Checking In

It has been 16 days since my last Gratitude blog post.  It was a good time to take a break.  I am not yet ready to return to daily posting.  I did want to write a short post and say “hi” to my blogging world.

This month my burn went from nearly healed to a closed wound to having like a mild case of road rash on fragile skin.  The wound reopened about 10 days ago.  Lea has been changing the dressing every other in the same way that the visiting nurse was doing last month.  It is healing much faster now that it was then due to having a much better skin bed underneath it with vastly improved blood flow.

I will go to my regular MD tomorrow.  She may or may not take a look at it.  For all 100+ times I have seen this MD over the years, she rarely examines my body directly.   Mostly it is the lab test result for the anticoagulant Coumadin that she checks.

I am grateful to be doing well, for longer warmer spring days and for all the support that others have given me along the way.

Time for a Short Break in Writing

I did not post for a week 13 months ago in March.  I wrote 359 posts here in 2014.   My plan was to write every day for a year and then take a break.   10 days in hospital in January knocked me off stride on that one.

Now I will take a break for a week or so to get recharged on writing Gratitude blog posts.  Burnout is becoming an issue.  Hopefully on my return I will have a renewed energy and sense of direction.  This blog is one of the best self-care activities I have done for myself in my life.  Quitting altogether due to burnout would be horrible.

On a side note, I took a shower today without having my ankle wrapped in a plastic bag for the first time in three months.  It feels good to be clean all over.  My graft is still very fragile.  It is now a closed wound.

I am grateful for the positive energy and thoughts writing this daily blog has yielded to me.

June Bug

My two cats are June Bug (name given by Joy) “Bug” and Love Bug (name when found at agency) aka Baby Kitty.  Bug has bonded with me really well.  She is sits by the keyboard when I am at my PC and will lay next to me in bed when I am reading.  She often sleeps on my wheelchair when I am not in it.

Baby Kitty bonded with Lea but is not hanging out with her like she used to before she learned how to use the cat doors to the deck last week.  Lea misses her Baby Kitty sleeping with her.  I feel for her.

I am grateful that Bug bonded so closely with me.   She gives me lots of love, purrs and comfort.

Alternatives to Incarceration

Drove Lea to Chehalis today to visit her son in rehab at American Behavioral Health Systems.  He is doing well after his first month.  This was an alternative to a jail or prison sentence.

Doing 3 to 6 months of rehab is a lot better choice than locking up an addict for 2 months and then releasing them to probation.  Probation for addicts is like sentencing them to a legal meat grinder that chews up their lives, tax money and opportunity.

Lea brought him some new clothes and cigarettes.  This was the first time she bought and gave presents other than gift cards to her son in years.   She had a sense of trepidation and some fear of rejection over buying clothes for her son.

I am grateful to be of service in helping another family get back together.  I wish my mother had gone to rehab or at least tried to get sober like Lea is doing.  It is a far cry from a perfect world, but they are both doing their best to change their ways and their lives.

PS: Seattle and King County have a pilot program to address low-level crimes with a diversion program called Law Enforcement Diversion Program (LEAD).

A Big Late Snow

2015 has had a roughly average amount of precipitation in Washington State.  It has been much warmer than usual though and fallen as rain instead of snow in the local mountains.  The snowpack is 73% below average.  We are going to get a late season snow of 6 to 12 inches in the mountains over the next two days that will increase the snowpack to some degree.

Even with average precipitation, locals are concerned about a “drought” due to how we count on the melting snowpack to provide water in the dry summer months and to keep our mountain forests from drying out.   Last year, we had the biggest forest fire on record with a much larger snowpack.

I am grateful for snow in the mountains and rain in the lowlands.

Greater Good – Cal Swim Coach

Here is a nice video on gratitude by the UC Berkeley’s women’s swim coach—2015 NCAA champions.  Coach McKeever stated she has only anecdotal evidence.  As coach Olympic and NCAA champions, those are powerful anecdotes.

Lea and I went for a walk and lunch along the Kirkland waterfront today.  It was a nice day with a great grinder at George’s.  It was good to get out for a little walk in the sunshine, watch the ducks and listen to music playing in the amphitheater.

I am grateful for the many ways to show gratitude in our lives today.  I do a lot better while in a state of gratitude instead of self-pity and resentment.

Officially Healed

I went to the burn clinic at Harborview today.  My burn has been deemed officially healed.  There is a tiny spot that was still open that they chemically cauterized closed with a dab of silver nitrate. 

After burning myself on 1/15, getting surgery on 1/22, and being released from the hospital on 1/29, its been slow progress to make it this far.  It was well worth the effort compared with all other outcomes except the one where I did not lose a part of my graft resulting in having been healed in about two weeks instead of two months. 

I again explained to the burn unit director that her nurse practitioner did a piss poor job of listening to my concerns regarding how best to deal with the complexities caused by my being paralyzed.  She agreed to discuss them with him.  In the past she had defended his choices.

I am grateful to be mostly healed and not having to have daily visits by the home health care nurse anymore.

Better Late Than Never

It used to be that when I was beyond a deadline for a task that I would just give up.  I missed posting last night and am now writing last night’s Gratitude blog post in the late morning.  There is great progress in doing something late versus never.

I am grateful for showing up differently in my life by completing tasks when I can instead of simply giving up.

Elise the RN

For all but eight days since January 30^th, Elise the RN came over to change the dressing on my ankle every day.  She did a great job advocating for me with my doctor and bringing supplies when necessary.  Today was her last day.  On Wednesday I will go back to the burn clinic when they will presumably deem my burn healed enough to not need dressing changes.

I am grateful to Elise for her outstanding service for the last two months.  My life and skin are definitely better for having had her in it.  Vaya con dios!

Prayer and Meditation

I would frequently pray when young.  So-called foxhole prayers for god to get me out of some trouble or another that I was going to be in when my father got home in a day or two.   That never worked.

In recovery, I have learned how to use prayer and meditation for a similar effect as positive thinking, visualization or self-hypnosis.  That works a lot better than focusing on the negative with my magic magnifying mind.

I read AA’s 11^th step prayer aka the prayer of St Francis of Assisi (undoubtedly not his work).

Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace!

That where there is hatred, I may bring love.

That where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness.

That where there is discord, I may bring harmony.

That where there is error, I may bring truth.

That where there is doubt, I may bring faith.

That where there is despair, I may bring hope.

That where there are shadows, I may bring light.

That where there is sadness, I may bring joy.

Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort, than to be comforted.

To understand, than to be understood.

To love, than to be loved.

For it is by self-forgetting that one finds.

It is by forgiving that one is forgiven.

It is by dying that one awakens to Eternal Life.

Then I talked about my insane alcoholic thinking that makes smoking crack seem like an attractive idea no matter how self-destructive it actually is.  It was a good meeting.   I felt better.

I am grateful for what skills in prayer and meditation that I do have today.

Thoughts and Feelings Are Not Facts

Had a rough week with crazy thoughts and negative feelings getting the best of my thinking for the last week.  Fortunately I am now wise enough with virtue (actually doing the right thing instead of simply knowing the right thing while not doing it) to keep me from acting out in self-destructive ways to change the way I feel.

When AA was young, psychologists and doctors studied a group of problem drinkers trying to find out what so-called problem drinkers had in common.  They concluded that alcoholics were “still childish, emotionally sensitive and grandiose.  How we alcoholics did resent that verdict!”

I am still emotionally sensitive.  Now I am also much less childish and grandiose.   That is great progress.

I am grateful for the progress I have made in my recovery so that I don’t have to react to every thought and feeling as if it were a fact had to be proven or disputed.  They are just thoughts and feelings that go away faster when I don’t get stuck obsessing on them.

Grocery Store Deli’s and Salad Bars

I love grocery stores.   The bigger the better.  To me they are like museums serving as an ode to conspicuous consumption in America with plenty of free parking.

Lea and I went to Whole Foods as a low-effort outing and lunch.   We picked two kinds of apples out of the 50ish varieties of fresh fruit, potatoes and onions.  Then we got box lunches from their 100 feet of salad bar next to the 100 feet of 6 kinds of hot counter food including bbq, tacos, burgers, and grilled sandwiches.

Definitely spendier than other grocery stores but at least customers don’t have to wait in line at the checkout register.    Whole Foods takes your money with a quickness!  I was pleasantly surprised to find a few produce and bottled water prices that were better than the other local grocers.

Small ethnic markets tend to run between tight and impassable for me in my wheelchair.    Otherwise I would shop at them more often.  Plus I don’t know how to prepare tasty meals from the products they offer.  I guess that is what cookbooks are for.  I like to read while eating not before eating. 

I was planning to make scalloped potatoes with ham for Easter.   It turns out what I really want is Au Gratin potatoes.  I had to Google the difference (cheese vs. cream).  Never made that before, slicing the potatoes by hand was a drag and I very rarely make casseroles (or other baked dishes).

I am grateful for high quality produce at affordable prices set up in dazzling displays of color and abundance.

Almost Healed

I have an appointment at the burn clinic next Wednesday.   It is my hope that I will be deemed healed enough to no longer need daily dressing changes from the visiting nurse.  It has taken 2.5 months to get this far. 

I am grateful having the resources to get this wound healed in a somewhat timely fashion.  It is a lot better than dying of an infection or having part of my leg amputated. 

Cheese

I love cheese.   Mostly the classic Americana dairy varieties like cheddar, Swiss, pepper jack, sharp, etc.  Not much for exotic flavors of cheese that are stinky or gooey.  I do like blue cheese for salad dressing and some cooking uses.

In teens, my father would bring home cheese from New Zealand.  Big giant 6 pound sausage shaped logs of yellow cheese.  I thought it was one step above government cheese at the time.  Why else would they sell such big rounds?   Turns out that it was a pretty nice smoked Gouda-like cheese.  They don’t even sell cheese like that in local volume stores like Costco or restaurant supply stores.  I had no idea how good I had it as a kid.

I am grateful for all the delicious varieties of cheese.  Tonight it was pepper jack on ground beef patties.  Delicious!

Chicken

I love chicken.  It is a universal meat prepared in thousands of different ways.  My cooking repertoire is far more limited with basic frying, baking and the infrequent soup.  Pre-roasted chickens from Costco are a huge buy—it is cheaper to buy a cooked chicken than it is to buy an uncooked one—and theirs are always delicious, moist and tender.

Boneless chicken thighs are my favorite chicken piece to cook.  Take out some frozen thighs, rinse the frozen brine of them that prevents freezer burn, season, and cook at will. 

Tonight I hoped to make chicken with peanut sauce on spinach with phad Thai noodles.  The spinach was too old so I threw it out and made garlic chicken with refried beans, cheese, sliced olives and salsa.   It was delicious and nutritious.

Chicken, beef and pork are my favorite meats.  I like fish and shellfish, but they are more delicate to handle and cook making them more of a hassle and sometimes too smelly when cooking/cooked.

I am grateful for red junglefowl, Gallus gallus, from SE Asia and its many permutations.  It is delicious.

My Deck Garden

I lived her for a decade with started out as a nice collection of house plants.  Then I got two cats.  They were plant killing cats.   I was down to my last two sorry plants and a short lemon cypress tree (cats hate citrus smells).  Then Lea got motivated to grow some plants on the deck.   It was a good year for the deck plants. 

She lost interest in the deck plants last summer and I took over.  We added more pots and plants and used a hose to water the plants since carrying water in a bucket was not going to work for me.  It worked pretty well until I got blocked from getting on the deck due to a bunch of stuff being stacked in the way.  I did not try that hard to get past the barricade and the plants suffered from a lack of water.

Last fall I bought a box of bulbs from Costco that could/should have been planted in the fall.  I finally got around to planting the budding bulbs today.  Most of the bulbs were in good shape, one type of bulb was not in such good shape out of ten different kinds.

I could rearrange the deck in a better way by myself.  It would be a lot easier to get help.  I will get Lea or a friend to help me later this week

I connected the hose to the kitchen sink faucet, watered the plants, stored ten gallons in a tub and watering buckets and put it away.

I am grateful for my deck garden.  One annual plant in a hanging basket started blooming two weeks ago.   I look forward to spending time puttering around in my deck garden this summer.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Varilite Pneumatic Cushions

I sit on a Varilite pneumatic cushion to protect from getting pressure sores (aka bedsores) on my backside while sitting in my wheelchair.  They work great being a sophisticated design of some foam padding for shape and air pressure for weight distribution.  The downside is that the can go flat which leads to near failure of purpose.

My current cushion is flat right now since the finger valve popped-up when I was starting my Gratitude blog post.   I will keep the post short and go fix the cushion.  It just takes a little glue and some time to dry.

I am grateful for my Varilite pneumatic cushions.  They are the best seat cushions I have had in my 33+ years in a chair.

Insurance

My car insurance renews itself every six months on my credit card. That charge cycled again yesterday.  I have not had cause to use my auto insurance for years.

Getting paralyzed while working resulted in my getting a disability pension via industrial insurance aka workmen’s compensation.   With the exception of a few large employers like Boeing and Weyerhaeuser , workmen’s comp in Washington State is run by the state’s Department of Labor and Industries.  A nice feature of that is I don’t have to worry about somebody bundling off my pension with a collection of other liabilities to a company that is headed for bankruptcy in yet another version of white collar fraud.

I am grateful for the benefits derived from well run insurance companies.

Continuity of Care

After burning my ankle in mid-January, I came home from the hospital at the end of January.  Since then my wound care has been done by the same nurse working every day but for eight days.  Five days missed when a nurse practitioner changed the orders to a stupid dressing that ripped part of the graft off during a dressing change and three clinic appointments. 

Today the nurse had to skip a day for having the flu.  She was going to come in the afternoon and rescheduled for tonight.  Then she called to check my willingness to trade off a dressing change for potentially getting sick.   We will meet again tomorrow.

The graft that is still there is doing great.  The lost part is doing fairly well on a relative basis.  There is still at least a week or two to go before it will be a closed wound.

I think some of her days are reasonably short working for 3 to 6 hours.  I know other days are quite long while doing complicated IV drug infusions for homebound patients. 

I appreciate continuity of care.  I don’t want to see her work herself into the ground though.  I had sensed from our first meeting that moderation was not her strong point.

I am grateful for high quality medical care at home that also brings supplies to treat my burn.  

A Warm Day in March

The temperature cracked 70°on a gorgeous day in Seattle yesterday for the first time since October 19^th with a whopping 72°.  That broke a 46 year old record set in 1969 of 70°.  That one day heat wave drops back into the 60s and 50s over the next 10 days.

I am grateful for warmer weather, the warmest winter on record in Seattle and for not having the snowiest winter on record like they did in Boston.

Now I just need to get cracking on deck gardening…

Future Tech

After having gone over four years without participating in a focus group, I did my second group of the month today and will be doing a third one tomorrow night. 

The first “group” was only me surfing MSN for Microsoft.  Today’s focus group was paid for by for by the University of Washington.  It might have been a preliminary study for cyborg bioethics.

Today’s topic was on implanting chips in the brain to control prosthetic or paralyzed limbs or other external devices.  There were 4 other guys with spinal cord injuries and the facilitator was a women with a spinal cord injury.  It was the woman’s regular job to facilitate focus groups, this one just so happened to be on man/machine interface with respect to spinal cord injuries.

Is it really a robot as in a robotic arm if it is guided by human controls?  Sounds more like a cyborg to me.  Either way, it is another quantum leap forward in human-machine interactions. 

The first focus group was held a mile from my apartment for which I got a copy of MS Office Professional worth maybe $200.  Today’s was in downtown Seattle and I got $75 and a nice discussion about technology.  Tomorrow’s will a freebie discussion about pain management.

My friends hardly listen to me! Hah!  It was nice to get paid for my “expert” opinion.   The other guy were either a lot less technically literate than I was or choose to cite a lot less anecdotal evidence.  They were surprised by the very idea that a wifi device should have secure communications.

I am grateful for my technical literacy, a good education, a fast web connection and a chance to maybe help steer future tech research.

Electronic Transactions

Lea and I shopped at Crossroads Mall today.  I always use my credit card to pay for purchases whether online or in real life.  Paying by credit card is usually faster and slightly cheaper—I get a 1% reward on cc purchases.  Plus, I don’t have to write checks, carry a lot of cash or end up with several pounds of change in my backpack.

I also pay my household bills online either by sending payment through my bank’s online system or by debiting my bank account when paying rent each month. 

Much like how a horse used to be primary transportation and are now for rich equestrian hobbyists; stamps on envelopes used to the primary way of paying bills, now stamps are used for mail greeting cards to friends.  The post office has conceded that by selling universal stamps that never expire no matter what the current first class postage rate is.  A booklet of 100 stamps is easily last through years of mailing cards and the occasional letter.

Home Depot has a deal where they email receipts to accounts associated with a given credit card.  It is a little creepy on the privacy invasion side, but actually works really well for finding the receipt for old purchases.  It is near infinitely faster for me to search an email folder than hope to find a receipt that I almost undoubtedly through away.

I am grateful for the convenience of electronic transactions.  They make my life easier, better and speed up bill paying chores.

A Crappy Lunch

After years of weekly dining together Sandy and I don’t spend a lot of effort on trying new places, we tend to repeat at the usual suspects.   She loves pho, so we eat Vietnamese a lot and I have chicken & veggies.

I had a Groupon that was expiring at the end of the month and so we went to Bushnell’s in Redmond.  They do “craft” beers (microbrews), burgers, and a few other things.  We had burgers and fries.  For an $11 burger it was a wussy untoasted whitebread bun with way too much sauce and wilted greens instead of lettuce on mine.  Sandy’s fries were too cooked for her taste.  This was one of the worst meals we have had in a while.  It was such a poor effort that we just said the food was fine and left it at that.  The presentation looked okay, it was a burger and fries with a toothpick in a tall burger, what could go wrong.

The good news is that even a place with crappy food it felt safe to eat there.  It would be a lot worse if we got food poisoning.

I am grateful even the Redmond places with crappy food are going to be safe to eat—at least for a burger and fries.

Grateful for Things

Ideally I would write about people in my life that I am grateful for.  After the first couple of hundred posts that got tough with at most a few score people in my life.  After 1100 posts, it is more nearly repetitive, onerous and grinding.  That is a proven method to put out the writing fire.  That is not what I want.  I know that writing is good for me and serves as a way of staying in contact with my sister in Australia letting her know that am doing at least well enough to write.

Opening up my choice of topics and tangents will help continue to make writing these Gratitude blog posts a positive experience.

While grateful for many many things today, tonight’s honorable mentions are modern batteries and electronics.  I charged up my Kindle and my droid 4G smartphone today.  They are both incredibly reliable pieces of sophisticated portable electronics although my Kindle never gets far from my nightstand.

DIY Home Projects

I stopped doing hobby projects last Fall  when the sun went away. The sun has returned.  I am already behind on plant work on my deck and it is only the second day of spring on the astronomical calendar.  We had an early spring based on the nice weather earlier this month.

I look forward to spending time nurturing plants to grow lush and flourish over spring and summer. It is also time to get back to metalsmithing jewelry.

I am grateful for the joy that I am learning to get from active home hobbies and for having the resources to make it happen.