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.

Calefaction

The moment I stepped onto the front porch I knew it would be a breathlessly hot day.

Friday had been very warm in the oppressively cheerful way the early summer days here are warm; in the sun the heat bears down like hot metal while the shady sunless patches are pleasantly cool. The real measure of a hot Oregon day, however, in just at sunrise. Today the sun rose on a flat, breathless sort of dawn. Pulling the air into your chest it felt dry with the scent of dust. Even the asphalt was still slightly warm underfoot.

It would be a hot day.

The Pearl District of Portland has, in the preceding decade, descended from being a rundown post-industrial hardscape of dreary warehouses and melancholy-looking duplex apartments to a shiny, happy bustle of steel and glass and carefully-hand-rubbed artisanry; cute little coffeehouses, precious retail outlets, many, many spas and salons.

The early-morning passersby were already in their hot-weather wear; shorts, brief tops, and sandals, for both men and women.

Why is it that a woman's feet in sandals look pretty and tended while men's just look...unkempt?

The same goes for our legs, unfortunately; most of the Pearl morning women were tender, neat, and attractive from the hips down...while we betesticled types ambled about in an ungainly shackle of knobby knees and hairy shins.

In my heavy boots and thick work pants I envied the gentlemen of leisure their cool shorts and open shoes, but not their bumptious look. I know my own appearance too well to pretend that I would look any less ridiculous in their abbreviation.

There was a single five-hour parking spot next to our work site, a city block being transformed into a wooden-slatted hole in the ground, now full of machinery and the debris of construction. I fiddled with the parking machine and then stopped to enjoy a lovely pedestrian, cool in her flowing white dress and (of course) tidy jeweled feet in tenuous sandals, her bell of iron-gray hair shining like a gunturret in the heavy sun.

She passed with a look, calm and pleased with herself and her morning, bound on who-knows-what errand or no business at all; perhaps merely "taking the air" on a Saturday morning.

I was what I call the "anchor nanny" today. It is, rather like highway driving, one of those appallingly awful tasks that combines the necessity of constant attention with a complete lack of intellectual or physical stimulation. It is bookkeeping, pure and simple; so many feet drilled, so much silt, so much sand, so much anchor length (how much bonded, how much unbonded..?), so much grout pumped.

Primary grout volume, secondary grout volume...the point of the exercise is simply to reduce the number of indeterminate variables when an anchor is tested and fails. That way the designer can decide whether it is the design that is inadequate, or whether the construction was defective, or whether - if both appear satisfactory - the failure was due to some sort of anomalous soil condition that no one could have anticipated.

The crew worked in the heat, roaring like their equipment, cursing and sweating. I moved, like one of those slow-migrating animals (a tortoise, perhaps, or a similar creeping reptilian thing), from west to east following the shadow of the superjacent building and the eastern wall until, finally I could retreat no further and the sun in its' loathsome splendor leapt overhead and I was sweating and cursing and stinking like the rest.

By midafternoon no one wanted to continue. One of the drills got stuck, the foreman breathed out one last fiery curse and shut the job down.

I still had an hour to go, completing my report for the day, but at least in the cool of the old mill building where my company has moved. There was also cold beer, and I could strip out of the heavy protective gear and into shorts, daring the empty office to laugh at my legs. It was late afternoon when I emerged to be punched; gasping, breathless, by the hot, heavy gold blanket of the dying day.

“Summer is the time when one sheds one’s tensions with one’s clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit."

~ Ada Louise Huxtable

The Grandparents arrive

When the Chief was a mere slip of a redleg, he had something of the reputation among his peers as one who had a loose tongue around his social and military betters, as well as being noted for his somewhat creative strain of invective.

In other words, his military superiors thought him a smartass.

He was famously quoted at length for his summary of a particularly scathing After Actions Report wherein his battery had been accused of failing to meet Army Standards by a rather gaping-chasm-like margin.

"Well..." I told the Regular Army evaluator "...there are good days and bad days. Some days you get the bear. And some days the bear gets you. And then there are the days when the bear just pulls your T-shirt over your head, bends you over and bloops you up the dumpster until the eyes pop out of your head."

Yesterday was one of those days.

I had hoped to post lots of pictures of the fun we had at Vancouver, Washington's "Dozer Days" riding the big trucks, working dozers and graders and excavators. Ummm, no. The Peeper was very excited on the way over but became more clingy and less happy with every minute we spent in the immense, noisy, busy sandlot. He hated the horns and sirens and seemed bothered by the people all around him. By the time we finally got to the excavator he refused to let go of Mojo and had to be carried off looking like a very frightened little monkey.

I have to say that I was a rather wretched Daddy, irked with my son for his lack of enthusiasm about something we had planned and expected him to enjoy. And a particularly lousy husband, taking out my ill humor on my wife, who had done nothing to deserve it except try and comfort her child, who was distraught with the noise, confusion and bustle of the event.

So they left, and I tried to stay with our friend Courtney and her sons, but they soon reported themselves tired and hungry and cashless. That ended "Dozer Days". Too bad - it's a fun event. Maybe we'll go next year. I promise to be less of a butthead.

Things went downhill after that, if you can believe it. Peep was a little serpent's tooth all day, Mojo was harrassed and angry, with him for being a little pill, with me for being a jackass in Vancouver; I felt frustrated and ill-tempered...just one of those T-shirt-over-the-head-bear-sodomy-days, and then Gramma and Grampa Mojo (let's call them Chickie and Bubba for short) arrived after midnight, their flight out of the East Coast having been cancelled and the rebooked flight over four hours later. I fell asleep on the couch and missed their first two phone calls before waking, stumbling out and driving in a sort of dazed frenzy across a darkened North Portland to the airport. Chickie was desperately chatty on the drive to the motel, while Bubba sat silently beside me, either as grumpy as I was or just at a loss for conversation. Which is perfectly possible - my father-in-law isn't exactly the Dorothy Parker of auto mechanics.

So here I am at 3 a.m., still sleepless, hoping for a better day today.