• Tag Archives hip surgery

  • Quiet Here Again

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                     Waning Strawberry Moon

    Kate’s surgery is in the morning and can’t come fast enough for her.  Her hip makes walking painful, painful enough that she uses a cane and on occasion, a walker.  What was it like when this type of pain had to be endured?  Otherwise healthy and mentally acute people must have suffered terribly.  Kate certainly has and there is at least an option for her.

    Life will veer from busy to slow over the next month, with taking care of Kate my priority.  The bees continue to need care too, as do the dogs and the garden.  Museum life slows down in the summer and that’s good for me right now.  The Sierra Club legislative work has modulated, not finished because there’s always next session and the upcoming elections.

    Well, early start tomorrow.


    📂This entry was posted in Family 📎and tagged

  • Here Comes The Sun

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                       Waning Strawberry Moon

    After weeding Kate and I took off for lunch–at Benihanas, not nearly as good as our own, much closer, Osaka–and a visit to Lights on Broadway.  A bit of dithering about where the order was, where the paperwork was, who was on third and who was on second I picked up the track lighting fixtures that had fritzed out on us.  Nice to have light the full length of the kitchen table now.

    Then, a nap.  A long nap.  Two hours.  I got up earlier than I wanted to this morning thanks to dogs barking.  Even earlier tomorrow.

    After so many days of rain, a very soggy June, we have a run of yellow suns on all the weather forecast sites through Sunday.  Tonight the temperature should hit 46.  Good.

    Kate has no anxiety about the procedure tomorrow.  She does, she says, “surgery well.”  I’d have to agree.  The back surgery was in January and that’s been behind us for several months.  I still want her out of the hospital as fast as possible since hospitals have a lot of iatrogenic disease and a lot of it is very intractable, super bugs, all studied up on the antibiotic armamentarium.

    The perennial beds now look like a gardener lives here.  That feels better.

    Spoke with a woman about a spirituality in art tour for July 8th.  It’ll be my first tour in a while.  Looking forward to it.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Art and Culture Family Garden Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • The Day Before

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                              Waning Strawberry Moon

    A beautiful day.  64 degrees with a dew point of 41.  Got more weeding done.  Finished the second tier, went after some returnees on the first tier and got through much of  the third tier.

    While doing this it occurred to me that gardening is the process of removing plants willing to grow where you are and replacing them with plants that don’t want to grow where you are. An odd task. Permaculture is an attempt to turn this process on its head and utilize plants that want to be where you are, grouped in companion plantings of plants that compliment and co-operate.  Makes sense if you think of it.

    Kate’s out doing a bit of last minute gardening, too.  She straightened up her large table downstairs and I’ve printed a copy of her health care directive.  Throwing a bag together and taking two special showers to disinfect are the next big tasks.  Then, around 5:30 am or so tomorrow, we’ll take off for Fairview Hospital, the East Building.  We’ve discovered that Kate’s procedure is not until 8:00 a.m, so I’m going to get her settled, then go home.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Family Garden permaculture Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • Night Time, Summer in the Exurbs

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    Summer                            Waning Strawberry Moon

    Night.  A couple of nights ago I went down the driveway to the mailbox.  As I came back up, I looked up as I often do and saw an object scooting from SSE to NNW.  At first I thought it was a plane.  Without my glasses distance observing for me turns into a game of analyzing tantalizing bits of information rather than direct scrutiny.  As it came overhead though, I could see what I thought were lights were blurs owed to my faulty peepers.  No, it was a satellite.  It was bright and moving fast.

    At heavens-above.com I tried to look it up, but the tables for satellite passes only look forward, not backward.  I don’t know what it was, but I know it was man-made.  Whether it was a communications satellite of the International Space Station, it’s still something up there because humans put it there.  An amazing and still almost science fiction notion to this boy of the 1950’s.  I remember Sputnik.  Well.

    Kate’s a day away from her surgery.  The vicodin she has to take now makes her dull, “stupid” as she puts it.  She doesn’t like that feeling and looks forward to the time post-op when she can return to her NSAID.

    Obama.  As a political leftist, I find things wrong with Obama’s record.  He supported off-shore drilling, he’s ramped up the war in Afghanistan and he’s accepted weakened regulatory legislation and weakened health-care legislation.   The Gulf oil disaster and McChrystal give an air of chaos to his administration, though neither one is his fault.  Here’s my prediction.  A year from now Obama will look very good in all the areas in which he looks very bad right now.  Her’s pulling troops out of Iraq as promised.  The economy will improve.  The public will get clear about the Obama administration’s role in the Gulf oil disaster to his credit and his firing of McChrystal will be seen as what it is, a necessary assertion of civilian authority.

    He’s working as a politician, not an ideologue, a necessary ambit if he  wishes to govern, which he does.  Bush was a right wing ideologue and no matter how charming or gritty he appeared it was clear his decision making was in thrall to the neo-con view of the world.  Ideology puts blinkers on the best of us and Obama seems to govern without ideology, though he’s clearly a left-liberal.  Kudo’s to him.


    📂This entry was posted in Family GeekWorld Politics 📎and tagged

  • Reaching Back in Time

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                      Waxing Hungry Ghost Moon

    We’re only a week away from the summer solstice, but you could not tell it from our current weather.  We’ve had a cool, rainy streak that has made work outside appealing.  It’s also given the weeds considerable encouragement.

    The internet allows a look-up phenom that you’ve no doubt experienced at least once.  An e-mail shows up from someone in the way back long ago.  A posting of Facebook.  A comment on  your blog.  I’ve had a few.  Got one Friday from a high school girlfriend, a relationship that meant something to me.  It was nice to hear from her since we stopped seeing each other my senior year and went our separate ways.  E-mail is a great medium for this kind of oh my it’s been so long reacquaintance.  Neutral. Not time sensitive.

    Vega has a new gorilla that she carries with her in the house where ever she goes.  It makes a noise and whenever she triggers it, she scoots off for a safe area, not quite sure.  Rigel has no interest in toys, she enjoys the thrill of the hunt, the joy of escape.  Which she did yesterday.  Again.  She got out through a hole under the fence I wouldn’t have thought big enough for her.  I’ve hardened the lower edge of the fence line over the years, but this spot had rotted out.  I found her collar hooked on a log where she’d crawled under the chain-link.  She does not go over the fence anymore.  Electricity.

    Kate’s on a countdown for a new hip.  June 30th.  She commented on a discogram yesterday (this involves a probing needle that injects dye between the discs to get a contrast image), “I’m a Norwegian, a stoic and a woman and still I had copious tears.”  She can bear it, but she pays a price.  She also observed, by the way, that I will never, ever have a discogram.  She’s right on that one.

    Not a bee day today.  Wednesday looks like the day for the hive inspection.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs Garden GeekWorld Memories 📎and tagged

  • In 80 Degree Weather You’d Do It, Too. If you fit.

    Posted on by Charles 3 Comments

    Beltane                              Waxing Planting Moon

    Vega the wonder dog continues a puppy habit.vegainwater Even though she’s quite a bit bigger now she can make herself small enough to fit in the rubber water bowl.  This means that when I fill it up, it soon empties.  I have to go buy a smaller bowl, one she can’t use for cooling off.

    In other dog related news I bought two sprinkler heads to replace the ones purloined by either Vega or Rigel.  They have a high degree of energy and intelligence.  That makes them inquisitive and with dogs this size that means destructive.

    I spent the morning on Ovid, translating verses of the Metamorphoses, 11-15.  This is a slow process for me because I have to look up each word, discern which of the possible words it probably is, determine its possible declension or conjugation, then go back and try to put all this together in an intelligible English line.  Latin poetic conventions make this difficult since words that below together are sometime split apart by as much as a verse.  Also, Ovid, like Shakespeare loved neologisms so sometimes the word he’s used is the only time it was ever used in Latin.

    Don’t get the wrong impression though.  When I finished this morning, I whistled and sang, a sure sign I feel good about what I’ve just done.   It’s a fascinating process for me.

    Kate has a big month taking shape.  She leaves on Tuesday for San Francisco and two continuing medical education conferences which will take until June 6th.  On June 30th she has hip surgery.  She needs the surgery, her hip is painful for her and painful for me to watch.

    The violence in Bangkok continues and some of it happens right outside my brother’s soi, a sort of side street with no exit that is peculiar to Bangkok’s urban design.

    Final Sierra Club legislative meeting for the 2010 session tonight.  There will probably be work upcoming related to next year’s session, but for the near term future, that work will come to a close.  No more weekly meetings.  Happy hour after this meeting.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs Family Humanities Politics 📎and tagged