with the Medrol, I stopped sleeping. I mean, like, maybe 30 minutes of rest, and up again, often without being really out. So, living alone in those years, I wrote. I wrote. And I wrote. 24 hours a day. Two weeks of somewhat jagged consciousness interspersed with maybe-rest.
I wrote Cuckoo’s Egg in that two weeks—which was the time I had before I had a convention to attend. I was still pie-eyed with exhaustion, but I went—I tucked the manuscript—the ONLY manuscript, no duplicates, no file—into my briefcase, and flew off to the con—figuring that I would do the final edit on the trip, since that was where the project was, stage-wise.
In the airport—the whole time passed in rather surreal fashion. I had a glass of wine to calm my nerves, not the brightest thing I’ve ever done.
I headed for my plane.
Then I realized I’d left the briefcase in the bar.
OMG.
I blazed a trail back—and the briefcase was still there, leaning against the base of the bar. I picked it up and blazed a trail back to catch my plane.
My memory of the con itself is fragmentary, rather as if the consciousness was coming back, but it wasn’t all the way there, yet. I was, however, finally sleeping in the normal sense.
I got home with the manuscript.
Thank goodness. It would have haunted me forever if I had lost it—the story I couldn’t re-create, because I wasn’t quite in control of the process.
I never did that again.
I never want to do that again.
But that’s the story how Cuckoo’s Egg came to be.”
Thank you again for your ongoing copy and paste from CJ’s Facebook.
It is a pleasure to do.
It’s one of my favorites, because it’s so definitely from an alien point of view.
CJ’s Facebook post late on Saturday morning: a Finity adventure in the enclosed, back garden:
“Finity has achieved her young life’s ambition.
She came into the house making a weird open-mouth sound, and —
She had a bird.
My attempt to free it let it loose and we had a merry chase, Finity and I, which I am sure Finity viewed as a bonding activity of great joy—but I retrieved her little ‘toy’ and found it uninjured. I took it out to the garden and let it loose again. It ran along the ground and took off, so I have high hopes it will be fine. There was no blood involved, wings were in good shape, really, hardly a feather ruffled.
Finity seems to feel she got full value out of her catch. She wasn’t interested in eating it—just the chase. Sigh.
I hope that sparrow and all his tribe are suitably warned—she’s gotten better at her birding (caught something after 4 years of trying) and they should be aware by now they share the garden pond with a young and not-as-lazy cat.”
It’s for the entertainment of her people.
My parents’ cats would do the same thing. Getting the ground squirrel out was exhausting. The field rat we had to trap – it was too afraid to come out from under the bed. (Clerk: “If you had a cat, you wouldn’t have mice.” Parent: “If we didn’t have a cat, we wouldn’t have mice.” The house didn’t have any entrances other than doors…and the cats had one.)
It’s always somthin’!
At last, I am able to sign in again. Lost my password. My new email configuration kept sending to spam, but sometimes nowhere. Toes crossed I will be able to get in when I wish to.
Many exciting things in my life, if I wish to think of them as part of the Chinese curse. Lesion in right eye, vision so far not a problem, a low grade leukemia, which cancer doc says is staying put, of course diabetes T2, and follow ups to upper bowel cancer surgery in 2000. Sounds horrible, but really it’s not.
The biggest thing right now it that I had LTHR (left total hip replacement) on August 7. I am recovering nicely. Spent a night in hospital to be sure I got the PT I needed to climb stairs. Plus staff is very pampering which is kind of nice. At home I have been going to PT and doing exercises. I am still using a walker, but yesterday using son to fetch and carry I baked bread. My F/U appt is tomorrow, toes crossed I get the bandage removed. It itches like crazy. Not quite ready to drive, but looking forward to it
We have had a very, very wet summer, which is kind of nice after so many years of drought. It looks like a jungle is taking over the yard. I am already looking forward to next year when I will be able to garden and go the pool etc. without feeling like I am mounting a polar expedition to do so. Raining again, offshore effect of yet another hurricane.
I have declared my self a TORTOISE, as in the proverbial race. Slow and steady does it.
Oh and to continue to make life interesting, I had a slight breast cancer scare earlier this summer. Iffy small spot, biopsied and tagged all as outpatient. Everything AOK. Medicine has *changed* in my lifetime.
This appears to be the summer of house maintenance. After 20+ years, we have 2 large-ish tasks. First, we need to tent our house, after enduring 2 swarms of carpenter ants (I found where they were getting into the house and filled it with insecticide, then sealed the hole) and repeatedly discovering termites in the tub. Then, we will need to replace our main water line, which is 40 year old galvanized steel and beginning to rust out.
I’ve contacted both plumbers and pest control companies to get estimates, and here the troubles began. Simply trying to get a quote out of any of these companies is like pulling teeth, let alone get scheduled for the work. The ones that get back to me promptly are generally the expensive ones, although not always (surprisingly Terminix has been the cheapest for bug control so far.) I decided on a plumber to replace the line, and it’s been nearly 2 weeks since I said let’s do this, let me give you a down payment and schedule it. Crickets. Neither of the problems are emergencies; if I could get one or both done by the new year I’d be pleased, but so far the communication has been almost uniformly awful. Most of them have recent online reviews that are good, so I dunno how the happy customers managed to get them on the job.
And for anyone following Pacific basin hurricanes, we survived our first one of the season. If one must have a hurricane, this isn’t a bad type; yesterday was slow steady rain and minimal wind gusts. Big Island got it worse with lots of flooding and stronger winds. I’m just pleased it didn’t reactivate our roof leak(s), which seem to only be a problem under very specific circumstances.
We have been invaded by a clowder of cats from the bunch that lives in the vacant lot 2 streets over. While I am not adverse to feeding them temporarily, they can’t stay here indefinitely; besides, they are giving the 2 already resident cats the hissies. We managed to trap one 3 days ago and got it to the Humane Society. This morning we caught another one, who will be taking the same trip after the Humane Society shelter opens.
Mirabile dictu, I now have both the tenting and water line replacement scheduled and a down payment in place. It wasn’t until after I contacted the second choice companies to arrange services that the original people I tried to hire contacted me: “Hi, are you still interested in having us do X for you?” Sorry, but I had to move on after you ghosted me for 2 weeks.
Glad to hear that you basically had a rainy day (and/or night) with no ominous, interior dripping! Good luck with the cat influx: the Humane Society sounds a good idea. Hopefully they will be able to find homes for them and/or neuter them.
I have a sneaking feeling that the original plumber, whose estimate for the job was several thousand cheaper than the next runner-up, decided they weren’t making enough off the procedure, and went radio silent hoping they could get out of the quote. Happy to oblige, if that’s how you operate. At least the other guys were quick to schedule me once I figured out the first plumbers were lukewarm about it.
Labor Day weekend I am scheduled for a massive influx of visitors, so cat catching is on hold. The Humane Society asked me to call in advance after my last deposit so they can schedule me, as they are full up on cats right now. Yikes!
I’m not surprized you’ve had difficulty getting construction trades to do their thing on Maui.
Around the first of the year I had to replace a 150′ section of PVC main waterline. $10K! The whole line is more like 250′!
p.s. From the visitors’ center up on Haleakala is PanSTARRS visible? I think I saw an image once that it is cylindrical, and I recall seeing a dome at the edge from there.
I don’t know if you can see PanSTARRS from the public visitors’ center on the summit but probably you can, although it’s been years since I’ve been to the top of Haleakala. There is a cluster of smaller (relatively; 1.5 to 2m) telescopes in that area, and PanSTARRS is one of them; I’d have to check with my tame astrophysicist friend who works with PanSTARRS about what is where. On clear days, you can see the two largest telescopes, the Air Force Maui Optical and Supercomputing Observatory and the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Observatory, from sea level.
A friend and I took the island cruise 10 years ago, and minutes after the bus parked at the visitor center it socked-in! I got a brief view of some domes near the edge higher-up. I now regret we didn’t take the tour of Lahaina, but went down east Maui. Maybe it was “too touristy” as I thought, but who knew…
Happy birthday from a salad!