Ken Update

On Sunday afternoon, Mary Jo drove Ken down to the Mayo Clinic's ER because he's been having increasing pain in the general region of his liver and he's been having considerable difficulties eating/swallowing.  About a month ago, he started a new chemo regime - interferon and something - although the doctors had confessed that they were sailing in uncharted waters with him since he had already survived longer than the norm for his type of cancer.  And not only just survived, but really, he has done amazingly well during these past three years.  When I talked to Ken about it about a month ago, he took a sort of perverse--but well-deserved--pride in being the strongest kidney cancer patient on record at the Mayo.

About a week ago, Ken and MJ decided to stop the chemo because they felt it was accelerating the extreme fatigue and causing the swallowing problems.  When things didn't improve much after stopping the chemo, and the pain has only continued to grow (varying between a 3 and a 9 on a scale of 1-10, depending on what he is doing and how he is positioned), they decided that they would feel better seeing their doctors at the Mayo.  So, after an interesting few hours in the ER with some fascinating people-watching, Ken was seen and they decided to admit him to Mayo-Methodist for tests.

In the end, it appears that the pain in caused by the tumor on his liver.  The team of doctors/med students (Ken refers to them as the Vultures) came through and determined that he breaths deeply or is in certain positions, his diaphram pushes down against his liver and the tumor and this is causing the pain.  At one point they thought perhaps the pain was being caused by gall stones, which I thinking we were all hoping for because then they could take him in for surgery and remove the source of the pain; however, they are pretty sure that is not the case so now they are left with giving him pain medications to mask the pain.

Unfortunately, the pain medications leave him pretty sleepy but when he wakes up he is clear-headed and his usual self.

I was down there all day yesterday and Ken was in and out, but when he was "in" he was his usual, feisty, opinionated, funny self.  Who knows what happens from here? 

I think that if they could get his pain meds titrated so that he isn't so groggy that he can't get out of bed, he will be much happier.  That is what I am hoping for.  It looks like they are sending him home today.

I left my niece in San Francisco...High on a hill...

I really did leave my niece, Meredith, in San Francisco last weekend.  On a hill in Pacific Heights.  Of course, that was the intention all along since the whole point of the weekend was to get her settled into her new apartment.  Meredith graduated from Villanova in Philadelphia back in May and starts a new job with PwC in San Francisco next week and in the interval managed to find herself an amazing apartment in a beautiful neighborhood!


Here is a little video tour of her apartment but I would suggest turning the sound down since I am babbling in the background.

The quality isn't great since I just shot this with my phone, plus I cannot figure out how to rotate the video clip so sorry about that.  Still it gives you an idea of where Mere is living.

We had a really lovely weekend.  Perhaps I shouldn't speak for Meredith, but I had a really lovely weekend with Meredith and if she didn't have quite as wonderful a time, at least she was gracious enough to fake a positive attitude.  They were LONG days though!  Meredith arrived with only two suitcases and two boxes of clothes and small items and we ran around the Bay Area looking for inexpensive furniture (mostly IKEA), sheets, towels, miscellaneous supplies, groceries, etc.

Meredith was very concerned about the cost of everything and we did try to be frugal; but I kept telling her that if her mother was truly concerned about containing costs of the move, then she shouldn't have put me--her sister with no financial good sense and a great love of decorating--in charge.  Seriously, what was Margaret thinking?  Despite me, we managed to set Meredith up for a very reasonable amount. 

Mere will have three roommates - all strangers to each other - and shockingly enough, they all seem really nice and normal.  Another Craigslist.com success story.

Oh, the embarrassment!

Ian is out of town so I've been rambling around the house by myself (well, Attila and Bodicea are there but they don't keep me on the straight and narrow) which usually means that I watch sappy chick flicks, or made-for-TV movies on Lifetime, but last night I sunk to a new low.

While channel surfing after watching a god-awful movie on Lifetime, I stumbled upon an infomercial from Time-Life on "Singers and Songwriters".  I was all set to just surf right past it but they started playing a snippet of James Taylor's Sweet Baby James, followed by Cat Stevens' Wild World, follow by Paul Simon's Still Crazy After All These Years, followed by Don McLean's American Pie....and what was I supposed to do?  How do you turn away from Don McLean and American Pie?  I was singing along because I know all the words to all those songs, and I found I couldn't turn the channel...and pretty soon something like 20 minutes had passed and I was still there, singing along with all 150 songs.  But wait, there's more!  The also had The Classics (free with purchase of Singers and Songwriters) and I knew all of those songs as well.

The sad thing was, there wasn't even any wine involved.  I was that pathetic absolutely sober.

Finally, the trance was broken when Margaret and Dave stopped by to return the kayak and I had to hurriedly turn off the TV lest they see what a sad sack I truly am.

In my defense, at least I didn't order anything...

(...but it did cross my mind)

Singers and Songwriters

Greetings from the Free and Hansiatic City of Hamburg

I like Hamburg.  I went on a tour of the city on Sunday afternoon and was really impressed.  It's very clean (as one would expect from a German city) but it also has an interesting history.   But we won't get into a history lesson. 

I am here for the International Society for Professional Innovation Management which has been a very mixed bag.  I've met several very interesting people, made a new friend in a woman from Latvia whose name is Gundega which is the name of the flower we call "Buttercup" which I think is a fantastic name, although I find myself wanting to greet her each day with, "What's up, Buttercup?", but I am not sure that she would really appreciate that.  I think it's funny when Mr. Barker says it to me, but she might just think I was strange.  

Most of the conference has been really academically focused and we all know that I have problems with people claiming to be experts on business and/or the challenges of managing technology when they have never worked in a business nor had anything to do with developing or managing technology.  Still, there are enough corporate types here to make it worthwhile.

I am staying at the Alster-Hof Hotel which is, of course, almost painfully clean if not just a wee-bit dated.  The location is wonderful, though, being just a couple blocks from the Binnen Alster (you were right, Ken) which is the little, lower part of Lake Alster.  Much like Minneapolis, there is a chain of lake here in Hamburg, surrounded by beautiful homes and trendy neighborhoods.   

Here is a photo of the Binnen Alster with the spires of four of the major churches and the Rathaus (City Hall - I love that they call the seats of local government "Rat" Houses...what could be more appropriate?).

Here's the Rathaus and the canal that runs alongside.

There are canals all over the place.  These are the old warehouses which had been built back in Hamburg's Hansa history.  At the time they were built, it was the largest warehouse complex in the world.

Parts of Hamburg were destroyed in The War, but amazingly much of it remains.

Amusingly, our planned social event for this evening is a Mississippi paddleboat ride/dinner down the Elbe!  Ha!  To think I have flown thousands of miles to take a boat tour which is part of every conference in Minneapolis/St. Paul!

Bis bald!

Bodicea Silliness

Our new cat, Bodicea, having fun with a shopping bag.  She had been going absolutely crazy with it and, of course, I missed that while I was looking for the camera but while this is more subdued, it is still cute.

Slideshow of photos from Spain

The Rain in Spain...

Ah...Valencia...warmth,sunshine..hmm...not so much.

So our warm weather vacation wasn't quite as warm as we might have planned but it was still absolutely delightful! We had the opportunity to stay with a couple of Ian's friends from college at their second home in Spain and it was really a wonderful visit! Poor Suzanne and Paul were stuck with us non-stop for almost a week but they were very gracious about it.

Xabia (I think!)

Suzanne and Paul have a lovely home just outside of Denia and we spent the week visiting local markets, walking the hillside, reading, watching football (soccer) and cricket, but mostly eating and visiting and eating some more. The food was fantastic! We ate like kings! Suzanne (and Paul) created such delicious meals for us that Ian and I are now committed to cooking more and better at home.

Ian, Tess, Suzanne, and Paul in Denia.

We quickly slipped into a relaxed routine of sleeping in, having a little breakfast on the patio, wandering or reading, eating a late lunch, wandering or reading, and having dinner at about 9pm and then watching cricket or soccer and THEN sitting around drinking wine and visiting until WAY past my bedtime.

Now that we are back home we are back to our usual, up at 6am, at work by 8:30-ish, and asleep by 10-ish. Oh well...

Ian in front of the very futurist IMAX theatre and Art Museum in Valencia--The whole complex is amazing (there are more photos in the slideshow to the right).

It actually feels like we'd been gone longer than a week because the weather here in Minnesota had changed so much in our absence. When we left there was still a covering of about 2 feet of snow everywhere with snowbanks along the streets between 4 and 6 feet and when we got back there was a lot of soggy bare ground and the dirty, salty, sandy remains of snowbanks. Yesterday morning they were talking on the radio about how the temperatures were REALLY going to drop and be prepared for frigid weather for the rest of the week. I was sure they were going to say the temps were in the single digits but then they announced low-30s! Two weeks ago, low-30s would have been deemed "balmy".

Oh the difference 13 days makes!

Fallas Festival in Valencia. The dresses are amazing--beautiful fabric and ornate designs--there was a parade led by the youngest girls, and in the plazas they created huge amazing papier mache floats which were to be burned on the last day of the festival.

Happy Christmas!

We had a lovely Christmas!  On Christmas Eve Day, we arrived down in Mankato at about 1:00pm and had a relaxed afternoon hanging out, chatting, snacking, and playing a little Trivial Pursuit (Team Treetie-Meredith won both games!).  People did an excellent job with gift-giving and we both go very nice gifts.  Ian, was perhaps, most happy with his gifts.

Yes...yes...it's more little metal men.  Ken and Mary Jo gave Ian a collection of beautiful Revolutionary War pieces and as soon as we got home, Ian immediately set them up.  Of course, things didn't stop there. Next we set about setting up the diarama of the battle of Waterloo in the coffee table.  This was made easier due to the book give to Ian by Margaret.

Look at how happy he looks!  It's pretty cool.

Chris Kluwe - Punter for the Vikings

Last night Ian and I drove up to Anoka, to the Courtside Bar and Grill so that Ian could be taped to the "MIAC Minute" to be shown on Fox News 9 on Sunday. 

It was a pretty interesting evening, as it turned out.  Also there for the show was Chris Kluwe, the punter for the Minnesota Vikings football team and he was a really nice guy.  I, being a doorknob, insisted that Mr. Barker stand for a couple photos.

I forget that Ian is a big guy.  Chris Kluwe, as a punter, is clearly not the biggest Viking, but he positively dwarfed most of the guys in the bar last night---except Ian, who was pretty comparably sized.

Not only was it nice to meet Chris Kluwe, but it was interesting to see how they film these things.  They film in 2.5 minute segments and the host Ron is very adept at taking just a few bits on information and building them into a conversation that flows.  He gets a lot of information and a little rapport-building chatter packed into those two minutes and still makes it seem unrushed.

BBC Book List

Rumor has it that the BBC put together this list of "classic" books and estimates that most people will only have read 6 of them. 

Ha!  I showed them...I've read 59.  The ones in bold are the ones I have read, the ones in italics I have only read part of or started but never finished.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible -
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazu Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

New Kitchen Remodel Pictures

So a few people have asked me to post new pictures of the new kitchen so here you go.  It's not completely done--the tv will be installed on the wall next week and I still have to tile the marble backsplash:

I also painted the living room and got a new couch so here's how that is looking now.

The glass-topped table is where Ian is going to recreate the Battle of Waterloo with is 300 tiny metal soldiers.

Finally, here are a couple photos of Attila looking pensive...or looking like he wants to crash through the window to attack (and eat) some poor defenseless squirrel:

Happy News! I don't have to take the GRE!

I was just talking to the Director of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (HSTM) program and he assured me that they will not require that I take the GRE and it will not reflect negatively upon my application!  This is very good news indeed since I my preparation for the Math section wasn't going so well...although I do think I would have done very well on the Verbal and Written.

The Best Buy/Geek Squad guy came by the house today to advise us on how best to install the new tv on the new flatscreen tv on the new kitchen wall.  The good news is that it will look great and do everything that we want, the bad thing is that I have to have the electrician back to the house to add an outlet.  Oh well---just part of the never ending kitchen project.

Thanksgiving Airport Travel Without the Hassle

We just took Tara and the kids to the airport this morning to send them on their way to Florida and we had worked out a plan to maneuver them through the airport with the least amount of hassle.  All for naught.  We practically had the airport to ourselves--Ian dropped us off at the curb and then went to park the car, and Tara, the kids and I walked directly up to the ticketing counter and were helped immediately.  From there we went to security and since there was no line at all, I didn't even have a chance to point out to the kids what the procedure would be.  By the time Ian had parked the car, Tara and the kids were collecting up their shoes and jackets on the other side of security.  Amazing.

Completely unrelated...here's a couple pictures of Attila.

Enquiring Minds Have Requested an Update on Attila-the-Honey

Attila continues to get acclimated to his new environs - he no longer jumps and runs at EVERY noise; and instead has developing a condition Ian calls "falling over" whereby he walks up to either Ian or me, falls over rather unceremoniously, and rolls sort of half on his back.  He languishes on the floor until we give in and scratch his head.

The other morning as I was preparing to leave the house, I heard a very loud, "bang, bang, bang" and considered momentarily that the workmen had arrived early to finish up the house.  Alas, that was NOT the case.  As I got to the main floor the sound seemed to be coming from the basement, but when I was in the basement, it seemed to be coming from the main floor.  When a plaintive, moaning "meeeooooooow" was added to the cacophony, I was pretty sure I knew what had happened.

A couple days earlier, the flooring guy had removed the wooden grate over an old heat register that was in the dining room floor so he could spray-coat it in his shop which meant the vent was open.  Attila hadn't shown a great deal of interest in it but on this particular morning, he decided to check it out.  Unfortunately for dear old Attila, there is a pivoting flap which enabled him to go one way quite easily but returning was trickier.  The banging sound came from Attila pounding his head into the flap.

In a joint effort of Ian trying to lure Attila with treats and me trying to get a grip on the behemoth, we managed to get him out and upon being rescued he casually walked away as if nothing untoward had happened.

Dave's Floor Sanding to the rescue!

I guess Jon must really want to get paid this week because he was able to get Dave's Floor Sanding to come in this week to finish up the floor.  I feel good about this - Dave's' probably the biggest hardwooding flooring company in the metro area, and while I am sure he has a few incompetents on the payroll, the company has too good a reputation for there to be too many.  Yeah.  They will either start tomorrow or Wednesday!

My idiot general contractor is on a mission to make me insane.

Or maybe this is just a twist on "suicide-by-cop"--instead, "suicide-by-homeowner".  Maybe that's it.  Maybe Jon Bartelt is, besides being an idiot, suicidal but too much of a chicken-sh*! to do the job himself but figures if he really works at it, then I'll kill him for him.  He really, truly is working hard to make me murderous.

Today's bit of news was that he wanted to move my furniture into my soaking wet, mouse-ridden garage for an indeterminant period of time...since he just found out that the flooring guy cannot work on the floor until after Thanksgiving.  Of course, the bulk of the work necessary on the floor is to repair the 10-foot-long gouge in the middle of the living room made by Jon's guy dragging the stove across it.

The floor will be done--and done well--this week.  I've had enough of this.

I LOVE the counters!

The countertop installers were at the house this morning - they said they would arrive between 8-10am and they were there at 8:18am :)   They proceeded to very efficiently install the counters and they look great.  The material is sort of like quartz but is made from recycled glass and mirro,r and the tiny bits of mirror pick of the light and it sparkles just a little bit.

The only slightly down side, and it isn't really a downside since I had been warned three times in advance, is that the seams are slightly visible.  The woman at Home Depot had warned me that with the white materials the seams showed a little more, then the guy who came out to measure warned me that the "Polar Cap" color was the hardest one to hide the seams and suggested that if that was going to bother me I should pick another color before we went any farther.  Then before the installers started installing, they warned me one more time. 

I was starting to get a little paranoid, thinking that the seams must wind up being like blaring beacons, but you can hardly see them...  And I love the color so much more than I notice the seams.

Here are photos.

Note the lovely line of plaster near the top of the wall.  That is where my idiot contractor installed the picture rail moulding---unfortunately, what he installed wasn't actually picture rail moulding but instead cheap, crappy trim moulding, and I had told him I wanted only real picture rail moulding installed just a 1/2" below the ceiling.  Just one of the many things he has had to rip out and do over.

The Countertop is Here! The Countertop is Here!

They are still in the process of installing it but it looks fantastic thus far!!  It sparkles!

Wow, that's amazing!

I've been working away in my basement office for the past couple hours and I thought I would take a little break to see the results of all the sewer work.  They were just finishing up leveling everything when I headed down to the basement and so I expected to see raked sand...

It appears that the concrete guy was here to work up the quote for the sidewalks and put down the temporary asphalt surface...

When I talked to the concrete guy at 9am, he had told me that they had shut down concrete sidewalk work for the winter but that he could come out soon to put in a little blacktop to tide us over til spring.  I didn't know he meant he would do it today...this morning!  Cool.

It's hard to believe that just a few hours ago, this was an enormous pit and a mountain of sandy dirt!

A So-So Night's Sleep Makes it All Seem Better

As Mary Jo predicted, crying did not help but a night's sleep, even if it wasn't a great night's sleep, has made the whole thing seem better.

Here's how my front yard looked as of about 9am this morning:

Now it has all been inspected and they are well on their way to filling in the huge, gaping hole.  I called the concrete people but they said they have shut down concrete work for the winter but they will come over to give me a quote and put a temporary blacktop surface on it so we will have some sort of sidewalk instead of a mud pit.

Attila is napping under the bed and I think he thinks he's hidden...nobody ever said he was bright...