I had to run around this morning gathering stuff we had on the front porch from the neighbors yards, and bringing in the flag pole and some of our outdoor decorations before they blew away. The cats were all jumpy because the wind was howling. Seems like tomorrow might be a good day to stay indoors, light the fireplace, make some hot chocolate, organize our stuff and start Christmas decorating.
As you may know, Stephanie like to drive her New Beetle to Roswell, New Mexico in the summertime for a large New Beetle car show called Roswell2K. It’s been going on since 2000, and Stephanie usually joins a caravan of cars from the east coast to attend the show, and they drive together.
Stephanie’s friend Lisa has even rigged up a live webcam of the caravan in transit, which is pretty effing awsome to say the least. The last couple of years, though, Stephanie hasn’t been able to go (Shhhh, don’t tell that to Phoebe. She can’t tell time and thinks she’s been every year) due to our surgeries and to moving.
Next year, they’re having a Route 66 caravan. It’ll start in Chicago and follow old Route 66 to New Mexico, where it will break off and go to Roswell for the event. Then it will finish up the last leg of Route 66 and head home, I believe. We’re hoping, if all goes well, to join in next year.
I’m really excited by the idea. I got to drive part of Route 66 when I helped my friends move to Arizona 9 years ago, but we didn’t have much time to stop and gander at Roadside Attractions because we were driving a big, frickin’ uncooperative moving van. On this trip, they’re apparently building in some time to see sites, which should be fun.
Our router was acting up at home, so we’ve been offline all weekend since we returned home from Thanksgiving. I finally isolated the problem as the router’s power source, and fixed the problem and reset everything this morning. So our home network is back online, thank goodness. Sort of ironic, given that I was so excited about the Super 8 Motel finally having wireless. Homeowners who are concerned with the security of their internet access and their online data may need to use the best residential proxies.
So here’s what you missed:
1. We had a great Thanksgiving weekend and saw the family, and on Friday visited a private museum of antique farm equipment owned by Steve Weeber on his farm outside of Iowa City. Weeber has been collecting and restoring the equipment for years. I took a ton of pictures; those are forthcoming. Much of what he’s collected was produced by Louden Machinery Company, which is where my grandfather worked in addition to farming. We later went shopping in Pella, Iowa, home of the Jaarsma Bakery, one of our childhood favorite places to visit.
2. We arrived home, and Stephanie took me on a carriage ride around downtown. While we were riding around the circle admiring the Christmas lights, she asked me to marry her. I said yes, of course. Our planned wedding date is May 31, 2008. I know that seems far away, but we want to have time to plan without stress. And given that 2005 was the Year of Surgery and 2006 was the Year of Moving, we sort of want 2007 to be the Year that Not Much Happened.
3. Then we went out to eat at Hot Tuna in the Omni Severin Hotel – highly recommended.
3a. Oops – forgot: Stephanie had some renters sign a lease for her house on Sunday. Yay!!
4. I spent all day Monday raking leaves.
So, you’re pretty much up to date on our stuff. What’s up with you?
We’re getting ready to head out to Grandma’s for Thanksgiving day. Our trip yesterday was pretty uneventful. We drove Stephanie’s Beetle (named Phoebe, for those of you who are just joining us) because it’s a fun roadtrip car and somewhat more comfortable than my truck. So I had the opportunity to take pictures out the car window and mess with the manual settings on me camera, which was enlightening. I learned all about the different color settings for my camera. A round barn in sepia tones:
It’s a six-hour drive to Brighton, Iowa from Indianapolis. Brighton’s population is about 700 people, and my extended family numbers around 50 people, so we drastically increase the town population when we show up. We’re staying in Washington about 11 miles away, because there aren’t really any motels in Brighton, although there is a bed and breakfast.
Washington has about 7,000 people and is the county seat, so they have a community center with theater performances, and they’re expanding their public library. They also have an evening Thanksgiving Day parade around the square. We sometimes catch the tail end of that if we go to the single-screen, retro movie theater in the evening to see whatever children’s movie is out over the holiday.
We’re in Iowa to visit my family at my grandma’s farm for Thanksgiving/Christmas, and normally we’re without internet access the whole trip. This year the Super 8 has wireless. Woo hoo! Farm blogging!
Picked up from Lisa. This is a hard meme, because, what haven’t I shared at one time of another? This site is 12 years old, I never shut up (ever), and I’ve answered all you questions, officer. But I’ll give it a shot.
1. I ate the tequila worm once at a party on a dare. I talked another girl into doing the same thing at the same time (there were two bottles) and she really wanted to chicken out, but she didn’t.
2. I know how to cook the perfect chicken gizzard. It’s very difficult to get it correct; usually they come out rubbery and tough to chew, but I can make them easy to eat. I learned the secret to doing it correctly at a little independent chicken restaurant I worked at in the summer during high school. Fried chicken gizzards and livers were two of their specialities. This restaurant was in Noblesville on Conner Street, and all of their customers were white (because I know what you were thinking).
3. I LOVE chicken gizzards (although I haven’t had one since I worked there).
4. The fact that I love chicken gizzards grosses even me out a little.
5. I make up little fantasies in my head all the time – ala Walter Mitty. I think it’s utterly retarded that I do this, but I daydream these little things up all the time anyway. From the time I was 11 years old, the subject of my weird daydreams was usually Princess Diana, and when she died I was completely devastated.
6. I can’t believe I actually wrote down number 5 and admitted it in public.
7. I hate it when the sheet and the blanket get separated from one another and one is longer than the other, or there’s more of one of the hanging off the side of the bed than the other. This will actually keep me up at night. I used to combat this by having my covers be solely a comforter covered with a duvet cover, so I could switch the covers to wash, but have a single covering on me at night that wouldn’t get messed up. But Stephanie gets too hot that way, so we have a sheet, blanket and quilt on the bed, and they drive me nuts.
8. Whenever I go up or down the stairs, I mentally count the number of stairs. This is how I know there are different numbers of stairs between floors at my work.
9. I’m fairly certain that my belly button is a different shape now than it was before my appendectomy surgery.
10. I have an unconscious habit of rubbing my hands together whenever I’m planning something. I don’t realize I’m doing it until someone points it out to me. Alternatively, I’ll rub the back of my head for the same reason. I’m obviously a total spaz.
I’m having another flare-up of pleurisy (this would be the fifth since my surgery, if we’re counting) and last night I was having a lot of trouble breathing. I also had a different symptom than previously — I had a sharp pain on the left side of my chest on Sunday evening. It went away after several hours, but the breathing difficulty stayed, and got worse. So last night we headed out to the emergency room at Methodist rather than the Immediate Care place, just to be sure that there wasn’t anything wrong.
The ER was really busy last night, so we ended up stuck in a bed in a hallway rather than in our own room. (Actually, they’re not really “rooms” at Methodist, but curtained off areas with numbers above them on the ceiling). They hooked me up to the EKG and ran a couple of tests, did some blood work and took a chest X-ray, and determined that I wasn’t having any sort of heart problems, and that I was having another lung inflammation. Unfortunately, all of this took awhile because the doctors and nurses had to run off to help critical patients, which was understandable given how busy they were. But it meant we waiting a long time to see someone and get information. We were also stuck in the intersection of two hallways, so we got more than an eyeful of some of the events. It seemed sort of interesting at first, but turned into a grim spectator sport that we couldn’t get away from.
First we saw a near-collision as some nurses hustled a bed down the hall one direction on a crash-course with another bed coming from the other direction… and when we called out to get them to slow down, we realized they were hustling the one guy out of the room because he was dead. Yikes.
Then we saw the Lifeline helicopter crew race a bed by with a guy by who had some pretty major facial trauma. Fortunately Stephanie was reading and didn’t look up to see him, but I glanced up and got an eyeful I didn’t want.
Then they wheeled a young guy past with a policeman closely in tow.
Then they wheeled a woman in a wheel chair past — they were looking for a bed for her because she was in serious shape and they needed to work on her. They ended up moving a woman out of a “room” nearby into the hallway because she was going to be admitted soon. When the doctors started talking to the woman in the wheelchair, it because kinda obvious from her answers that she’d had a pretty major heart attack and was in bad, bad shape. They got her into the room, pulled the curtain, and started working on her — there were four nurses, four doctors and other people racing in and out from behind the curtain, carrying supplies, a crash cart, other monitors and machines. That went on for quite awhile, while her dazed, freaked out husband sat quietly in a chair on the other side of Stephanie, watching what they were doing and clutching her bag of clothes.
At this point they knew that I should get released, but we needed the doctor to do the paperwork, and he was in the room with the woman, so we had to sit and wait, although I was pretty desperate to get out of there at that point. My lungs were absolutely on fire, and I needed to get to the pharmacy to get the anti-inflammatory, but we were stuck until we could get the doctor, so I tried to read, and relax so I could breathe. It helps to sit still; once I’m moving around it’s harder to catch my breath, and I can’t take deep breaths at all. If I sit still and relax, I can breath shallow breaths without feeling the firey pain hit.
A different Lifeline Medevac crew went past, with a different patient with a bloody, torn up face. Some doctors wheeled in a guy who had a broken neck, canvassing the nurses for a room to put him in, and discussing between which vertebrae the break had occurred.
Eventually the doctor helping me came and got my paperwork ready, which I signed, but I still needed to get my IV removed, and all the nurses were helping heart attack lady. So we sat for a while longer, and I picked off all the EKG sticky monitors and got ready to go. If I could have figured out how to take out my IV myself, I would have, I was so tired of sitting there.
After about another hour, they finally got heart attack lady ready to move to the Cath Lab so cardiologists could work on her, and our nurse came to help me, while the doctors went to the woman’s husband and explained that she had had a massive heart attack and that they were taking her elsewhere for more help. The poor man looked like he was ready to break down, and we felt awful that we were there listening to it, but we had nowhere to go.
I got my IV out, we went to CVS and got my drugs – which have been a major help – and we came home. And after watching that woman have a heart attack in front of us, I don’t think I ever want to eat a cheeseburger again. Wow I do not want to be her someday.
UPDATE: I’m getting a referral from my regular doctor to see a pulmonologist (sp?) er – lung doctor so I we figure out why this lung thing keeps happening, and I can figure out how to avoid dragging my girlfriend to the doctor all the time.
I keep meaning to blog that… I’ve been going for the past several weeks, and I ended up joining the Jordan YMCA because I really like the classes, and I started going more than once a week. Get this – I actually got out of bed and made it to Saturday morning classes at 8 a.m. for several weeks in a row now. I went to the deep water class for the first time on Thursday night, which really kicked my ass. It’s not especially harder, just exercising a lot of different muscles (like abs) that I haven’t worked out so extensively. And I went this morning also. My goal is to go three times a week on Tuesday and Thursday nights and Saturday morning, but if I can at least go twice, that would be great.
I’m surprised how much I missed being in the water all the time; we used to swim quite a bit as kids. I’m also starting to get addicted to the endorphin high I get after the class is over — I just feel amazing driving home.
The message on the answering machine from my cardiologist says that there’s no change in my heart and everything is fine. Yay! I’m apparently a paranoid lunatic for worrying about it. But I’m a healthy paranoid lunatic, and that’s what matters. That’s quite a relief.
We used to have these. Now that I recall, we had this type of Slush Mug, then later another version. I still have my second, newer one; mom gave it to me a couple years ago when we were cleaning out stuff at her house.