Getting on with things

Today is four weeks post-op for Knee #2 (nearly two months for #1). The aftermarket parts are...settling in; still stiff and creaky (the right obviously a LOT more than the left) and requiring lots more work to approach anything like normal walking.

But I can walk. It's not fast and it's not graceful - I'm still pretty stiff and tottery, particularly on the stairs - but it's doable with just a cane or even without, if I go slowly enough.

Sleep is still a huge issue which is why I'm typing this at 3am on a Friday morning. I've gotten into a weird sort of routine where I turn in about 11ish and then spend the next four to five hours just lying around. Occasionally I can sort of drift off into a doze, but seldom for more than a quarter-hour or so.

Until about 4:00 to 5:00am; then I drop into a light sleep. It's not a great sleep, it's like when you're so exhausted that you don't so much "go to sleep" as "fail to stay awake". When I wake - usually around 8:00 to 9:00 - I feel mazy and disassociated, wanting to get back to sleep but unable, but still not very "awake". As you can imagine, this shit is getting very old, and I sure wish I could do something about it.

I'm slowly beginning to re-engage with my job, with the intention to return to indoor work at the end of October. This past week I was yanked back in abruptly by a minor crisis and not happily.

I am the "Radiation Safety Officer" for my office. We have several machines - "nuclear density gauges" or "nuclear densometers" - that are used to test soil (or asphalt) density and, as the name implies, use radioactive isotopes for the measurement. Needless to say, they're expensive and have to be handled with great care; the isotopes (Cesium and Americium) are quite radioactive for the small size of the sources.

That's me in 2009 with one of them - it's the orange thing just behind me. The long black rod sticking up is the "probe"; it's all the way retracted so the source is enclosed in a little lead box with a sliding lead "shutter" on the bottom. When you use it you push the rod down into a pre-driven hole in the soil - the shutter slides out of the way - take your test, and then pull the rod back up to shield the source again.

Well...I got a call from one of our senior engineers who had been dragged out to the field because we're short-staffed. He described a litany of problems with the machine, the worst of which being that the sliding shutter that is supposed to close when the radioactive sources are in the "safe" position was jammed open.

This shutter thing is kind of a kludge. It needs to be decently clean to function, but it's used in all sorts of filthy soil materials which, unsurprisingly, will build up inside the shutter well and cake the thing and make it stick.

The solution is to remove the cover plate and remove and clean the shutter and then put everything back together again. It's a pain, but it's fairly safe (you face the bottom of the machine away from you and reach around to clean the shutter well...) if you know how to do it right.

Well...in the seven or eight weeks I've been out our two staff-level people have thoroughly trashed two of the three gauges, the worst problem being that the shutters were both jammed open with crud.

I spent a frustrating evening trying to solve the problem before deciding that standing a foot in front of an unshielded radioactive source was a fool's business. I shoved the things back in their carry boxes and sent them off to Seattle for our depot maintenance person to fix.

But I can see I need a little wall-to-wall counseling with the staff people involved. That sort of negligence - hell, they could have called me at any time and I'd have come in, knees and all, to try and clean and repair the things - is truly culpable. These aren't $1.49 gadgets from Radio Shack, but because of the staff guys' laziness now $8,000 worth of density gauges are both useless and dangerous.

How freaking hard is it to clean up your damn equipment..?

Rrrrrr.

Oh, and the other excitement is that Little Cat has started scratching herself again.

 

She was doing that when we adopted her; clawing out bits of fur and injuring herself for no reason we could see. It wasn't fleas, and we went to a vet allergist for several months, spent a shit-ton of money including this horrible "rabbot-and-pea" food that Little One hated, and got nowhere.

Well, she's at it again, so this time we went to a little kitty-cat ER and got some corticosteroids and a special flea treatment and she seems to be better. Still a goof, and very sweet and affectionate - she's our lap-kitty now that Drachma is too proud to let himself be mauled by hairless monkeys.

One last note; for some reason I got interested in a bit of history I'd pawed over and kind of tossed aside; the 1071 Battle of Manzikert; Seljuk Turks versus Byzantines for control of the Anatolian heartland. So that should be coming along here not too long.

I'll probably be back before then, though, with something.

But not I have gotta try and sleep.

G'night.