Potpourri #3: Pictures, Progress, Politics, and a Puzzler!

BEFORE AND AFTER

Three Months after Autologous | Eight Months after Allogeneic

Be sure to click on the photo above to appreciate the full catastrophe, especially the loss of fifty-five pounds from the allo, making me but a shadow of my former self. While I haven't simply been waiting for my body to recover naturally, which it seems disinclined to do, it is clear that once my back heals up from the kyphoplasty, full recovery will require serious exercise. This will be difficult for me because of my inherent laziness.

BELL'S PALSY

My Bell's Palsy has slowly improved, albeit with a relapsing/remitting course. Here's what I looked like at Christmas, when it was at its worst:

I'm the one on the left

Because the tear ducts for my left eye are paralyzed, my vision has drastically deteriorated. If I lie on my back, my eyes dry out painfully. At night I have to wake up two or three times to use eye drops (Hypo Tears are the best, although expensive). If I am upright, too much fluid distorts my vision — I am constantly dabbing my eyes with tissue and mechanically blinking with my fingers. Finally, if I look down, both eyes flood (I think the right eye floods sympathetically). 

PROGRESS, OR LACK THEREOF

Click on the Chart to Enlarge

I had expected to see another reduction in kappa, but, instead, it's unchanged from last month (+5.5). I like the drop in lambda, which is as inexplicable as its recent rise. I was apprehensive that my cancer had mutated into another type, as it sometimes does. Chemotherapies for myeloma tend to be mutagenic. Lambda is more troublesome than kappa because the particles are too big to pass easily through the kidney. The resulting accumulation can lead to kidney failure. I am breathing more easily now that I've seen the drop in lambda.

My labs used to tell me where I was and where I was going. After the allogeneic transplant, I find myself living an unpredictable life in an alternate universe largely devoid of explanation. I hereby relinquish all forms of medical prognostication. They no longer help.

WAR!

I hope you will permit me to repeat a useless but sadly valid observation: wars are incredibly easy to start but deucedly difficult to stop.

One of the few wars that ended quickly began with the invasion of Grenada, codenamed Operation Urgent Fury, on October 25, 1983. It lasted about a day. Of course, the population of Grenada was approximately 100,000, the size of Davenport, Iowa. The next-shortest was The Battle of San Juan Hill, which began on the First of July, 1898, and ended three days later.

Teddy Roosevelt is left-of-center, as he was in life

In recent history, wars seem to have become permanent. I refuse to make the analogy to George Orwell's 1984, where perpetual war was considered to be politically expedient and therefore desirable (see Praederitio). Orwell is by far my favorite essayist.

HOW AN $8 FAN BECAME A FINANCIAL FIASCO

One of my daughters, who shall go nameless lest this post be used later against me in her murder trial, came running up to me with alarming news: her computer had shut down and refuses to come back up!

The children's computer, which was my old game machine, a hand-built speed demon, had complained of USB over-current (rather like a blown fuse) before shutting itself down. I disconnected all of the USB devices, but, still, the message and the shutdown. I was baffled.

Then I noticed that a case fan had burned out. The spindle was charred and the blades were difficult to turn with my fingers. Could the error message be incorrect? So I put in a new case fan, turned it on, and got the same message. More bafflement. The second time I tried booting up the machine, it decided that death was better than torture by USB and promptly shut down for good. Requescat im pace.

So I reasoned myself into building a new game machine with state-of-the-art components. First, in this day and age, kids need a computer. Curiously, building a cheap computer for them seemed to make no sense to me. What did make sense to me was to give them my 3.8GHz speed demon, which is adequate for any game on the planet, and build a new machine with state-of-the-art components for gaming. (Do you have any idea how many hours a day an adult male not unlike myself can spend fighting exotic monsters in games like World of Warcraft? Yet, at the same time, be thoroughly appalled at how much time the children waste on Facebook, MSM, and Youtube?)

When a man wants to do something incredibly stupid, a man can invent all sorts of plausible-sounding reasons to convince himself that it's the right and necessary thing to do. Fortunately, my wife's idea of digital has something to do with painting her nails, so there was no voice of reason to get in my way.

Therefore, I could happily spend all kinds of money I didn't have on something I didn't need — a machine that today runs at an absolutely blinding 4.0GHz. Without all kinds of extremely expensive high-tech components (think liquid nitrogen or phase-change cooling), that's about as fast as a desktop computer can get. I refuse to calculate the final bill. I stopped counting at $837 although the final bill is probably a few hundred more.

Finally, I moved the guts of my old machine into my kid's enclosure, pushed the start button, and SPLAT! No change. USB overload.

OK, I thought, this is bloody impossible. I stared at the machine stupidly for many minutes.

Then, with a drawn-out, audible "ah...", came the dawn. What my darling daughter omitted from her story was that she or her sister had broken the front-panel USB connector, shorting out the pins. After a few minutes with a magnifying glass and a miniature screw driver, the machine came right up.

Had I been told the whole story, the fix would have cost $8 plus shipping. Instead, I wound up selling mutual funds when the market was diving. (Do give me moral credit for not saying I had to sell them.)

One of my Characters, Prune, from the The Rift

The Anatomy of a Hand-Built Game Machine