November 4, 2009

• News and Notes for November 2009

  

  A couple of people have asked me "how I am" in comments and I notice I haven't posted a News and Notes column in a long while. I do scatter personal information in my entries, but for the most part they are more like "magazine articles" and I update my personal life in the News and Notes columns. So here's a health, wealth, and welfare update from the Mikester this 4th day of November, 2009.

  HEALTH: As I wrote in a recent Facebook update, I just can't seem to get away from health issues this year. Hopefully, this means 2010 will be a year when the only doctor visit I make is for my yearly physical. (A habit I got into when I turned 40 years old) I'm completely healed from the hip revision operation I had in June. Hard to believe that was six months ago. I'm paying the hospital bill in installments now. I still don't know my complete burden, but it's been estimated at $3000.00. I've been back to power walking (a little shy of two miles) each evening when I get home from work. I used to power walk around our business park in the early mornings, but it's much more pleasant walking the perimeter of the mobile home park. I stopped doing my "leg exercises" about a month ago, but sometimes go through the motions for fun. I do try to remember to do my situps, however, and am up to 22 a night. I usually do the situps before or after the walk. My walk is exercise for my high cholesterol. My orthopaedist stopped me from walking for almost a year, while preparing for my hip operation, so I had to take cholesterol pills. I hope to be taken off the pills when they next gauge my cholesterol levels during my next physical.

  My pinched nerve started acting up a few weeks ago, but the pain has abated, and my shoulders and back feel good now. I still don't have feeling in the two small fingers on my left hand, which always causes me make lots of intital typing mistakes, which I can quickly recover, since I type pretty fast. (I've never looked at the keyboard when typing, so if I can't feel my fingers, sometimes they fall on the wrong keys!)

  As I write this, I can't feel my bottom jaw. Last month I had to have two bottom teeth removed, and a partial installed, and since I hadn't seen a dentist in much longer than I care to admit, I made an appointment for "deep gum cleaning". My first appointment was this morning, and I'm still numb from the novocain. My dentist really got into the cracks and crannies. My next appointment is Nov. 17th. Today he cleaned the bottom jaw, and the top will be cleaned in a couple weeks. He also has to fill a cavity in one of my molars. There is one more loose tooth, and hopefully I won't be having any pain in it till I can afford another partial. I have one hole where a molar was pulled three years ago on the upper right side of my mouth, and eventually, I'll have the opposite molar pulled (which is incredibly loose but not hurting at this moment) and a partial constructed to bridge these two holes. When I had the first tooth pulled I never got an implant, and they couldn't put in a partial for just one tooth!

  Three weeks ago, or thereabouts, when my pinched nerve started bothering me, I began using my "comfy chair" in the corner to watch TV on my 60" bigscreen HDTV, instead of the less comfortable but closer sofa. I began to notice that the picture was a bit fuzzy, esp. in my right eye. Last week, while driving back from Hollyweird after taking photos, the glare in my right eye seemed overwhelming. I knew exactly what was happening. A film is growing over my right eye, same as when I had to have cataract surgery on my left a few years ago. I knew I'd eventually have to have the cataract on my right eye removed, but it seems like it's come up too soon. (One of the drawbacks of growing older, it seems, is that time gets compressed. ) I figured I'd have at least till 60, but it's been about 4 years since the last operation. I wanted to make an appointment with my opthamologist anyway, and will now get the news, I'm sure, that I need to have the second cataract surgery. I really can't afford it. (Cost is just under my $1000.00 deductable, and it's a different health plan than for my hip, so even if I would have done this in 2009, I wouldn't have saved any money.) Oh well, hopefully, as stated earlier, 2010 won't be filled with so many health problems.

  WEALTH: On paper (well, on my financial spreadsheet, anyway) I look to finally be breaking even each month instead of having negative cashflow when the new year arrives. I got my consolidation loan cut from 17.99% to 4.50%, so my monthly payment is $620.00, about $150.00 less than it was. (Of course, with a hospital bill of $120.00 a month, that savings has already been eaten up somewhat.) I was able to convince DirecTV that since I'm such a longtime customer, and don't want to HAVE to switch to Dish, I now have CineMax, HBO, and Showtime, plus all my HDTV channel packages, at least for three more months, for a reduced price or free. The bottom line here is instead of $100.00 a month, I'm spending $77.00 a month, and am getting premium channels for free! I only need Showtime until after Dexter's 4th season goes off the air anyway. With the money I'm saving on DirecTV, I was able to increase bandwidth for my internet provider, which makes the internet faster, and also allows me to get full HD on my Netflix streaming video to the bigscreen. So, entertainment has been increased and overall cost lowered.

  I'm becoming so frugal with my meal taking, that I haven't gone out to a restaurant in over two months now. When I lived with Cancerboy those 14 years, I never went into the kitchen, and let him make his messes. I just ate out. All the time. I'm saving a lot of money by cooking for myself, and I'm brown bagging it at work too. I did "treat" myself to a Tommy burger last Saturday when I was in Hollyweird. I used to think nothing of spending 30 bucks at Claim Jumper for lunch, and now I nearly balked at $8.00 for a chiliburger, fries, and a drink.

  I still find I'm using my overdraft credit account, but I've also paid it back the next month. Hopefully, if my spreadsheet is telling me the truth, I'll be in the black instead of in the red, if I continue my frugal ways and don't have any more emergencies. (Then there's that upcoming cataract operation. Sigh.)

  ENTERTAINMENT, SPARE TIME AND SOCIAL LIFE: I'm watching lots of movies and TV series from DirecTV and Netflix. Here are some of the series I'm catching up on: Firefly, a Joss Whedon (Buffy, the Vampire Killer, Dollhouse) sci fi series from 2002, with Nathan Fillion (so good as "Castle" ) as a "space cowboy" captain of a salvage vessel in the future. DeGrassi High (a Canadian series from the early 90s) I watched this when it came out but haven't seen it in years, and I loved the original DeGrassi Junior High series as well. House: When I posted my blog entry about the new series I wanted to catch this season, more than one correspondent mentioned that "I only watch House". I've heard about this series for years, but it premiered five years ago, and I like to watch TV series from the beginning. (I was a taper back in the 80s. I taped a whole year's worth of episodes of some TV series, L.A. Law comes to mind, before even watching one of them, then I'd have marathons where I'd watch multiple episodes in one sitting, like reading a novel.) House came out on DVD recently, so I'm starting from Season 1. Hugh Laurie plays a real asshole of a doctor, who is a great diagnostician, but has no bedside manner at all and seems to hate his patients and not even want to interface with them. Pretty original so far. Thirtysomething: A series from the 80s, when I myself was thirtysomething, but didn't have the time for watching televsion. I'm almost finished with the first season. Neat to revisit a time before computers and cell phones.

  During the summer, I spent a lot of time poolside, but the heat is turned off now till April, so I'm not socializing there again till spring. I met a lot of folks, but mainly only saw them at the pool. My neighbor Mike, who is about 40 (he lives with his mother, who owns their mobile home) is a bit of a friend, but not that close. I talk to him occasionally. I'm trying to reconnect again with my buddy Jim, who spends a lot of time playing World of Warcraft online (and still tries to get me to play the game every time I see him.) Mostly, my "internet friends" on Xanga are the folks I connect with more than anyone else short of acquaintences at work. Neat that social networking exists for those of us who are rapidly losing their original circles of friends. I have tried to connect with some of the single women at the park, but most of them smoke cigarettes, and this is a turnoff for me from square one. I still see my ex girlfriend Liz occasionally. Now that I'm able to walk again under my own power (even though I'm losing my sight, Nyuk Nyuk) I have been out and about taking photos for my Webshots Gallery and Xanga PhotoPosts.

  WORK: It still exists. We're down to 19 people, and most of those are managers rather than employees. Our receptionist is down to part time and leaves at noon. We won't be replacing the inside salesman who quit right before I went into the hospital. It's been refreshingly busy lately, but not too busy that I feel like I'm overworked. I design the panels, quote them to the customers, specify the parts, okay the kit lists, create the master documents so the  techincians can build the panels, and eventually test them when they're finished. I'm involved at every step of the process. As long as the company stays solvent, I'll have a job. I'm also quite positive that with 21 years in the electrical industry, I could get a replacement job pretty easily if our company ever went out of business. Jack, our 86 year old CEO, who had a stroke in March, came "back to work" on his birthday a couple of weeks ago, for the first time since he was debilitated. I'd visited him at home before, but he was much more "active" when being pushed around the facility in his wheelchair during his birthday party. I'd taken some photos of the last panel he and I designed together, and asked him if he remembered the Alaska F.A.A. job. He beamed at the memories and I even asked him to criticize the panel build to make sure we did everything just right according to his specs. Jack didn't criticize anything, of course, but he smiled. Visiting was possibly the best thing that's happened to him since the stroke. After all, how many CEOs do you know who came into work into their 80s and still helped customers and got sales.

  CREATIVITY: I need to redesign my "Virtual Pantherama" website now that the original is offline. I took lots of photos from my old yearbooks (Pantherama was the name of our highschool yearbook) and am going to retool the website as a memorial to my high school years. I'm also wrting those chapters in my online autobiography. www.allthingsmike.com hasn't really been updated at all this year. What online activity I've had has been here on the blog. Usually, I recognize this right about the first of November, and then update furiously, then get tired out by January. 2009 was "supposed" to be the 10 year anniversary of AllThingsMike, but the beginning of the year was spent more on my physical move and then the operation, so I didn't really concentrate on the website. When the original pages, from my Homestead account, were deleted late in the summer when I stopped paying for the subscription, my "1999" website is gone. The current edition of AllThingsMike came online on my own server in 2000, so perhaps 2010 will really be my "10 Year Anniversary". I revitalized the MikeVideo section last year, adding links to all the videos on YouTube, and then YouTube deleted the soundtracks of a lot of my videos this year for "copyright infringement".

  I mentioned clogging to Randy (flatpick46) in comments on his blog and he suggested I put together a clogging video. Clogging is a form of traditional dancing from early in America's heritage. It is derived from Irish jigs. My mother taught me to clog when I was a kid, and whenever I hear Randy's flatpicking guitar tunes (or a mandolin tune, like he posted recently) I always tell him I feel like getting up and cloggin'. I have some more "poetry reading" footage, and really want to shoot footage of a drive along Hollywood Blvd. since I've been spending a lot of time up there taking photos.

  XANGA: I was quite disappointed to find that a lot of the blogs from 2004 through 2006 are missing their images and photos. A lot of my photoposts from that era have "x"'s where the photos should be. The photos are still online. Xanga must have changed the URLs and not told the server. I've been going through some of the early entries, and reinserting the photos manually, which is a long and tedious process. I hope nobody tells me to try and contact the Xanga Gods, either, They seem to have vanished lately, and they never do answer my messages, chatboard posts, or comments. I wonder if other Xangans who have content from 2004 and 2005 have found their photos and images disappearing at an alarming clip.

  I'm attempting to blog more often, and I'm making visits as time allows. I've got a couple of "metablogging" entries planned, and those usually get me some exposure on the front pages. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the five or six regular readers who have been insuring a lot of my more recent "creative" posts a place on the Most Rec'd page and the Top Blogs page. Usually only 3 recommends puts an entry at about position 36 or so on Most Rec'd. With more exposure comes more visits, (and more comments) and I really like the feedback. One metablogging entry (blogging about blogging, for those who don't know the term) will be about exactly how I blog. I'm a bit different in my habits than most Xangans. Another is the long planned "Xanga Friends: Who are These People", a somewhat humorous look at the Xanga Friends trend. I seem to have lots of "friends" I don't even know, and a lot who don't seem to visit. Personally, I'd rather just have subscribers who read the blog. (And who comment, of course.)

  Well, I wrote this rather quickly, and will post without really editing, cause lunch is almost over, and I've got to get back to work. That's what's "up" with the Mikester this month. I'm going to try and remember to post one of these "News and Notes" columns at the top of every month.

  EDIT: 11/05/09 6:51 pm pst. THIS JUST IN: I usually get my news now from the LA Times website updates, which get sent to my email inbasket. I've been watching a rather bad movie on DVD (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, evidence of everything that's wrong with movies today) when I decided to switch to my DirecTV feed to see if FlashForward is on my queue. It's right in the middle of network news time, and the Ft. Hood shooting is all over the tube. We've had our share of tragedy with school shootings, workplace shootings, freeway shootings, almost every type of shooting one can imagine. I've lived a lot of life, but I am quite shocked that now we have shootings at military bases. 12 confirmed dead and 31 wounded. Early reports that the shooter, a psychiatrist who had only been on the base for a few months, was killed, are incorrect. He is still alive, as is the policeman who shot him. At least he will be interrogated, although I don't know if there will be any insights into why people have gotten so angry and confused with life that they actually not only consider but fulfill their insane desire to end the lives of innocent people. Consider the "fallen" solidiers who were lined up waiting for redeployment, standing not in the line of fire of their enemies, but in the line of fire of not only one of their own, but a military psychiatrist whose job included counsel to returning vets. What is humanity coming to? All I can say is I'm shocked, and still have the capability to be surprised. Where will the next shootings occur? And when? And most importantly, why? Why? Why? If one feels the need to end one's own life, why take the lives of the innocent?

  • 3:59 pm
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