Hello everyone. I'm back in the land of living after some major tectonic shifts in the geography of my life. I got a call from a good friend of mine about a week ago to ask why he hadn't heard from me since his first child was born on June 19. When I finally called him and told him what had been going on in my life, he said "wow, you've been dealing with some stuff".
My mother had her operation on July 2 and is doing well. She got to keep both her kidneys. The surgeon tells us that she is doing quite well, though the anemia due to the blood loss is making her weak. I am told that she had additional tests on Monday, July 14 to determine how she is healing internally. We are all thrilled and very relieved that the operation was an apparent success. Thank you everyone who wrote a supportive line or two in my guestbook.
Girlfriend S. is now living with me. We completed the final part of the move this past weekend by moving the last of her belongings from her temporary apartment to my place. We both look longingly to some point in the future where our apartment is not littered with boxes, everything is put away in its more or less final location, and no more packing and unpacking of boxes is required. More items will have to be dealt with as time goes on; some items were placed into storage because the roof blew off the house last November. We will deal with that when it happens, however. For the moment we are grateful for a lull in the action that allowing a moment or two to breathe. We keep thinking about two words for the next move we make: PROFESSIONAL MOVERS!
I am also finished with nearly everything associated with a major release of the product I work on for Company O. As with nearly all software development projects, ours was late. This normally would not irritate me, but, I was responsible for the development of keys features of this release and that development took much longer than expected. Granted, there's an old Corollary to Murphy's Law in Software Development that says "90% of features require 90% of the time, and the remaining 10% require the other 90% of the time." In this case, all it costed us was a leisurely development and testing schedule and about two weeks of overall delay during which we were able to provide functional intermediate versions of software. Still, the fact that I was the one responsible for the delays ratcheted up my blood pressure by a few points.
I've also been fighting some skirmishes with the medical professionals in my life. I've been going to an onsite dental office for the last three years -- a dental practice operated out of a large Winnebego-like RV -- and the deficiencies of the approach are now becoming evident. I'm up to my third dentist in as many years -- the first went on maternity leave shortly after I started going there, the second one filled in for the first during her absence, and now the franchise has been handed over to another dental practice completely. It all adds up to a lack of continuity of care... and the fact that the first thing a new dentist always seems to want to do is fix something in your mouth. I've been through enough dentists in the last few years to become skeptical about whether this initial course of treatment is objectively required, or is just performed to a) raise some money from the insurance company, and b) to bring your dentition into line with a particular dentist's pet peeves, personal preferences, and more and philosophical beliefs. My new dentist's latest bent: replacing loose amalgam fillings. How come my old dentist didn't want to do this work when I saw her four months ago? I used to jokingly refer to visits to the dentist as "visits to The Dental Winnebego of Love". Now Girlfriend S. refers to them as "visits to The Little Shop of Horrors". Girlfriend S. has a nice dentist in a conventional office, not a Winnebego. I think it's time to start seeing him.
said drgeek
on 2003-07-16 at 11:56 a.m.
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The Wayback Machine - To Infinity And Beyond
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