H is Moving On

News today that H has made the decision to transfer from Marylhurst to Boise State. This means he will be rejoining the rest of his family in Idaho. He has done here what he needed to do, I guess. C was concerned that we'd go through December without a student in the house; having a student has become just a part of our family fabric, I guess. Well, her concerns were short-lived. The same day Hussein informed us of his official departure, the international hosting people called to tell C that they have a new student for us. He's from Taiwan, and he's sixteen years old. Nevertheless, he's apparently quite independant and enthusiastic about being here.

We wish H well.

Thanksgiving

It was an exceptionally quiet and low-key Thanksgiving. We made the holiday last four days, but kept it VERY relaxed.

Thanksgiving dinner for the Typhoon was at the beach house in Pacific City. Grandma and Grandpa presided, with the Typhoon members (N, C, R and M) and our Saudi student, H. This was H’s first time to the Pacific shores, so we made sure to see some sights.

On Thanksgiving Day, R, H and I made the hike to Cascade Head. It was a wet, rainy sort of expedition (1.3 inches of rain that day in Pacific City) but it was also tolerably warm and calm. H liked the view once we cleared the top of the bluff… seemed it was worth it. And, by the time we made our way home and dried off, our appetites were ready to go for Thanksgiving dinner.

Friday, everyone slept in except C and I. We got up at 4am and drove to Tillamook where we waltzed in the doors at Fred Meyer at 5, and bought a 50” Plasma Television for almost $1,000 off the prevailing street price. Yeah!

Saturday, we all slept in again. Later, we went to Newport, where we visited the OSU Hatfield Marine Research Center, and introduced H to salt water taffy and the quaint grandeur of Depoe Bay. I snuck in a haircut in the morning, before our trek south.

Sunday, it was feeding the neighborhood deer apples and exploring the tide pools at Cape Kiwanda. Once again, we all slept in. H slept until after noon.

Sunday night, after we got home, H immediately bolted to catch up with his friends – perhaps we were just a little TOO slow-paced? Oh well…

Me? I set up that monster of a television set. After hooking up the antenna, programming the DTV channels, connecting the Wii and the DVD player, I fired up Star Wars Episode 1 for a family demo. The picture was so amazing, and so enamored the rest of the family that we all stayed up until 11 o’clock on a school night, watching Jar-Jar, Qui-Gon, Obi Wan and Annakin!  It was okay come morning, though, because everyone had caught up on their sleep over the holiday weekend.

C and I have been discussing the slowing down of our family pace. Since cancer, it has been altogether too challenging. This holiday was a slow one, a recharger of a weekend, not a depleter. We’ll be working to simplify the list of family obligations even more. It’s good for our overall health. Boy Scouts, Ballet, Fencing and piano are more than enough for the whole family.

Algae to help with Battery Advances?

from the article:

"The algae-based paper sheet batteries hold up to 200% more charge than regular paper-based cellulose batteries, and they can recharge in as little as 11 seconds. Eventually, they could be used in any application that requires flexible electronics — for example, clothing or packaging that lights up. Perhaps most importantly, the algae batteries could one day cut down on e-waste from conventional metal batteries."

[link]

Around the World in a SOLAR PLANE?!?!?

The Solar Impulse project aims to do exactly that [link].

Low speed taxi tests just took place… successfully.

Prove the ability to circumnavigate the globe in a solar powered aircraft and we’ve changed the game again.

Electricity from Slow-Moving Water

Off Make Magazine’s blog, I’m snipping most of the Make blog entry here:

Capturing the same powerful forces that destroyed the Tacoma Narrows Bridge shortly after it was built in 1940, researchers at the University of Michigan are developing a new way of generating electricity with the slow moving currents found in most of the rivers and oceans of the world.

This technology is hoped to be easier to site than traditional windmills and hydropower generators.

[link]

So, I’m posting this here for the alternative energy expert in the family – R!  Enjoy!

 

==

This idea is particularly interesting to me, as a resident of the Pacific Northwest, where our massive and fast-flowing river system has been throttled by dams that continue to threaten the river ecosystems. I’m not going to get all ‘environmentalist’ here, but a technology that allows for widely distributed power generation from other water currents provides yet another way to relibably go locally off-grid. Don’t have reliable solar at your Alaska cabin? I bet you’ve got a nearby stream or river…

What if --- really. What if we really could breach dams like Bonneville? Dams who’s PRIMARY reason for existence is power generation? It’s too much to target Hoover Dam or Hech Hechy, because they’ve been built to create water reserves, not power. Still, the more we’re able to decentralize the creation of electricity, the more we’ll be able to move away from the dinosaur power plants of the 20th Century.

Cleanliness is next to Godliness

 

I just snipped this email from my personal in box… Delighted to post it here. I’d read it to you myself, but there’s something in my eye…

 

From:     C 
To:       N
Date:     Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 4:43 PM
Subject:  News from Dr. Chxx
=============

Nojo,

Ce – le -- brate good times,come on!!!

Clean bill of health from Dr. McCoy…ok Dr. Chxx, but the same emotion reigns.

Complete pathology came back today:  …no cancer…no pre-cancer…no medical jargon that I can’t understand…no need for second opinion……. unequivocally…. totally clean… and normal.

O.K. to cry now!

C

C updated

At the five day mark since C came home from her surgery. How's she doing? Pretty darned well, all things considered. She's getting around pretty well. The pain meds work well enough that she starts to think that she doesn't need them any more, so she stops taking them. Which means that suddenly she REALLY needs them and gets VERY grumpy until they catch up with her again....at which point the cycle begins again <GRIN!>

Sam the cat has quietly and expertly inserted himself into our lives. Sam has selected C as his preferred person, followed next by M. In other words, he definitely likes the girls. Which is just fine with Shadow, because she has always preferred the boys. Both cats get along with the other just fine so far. Sam hangs out on C's side of the bed. When C gets up, Sam follows her to her new location, then hangs out with her there. He's quiet, has yet to misbehave, uses his litter box inviolably, and hunts spiders. What is there NOT to like so far?

C has also shared that she's starting to notice a reduction in her joint pain, and other chronic issues that were side-effects of the Tamoxifen drug. As she migrates away from Tamoxifen, she should see a general loss of weight, and better joint health overall.

C does seem to run out of gas by about dinner time, though. It's a little bit like 'back in the day' when chemo would cause her to literally shut off without warning. She does that now, too.

We're making some progress each day on settling the house in. It dawned on me that the last time we lived here, we slowly evolved the house into a fully functional space over the span of about four years. This time? We're doing everything we did then, plus a bunch of setup stuff that we never got around to before - like cupboard pullouts to make it easier for C to reach things on the very bottom shelf. The result? I'm doing in one day now the equivalent of about six months slow evolution the first time.

Curtains have been going up in the bedrooms. M's room is really cool now that it's finished. R's room is developing a great sense of personal character as well. There are still a few scattered boxes on the landing and in the master bedroom, but they're steadily disappearing.

We planned out the curtains for the main level today. Tomorrow, the rods and drapes will go up. C is apparently planning to prepare pictures/paintings for hanging on the wall tomorrow as well. Once the drapes are done, and the paintings are on the walls, the place will be nearly complete.

Of course, there's still the office and the garage to tackle. The Office has served as our staging room. It's a pile of boxes right now. We'll get to it last, but it'll be worth the wait.

C is Home

Those who see my facebook posts are more up-to-date than blog readers. Because the blog’s mission is to only share good news, I held off on posting to on C’s surgery. My caution, in hindsight, was unwarranted.

C’s surgery went amazingly well. The surgeons started early; they needed less time than planned. So she ended up in recovery a full two hours earlier than expected.

C’s time in recovery was minimal and smooth. C has had previous experiences with difficult recoveries coming out of anesthesia; all I can say at this time is that the docs have C completely dialed in. They put her under smoothly, they bring her out with comfort and grace.

The surgeon reported to me that the tissues they removed looked to be healthy and cancer-free. Now, normally you don’t want to hear that the surgeon took out healthy tissue – you want to hear that they’ve LEFT the healthy tissue and taken out obviously diseased, problematic tissue. Point taken. This is a little different.

C’s procedure about six weeks ago removed a polyp that turned out to be pre-cancerous. The doc’s recommendation was to remove the now-unnecessary organ where the polyp was located* as soon as possible, so as to 1) ensure there wasn’t more cancer in there, and 2) to generally simplify C’s post-cancer life.

Given the whole picture, the removal of generally healthy stuff is good news.

C moved from recovery to a room at about 6pm; so an overnight stay was the expectation. C stayed over, and came home about 5pm the following day – yesterday.

She’s getting around effectively, though gingerly. She’s not tackling stairs. And, if she gets a little behind on her pain meds, she definitely gets told by her body why she’s supposed to take the pain meds. She’s loopier than normal; it’s a little frustrating but also incredibly endearing…

Beyond that, everything’s fine. Like I said, she’s not taking the stairs, so she slept on the couch last night. I’m thinking she’ll be making her way upstairs by tomorrow night.

 

* see how I dance to avoid naming body parts? Astute readers can connect the dots adequately.

M is an Angel

As in, an Angel in the OBT Nutcracker.

 

We just found out on the casting update. Here are her performance dates:

Day	Date	Curtain
Saturday	Dec 12	2pm
Saturday	Dec 12	7:30pm
Thursday	Dec 17	7:30pm
Friday	Dec 18	7:30pm
Sunday	Dec 20	1pm
Sunday	Dec 20	6:30pm
Tuesday	Dec 22	2pm
Tuesday	Dec 22	7:30pm
Wednesday	Dec 23	7:30pm
Saturday	Dec 26	2pm
Saturday	Dec 26	7:30pm

If your tickets to the OBT Nutcracker just happen to line up with one of these dates, then you can feel free to silently cheer her on as she floats that angel dress like nobody’s business!

Tucker & Crawford

What a great article on the International Space Station and performing IT support!

[link to article]

A quote from the article:

“It's the most expensive single thing ever built (£92bn and counting), the quickest manned vehicle in existence (17,300mph) and the staging point for future Moon and Mars missions. But when computers on board the International Space Station go down, the astronauts living there do the same as any office drone in Slough -- they call IT. We were lucky enough to meet Tyson Tucker and Joey Crawford, the NASA flight controllers responsible for maintaining uptime in mankind's first permanent space colony.”

Return of the “Nice-to-Do” task

To walk around Dragonfly this Monday morning, it would seem like very little got accomplished over the weekend. But things are not always what they seem, are they? We’ve worked through an amazing list of must-d0 items; we’ve been delaying virtually every nice-to-do task on the list for well over a month.

Sure, there are still boxes to process. But,in many cases, the box that’s in the house is not the same box that was there on Friday.

Other things that moved along at Dragonfly over the weekend:

• R’s bunkbeds are assembled. I had to buy some replacement fastener hardware to assemble his bed. That took a lot of mixing/matching time at the hardware store to complete.
• C and I have a real bed finally. The frame was put together on Friday, but the mattress and box springs were still at the other house. We brought them over on Sunday morning.
• The garage was overhauled, fixing the blessing of unexpectedly effective movers, by accomplishing the following:
  • still-packed items organized in the center of the garage
  • Final shelving units assembled around the garage periphery, ready to receive their stored items
  • emptied boxes cleared.
• Outdoor furniture was unwrapped and placed. The Chiminea is reassembled, too.
• Curtain rods are installed in all three bedrooms.
• Family room was organized and consolidated.
• We determined that the old big-screen television will cost too much to repair. We’re opting to buy a new LCD unit after Thanksgiving. Getting a new TV is a nice-to-do for which we can pick the timing that works best for us.

Thankfully, Mondays are trash days at Dragonfly. I put out a stack of cardboard boxes for the recycle truck that would have filled the back of the mini-van to the gills. They’re going to shake their heads at me when they find my pile! Of course, I still  have a pile of similar size that I didn’t take to the curb…

But … that’s not all. The real work happened over at the cottage, getting it prepared:

• Removed last contents, including mattresses and box springs.
• Cleared and cleaned the basement.
• Cleared and cleaned the kitchen.
• Winterized the yard, including:
  • mowed and edged lawn
  • cut back all flowers, roses, etc.
  • Raked yard, cleared leaves from Chestnut tree.
  • packed away hoses and sprinklers.
  • applied lawn winterizer

So, by the end of the day today, the other house should be ready to receive new occupants. Oh, except for the water treatment system I need to uninstall. That’ll be tonight or tomorrow.

C has opted to hire some house cleaners to the the vacant house cleaning. It’s money well spent; reclaiming two days of her hard labor just prior to her surgery is a wise use of resources. With the other house finished, C can turn her attention to finishing the inside at Dragonfly and writing, not running all  over the Portland metro area.

Back at Dragonfly, I should be able to get the surplus appliances onto Craigslist by the end of the week. I can reach them now, which lets me take photos.

The living room is starting to look like a room, not a pile of boxes. Same for the kitchen nook. The kids’ bedrooms are clearing out, and the master is starting to take shape as a usable room. Kitchen, upstairs bathrooms and upstairs hallways are still chaotic, but that will be changing today and tomorrow. The office is usable, but most of the office-related boxes are still just stacked neatly in a corner of the office.

The kitchen is increasingly functional; we can move around in the space now. We’re cooking. We can find food in the cabinets. The dishwasher is running daily. We’re making coffee. Yeah, pretty much there in the kitchen.

The laundry is working, accessible, and in use. Clean clothes now have a place to go, in the form of accessible and operational closets and dressers. So the clothing and closet bottlenecks have been removed.

Apparently, the landing at the top of the stairs has been designated a practice space for M. A mirror and a ballet barre will reside there, for her use. Apparently I will be swapping the location on some mirrors in the house to accommodate the ballet practice area.

I can reach my workbench and tools. Handy, since I’m called upon to use both to accomplish my long list of tasks. The pile of boxes from last week’s move has been worked into an orderly, logical arrangement.

Remember last week, when I noted that having an overwhelmed garage because the movers overachieved would ultimately save me time and effort? Seems I was right. It took me four hours to fix the garage arrangement on Saturday morning. Had I been ferrying loads over from the other house as originally planned, it would have taken me six loads minimum, at two hours round-trip or more. Four hours of box stacking definitely beats twelve hours of box-ferrying.

If boxes continue to empty at the same rate as this last week, we should have a mostly organized house (nearly clear of boxes, anyway), and one car in the garage by the end of next weekend.

You know, it’s easy to say “we unpacked in two weeks!” and call it a victory. It is a victory, afterall. BUT, this process started exactly a year ago, when we made the hard decision to put our house on the market. We’ve been living in ever-increasing degrees of limbo ever since. My family is tired of being in limbo.

So it is compelling for us all that we should be able to return, this week even,  to a more normal schedule.  A schedule including time for Fencing and other activities. I still have a lot to do. But the urgency of the tasks is dropping off. There are more nice-t0-do’s than must-do’s. And that is a measure of forward progress.