2012 – Page 5 – Fascination Place

Impromptu Weekend

We had a pretty busy weekend lined up this past one, and then it got even busier with some sudden plans (“sudden plans”? Is that a thing?) that came up.

Saturday morning Debbi had an appointment with the hair stylist (on Saturday morning as the result of her schedule getting jumbled up during the previous week), so I spent the morning finishing up some work on the study (okay, mostly I was filing Magic cards, but also paying bills).

When she got back we went to lunch and then to the hardware store.

See, a couple of weeks ago I inadvertently fertilized part of the lawn. (Well, I was planting some new seed, with a mix that included mulch and fertilizer.) I noticed last week that that patch of lawn was growing much better than the rest of the lawn – which has gotten a bit brown despite all the rain – so I determined to fertilize the rest of it. I bought a fertilizing machine from OSH and spent some time on Saturday doing the lawn. I had to run back to OSH for more fertilizer, having probably over-fertilized part of the lawn (but it probably needed it). Whee! Now I’m trying to keep from checking the lawn every morning and night to see if it’s looking greener and lusher. 🙂

We also picked up some new solar lights, and a new hose and a box for it. Home improvement! Well, yard improvement.

(Wait until I buy a shed and see how much I write about that!)

As I was finishing up, I got a call from my friend Syd, who was in town for one night and was inviting some of his friends out for dinner. So on fairly short notice Debbi and I got our act together and joined them. It was good to see him, as I’ve missed him since he left.

This was in lieu of our usual Saturday plans of going to Cafe Borrone. We’ve been down on Borrone lately because the variety, prices and portion sizes of their entrees have all been going in the wrong directions, and they’ve eliminated some of our favorite desserts. So going elsewhere wasn’t unwelcome (we’d planned to have dinner elsewhere anyway). One of the desserts they’ve eliminated was the chocolate rum cake from The Prolific Oven, so after dinner we went to that establishment and got a couple of slices of cake. In theory I guess we could consider hanging out there on Saturday evening from time to time. (We’ve tried the coffee chops in downtown Mountain View, but they all tend to have bands on the weekend nights, which puts a damper on our desire for a quiet reading evening.)

Friday night we got an invitation from our friends Chad and Camille to visit on Sunday for swimming and a barbecue. So Sunday morning we went to the grocery store and Debbi made potato salad to bring. Chad and me and the kids spent, what, an hour or two? swimming in their pool, and then we had dinner. We hadn’t seen much of them since last year, since we’ve all been busy, and we had a great time. Camille tells us that their daughter has upgraded us from “friends of their parents” to “cousins”. 🙂

Monday was my and Debbi’s 11th dating anniversary, and we went out for our usual anniversary dinner. Where have the years gone?

Since then I’d like to say things have been quieter since then, but yesterday I biked to work for the first time this year, and boy did my butt hurt afterwards!

Dad Visits Our New Home

Dad came for a visit last week. (And it’s getting hard to come up with entry titles that are just variations on “A Visit From Dad”.) He flew in on Thursday and left on Wednesday. By this time we’ve gone to see most of the things in the Bay Area I know about, so it was a visit mostly of re-runs and hanging out, although he did have a couple of new things he wanted to see.

This is the first time he’s seen our new house, which we’ve now been in (hard as it is for us to believe) for 11 months. Mom saw it on her visit a year ago, but that was before we’d even closed (we were doing a walk-through with the seller the day she arrived), so it almost feels like it doesn’t count, since it was completely empty. Dad had to wait a little longer, but he got the full experience, since it’s well lived-in by now.

The day he arrived we walked down to the nearby Safeway which has a Starbucks in it, as he has been in the habit of walking out in the morning on his visits to get coffee, and his previous place, the 7-11 near our old home, is rather farther from the new place. I think he walked there every morning but two during his stay.

One place he wanted to visit was the campus of University of California – Santa Cruz, because it’s on a list he saw of the 10 most beautiful college campuses in the world (I think he saw this one). Although I’ve been to Santa Cruz many times, this was my first trip to UCSC.

I gotta say, it’s a very unfriendly campus for visitors. Apparently you are supposed to buy a parking pass to park most places on campus, which isn’t a bad thing, but they don’t tell you this. I saw no signs driving in to this effect, the booth where you buy the passes is not marked at all, and none of the parking lots we drove by or through have any indication that this is so. We only figured this out because most of the cars in one lot had things hanging from their rear mirrors, and we asked some people and they confirmed this. It’s like it’s a big trap to issue tickets to the unwary. Bastards.

We didn’t buy a pass but rather just drove around to see the place. Is it stunningly beautiful? It’s not bad; the buildings set in the redwood forest are pretty. The regions in the nearby fields look a little more generic. The architecture didn’t seem especially noteworthy. (Then again, Stanford is also on the list, and its campus has never impressed me either.) The campus is very spread out and I bet students spend a lot of time on buses or bikes to get from place to place.

We also visited the arboretum, which is quite impressive, large and varied. It’s the place I’d suggest visiting if you go to the campus for the scenery.

Saturday we drove to Livermore wine country, having lunch at Garre (nice restaurant, but their wines are not our thing), and then dropped by a couple of wineries for tastings. In the evening we went to a new restaurant that I discovered through a cow-orker, Bistro Vida, which we all enjoyed.

We came home from dinner to find that the power had gone out. We lit some candles and Debbi and I walked around the neighborhood a bit; it was a failure that covered several blocks, and it didn’t come back on until after 11, by which time we’d gone to bed. Our neighbor Juan said the power goes out from time to time – I think it only went out twice in the 10 years I was in my townhouse, so hopefully it won’t go out much more often than that! Apparently it was because of a equipment problems rather than due to the heat we were having on Saturday.

Sunday morning we went to the Moss Beach Distillery for their Sunday champagne brunch, and were pretty disappointed compared to earlier visits. They weren’t playing the classical music that Dad remarked on at his last visit, and worse, they had taken both french toast and pancakes off their brunch menu! Since I don’t eat seafood or egg dishes, that left hardly anything on the menu I would eat. Fortunately they were willing to make pancakes (for Dad) and french toast (for me) as a special order, but they were pretty ordinary compared to the more elaborate forms they used to have. I don’t know what they’re thinking, how can it be brunch without at least pancakes? I guess they’re trying to go more upscale? But they’re likely to lose me as a patron if this is the way it’s going to be. Pity.

Sunday evening we drove to the east bay to have dinner with my cousins, both of whom live out here, but neither of whom I’ve seen much of. Cousin L and her husband have a very nice house, and cousin K came from the city to meet with us. We had a good few hours visiting with them, and perhaps when their parents come out to visit next we’ll have a chance to meet them, too.

Monday we had a pretty quiet day, mostly driving around the south bay. Tuesday was a little more ambitious: We dropped Blackjack off at the vet about his eye, then went for breakfast, and finally up to San Francisco. We went to SF MOMA, which sure enough is an art museum. (I’m not really into art museums.) Then off to Ghirardelli Square for ice cream sundaes, and finally to Golden Gate Park. Strybing Arboretum – formerly one of my favorite place to wander around in the park – is now charging non-residents for admission. If nothing else that will eliminate any motivation I might have for donating to them.

Along the way we also watched some episodes of classic Doctor Who that I’d bought on DVD (used, to avoid the ridiculous prices the BBC charges for them): “The Talons of Weng-Chiang”, “Pyramids of Mars” and “Logopolis”. “Talons” was better than I’d remembered, while the other two were not as good (though still enjoyable). In particular “Pyramids” seemed to suffer from the limited (though very good) cast.

Wednesday it was a morning drive to drop Dad off at the airport, followed by meeting Debbi at her workplace for coffee, and then an afternoon of chores around the house. As always, it was a nice visit with Dad – and the cats enjoyed his company, too!

Blackjack’s Eye

Blackjack can’t catch a break with his illness, despite having responded to treatment quite well. This past week we noticed that one of his pupils was more dilated than the other, something Debbi says she’s noticed before. The next day we realized that it wasn’t that one eye was more dilated, but that the other eye was less dilated, and that his inner eyelid – the one that closes sideways from the side of his eye near his nose – was partly closed.

While he didn’t seem disturbed by it all – I did some informal tests and he can see out of both eyes – we contacted his vet who’s been treating him for his lymphoma, and she said this is an indication that something may be impinging on his optic nerve, that it may be related to his lymphoma, and that there may not be much we can do. But to keep an eye on him in case he develops symptoms that indicates it might be something else.

Other than some watering from his eye, he’s been behaving pretty normally, so we’re just keeping an eye on him for now.

It’s pretty frustrating, since he’s otherwise been showing signs of getting stronger and more stable lately, and an indication that things might be getting worse is pretty upsetting. But at least he’s still happy and comfortable. He’s been cleverly finding new places to sleep in the unusual heat we’ve had this weekend (he’s the only one of our cats who bothers to find cool places to sleep – Newton and Roulette seek out the heat).

Right now he’s lying on the couch next to me while we watch an old episode of Doctor Who. I think his watering eye bothers him from time to time and he shakes his head to clear it out. But otherwise he still seems pretty happy. Hopefully this will just be a cosmetic incident for some time to come.

He’s a sweet cat, and he really doesn’t deserve all this at such a young age.

A Week Under the Weather

So last Saturday Debbi and I started our weekend by going to Half Moon Bay (breakfast at the Main Street Grill!) and walking along the coast. When we got back, I went out and mowed the lawn for the first time this year. It took about an hour, because I bagged the grass rather the mulching it, since it had grown quite long in some places. I really should have mowed 2 weeks ago, but it’s rained the last 2 weekends.

By the time I finished and showered, I had the beginnings of congestion and a sore throat, harbinging four days of illness.

Sunday we tried to get a few things done, but we discovered (really, re-discovered) that many places are closed on Easter Sunday, so we didn’t make much headway. We did go across the street to visit our neighbors for their Easter party. By the time we finished, I was running out of energy, so we called it a day.

Monday morning I couldn’t see myself sitting at my desk all day, so I called in sick. Time was I would try to power through a cold, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve learned that it’s best to lie low early to knock the illness out of me. My cow-orkers appreciate me not coming in to make them ill, too.

Fortunately this was not as bad a cold as the one Debbi had for the better part of two weeks (which was so nasty that I kind of wondered if she caught two different colds), and I felt much better on Tuesday. Unfortunately I felt worse on Wednesday, mainly very congested and with a nasty cough. I didn’t realize until the afternoon that I really did feel worse, so I had taken my car in for maintenance and gone in to work. Oh well.

But I felt much better on Thursday, and have gotten better since then. So I seem to have finally shaken it.

On a happier note (well, for me, anyway), we had a series of showers and thunderstorms in the area this past week, which I enjoyed immensely. After a bone-dry winter, we’ve gotten a fair bit of rain over the last month, which we really needed, and I loved since it breaks up the otherwise eternal mild weather around here. I think the south bay is still below average for the year, but hopefully these storms have helped build up the snow packs in the mountains (melting snow is where most of our drinking water comes from).

After a long week, we now have a long list of chores to do at home and errands to run around town, partly in preparation for my Dad coming to visit soon. Fortuitously, we won’t have to go out in the rain to do them.

Fantasy Baseball 2012

2011 was a pretty frustrating fantasy baseball season for me: I drafted what I thought was a terrific team, and then got slammed by injuries and slumps (such as Albert Pujols’ ineffective-then-injured first half, Rafael Furcal having nothing left, and Chad Billingsley turning into a pumpkin) and struggled to cover for the pieces, ultimately finishing 8th out of 16 teams. On the bright side, finishing 8th gave me the first overall pick for 2012, so I decided to come back for my 20th year of fantasy baseball.

My keeper roster was tough to figure out, since Albert Pujols and Cliff Lee seemed clearly better than anyone else I had to keep, but they also used 3/4 of my keeper years. I considered not keeping Pujols and drafting him with the first pick, but I had trouble figuring out how to turn James Shields (or Ryan Zimmerman) + 5 more years into something equivalent to the guy I was planning to take, Roy Halladay. So ultimately I traded Lucas Duda and Jamile Weeks for a 3rd and a 7th round pick, and kept Pujols. I tried mightily to acquire enough years to keep Shields, but couldn’t do it, alas.

I went into the draft with two solid starters – Lee and Jordan Zimmermann – and with Halladay I figured I’d start working on hitters. A good strategy, since the pitching pool felt quite deep this year. But the hitting pool seemed so shallow that this year really tested my maxim that you can always draft hitting.

Here’s the team I drafted:

Pos	Player	Team	Round/ Pick	Age	Comments
C	Miguel Montero	ARI	2/17	28	I took him in the 4th round last year, and he had a breakout season. I sure hope he can do it again.
1B	Albert Pujols	LAA	Kept	32	Let’s see whether moving to the American League perks up his bat this year.
1B	Ryan Howard	PHI	14/209	32	Taking a gamble that he’ll play this year and hit a bit.
1B	James Loney	LAN	16/241	27
2B	Neil Walker	PIT	Kept	26	Another guy I’m hoping will repeat his 2011.
3B	Ian Stewart	CHN	12/177	26	Whether he’s really my third baseman remains to be seen. I have other options as backups.
SS	Jimmy Rollins	PHI	4/64	33
OF	Nick Markakis	BAL	3/43	28	Another year, another weak outfield.
OF	Josh Willingham	MIN	7/97	33
OF	Alfonso Soriano	CHN	8/113	36	Drafted purely for his power.
C	Tyler Flowers	CHA	24/373	26	Marginal backup catcher, maybe Pierzynski will get hurt and he’ll break out.
C	Gorman Erickson	LAN	25/400	24	Might get called up if the Dodgers can’t stand their current options.
1B/3B	Mat Gamel	MIL	10/145	26	At least, I hope he plays enough – and plays well – to qualify at 1B this year.
2B/OF	Howie Kendrick	LAA	4/49	28
3B/OF	Martin Prado	ATL	7/107	28
SS	Clint Barmes	PIT	23/361	33	Another guy I just hope plays and hits some dingers.
SS	Jonathan Villar	HOU	22/348	21
SS/OF	Grant Green	OAK	25/393	24
OF	Peter Bourjos	LAA	18/273	25
OF	Brett Jackson	CHN	Kept	23
OF	Domingo Santana	HOU	21/335	19
OF	Michael Choice	OAK	24/383	22
SP	Roy Halladay	PHI	1/1	34	I don’t think there was anyone else available who was clearly a better choice for the first overall pick this year.
SP	Cliff Lee	PHI	Kept	32	I was surprised he fell to me with the 8th pick. Taking him was a no-brainer, as Halladay and Sabathia had already been picked.
SP	Jordan Zimmermann	WAS	Kept	25
SP	Matt Garza	CHN	3/33	28
SP	John Danks	CHA	6/81	26
SP	Ryan Dempster	CHN	9/129	24	How did I end up drafting so many Cubs?
SP	Brett Cecil	TOR	19/289	25
SP	Josh Tomlin	CLE	20/305	27	There wasn’t much left in starting pitchers at this point.
SP	Julio Teheran	ATL	Kept	21
SP	Wily Peralta	MIL	21/321	23
RP	Addison Reed	CHA	13/193	23
RP	Grant Balfour	OAK	15/225	34
RP	Sergio Romo	SFN	17/257	29

I’m definitely gambling on a few players coming through rather than washing out (Mat Gamel, for instance), and as often happens I hate my outfield. But it could be much worse, and I do have quality starting pitching. It’s not a world-beating team, but it has potential.

Gas?

I had a pretty rough night last night. The evening went fine, but…

Around 2:30 am I woke up and needed to pee. While doing my business in the bathroom, I reflected that I still have a mild pain in my neck, probably because the pinched nerve there still gets pinched from time to time. I imagine this will be an issue for the rest of my life, but it hasn’t been anywhere near as bad since I got it treated three years ago. However, it has been a little annoying recently. It might even be something unrelated – maybe my ergonomics are bad and I need to work on my seated posture (again). I dunno.

Anyway, as I was thinking about this, I started to feel kind of ill. I went back to bed, but soon felt even worse, and realized I was breaking out into a cold sweat. I got out of bed and my stomach felt really upset, so I lay down on the floor. Debbi woke up and asked if I felt okay, which I didn’t. Then I felt like I might throw up (maybe food poisoning again?), but I didn’t feel well enough to stand, so I crawled to the bathroom and lay there for, I don’t know how long, maybe 10-20 minutes. Debbi gave me a cold wash cloth which helped a bit. (The cats also came in to check me out, which didn’t really help.)

After a while, the pain went away, and thankfully I never threw up. I went back to bed, and still felt cold, so I bundled under all the covers. And fortunately I felt like a log for the rest of the night. (Debbi, unfortunately, did not, and she gets up a lot earlier than I do.)

Debbi conjectures that I had a bad case of gas in my stomach or elsewhere in my digestive tract, which if true would be a new one on me. We did have a dinner last night which included cabbage, which Debbi thought might have given me gas (apparently it can), although I didn’t have that problem when I ate even more cabbage at our pot luck dinner a couple of weekends ago. Debbi ate the same thing I did and didn’t have any problems.

I feel tired and a tad weak today. But that’s about all. Even my neck feels better! Hopefully it was just a flukey one-time thing.

More Good News about Newton

Yesterday I dropped Newton off at the vet for an ultrasound and a check-up on how he’s been doing in the week since he came back from his hospital stay.

The ultrasound mainly reminded me that ultrasounds are expensive. We learned that he has signs of heart disease, with the walls of his heart starting to thicken. Given his age, that’s not a surprise. It doesn’t really shine any light on the heart murmur he’s had for most of his life, though. He also has some mottling on his liver, which could mean any of a number of things. But as the vet pointed out, even if it turns out he has a tumor, am I really going to put an 18-year-old cat through radiation and/or chemo therapy? Probably not (especially since he’s had trouble with just plain sedation for a number of years now).

I kind of wonder whether I should have done the ultrasound at all, since what was it going to tell me that would have made me behave differently? I guess if we learned he had something really seriously wrong and we’d have to put him down (depressing as that is), but that’s about it. Really I just want him to be happy and comfortable for the rest of his life, so I don’t plan to put him through a big production if something heads south.

Anyway.

The good news is that his blood test came back and almost all of what they tested for is back within normal levels! One item – I think one of the kidney indicators – is still a little high, but it’s down a lot from where it started. And the vet says we can cut back on giving him subcutaneous fluids to every other day, and cut back his potassium supplements to only once per day. So that will make everyone happy. She’s very pleased with how well he’s responded.

On the home front, he’s clearly not able to do all the things he used to be able to do – he has to pull himself up when he jumps on the bed, for instance. Although he can jump up on the kitchen counter fine, so maybe he just has trouble judging how far to jump. I also watched him jump down from things today, and his rear legs are much more stable – he was still a little wobbly when we brought him home last week (of course, he’d just spent 4 days mostly in a cage).

So it looks like Newton’s going to be with us for a while yet. Which is good news!

Hobbes and Bacon

By far the entry on this site with the most hits is the one about Calvin & Hobbes‘ last strip. It also gets a lot of comments like “That’s not the real last strip!” from people people who surf in there and just read the title and the strip in the entry without reading any of the actual entry. Sigh. Internet nitwits, what can you do?

If you’re a fan of C&H, though, probably the closest you’ll ever get to a fix of new strips comes from a webcomic called Pants are Overrated (now apparently defunct), which did an occasional strip about Calvin all grown up, but really more about his daughter Bacon (!) who hooks up with Hobbes in much the same way Calvin did.

You can read the four strips they did here:

Good stuff!

Recharge Weekend

After all the excitement last week, we had a fairly low-key weekend. Starting Friday night with dinner at Don Giovanni, always tasty. We walked there in the rain, as we were getting showers off an on all weekend, which I appreciated. (I wish we’d gotten more rain than we did, though.)

Friday was also new iPad day, and I received mine as did everyone else who pre-ordered them. I set it up that evening, and converted my iPad 2 to Debbi’s use. Trying to move it over to someone else without wiping it seems to be a little risky, as she ended up with a melange of her data and mine that I couldn’t figure out how to fix, so on Saturday I just wiped it and started anew, which worked much better. The high-res display sure is gorgeous. Otherwise it’s not a huge step up from the iPad 2 in my (brief) experience, but friends who moved from an original iPad say it is a big step forward from that.

Saturday evening we had plans to have another pot luck dinner with our neighbors, and since one of them usually cooks enough entrees for everyone, we decided to make dessert. Debbi baked an apple pie, and I made cream cheese brownies. We had a great time with our neighbors; got to see someone else’s house, and the food was great. Afterwards there are show tunes (one of the neighbors plays piano, another one sings), and home-made limoncello. I ate a little too much, and started drifting off due to the alcohol (have I ever mentioned what a lightweight I am when it comes to drinking?), but we had a lot of fun.

Sunday we mostly just hung out at home. We took care of some chores around the house, and I started preparing for fantasy baseball draft day. We got a few rain squalls – one of which came with tiny hail stones – and snuggled with the cats. A nice quiet day.

Newton is doing quite well. We’re getting good at giving him his subcutaneous fluids, and Debbi thinks he feels perkier and healthier shortly after we give them to him, which could be given that we’re doing it to help his weak kidneys. Overall I’m happy with how he’s doing, and we’ll see what the vet thinks when I take him in later this week.

We needed some time off this weekend. It went by too fast.

Newton’s Home!

I left a little early yesterday to pick up Newton from the vet. He’s so much better! He’s gained about a point of weight, is standing fully on his hind legs, and is much more alert and cheerful. He came home and got a good sniffing from Blackjack and Roulette, and hung out with us for part of comic book night until deciding to go snooze on the bed.

He’s still a little subdued and his legs seem a bit wobbly, but as Debbi pointed out, he did spend most of 4 days in a cage hooked up to an IV drip. He’s been meowing a bit for attention, and last night I woke up to see him holding Blackjack by the scruff of the neck (something he used to do to Jefferson a lot) and making little meowing sounds. I guess he needed to reestablish his position with Blackjack when he returned.

The downside to all of this (other than a shockingly high vet bill) is that he’s going to be on a variety of medications, some of them for the rest of his life. He’ll be getting subcutaneous fluids daily, and pills to reduce his phosphorus and increase his potassium levels. (The vet thinks it’s likely that his funny walking was due to low potassium.) In the short term he’s also taking an antibiotic for the cold he had, and will be getting shots which are supposed to promote red blood cell creation. Fun fun.

My hope is that eventually he can cut back on the fluids to every other day, and reduce or eliminate some of the other pills. Giving them all to him is no fun, although he’s largely well-behaved in taking them.

This will make planning vacations trickier while he’s around, though. We may have to give in and actually hire a professional pet sitter.

I’m just glad he’s back. When we took him in on Saturday I didn’t really think he’d come home, and I even took him to Roulette and Blackjack so they could say goodbye, whatever that meant for them. (Jefferson just went to the vet that last time and never came back.) Roulette’s been following him around, which is adorable.

In other cat news, this morning I took Blackjack in for his scheduled check-up, and he seems to be doing fine (pending the results of the blood work). He’s put on weight, so we’re going to cut back on the steroid he’s been taking to stimulate his appetite, and the vet doesn’t feel his tumor returning. The technician I met with says she also has a deaf cat, and her cat also goes into small rooms and meow its head off, just like Blackjack does, so maybe that’s just a deaf-cat thing. (If we get kittens while he’s still around, I wonder if they’ll go look for him during his meow-fests, and what he’ll think of that.)

Anyway, I don’t have any illusions about how serious Newton’s condition is, but the vet says it’s possible that with continued care he could be around for a while yet.

Which, since he turns 18 next month, means we still need to figure out where he’s going to go to college. Sheesh!