the kindness of nurses

Today in Penetang the snow fell for most of the afternoon. I was at dialysis, and around 4 pm about thirty minutes before I was done two of the nurses coated and booted up and went out and brushed off the cars of the four nurses and the cars of two of the patients who drove themselves. One of those was me. I thanked them profusely and cancelled the lumps of coal I had ordered for them. in thirty five minutes after they brushed my car, about another two inches had accumulated. Lots of snow in Penetang and Midland, not too bad here in Victoria Harbour.

The photo below I took of the car next to mine.

front of the hospital today

things that haven’t mattered for awhile

saying funny things

CHUM chart

needing to hear my voice at meetings

shined shoes

going to Mars

doing most of my homework

shaving extra close

saying the right thing

that the wisdom of humility is endless

wondering what I want to be when I grow up

Twilight Photos Tay Township Backroads

Tay Township 100 miles north of Toronto, Sony NEX F3 with Sony 18-55mm lens, edited using Corel Paint Shop Pro X5.

November light fading. temperature -1 degrees Celsius, dusting of snow lingering.

A few of these shots are within yards of a 17th century Huron village site.  It is debated whether it is the site of the martyrdom of St. Jean de Brebeuf, St. Gabriel Lalemant (French Jesuit missionaries) and many Christian Hurons at the hands of the warring Iroquois in 1649.  Whenever I stop and look and photograph these spots, my imagination turns back and I keep one eye out for those Iroquois.  This creek with the still water was most likely the water supply for that village.

entertainment technology and the dialysis patient experience and that Windows 8.1 upgrade such a long time

some tech musings from a dialysis patient

Gnawledgewurker and his knowledge work blog

I love technology but now and then the romance gets a little difficult

I was surprised at how long it took to up from Win 8.0 on a laptop and a desktop. By far the longest version upgrade of PC software I have ever experienced and I have been doing this awhile.  I did personal computing beforeWindows 3.0.

Certainly Windows 8 is an interesting and enjoyable interface.  The upgrades went fine.  So far, so good, knock wood.

For convenience, especially at Dialysis, I carry an iPad2, was reading my Sony Ereaderbooks on it this week. I just wish the tablets had 250gb of storage, not 16. Hard to carry a decent load of digital TV shows or movies with just 16gb for copies from my iTunes selections.

With four hours in the dialysis chair with very modest sized desklet wings on the chair, I find…

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Dialysis today

Hemodialysis today my third day in a row, smooth run, with a question about a schedule change.  I am currently going Monday, Wednesday and Friday for four hours per day starting at 715 am. Then a “4th” run on Tuesday afternoon.

The proposed change was to help out with another patient who is cutting back to one dialysis run per week and fits the schedule better on Tuesday afternoons.   So question was could I manage a change to Thursday afternoons.  I said I could do that but that I wanted an answer to one question.

“Who do I have to kill to do just one run a week?”

One of the dialysis nurses replied, “It’s just money, Bill. We just want money.”

Google trick for the day,  I looked up Old Tom Parr, who reputedly lived to the age of 152 in England.  i found a description of him in Pete Brown‘s book, Shakespeare’s Pub.

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Tom_Parr

It’s a beautiful day.  We have had a long stretch of sunless days. so the sun is a happy visitor today.  Time to take a shot of the Bay.

dialysis note for today

well, it has a been several weeks since I switched to four runs per week, each run takes four hours.  Previously my week was 3 runs of 4.5 hours.  Since my fistula was wrecked in hospital the day after another but still renal failure related surgery, and a chest line or centre line was put in my chest, my clearances were not so great.  I had not been feeling very well until this week and today it is a bit like the clouds parted and the sun returned.

This was odd because the real weather was lousy up here on the south shore of Georgian Bay, not as bad as Barrie to the south but sand trucks were out and people were driving after having taken an extra dose of stupid.

It was also monthly nephrology clinic and I spoke with the doctor and got a few questions answered and that was good.   Now I need to drive to Toronto in the first week of December to talk with transplant team and see what is next, where I am on the donor list and perhaps begin the testing work up for tissue matching.  

Right now, knock wood, I feel better, much better.

One thing on the house front, I have to bar the critters, Grace the golden retriever and the five formerly feral cats from my bedroom.  They messed with my airway last year and I dont need a repeat of that this winter. 

 

Book recommendation:  Shakespeare’s Pub: A Barstool View of History of London as Seen through the Windows of its Oldest Pub – The George Inn, by Pete Brown

Plumbing past and present

Recently the man who is our plumber up here in cottage country, called Tim, came to do a small job today. We got to talking about the place and its peculiarities. This place, a cottage, originally with three bedrooms was built in 1969-70…and Tim remembers coming down here with his uncle the plumber when he was a boy of 6…. and being enlisted to don oversized hip waders to drag out the old water system water intake hose and feed on skids that was submerged in Georgian Bay for non-drinking water supply in the Spring when the bay was cold and of course taken in around this time of year. We had the local obligatory conversation about Georgian Bay water levels.  High water at the last time was 1986.  The shore has retreated about 80 feet. In other places around here it has drawn back five hundred feet.

Tim also remarked as we discussed renovating the kitchen about my late father talking about digging paths in the crawlspace under the cottage. Tim had brought along his son Jeremy, who is a mature man and is probably transitioning to take over all of the plumbing business….I laughed and spoke up to tell Tim that I did the digging under the cottage to lower the ground level for scrambling around under there. “I was 17 and it felt like I was in The Great Escape, digging and scraping and filling buckets with the waste ground and dragging it over to a small access window in the foundation wall and passing it out to my Dad.” Tim laughed. “Your Dad said he dug it out, anyway it is a good space to work in, not hard to get around at all.” A lot of places have crawl spaces that make plumbing difficult.  Tim and his son are both over 6 feet tall.

So we will look at some re-insulation down there in the Spring and some moves in the kitchen next year as well.