Ramblings, rumblings, grumblings, and rambling grumbly rumblings.

It was a good weekend. Let's start there.

Back in early March, I saw a truck with a chipper on the back parked at one of our neighbors' houses. I called the guy over to chat with him about the two large brush piles in our front yard, one by the fence (the remains of a redbud tree) and one under the maple tree (misc branches, including several from the maple itself.) He quoted me a price, and we set the date for the last week of March. I set that date so that we'd have time to save up the money to pay him.

Between that day and the last week of March, he called or stopped by a few times to see if he could do the work. No, I told him, last week of March - unless you like working for free. One of his calls came as I was walking into the doctor's office to have my vasectomy!

...and I started to get angry.

( Courtesy snip... )

Michelle fought the good fight, treating her migraine with all the weapons in her pharmaceutical arsenal. Finally, after two weeks, she called her neurologist. At the Thursday appointment, the doctor said, heavily paraphrased of course, "You've had your shot. Now it's my turn," and put her in the hospital. There she was treated with several doses of a drug so powerful you can't take it at home until you've had it under the care of a full nursing staff to make sure your body can tolerate it (read: make sure it doesn't kill you.) It took about six, maybe eight, doses, but it did finally break the cycle, and she came home on Saturday.

She brought with her the home-use version of the medication - it differs only in the delivery method. $1000 for eight days worth, of which insurance covered about 80% and, thank god, her parents covered the rest.

With all of our other financial considerations - a massive debt load and four pay cuts in the last two years - we have talked about bankruptcy, and I must admit with this hospital stay I was seeing lawyers' phone numbers in my head. Again, we are quite grateful to her parents as it seems they intend to help us with the bills. I don't know how we'll ever pay them back unless and until the day-job hits pay dirt.

If Audrey Hepburn had a younger, librarian sister, that would be Michelle's neurologist. Young, slender, a little taller than average, very pretty but with enough small flaws - a little bit of an overbite, nose a little too prominent - to keep her from being striking and aloof, she is soft-spoken and very very kind. We both like her a great deal. She was, nevertheless, very firm when it came to killing this migraine.

Well done, Doctor B., and thank you.

It is my hope that the migraines will be controllable now, and that Michelle can continue her recovery from Summer 2011's adventures.

It's funny. I nearly died from neglect as a toddler, and was sick quite a bit as a child. Given my stress level since our children were born, you would think I'd be the one who was sick all the time, but I just keep forging - sometimes trudging - along.

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In other news, I continue working to make my shop as comfortable as it can be. If last year is any indication - not quite 10k in gross sales - I'm going to be spending a great deal of 2012 there. My goal is to purchase an apartment sized washing machine sometime in the next six weeks, hack its main-board and put my own timer on it for use in dyeing fabric. Anything to keep us from being chained to a plastic bucket for and hour and a half every time someone orders a pair of tights.

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MoneyGuy and DataGuy are going with one of our partners to the NADA conference this weekend. The last time we did this we got a significant (if somewhat short lived) lift from it. I'm hopeful it will be the same way this time, with longer-term results of course.

Car dealers and their ilk are shit to do business with. The dealer group we did all the ad campaigns for (which I have written about before) owes us 16k and is showing no signs of being willing to pay - in spite of the massive customer response (and presumably, profit) the campaigns generated.

A weekend of very low Lows and very high Highs, but taken all for all, a good weekend.

Friday night/Saturday morning, about 1:45, Katie became very sick. It hit her so sudden that she didn't have time to make it to the bathroom for the initial heave, so in addition to seeing to her comfort we had a mess to clean up in her room as well. It was shockingly sudden: she was fine when she went to bed, no symptoms or warning. She ran through a new round of vomiting every forty-five minutes or so until mid-morning, so none of us - except for Jami - got a lot of sleep. The rest of Saturday, day, was relatively quiet. She's fine now, bouncing back. Even rode her bike some yesterday (Sunday).

Saturday night, my usual first-of-the-month performance at Stone Bridge. My God, what a terrific night that was.

( The rest of the story... )

CPAP mask in place, machine Darth-Vadering on the nightstand, I slept through the night. I woke this morning at my normal time with the mask still in place. Pretty much every morning since I got the new mask, I wake at my normal time with the mask on the floor and rarely do I have any memory of when or why I took it off. 

I don't feel miraculously better. I'm still sorta tired, but it's more of an even tired. I'm not getting the extreme, almost painful lows in the afternoon. That of itself is a blessing.

It was a mixed bag as weekends go.

The August Dormer Roofing Project of 2009 is officially finished. With the prospect of friends coming over on Sunday - one who hasn't been to Osage in years and one who's never been at all - I applied my energies to finishing the portion of the ceiling and wall affected by the leaking water. I have a little touch-up to do in the paint along the ceiling (you wouldn't notice if you weren't looking for it), but it's done and looks really nice.

That and a trip to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore was most of Saturday. That story, with an update on the shed project, is detailed here.

Sunday, Jami became feverish, hitting 101° or higher. Not sure what he's sick with, but he's a kid and the weather's been very changeable. Dinner with friends was postponed (bummer, that). By mid-afternoon I was feeling very out of sorts myself, but as I look back I think that was a product of a very bad sleeping night.

Dinner was chicken tenders made with Panko breadcrumbs, very successful there.

I have discovered the joys of MySQL and Wordpress. I've set up three websites so far: Bill Morris Music, Lezlie Revelle's Blog, and The Road Less Ordinary, a blog about responsible living, good food, and autism. What I'm learning there will serve me in good stead not only for personal projects but for work projects as well.

Last night was a choir concert for Katie's day school. It was as you'd expect a large group of singing 5 to 15 year olds to be: unintelligible, cacophonous, and cute. Katie, much improved over years past, sang in most of the songs, and was right on for all of them, hand motions and all.

As a tangent, I'm waiting for the world's school choir directors to figure out that hand motions aren't cute any more past the age of eight or so. Making a fifteen year old do them backfires, often as not.

When the choirs came off the stage to return to the pews and the "group sing" started (another disastrous choir-leader invention, in my opinion), Katie remained sitting while the people around her stood. Bad sign. I moved to where I could see her better, and her hands were up by her face. Another bad sign.

Katie was overwhelmed and she'd checked out.

I went and knelt by her seat and asked her how she was. She shook her head, "not good", so I took her by the hand and we went out into the foyer to get away from the noise and activity. She rebounded, but was hyper, chatty and childish below her chronological age, the rest of the night.

I didn't realize at the time and only came to it this morning that I was affected by the evening as well.

Without devoting a lot of thought to it, about five minutes after we got home I installed MySQL (a DBMS I'm not really familiar with yet) and two Wordpress installations on a production server. Thankfully, it's stable and didn't interfere with MSSQL in any way. I was so out of it last night that I wouldn't have been able to deal with any serious problems that arose.

 Had a follow-up with the pulmonologist yesterday. I explained my issues, and he nodded understanding to each. The final word was that "CPAP, when it works, is the best solution, but it may not be for you. If you decide not to use it, the next step is call your dentist."

I tend to respect the authority of someone who is an expert in a field in which I'm not, so I took that statement as a permission or a sort to abandon the CPAP. Since Apria is right down the street from his office, I went there next, machine in hand, to give it back to them.

( This is where Hayden Christiansen steps in as Anakin, inexplicably aging twelve years while Padme stays the same age... )

I had high hopes for the CPAP  machine, but I'm sleeping worse with it than without it. The constant physical nagging of the mask, for want of a better metaphor, is waking me two and three times a night. That's right on a par with how I sleep without the thing, so there's not a whole lot of benefit there.

I tried the nasal "pillows", and found two problems. My mouth would drop open, waking me, and condensation would build up inside the silicon form and either run down my face or, worse, get snorted up into my sinuses causing burning and irritation. 

I tried the nose-to-chin mask. My face must be built oddly because the mask would cut in just below my cheekbones and cause soreness after a while. In the middle of the night the mask would begin to slip, and the leaking air would wake me.

I made a cotton/lycra chin strap to hold my mouth shut and went back to the nasal pillows. The strap worked, but I'd forgotten about the condensation: I got a snoot-full sometime around 3:00am, so off it came. For some reason, also, my nose feels like I've been punched, hard. Must've been the way the thing was sitting overnight, I don't know.

Here's what I do know: I'm grumpy as hell this morning because I slept badly.

There's going to be a CPAP machine for sale soon, if anybody wants one.

Ninety feet of driveway is a lot of driveway, even with a snowblower. Under the inch of fine, easily blown powder was three inches of heavy, wet, compacted frozen concrete. I had to nibble away at the job, and progress was slow. My father-in-law's snowblower was wheezing almost as bad as me.

The drift around my car was just under three feet, a depth that, for Missouri, is quite rare. Now, you might say, oh sure, Bill, but they have drifts of six feet or more in New York.  Yes, but given our much closer proximity to, say, the Gulf of Mexico, three feet is quite the event. The kids have played outdoors a lot yesterday and today. There haven't been many great snowfalls in the years they've been old enough to enjoy them and they've been lobbing chunks of snow, building "forts" inside the drifts, making snow-angels, etc.

This morning, as the kids were going out for their first Arctic adventure of the day, Schipper decided to make a break for it and investigate a car that was stalled in front of our house. Michelle, in wild pursuit of the soon-to-be-very-sorry dog, fell down the front porch steps. Her right shoulder and hip/butt are very sore, and stiffening quick. I know she has plans to take some very heavy painkillers as soon as the kids are in bed, and I don't blame her.

Schipper, terrified by the commotion she caused, hunkered down and waited for Death. I'm pretty sure there was some submissive urination involved, too.

After Christmas dinner - which was wonderful and will feed us for a few more days - I went out, unloaded the snowblower from father-in-law's truck, and went to work.

Jami joined me outside as I was clearing the driveway. Like his father, he gives little thought to concerns of personal safety, and so placed himself in what he took to be the direct path of the snow chute. I adjusted it on each pass so that the machine threw the snow just in front of him and downwind, and with each pass he moved to try to be in the path. I finally decided to give him his wish, indirectly. I adjusted the chute to blow upwind of his position. My warmth-loving son found himself enveloped in a thick cold cloud of light blowing snow. For just a second I couldn't see him for all the frozen white...and then it settled. He stood, unmoving, waiting to see if it was safe.

Without a word, he turned his back on me and went inside. Yes, I laughed.

It was hard work, but done now. My neck and back hurt.  As for Jami, he's had his bath and is warm and snug in bed. Katie, too. Michelle and I are on our way to the family room to watch Star Trek (my stocking stuffer from "Santa") where we will fight a losing battle with sleep and gradually stiffen into immobility.

It's getting better, it really is. I left the mask on until 6:00 this morning, when I took it off in the mechanical equivalent of the "snooze" button. I was afraid going into this that the mask and hose would make me feel claustrophobic, that in my sleep I would rip them off and away, but such hasn't been the case. I accommodate them, without much thought.

I'm a side sleeper, always have been. I find that when I roll to my side the straps securing the mask to my face loosen and the mask pushes away just enough to annoy. Simple to adjust and deal with it though. I'm working on changing my sleeping habits, to sleep on my back. That's tough.

I had been running the air hose behind the lamp to help control it, keep it above my head. What I didn't think of was that behind the lamp is a very cold exterior wall. I shifted the hose to the front and turned the humidity down. Condensation problem solved.

I feel somewhat better today. Not good enough to proclaim victory, or that even the device has anything to do with it, but, as always, I am hopeful. The real challenge remains having my mouth fall open. I awoke feeling like I'd been chewing fibreglass in my sleep.