Dan Among Den

• Family: The twins are doing well. Catherine’s vocabulary is expanding all the time, though her speech is still mostly gibberish. A lot of her new words are really just her repeating us without much comprehension, but it’s still a good thing. Her latest word: “Touchdown!” Tommy is getting some words, but he’s still lagging behind. Lately I think he’s been working more on his motor skills, learning to use all the strength he’s gained in the last few months. At his two year check-up, he was at the 50th percentile in weight. At one year, he was well below the 1% line. Sammy is now back in school, and he’s taking to it as well as last year. He’s also had another round with the neurologist who is trying to narrow down or confirm a diagnosis beyond “might be autism, might not”, but the latest round of tests all came back negative, so we still don’t know.
• Work: It’s really busy this year with lots of ambitious work being done. Alas, I personally am having a lot of problems with my parts of the project, but I’ve been making more progress in the last few weeks. For various reasons, I rarely talk about where I work or the details of my projects, and this has led to one or more friends joking about me working on a new faster-than-light space drive for the MIB. Well, let’s just say that we’re aiming for Warp 7, but I’m having a really hard time aligning these damn plasma conduits. As such, I’ve got my section head, the captain, and the sector admiral breathing down my neck. But the paycheck shows up twice a month, and it’s a nice number.
• Flipside: I suspect that this next year, work is going to be less taxing, so I’m hoping to be a bit more involved in Flipside 2006. They’ve got new land for the event this year (contact me for details if you want), and there’s going to be a lot of work done to prepare for it. I’ll actually be going out there next weekend, so that should be fun. The new land has no shower facilities, and I’ve been thinking about ways to build some temporary ones. (For various reasons, we can’t build much in the way of permanent structures out there.) I’ve got a plan for a gravity fed system, with a hose leading from a reservoir uphill to a shower system down below. I’ve bought the pipes/etc. for a single nozzle shower system, and if I can put it together and test it this week, I plan to take it out with me this weekend to field test it. Yes, I know about “sun shower” products, but they don’t provide the kind of pressure I need to really wash my hair or get the sunscreen and sweat off. I’m pretty sure I’ve got a workable system except for a water supply to fill my reservoir with. I’m still investigating that.
• Poker: I went to a casino party last weekend and got in a little blackjack and roulette, but I also finally got in on a Texas Hold’em poker game. I was already familiar with it from WWDN (in exile) and movies like Rounders, but I’d never actually played. For that matter, I hadn’t even played poker in about ten years. But I played decently. I still lost for the most part, but the one hand I really went in big was a hand I had a decent shot at making. I had a reasonably high flush, J-7 with A-Q-4 on the table. Unfortunately, the winning hand also had a flush with King-5. Still, it was enough fun that I’ve added it to my list of things I’d like to go out and do if I ever had the time or someone to do it with. I wouldn’t want to do it for any significant money, but I’d probably be willing to blow $20 on an occasional game just for the fun of playing. I understand that some of the various matchmaker services are expanding behind hooking up horny housewives and actually trying to match up groups of people who just want to go bowling or play pool. I might have to give one of those a try.
• Health: Here I’ve got some troubling news. Last fall I had some persistent heartburn that lasted for a couple of months before mostly disappearing. It returned this August, and when I say “persistent”, I don’t mean twice a week. I mean 24/7. Well, almost. It’s far worse at night than in the morning, but even in the mornings I’d be burping up a storm. Well, after a month of this, I went to my doctor who gave me some samples of a new drug, Aciphex. It made the heartburn pain go away in a couple of days, but the burping continued, so he sent me to see a gastroenterologist.

  I saw him just this past Friday, and he reviewed my history and scheduled me for an endoscopy, i.e. sticking a camera down into my stomach. It could be a variety of things, ranging from gall bladder problems, to an ulcer, all the way down to just a nasty case of reflux. There’s a very small chance of stomach cancer, since that sometimes presents with these same symptoms. However, the cancer would almost always be accompanied by an unexplained weight loss, and I have definitely not been experiencing any weight loss. He said that in 15,000 endoscopies that he’s done, only once did he find cancer in a patient who hadn’t lost weight. At the odds of 1 in 15,000, I figure I’m at greater risk of just discovering out of the blue that I have prostate or testicular cancer which both have much higher incident rates than that. So, I’m honestly not worried about the cancer.

  But while we’re waiting for the tests, he wanted me to make three lifestyle changes. First, he wanted me to reduce stress. I could have been on the borderline with this for years and only now had this year’s stress push me over. So much for that plasma conduit. Second, he wants me to start some kind of aerobic exercise, even if it’s just walking. “We’re built for movement,” he said, “and the digestive system works much better if the body is moving a lot.” Third, he wants me to give up sodas.

  It’s this last one that’s perhaps most troubling. I’ve been drinking Coke for over thirty years, with only one real interruption. That interruption came when Coke became New Coke before reverting to Classic Coke. In that time, I first just went cold turkey, went through caffeine withdrawal, and eventually had to go to the doctor for problems of low blood pressure (89 over 48). That doctor (a cardiologist, mind you) just told me to start drinking Mountain Dew, which I did. Since then Mountain Dew has been my fallback position with Coke was unavailable. (IMO, Pepsi is not even fit for giving my camel an enema… if I had a camel, that is.) I’m not really worried about the low blood pressure, just that I don’t particularly want to give up both my comfort drink and my caffeine source.

  So, when he told me to give up the Coke, I started pressing him on just what the problem is, on what magic ingredient I need to avoid. “It’s all of it together. With your problems, a cola is the worst thing you could possibly be drinking.” Well, I figured I was still OK since the switch to Mountain Dew would at least be an improvement. I hadn’t said anything, but after a moment’s reflection, the doctor added, “No, I take that back. There is one thing that would be worse for you than the colas, and that’s Mountain Dew.”

  So now I’m looking for an alternate source of caffeine. I never warmed to hot drinks, so to speak, so coffee’s out. Actually, coffee is out no matter what since the mere smell of it is often enough to upset my gut. The doctor suggested iced tea, and I’m giving it a go. MAW was kind enough to brew me up some iced tea these last three days, so I’ve been cola-free since seeing the doctor, but I must say that the tea leaves something to be desired as a caffeine vehicle. There is something of a rush when drinking a Coke, a wave of alertness and euphoria than hit just as the first sip reaches the back of my throat. With the tea, nothing. It’s like drinking water with a bad aftertaste. The comparison I had for MAW was that it was like being really horny, and someone giving you a pill for it. The pill made you stop feeling horny, but it’s not like you got to have an actual orgasm.

  We’ll see. Maybe I’ll just give up the caffeine too. Damn, now I’m horny.

• Art/comics: I haven’t been as busy on the rendering as I was in the spring and early summer. As predicted, after the coding at work heated up, my itch to render waned somewhat. I’m still doing it and getting better at it, just not cranking it out as fast. This is somewhat annoying, since I’m still piling up lots of material to do that comic. I suppose I’ll just have to learn to lower my artistic standards for the comic renderings. However, there are two “art” projects coming along that take a higher priority than the comics. First, if you liked my September Calendar Girl, you might be interested in this. I’m going to try to get together twelve images of that style in time to actually do a 2006 calendar over at my Café Press store. Second, Aggiecon is coming up in a few months, and I want to do some new images for that. I’ve learned a lot about image quality since this spring, and I think I can make much better images this time around.
• NaNoWriMo: Well, it’s not decided yet, but it’s starting to look like I’ll be going for it on NaNo again this year. I talked to Tanya about it today, and she said that while she could think of a lot of reasons why she shouldn’t this year, that’s just making her want to do it that much more. I think we’re going to sleep on it before doing our final Wisdom check on Monday, but it’s looking like we’ll be making that little NaNo suicide pact.

And that’s about it. I should probably go for a walk.