Officially Summer

Last night I was greeted by my little friends as I worked on opening the pool.

I have fireflys, so everything is right with the world.

No Great Surprise Here

Your results: You are Mr. Scott

Mr. Scott 75% Worf 75% Mr. Sulu 70% Geordi LaForge 65% Will Riker 65% Chekov 60% Uhura 60% Deanna Troi 60% James T. Kirk (Captain) 55% Jean-Luc Picard 55% Leonard McCoy (Bones) 50% Beverly Crusher 50% An Expendable Character (Redshirt) 45% Spock 30% Data 30%

You are a fun-loving foreigner with an amazing ability to get any job done on time. Often described as a "Miracle Worker".

Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Quiz
Must just be my purty face and rude engineering skilz.

Guess What?

A week ago Saturday, I received the following picture on my cell phone from my eldest (Sagacitas) with the note "Guess What?".

Looks like we are going to have an interesting Fall.

I think this is true in real life also

Found at xkcd

Winter Comes in Two Days

Don't Worry, It's Here!

The last few days, they've been predicting that today's snow storm would drop from 6 to 12 inches of snow between when it started at midnight and when it finished by mid-afternoon. By last night they had reduced the range to 7 to 9 inches of snow.

This morning I removed no more than 3 inches of snow off the drive and sidewalks before work. When I left for work, it was still blowing and snowing at a rate of around an inch an hour. The streets had not been plowed and it was interesting making turns at the intersections. (When the roads aren't plowed, the intersections build up hedgerows that have to be broken through. People have been known to bottom-out on these hedgerows so their car gets stuck and they lose traction.)

The snow in the parking lot at work was 6 inches deep when I went in and 8 inches deep when I left at lunch time. By lunch, only the very major roads appeared to be plowed, trucks were getting stuck on the side road leading up to my place of work, and I had difficulty getting out of the gas station after filling up my car.

The snow quit around 1:30, by 5 pm the major roads were plowed clean and side street were more-or-less passable. Overnight my driveway has gone from having a couple of piles of snow to being enclosed by 2 foot high walls of snow.

According to the NWS we have received 10.2 inches of snow at the airport. This sets a new record, besting the 4.5 inch snow fall from 1975. It would not surprise me if we got more snow on our side of the city than at the airport.

And more snow is coming over Saturday night, Sunday night, and Monday. We are certainly going to have a White Christmas.

(This entry will be updated tomorrow morning when the NWS publishes the snowfall map for today.)

Yes, that was some snow.

So, We've Had Some More Snow

Here's the snow from the end of this week:

12/06	12/04	12/03

The main roads are clear. The side street and country roads are packed snow and snow covered.

West Michigan Snow Maps (again)

Here's the snow so far:

11/30	11/24	11/20	11/17

Oh, the joys of "Lake Effect" Snow.

We are currently under a Hazardous Weather Outlook, its raining, and they expect 2 inches of snow over night.

First Snow (Sleet)

Sunday we had the first "Snow" of the season. Right now we are getting freezing rain, so tomorrow will be amateur hour as most drivers relearn how to drive under slippery conditions.

So what have I been up to?

Note that the white stuff at the top is not attached to the pink ball at the bottom. This is known as a torn rotator cuff. The surgery reconnected the two.

To make it all easier, I received a nerve block on my right arm which gave that old "its 1968 all over again" feeling just like when I broke my right elbow. When I came out of surgery I had no feeling in my right arm and could not control the muscles, just like after my bicycle accident. It was a disconcerting 24 hours until the nerve block wore off. I got good drugs for the pain including a Stryker Pain Pump which was implanted into the incision. The Pain Pump fed some form of 'caine into the surgery site to block much of the pain for two days after the surgery.

By the Sunday following the surgery the maximum dose of Vicodin wasn't knocking back the pain, so I had to supplement it with the maximum dose of Ibuprofin. That did the job until my stomach got upset. One thing that made it possible to sleep at night was the piece of durable medical equipment that my surgeon insisted on to handle icing the shoulder. He ordered a Blue Arctic Cryotherapy System for me to "ice" the shoulder. All I had to do was to load the little cooler up with ice, fill the ice with water, turn it on, and it would keep my shoulder at 40 degrees all night. I still use it the evenings/nights after the torture of my physical therapy.

I've been back to work for three weeks now, have been through three sessions of physical therapy, and can raise my right arm up to about 8 o'clock when making snow angels. I have cut back on the medicine so that I am only taking it to sleep.

This leaves my right shoulder in constant pain during the day, but as I said before the surgery, I was already in constant pain during the day, so what's the difference?

My current level of pain is not that much worse than where I was before the surgery, so I might as well do without the pain meds. I know that pain meds are supposed to help you heal, but by working myself to the limit of the pain I can endure and knocking back the inflammation at night, I have been progressing faster in my healing that the physical therapist expects.

I have been living with this problem for twelve years as an irritation to both my shoulders and for the past three years as an annoying pain in my right shoulder. We kept taking X-rays to check for bone spurs, but it wasn't until I had to sit up in bed to roll over (due to the shoulder pain) that I asked to see an ortho surgeon. The MRI then showed that I had a 3/4 inch tear in the rotator cuff ... the rest is history. Now I just need to heal.