Lest The Old Traditions Fail

How many other nights at Dartmouth have ended like this, with EBA's at 1 AM?



Reunion Day 1 has been lovely. I've been able to spend time with several of my best girlfriends, and the weather is just spectacular. Hanover is looking particularly green compared to the arid Southwest! I've had a chance to catch up with many familiar faces. However, I am sticking close to my friends, as venturing afield alone results in me noticing people looking at me like I am a complete alien...at our next reunion, many many people will be pregnant or toting babies, but for now it's quite an oddity.

The only thing that would be better is if Alex were here, too. But the crumpet and I will be headed back to Minnesota in just a few days. For now, we're enjoying an interlude in the other place that I consider home!

Sara read her favorite book to the crumpet this evening: Elephant Elements, which she discovered during her term abroad at Oxford.

Bathroom shaping up

I have managed in the last day or two to get the first coat of paint up in the bathroom. The color, according to the paint producer, is "Cracked Wheat." It is a light shade of yellow-gold, which you can see against the white primer below. I have to admit that it appeared more subtle when looking at the color swatch. I had some angst that it would be too much, too bold, a color to put in the bathroom. Would it play nicely with the (existing) light green trim? How about the finished oak of the vanity and medicine cabinets? How would it look under the soft-white of the vanity lights (which are currently sitting in the corner. I suddenly felt out of my depth.



But, now that all the walls are covered and dried, I think it will be alright. The yellow-green combination of colors is a favorite in hobbit clothing, if that is any comfort.

And yes, the gaping hole in the wall is still there, and still gaping. I won't be able to fill it until the painting is done and the cabinet it finished. I am making some progress with that, though. I recently got the hinges I need in the mail, although laying out holes and cuts to make them fit and line up right will be tricky. That's a job for the weekend.

WWDC

No, that's not some play on "What Would [D] [C]?" It stands for World-Wide Developers Conference, Apple's annual week-long conference for people that write software for the Mac. For the last several years, the major focus has been on whatever is coming in the next version of Mac OS X. This year, there are rumors that there will be a preview of the next release, 10.6, which some are code-naming Snow Leopard, which might be released next year sometime. But, for the first time, there will also be a major track on developing for something other than the Mac - the iPhone. At the end of the month, apple will release firmware version 2.0, which will bring the capability to run (legitimate) third-party applications, and support for many features desired by corporate America. So, developing for the iPhone will have a lot of airtime.

But both of those are overshadowed by the number one rumor surrounding Steve Jobs' keynote address - the next generation of the iPhone. Those who follow these things feel that an unveiling is all but certain - there have been many strong indications that it is imminent. The biggest anticipated change is the addition of 3G wireless, which is a much faster cellular data network than EDGE, which the current iPhone uses. EDGE feels like the bad-old days of dial-up internet access, but is available most everywhere you can get a cell signal in the US, and requires relatively little power. Most of the iPhone's applications - weather, maps, email - have been optimized to work well even with the relatively slow speed of EDGE. Surfing the web, however, can be somewhat painful, especially if you need to find some information now. For that, you are better off using the built-in WiFi, but only when you can find it.

3G is comparable to broadband, is available in most metropolitan areas of the US (and most of Europe, Japan, and Korea), but is more expensive to implement and burns through battery power a bit fast, which has stifled its adoption in cellphones until recently. iPhone users have demonstrated a much greater appetite for wireless data access than other smartphone users. While hardly the first smartphone to take advantage of it, a 3G-iPhone will certainly speed adoption of this technology.

Others anticipate that the iPhone will have a built-in GPS receiver, allowing it to know where it is located to within, say, ten meters. Right now the iPhone can very generally work out where it is, based on the closest cell towers. The best I've ever seen that work is to within a couple hundred feet. Good enough to tell you what the closest restaurants are, not good enough to give you realtime directions to find them. There are tremendous amounts of "location-aware" applications that will blow your mind, most of which haven't been invented yet.

Others expect a better camera (myeh), more storage (always a plus), a slimmer (or thicker) profile, etc., etc. Other question marks abound. For myself, I just hope for a trade-in/upgrade program :-) If nothing else, you can expect to hear about it. For those interested in the blow-by-blow, you can get live blog coverage from the event.

In Phoenix Again

Taking some much needed R&R, I've been visiting H and the crumpet in Scottsdale this past weekend. Really, one could describe the whole weekend in that one sentence. But, since this is not Twitter, but an actual blog, I'll elaborate a touch.

I showed up late Friday after a flight as pleasant as one can hope for these days. Saturday was spent largely hanging around and escaping the heat. We had a really neat dinner at a vegan restaurant called, simply, Green, and enjoyed a tasty meal and Tsoynamis for dessert while working our way through a baby names book. Don't expect to hear much about names from us until the crumpet actually arrives. I will say this - many of the entries in that book are clearly made up. I ask you, have you ever met a girl named Parslee, or Schmoopie? I won't even go into the bastardized spellings of popular names these days.

Sunday we had brunch at a place called The Mandala Tearoom, in the artsy district of Scottsdale. That's where this hear horsy fountain is located. In the afternoon we saw the latest Indiana Jones movie. I could perhaps write a review, but instead will sum up by saying that if you go into it looking for entertainment and fun, though not quite as good Raiders of the Lost Ark, then you'll not be disappointed. Some of the adventure sequences are over-contrived, but clever nonetheless.

And now I am hanging before my flight back, while Hilary begins a week rotation through the ICU. I'll be spending this week, like last, splitting my time between the knee walker at work and the bathroom at home.

Knee Walker - not done yet...

Since I last posted about the knee walker, a fair bit has happened. For one, we've finished building the thing.

Here's an end-on view of the disc brake mounted up to the rear axle. I just like the symmetry of it.


The rear axle mounted up to the underside of the frame. The red and black thingamajigger is the disc brake caliper. As things have progressed, using this stop bike part was a good call. It was a little tricky making sure it got mounted and aligned just right, but it will provide great stopping power, and saved a lot of time and effort in designing some other braking mechanism.


We took the whole thing over to the bike shop last Friday when we picked up a brake cable and housing. They got a kick out of seeing the finished product. When I ordered the brake assembly from them, I could only give them a hand-wavy description of the project, because I was still in the middle of designing it!


The wheels we are using have what are called "split rims," - symmetric left and right halves that are bolted together with the tire in the middle. This is unlike the wheels on your car or bicycle, which are one-piece and have the tire pried over the rim. The tires also have an inner tube. What it all means is that, if one tries to unbolt the wheels before deflating the tires, you'll get about halfway before the 50 psi in the inner tube blows the two halves apart. I should have known this beforehand, but instead learned it the hard way with quite a surprise. Hence the warning label we added to the frame.


This is how the finished device looked when we brought it over to adjust it to the patient and have him try it out. Keep in mind that this guy is big - over seven feet and nearly 600 lbs, so it looks much smaller next to him. The time spent having him try it out was well worth it - I was able to pick out some things that we'll need to change and adjust before he uses it full-time. So, after that brief time over at the hospital, it has been back in our Shop for revision.

One of the major changes will be swapping out the front wheels, which are fixed, for swivel casters. It seems obvious that you would want to be able to steer something like this, but we were initially told that the front wheels should be fixed. The PTs and docs we were working with were concerned that, like the commercially available knee walkers that have handlebar-steered front wheels, the device would be too tippy. Well, without some amount of steering, the device is too difficult to maneuver, making it a good bet that he simply won't use it at all, which is a bigger concern than it being too tippy.

Next, the arms that the front wheels attach to need to be shortened up, because the hallways in his house aren't as wide as we thought.

The uprights for the seat need to be lengthened, because even with the seat all the way up, it still needs to be an inch or two higher.

The handlebar stem needs to be a bit longer, too.

The attachment for the handlebar stem needs to be beefed up, because we was able to twist it around much too easily by leaning into it.

The frame, although strong enough for the load, needs to be stiffened. As it is, with a full load on the seat, the frame twists a bit more than I would like to see.

So, that's what has been keeping me busy 12-14 hours/day for the latter half of the week - designing these changes, putting together drawings of new parts for the Shop to make, and assembling the new parts together. With luck, that should be complete by the middle of next week, and we can give it another go with the patient.

We've been told by his doctor and family that, once this guy's leg heals up, we should think on how to build him a bicycle!

Front Steps Finished

The rails were installed earlier this week and the caution tape taken away. The anchoring seems solid - a huge improvement over the old steps. I'm quite pleased with the results.



So, that's at least one house project that's finished - an advantage of paying someone to do a job, rather than relying on nights and weekends of your own sweat equity.

Dispatch from the trenches

In the few hours a day when I am at work, sleeping (not nearly enough of that), or just plain dealing with the world, I have been painting in the bathroom. At this point I have the walls well coated with white primer and ready for painting. It hasn't exactly been a cakewalk getting to this point, however. I have learned that, due to more false advertising in the dimensions of the new vanity cabinet, it is a touch narrower than the existing cabinet. As a result, in order for the paint job to look right, the vanity had to come out so I could paint behind it. On course, with the vanity went the sink (I tried to conjure a bathroom sink joke, but came up with nothing). So, ever since last Sunday, I've had no bathroom sink. Ah well.


Next came the long process of scraping loose paint and sanding around the rough edges. In the process, I learned that the walls have a skim-coat of plaster over the much harder, horsehair-reinforced plaster over the rough slats. Sanding the created a tremendous amount of dust, as you can well imagine. I set up a fan in the bathroom window to try to help suck it out.

Next came the primer - first around the edges with a hand brush, then in the main areas with a roller. Considering the relatively small amount of square footage involved, both seemed to take a lot longer than I would have expected. But, I now have gleaming white walls and a firm foundation to take up the off-white paint I'll put up next. It's a little tough to get an accurate read on how the dramatic color change (speckled dark green to gleaming white) has affected the tone of the room, since it is missing sink, medicine cabinet, shower curtain, and blinds.

Painting the bathroom was really the whole impetus for this whole project - replacing the vanity, sink, and faucet seemed a good idea to take care of at the same time, while replacing the medicine cabinet seemed necessary to match the new vanity. I am also considering replacing the lighting fixture above the medicine cabinet, also to ensure it matches. At the least, I'll redo the wiring between the switch and that lighting fixture, because it was held together with just a wrap of electrical tape. I have set the medicine cabinet aside while waiting for hinges to come in the mail, and for my glassblower colleague to clean up the edges of the mirrors I cut. At this point, I'll focus on wrapping up the painting and getting the new sink in before H comes back in a week and a half. Medicine cabinet she could do without - a sink would be a bit tougher to deal with.

Weekend with Dad

This weekend we had a digital camera and tried to take some advantage of it! So here's some proof of my continued existence, despite the lack of blog posts. Dad arrived on Thursday and we've been having a wonderful time just hanging out.

I have gotten through another week of surgery (mainly more hernia repairs and gallbladders). I have one more week of actual surgery coming up, which will probably be quite busy. More getting up at 5 AM, unfortunately. Then a week in the ICU and a couple of days of anesthesia before heading back to Minnesota. Alex will visit next weekend, which will be wonderful. I've been so lucky to have so much company to break up my time here!

Thursday I left the hospital at a reasonable hour and we went for falafel sandwiches at Pita Jungle, then got gelato next door. Alex and I had discovered both of these places when he visited last. Here I am eating, which is something that I spent a LOT of time this week doing.

I think the crumpet might be having a growth spurt, as I have been hungry all the time. I eat breakfast at home just after 5, then again during the 7 AM conference, and usually a nibble or two in the middle of the morning as well to bridge the gap to lunch! I bring some food in every day, and there are also snacks (some healthy and some not) in the resident lounge, and then I have a small food allowance to use in the cafeteria as well.

Yesterday, we had a great vegan meal at Green, where they make their own ice cream. I had the yummiest dessert, which they call a tsoynami, with the ice cream, mint and chocolate syrups, and chocolate cookie bits in it. It is the vegan answer to a Dairy Queen blizzard and I want one every night!

Today, we went to see Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright's camp that is just a few minutes from my apartment. We had a wonderful two-hour tour from a fantastic, interesting guide.

They gave us umbrellas for shade!


Here's an outdoor view:


The drafting studio and dining area from the outside:


The living room:


Dad in the living room. The entrance is directly behind him: all the doorways are very short, and then once you enter, the rooms open up. To the far right of the photo is a mosaic-ish piece. Clare Boothe Luce made that from stones and other natural objects she found on the property when she came to visit.


I love this little door, it makes me think of a Hobbit:


This one's for you, Clara: a dragon standing guard on one of the posts in the garden. Wright was a huge collector of Asian art, and it's scattered all throughout the property.


The weather continues to be sunny and hot. I think it hit 100 today, and though it is a dry heat, that's pretty warm! I'm never outside during the hottest parts of the day, though, and things are pretty climate-controlled in the hospital. I would definitely miss the four seasons if I lived here all the time. Besides, it would be way too hot for Jasper!