The Barry Bonds of Chemo

4am, day 2 of steroid/vincristine/slam week. I could get a lot more done if I could get a shower without waking everyone up. Let me say rht now, beoe I fogt, don ev buy a Micosof wreles keybord and mose, thy suck@! OK. I'll pay attention now. As I was saying, Barry Bonds week. I feel great, a little stomach ache but that's OK, throw some Tums into the pit and all is well. I'll go see the doc today for my monthly checkup and smack of vincristine. The numb fingertips and toes have never progressed beyond the tips, and I have compensated so that I hardly think about that unless I think about that.

All that poemerizing was awesome, felt like I was back at URI, or maybe a nice advanced care facility. Here is mine
Think that I am Barry Bonds
or maybe just a hopped up Fonz
give me yoga and tai chi
eight glasses of water
and then laugh and pee
4 am and nowhere to go
no wine no pot and no spiced ho
Cindy's kidney is now a pie
they got the cancer
stabbed it in the eye
threw it down and Abu Ghraibed it
now she don't have no more of that shit
Raise a glass of whatever you got
to Cindy's now departed part.

Sort of stream of conscience maybe, if I had one, or consciousness if I wasn't so often. Stream of consent? Stream of nonsense? Stream? Out of steam? So it would seem.

I worked about 15 hours this long weekend, digging up the turds of old bookkeepers. I hope to get through the archaeology phase of this job soon and move into new territory. Dana and Mike and I went to see the new XMen movie, it rocked. If you go, make sure to stay through the credits, there is a quick tickler at the end.

The house is not progressing much, I think they nailed up five boards last week. Hmmmmm. Dana keeps doing a circular dance with the windows/doors/rough openings/contractor/kitchen designer/dishwasher left or right. She is losing patience, but she has one of the most bitchingest second grade classrooms you ever did see, ask anyone. For a half-time teacher, she sure puts in some hours, like 40/week, and I don't think they are all just to get away from me and this house.

OK, gonna go get coffee now, then shave the weakass hair nubs off my head, take a cold shower in the backyard, pick splinters and nails out of my feet, put on California casual wear by some designer type that Dana bought me so I don't look too much like my father at 75, and go to work, driving the gals that work for me crazy by tearing up their old job descriptions which they never had and giving them new ones. All that by 8:45 am. We're gonna need lots more poemry, because all I do now is work, and I can't blog about that too much.

I had leukemia but now it's gone
with Cindy's kidney to the great beyond
I now have chemo
like Barry Bonds
'cept I have a conscience
and he has a pond
This job and house are now killing me
but this too shall pass, just wait and see

Reality is for those that can't handle drugs

This reality thing is not all it's cracked up to be. My house is a shambles, kitchen gone, dining room gone, computer room gone. It rained about an inch today, and I had to squeegee water off the slab so it didn't get under the hardwood flooring that remains. We are eating off plastic plates and bowls, and doing any dishes in the bathroom sink.

My health is fine, same old same old, take the pills, drink the water, pee pee pee. I spent last week in Reno, at the main office of my new job. We decided to call me Director of Operations for TEC SLO. TEC Reno is about 18 years old, an engineering firm that does land and water resource planning, engineering consulting, design and planning, surveying, and some other stuff. TEC SLO is only about 15 months old and does the consulting, design and planning, and survey stuff for now. TEC had picked up a big job here and decided to open the SLO office, and now has grown to the point where they need someone like me to bring order to the chaos. Kind of a harmonics/resonance thing, know what I'm saying? Check us out at http://www.thiel-engineering.com/.

We still can't nail the windows and doors guys down, and this is getting critical. Dana has rearranged the kitchen plan so much I am thinking of just doing it out of Legos, couldn't be that much more expensive. We had the big yard sale and made about $750 bucks selling what I originally paid $10,000 for, but hey, now I have room for plastic spoons in my garage/kitchen!

Tomorrow will be my first full day in the new office, so it should be interesting meeting the people. My boss, the CFO, is coming down from Reno with another of the owners tomorrow, so we'll have some meetings and lunches and grind out some decisions. Mike B. wanted me to watch the office to prep for going back to office life, but I am always ready to tell people what they should be doing, ask any Republican! Where the heck is Osama bin Laden, anyway?

My friend Cindy just had a kidney taken out, seems there was a little malignancy in there, so please everyone send her some positive thougths of whatever type you have, some chi, some reiki, some oon yellymon. She will be fine, they got it all and it was very early, and they threw in the liposuction and butt tuck at no extra charge! She's ten pounds lighter already! I shoulda got the blepharoplasty when I was in, I had a coupon 2 eyes for the price of 1, I could've gotten rid of the baggage terminals under my eyes. Oh well, better to grow older than to not grow older, I think. Isn't it? I found this poem by Ogden Nash, one of my favorites for a humorous poem, but I didn't find this one all that funny.

Old Men
People expect old men to die,
They do not really mourn old men.
Old men are different. People look
At them with eyes that wonder when ...
People watch with unshocked eyes;
But the old men know when an old man dies.

This from the same Ogden Nash, more typical

Lines on Facing Forty
I have a bone to pick with fate,
Come here and tell me girly,
Do you think my mind is maturing late,
Or simply rotting early.

Back to reality

Man oh man, life can really throw some curveballs at you. Healthwise I am fine except for losing my mind thanks to this remodel. First, the quote for the doors we want came in this morning, almost double what we expected. Ouch. Then our general contractor showed up and told us we really needed to move out of the house for 3 ½ months, ASAP. It seems nobody anticipated shifting the bearing of a shear wall (CA earthquake code) from the North wall to the East wall, and that means demolishing our bedroom wall and kitchen NOW. I suppose we could all move into the boys bedrooms and cook in the microwave in the bathroom, but ……..

The timing couldn’t be worse, either, as I start a job with an engineering company this Friday, and have to spend next week at the main office in Reno. That means finding a house and moving into it this week, on top of Saturday's yard sale. So if anyone reading this knows a rental or housesitting situation, call me NOW.

Yes Mac, you hear right, no more golf for me, at least until I get a new bionic hip. I am trying to finish off this osteo-arthritic left hip by playing racquetball, and I need to do that to save Mikey from a life in a chair playing computer games. I can actually win a game a month, during steroid week, but he and uncle Barry are pretty good and Mike likes the game. Golf is just too damn painful, and I can't drink the necessary painkillers needed to play and not care, so it will have to wait.

I was anticipating a relaxing last 4 days of retirement – not to be. I will be Director of Operations for the SLO office of this company, which they opened over a year ago and now need some help running. Should be interesting. Friday will also be Johnny’s 18th birthday, holy smokes.

He went to the prom Saturday night, and he and his girl looked like movie stars. He says he had a great time, so that’s good since it cost him a pretty penny including dinner at Café Roma. The prom evening started out as classic Johnny. We started to drive him out to his girl's house in Varian Ranch (that's right, still no license) to get some pictures for us and for her parents, and realized we forgot the corsage and her phone number (just in case). Soon we are driving through Varian Ranch and realize John does not know where the house is. Of course, we cannot get a signal in the hills and valleys of Varian Ranch, and they have a dinner reservation at 6:00. I can see Dana getting a little anxious in the rearview mirror, and John is trying to remain cool, so I knew I had to remain cool. John finally gets through on the phone, but it cuts out twice before he can get street and number. We find their house, which happened to be Dana's dream house, Tuscan with arched doors and windows, great gardens, just beautiful. We are greeted by Jessica and her mom Susan and find they are having a shoe crisis - the strap on the brand new shoes has broken, and there is not enough material at one end to resew it. I ask Susan if they have any duct tape, and we effect a repair that looks like it might hold and doesn't look too bad if you don't look. It lasted half the night. Cafe Roma was happy to move the reservation to 6:30. Then as Dana is pinning John's boutonniere, the pinhead (not me) breaks off and Dana is stabbed. So, bad luck comes in threes - lost in Varian Ranch, broken shoe, stabbed by pin - and the rest of the night was a great success!

Randy and Donald came out last Thursday, and Mike B. and I picked them up at the SLO airport at 3pm. We were pitching tents at Limekiln State Park at 6pm. We hiked up to the falls and the kilns the next day, but then had to break camp and move to Plaskett Creek campground ten miles south. We were lucky to get a site as it filled up. I probably should’ve brought bigger steaks and a grandiose salad, because I think Randy left hungry on the fruit and nut CA diet. We fixed that on Saturday when we came back and had lunch at the Hofbrau and then dinner at the Big Sky Café.

Randy and Donald were troopers, dealing with jet lag while we ran them through the paces of poker and bocce. Donald wiped us all out in 8 hands, winning seven of them by obviously cheating, though we didn’t catch him. Randy and I dominated in bocce. It was steroid week (Mon-Fri) for me, so I was last to bed and first up at 5am, but I flat out ran out of gas Saturday night and was pretty wiped out all day Sunday, steroid withdrawal. Donald and Randy left at 6:30 am Sunday, a whirlwind trip. It was great that they could come at all, and it was like old times instantly. We filled in all the blanks quickly and got down to ranting and raving. I remembered the tent poles this time!

When we tromped down to the beach at Willow Creek I noticed a car that had a license plate frame that read 'One Gallon Club - Blood Donor', and I saw these people walking to it and asked if it was their car. They said yes, and I asked who the donor was and went over and hugged her. I would have hugged her even if she wasn't good-looking, and I told her I may have some of her blood and thanks for helping to save my life. She was B+, but if that meant some B+ took her blood and left some O+ for me, she helped save my life. It was cool.