I guess I *should* have taken pictures
Maybe if I had let my friends take pictures of my heart surgery, I would’ve gotten Boing Boinged, like this guy who photo-documented his brain surgery.
I have glue in my hair
I had two health appointments last night and this morning: my follow-up sleep study to see how well I’m doing on my CPAP machine, and my follow-up cardiologist appointment to see how I’m doing after my surgery.
I didn’t manage to get all the glue washed out of my hair from the electrodes that were glued there for my sleep study last night. I had 16 of them attached to my head and face and other body parts. This time, though, I had fewer things to deal with; I had only one microphone glued to my neck rather than 2, and no breathing tubes, because I had the machine.
One of the things they mentioned, that I noticed, too; I have dreams again. I’m actually sleeping long enough to fall into REM sleep and have dreams, which I wasn’t doing before; their study showed I wasn’t getting any REM sleep at all. This had probably been going on for years actually, which you can tell if you look at the dreams section of my journal, where there’s a gap of about three years between dreams that I remember enough to write down. So the return of dreaming is a really Good Thing, as Martha would say.
The cardiologist’s appointment was really short and not much happened. I expected to have a electrocardiogram, but they didn’t do one. And Dr. Yee didn’t even realize I had the heart valve surgery; he had to take notes. He listened to my heart and said everything sounded good. I should be walking a mile a day, or biking, etc. I also should be able to lift whatever I normally lifted before surgery. I’m supposed to see him again in on October 17th at 9:00 am and they’ll do an electrocardiogram then, and then again once a year for the next several years to monitor how my heart is doing.
While I was in the waiting room, I was watching the health channel they have on TV — same one that I wrote about before, with the dog trained to detect a woman’s epileptic seizures before she had them, to warn her so she could prepare. Turns out the channel I was watching is Accent Health. Here’s a news article on the subject.
I made notes this time because the program today was on healthy eating; they said studies show that lycopene in tomatoes can reduce women’s risk of heart disease by 30% if you eat 1/4 cup of tomato sauce a day. I wonder how that translates to V-8 juice.
Choosing the right cookware
Stephanie and I have had several discussions lately about cookware, including one with her dad, who’s an engineer and who has tried cookware made from several different materials. Make Magazine posted this interesting article on cookware materials from an engineering perspective.
About halfway down the page are charts comparing the various materials. I didn’t have a chance to read through the comments.
I recently replaced my teflon-coated fry pan with a copper-bottom stainless steel one. I was worried about the scratches on the teflon coating.
Refurbishing an Old Gas Grill
Having just finished (or almost finished) this task, I’m infinitely qualified to give advice on the subject. So here’s a step-by-step guide on how to get the most out of an old gas grill:
1. Throw the old gas grill in the back of your truck.
2. Drive to the local landfill.
3. Give the attendant money to take the grill.
4. Drive to the store and buy a brand new gas grill.
5. Cook.
Trust me, you’ll spend far less money and HOURS less time this way, than if you do what I stupidly did and take the old one apart and repair it.
Don’t let my friends or family members fool you into trying to do it yourself, no matter how hard they try.
“It’s easy!” they say. “Just buy replacement parts and put them in!” They’re liars. I love them, but they’re god-damned liars, every one.
In the summer of 2003, I bought a burner to replace the old one. I bought the wrong size, of course, so I had to take it back and get a different size. I managed to remember to do that in the spring of 2004. I opened the burner and read the instructions. They were so complex that I didn’t bother to try to figure them out.
Then I realized that I also needed the ignition switch and grates, too. So the grill sat for another season until spring of 2005. I went to 4 different stores to find the ignition switch.
Replacing the burner was a BITCH. I’m not kidding. Taking the old one out almost kicked my ass and took 3 hours. And putting the new one in took me 4 hours, and the help of my friend Kathy to force the burner into place after I assembled it. The assembly was difficult because it was customizable for several different grills, and I had to measure and figure out which assembly went with mine, and follow unusable instructions to do it. It took an hour to replace the ignition switch, for the same reason.
I also had to replace the rock grate and the food grate. I went Target, Menards, Lowes, Kmart, and WalMart before I found the right size. I bought and returned 3 grates that I thought were right (yes, I measured) before I found the ones I needed. I found the rock grate at Walmart, and the food grate at Menards. Stephanie also found new grill knobs at Menards.
After all the running around, I spent about $80 on replacement parts for the old grill, and about 12 hours either buying parts, measuring the grill, or putting stuff in. (For less than $100, I could have had a new gas grill, and 3 years sooner.) Finally, I was done. Finally, we could eat. Maybe.
Today, I went to replace the empty propane tank with a full one. I went to a gas station nearby that carries them, but the lady behind the counter had no idea how to trade mine out. So I went to 7 other gas stations downtown. No propane. Maybe tomorrow I’ll finally be able to grill out.
Over 100 Quick and Easy Healthy Foods
I’ll have to take a look at this site later. Stephanie and I have been trying to build our regular cooking menu with things that are easy to prepare and healthy. Because we don’t live together yet, we have an extra time-crunch due to traveling back and forth from one house to another, so we have to find and whip up things that are quick and easy.
Weekend Update 2005-07-11
We received a company e-mail this morning to tell us that one of our company’s employees from their London offices has been missing since Thursday’s attack. That’s very distressing news. I was discussing in an e-mail with my sister, who lives with her husband in a town outside London, the terrorist’s choice of targets. They’re incensed at the attack on the double-decker bus because it’s such an iconic symbol of London. Which made me think about the World Trade Center — they wanted that target so badly, they attacked it twice; once from below and once from above. If they were truly trying to attack our freedom, they would have blown up the Statue of Liberty, but they went after the twin towers. I’ll bet money Bush has never really sat down and thought about that, and why. Because I think it says a lot about what bin Laden is really after.
Stephanie and I went to Kathy’s softball game on Friday. Saturday we did some reading (we’re both re-reading the current Harry Potter books) and some work around both our houses. I had two birds in the house on Saturday morning, which was fun for the three cats, but not so much for me. I think they came in through a hole in a screen in the spare bedroom, so I fixed the screen.
On Sunday, Kathy came over and started breaking down the concrete stairs beside my house. I worked on replacing the burner and igniter for my gas grill, and on painting the lawn furniture that Amy gave me. I also talked to a gutter guy about giving me estimates on getting my gutters fixed on the front corner of my house above the front door. I’ll have to see how much they are.
Long-delayed t-shirt blogging
I started out with such great intentions. I was so determined. I as going to take a picture every day, and blog it right away. How quickly I got sidetracked. Curse you, real life! How dare you get in the way of my silly website projects?
Well, anyway, here’s the catch-up… see the main photo page for all my shirts in context.
[edit needed: update photos]
June 28, 2005 – One of my three Curious George shirts. Sleeves are too long, but I love it.
June 28, 2005 – fun grey shirt; this looks good on me.
June 30, 2005 – I have six white shirts exactly like this, and a grey, blue and black. I’ll have to try on another to see how they all look.
July 1, 2005 – Beaver Mountain. Hee hee.
July 2, 2005 – Darn it, I need someone else to take pictures.
July 3, 2005 – I love this shirt, but it’s too big, and is getting old. It’s definitely a wear-around-the-house shirt.
July 4, 2005 – One of my standard Old Navy ringer shirts. They look alright.
July 4, 2005 – Another Old Navy. I spilled on the other one, and had to change.
July 5, 2005 – Inexpensive Fruit of the Look I bought for $3 several years ago. This looks okay.
July 6, 2005 – Cool “year of the rooster” shirt I got several years ago. They didn’t have the “year of the monkey, or I would have it instead. Sleeves are too long.
July 7, 2005 – Standard Old Navy ringer shirts.
July 8, 2005 – I’m blogging this! I got this at thinkgeek.com
Okay! Now I’m all caught up.
The Ridiculously Thorough Guide to Making Your Own Pizza
By Billy Reisinger, The Ridiculously Thorough Guide to Making Your Own Pizza is a great tutorial on doing it yourself, and although I made pizza from scratch for years in my mother’s kitchen, this is an excellent refresher course and covers detail (such as moisture levels in cheese) I’d never thought of before.
Vivid Dreams
The first dream I had was about a house that I owned with my brothers. We were renting it out to a friend of mine, and I found out that he had a dog, which was okay, but he was keeping it in the crawlspace beneath the house, which was not okay. So the whole dream was about going to rescue the dog and explain why it’s not good to keep it in a crawlspace. For some reason I was being really polite to this friend, instead of being pissy and indignant, like I would be in real life.
The second dream I had was about a video copying place. I went with one of my co-workers to get a home-made video copied onto DVD, and while we were wandering around in the store, we discovered that they also printed books, too — our books, it turned out. They were making pirate copies of books from the company I work at. We started to snoop around a little more, and we stumbled across an executive from our company in a back room; he was startled to see us as much as we were to see him, and it became obvious that he was running this company. So we tried to sneak out the back door, and the mafia showed up in cadillacs. Then I woke up. Writing about it now, this dream makes no sense for a variety of different reasons, but it seemed to while I was dreaming it.
In the third dream I had, Stephanie and I drove up to Valparaiso to meet a friend of hers that I had never met before. I don’t remember of the name of the woman in the dream, and it certainly isn’t an actual friend of Stephanie’s. Anyway, the woman was older and had three or four kids and drove around in a mini-van. Stephanie left me alone with the woman and the kids (which I thought was highly weird) and we ended up going to her house to work on a craft project with all the kids, involving making a full-sized grandfather clock out of clay. (I honestly don’t know why that would be in my head). Suddenly, the woman started hitting on me, in front of the kids. I was really freaked out, and she ended up telling me that Stephanie had encouraged her to do so because Stephanie didn’t like me anymore, and wanted to set me up with someone else so I wouldn’t be heartbroken when she dumped me. And I got really upset and woke up. 🙂
Stephanie’s Feeling Well
Stephanie had her surgery today and everything went fine. The surgeon removed two lumps from her breast, and she came out okay and is home now recovering. She’ll be home tomorrow taking it easy and relaxing, as recommended by the doctor.
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