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I think I’m going to start tracking what all I’ve accomplished around the house. Even though it severly cuts into my available time for building my model, I think it’s worth it.

This last week:

• Replaced bulbs in garage lights. Replaced ballasts in garage lights with high quality electronic ballasts.
• Repaired upstairs air handler unit (new motor control switch).
• Remounted upstairs thermostat because original mounting was loose (cracked drywall around anchors)
• Repaired master bedroom air handler unit (new motor control switch).
• Disinfected master bedroom air handler (had some A/C related mold issues).
• Flushed master bedroom A/C drain pan and lines (try to eliminate standing water and thus mold).
• Last year we upgraded our hot tub circuit to a 220V 50amp circuit and ran new wire to the hot tub. But, it was just laying loose in the crawl space. This week I took the time to properly nail the new wire to the underside of joists and pull it tight up to the point where it passes through the outside wall. Then I unhooked it from the outside electric panel, pulled it all inside the crawl space, drilled out the hole in the outside wall a little larger than it used to be on the inside, pulled the flexible conduit all the way through the inside, put a new end on the flexible conduit that will keep it from being pulled out of the hole in the wall, then rethreaded the electric line through the conduit and back into the panel. Then I pulled all of the slack out of the line, re-cut a new end, and re-wired the panel up from the new end. All in all, removed about 15-20 foot of 6-3 or 8-3 wiring. If anyone needs some heavy amp wiring, let me know, you can have it.
• While in the crawl space already, I spent some time looking for the source of our settling issues. Found one joist that was busted. Otherwise, nothing really jumped out at me. Need to get two people down there with some straight edges and start looking at suspect areas for bowed joists. If we find some that are bowed, then we’ll need to put in a support beam.

I think that covers most of my work this week, on the house anyway.

Well, I *did* overdo his narcotic pain meds yesterday, but that doesn’t appear to be the only reason he was acting so high. Evidently, his lack of eating has been catching up with him. After 24 hours with no additional pain meds at all, he’s still acting stumbly and weak. He’s also not eating, and now when he drinks there is an odd slurping noise from his throat. Not to mention his meows are now sounding a bit muffled. I’m afraid the tumor is starting to actually close off his throat.

My cat is much higher than he should be….and I don’t mean elevation. I missed with his first pain med syringe this morning, so I gave him another. Well, evidently not quite *all* of the first syringe missed. Now, he’s the equivalent of down syndrome kitty. He’s very, very, umm…relaxed…and wobbly…and sedate…and he almost fell over when he batted at a piece of roast beef with his front paw.

So much for trying to be nice while giving syringes. When I’m trying to be nice, and not grab his head, I sometimes miss. For the sake of consistency and avoiding SuperMan on Kryptonite Kitty, I’ll just have to grab his head and hold it firm :-/

Two days ago, Rocky didn’t eat a thing all day long. He hardly even drank any milk. Yesterday, we started him on the narcotic pain meds again to see if that would help. It seemed to, although all we really got him to eat was the roast beef out of an Arby’s roast beef sandwhich (and he ate all of it, although in 3 different sittings). We were really happy to see him eat that much yesterday. Unfortunately, today he’s being finicky again. I tried more raw hamburger. No dice. Sliced pastrami. Nada. I even cooked up a little hamburger (in very tiny pieces, and constantly worked it while it cooked to keep them tiny) spiked with bacon grease and left all the grease with the hamburger when I tried to give it to him. No interest. I’m not sure what I can find around the house to perk his taste buds. I may have to have Jessica stop for another one of those roast beef sandwhiches when she comes home just to see if he’ll eat that again.

So, I’ve decided to sell my R/C truck. Primarily for two reasons. One, to recoup some of the money I’ve got into it to offset what I’m spending on my second airplane. Two, I don’t really have any close areas that are good to run it, so it mainly sits around doing nothing.

That said, I’ve got a good start on my second airplane. My first was a prebuilt kit just to get me flying so I could learn on something that’s easy to learn on, etc. My second is one that I’m building to really *enjoy* flying, and to enjoy building, and to be proud of. It’s a 1/7th scale P-51 Mustang (OK, I know everybody and their brother has a P-51, but the reason I’m building it is that parts are plentiful and it’s easy to customize for that reason, kinda like the only reason to buy a chevy hot rod is because a 350 engine costs all of about $6 at Advanced Auto).

I actually want to start researching what the rules and judgement guidelines for the scale model class area at the AMA (not the medical AMA, the R/C airplane AMA) Nationals. If the competition is about how well you can build the model, how true you can be to life, and how well it works (versus flat out flying ability since I’m so new), then I wouldn’t mind entering it with a model some time. With that in mind, I’m taking a lot of care to get detail items on my plane that most people skip. Lots of extra manual labor ahead for that reason.

Oh, and 7 channels on my remote isn’t near enough for what I want to do. If I actually put all the controls in there that I want to, gonna have to double up some channels. You can do things like set it so that one thing turns off at 20%, the other at 15%, and put them both on the same servo and use the trim function on that channel to control whether one or both turn off, that sort of thing.

Oh well, enough for tonight. I built for about 2 hours, getting sleepy.

Since going on his “eat anything you want” diet, Rocky has been thrilled with something for anywhere from a couple days to a week, but then he gets bored with that special food and moves on. A while back, it was the cat food that our vet friend calls “fish heads” (because it’s litterally made of fish parts, non-processed sometimes even). After that, he wanted the plain turkey meat (we had to boil another carcass to make Delilah’s joint medicine, lot’s of left over meat). But, now he’s getting tired of fish heads, and somewhat tired of normal cat treats even. And he’s slowing down on the turkey. So, today we started a new food option. Raw hamburger. He must have ate two or three loose ping pong ball sized clumps of that stuff just now. He even ate the one I spiked with his pain meds. Hopefully this food choice will last a while.

On the down side, since coming back from Florida, his right cheek is noticably, and I mean very noticably, larger than his left cheek (it was before we left too, but not as pronounced). His face basically looks lopsided. And the tumor is large enough around the corner of his mouth that he’s starting to have a very minor amount of saliva leakage at that corner. Plus, it seems like it’s harder to get the syringe full of meds down his throat. It really seems to me like this tumor is moving *very* fast. They said it would, but until you see it in action, the words and explanation just don’t do the process justice.

I’m a bit disappointed in the company I bought it from though. The instructions for gluing support structures onto wing surfaces say that when you are cutting away the plastic film on the wing surface so you have a clean place to glue to, you have to be careful not to cut through the plastic film and into the wood underneath because it’s extrememly then and cutting it seriously decreases the structural strength of the wood. Well, as I’m working on the aileron servo mount problem, I remove the reinforcing bracket they glued into place on the underside of the wing for me to mount the servo to, and I find out as I’m cutting away plastic film to increase the size of the support bracket that THEY cut through the wing surface when they originally cut back on the film to put their original bracket in place. So, that explains why the servo broke loose from the mount. Well, I fixed it by gluing support brackets on the bottom and top sides of the wing surface skin, with both sides larger than the original support bracket size so they encompass unbroken wood all around the outer edges (which is all that really matters when it comes to shear strength of the bracket area, the cut and broken portion inside the wood sandwich is effectively rendered moot by the larger bracket size).

Anyway, that’s why my next plane isn’t going to be a mostly pre-built plane, it’s a build it from scratch, we give you the wood and the plans, type affair. I take care to build things right. Someone making $6/hour and not flying the plane when it’s done doesn’t.

So, I flew my plane on Saturday. I had 4 flights, and didn’t crash my plane a single time. In fact I even ran it out of fuel mid-air once and successfully made what is called a “dead-stick” landing. All in all a good day.

I went back out today and had 4 more good flights today. However, I noticed a funny sound coming from the airplane during some high speed flight. It alsmost sounded kinda like helicopter blades beating against the air. They call that “flutter”. It’s when one of the control surfaces on the airplace starts to reverberate during flight. After I got home, I checked the airplane over closely and found that the elevator had a loose control horn that could cause flutter. In addition, I found that the servo that controls the ailerons had actually broke some of the wood around the servo mount, which could also cause flutter and was likely the cause of the occasional odd movements of the plane I noticed today.

So, I’ll have to repair the plane before flying it again. I’ve already fixed the loose control horn, now I just have to fix the broken wood. It shouldn’t be too bad to fix, just a little difficult to get to on an assembled plane. Then I’ll go fly again.

So, most of you know about my R/C truck that I’ve had for a couple years (that thing *still* screams its way around). But. lately I’ve been spending my free time with an R/C flight simulator (Real Flight G3.5). This thing is amazingly realistic. It doesn’t simulate flying a plane from the cockpit like regular flight simulators, it simulates running R/C controls from the ground and watching your plane. It’s intended to help new R/C pilots fly their first plane successfully instead of crashing it on their maiden voyage. It’s also intended to help experienced pilots get a feel for a new model’s behavior before their first flight of that model, or to practice advanced maneuvors before trying it on the plane and possible wadding it up. For all these things, it is amazingly good. They use a true to life physics model, and accurate modeling of the plane’s airfoils, dimensions, weight, balance, etc. in order to make accurate physics calculations of how the plane will handle and behave. As long as the model’s traits are accurate in the simulator, it very closely mimics real life (up to a point, if the model would fly at 200+ miles per hour, then their calculations start to differ from real life because in order to make all the calculations in real time, they use some short cuts for the physics that start to falter at very high velocities like that).

Anyway, after having spent about a month playing with this thing off and on in my spare time, and at the same time build a trainer class airplane, I’m planning on heading to the airfield closest to my house today, meeting up with the airfield’s owner, and hopefully getting my maiden flight in.

I’ve also ordered my second plane. But this time I ordered a kit that needs assembled instead of a mostly assembled aircraft, so I should have plenty of practice in on my trainer before my next plane is built. That way my skills are ready to graduate up to this more difficult to fly model by the time I’m done.

The trainer I got is the largest size trainer you can get. That way you can see it easier at long distances. If I get to fly it today, maybe I’ll take a few shots with the camera.

After seeing the oncologist at VSH yesterday, Rocky has been diagnosed as possibly only having “weeks” to go before he can’t eat any longer and we have to put him to sleep [1]. We told him that we wanted to make sure that for whatever time he had left, he was comfortable as possible. Since we were opting not to do chemo or radiation treatment [2], surgery is more or less useless. So, in order to keep Rocky pain free, the oncologist went over his blood work then prescribed buprenorphine. This chemical is used to treat all sorts of opiod addictions, including morphine addiction. His previous pain med was ketoprophen (sp?) and was technically an anti-inflammatory, so it might have helped the pain by reducing inflamation or blocking certain pain chemicals in the cellular metabolic process, like aspirin or tylenol do, but it wasn’t a narcotic that just makes you not care about the pain. His new med is. He got his first dose this morning. Now he’s sitting around with that characteristic narcotic “I kinda know what’s going on, but everything is *real* *slow*” look. I think he’s high. Better to spend his remaining time high and happy than struggling and in pain as far as I’m concerned. So, Rocky, you’ll get the best food you want to eat, even if that means I cook you a hamburger and some bacon each day, and you’ll be high for as long as the high staves off the pain. Enjoy your time.

Edit: forgot the footnotes :-/

1. When my grandmother had a double heart attack about 3 years ago, they said she had “weeks” to live. She’s still living at my mothers house. So, we know how “weeks” can go sometimes.

2. Radiation and chemo are neither one guaranteed to take out the cancer, and both are extremely upsetting to an animal (coming in daily for radiation and being sore from it, or coming in weekly for chemo and being sick from that, or both). In addition to not necessarily guaranteeing a good result, and tormenting the animal, it’s very expensive ($3,000 – $5,000 total). So, in light of those facts, we chose to make Rocky comfortable for as long as possible instead of tormenting him for a few more weeks. We learned our lesson on Zeus. We tried everything on him. For 5 days, he was tormented by being locked in a cage at VSH. In the end, we had to put him to sleep without him getting to come home and see Rocky, Delilah, or Jin. The only regret I have with Zeus is that his end was all pain and torment. I don’t want to repeat that with Rocky.

It’s bad. She has stage IV lymphoma. This means that the lymphoma cells are present both above and below her diaphram, and in at least two organs. In her case, it’s worse. She’s not borderline stage IV, she’s full blown. It’s in at least 4 organs and they found cells free floating in her blood. And to top that off, it’s the type that’s not curable. The best you can do is put it in remission. The average expectency for someone with her stage and type of L. is 6-8 years. But, she’s not at an average stage of advancement, she’s beyond that.

The treatment is going to be just prednisone for the next 3 weeks to give her baby more time to develop. Then they are going to do a C section when the child is only 4 weeks premature. Then they are going to start her on 2 months of mild chemo as a starter. Then she’ll have at least 6 months of strong chemo. They are going to kill her bone marrow entirely and she’ll have to have a bone marrow transplant.

Once all that’s done, then it will be a waiting game to see if/when it comes back. Worst case is that the chemo doesn’t even fully put it into remission. Either way, the only thing left after the chemo will be the cells that were immune to the chemo treatment, so a second round of chemo is a waste of time. There will be nothing to be done unless some new drugs come on the market between now and then.

She went into a store to buy some baby furniture the other day. Then the reality of her situation and what it might mean to her ever getting to see her daughter grow up hit her. She had to have her husband help her out of the store without buying anything because she couldn’t stop crying.

Actually, it’s fairly well established that there are genetic predispositions to cancer, so in that sense it does exist. The new science of epigenetics also is explaining why families that have been exposed to cancer causing conditions in grandparents can pass that cancer on to their grandchildren

Well, my grandmother on my father’s side died of cancer (she had 3 different incidences of cancer before it became untreatable: breast, lymphoma, then bone). My grandfather on my father’s side also died of cancer (he first had stomach cancer, then later got gall bladder cancer, and he was too weak for them to operate on the second cancer, and so he passed). His brother, my great uncle Lee, also passed due to cancer.

It’s been no great secret to me all my life that the thing most likely to get me in the end will be cancer. Tonight though, I found out that my sister, my 42 year old, pregnant with her second child, helping to support her husband at his new job at a university in Tallahassee FL, helping to set up the first house she and her husband have ever bought just some 6 months ago, and still doing the last bit of raising of their first child that is about 14 years old, sister, has been diagnosed as having lymphoma with multiple tumors in her neck and face. The one that made her go to her doctor is in her upper eye lid area on her left eye.

The multiple lymph node tumors are bad enough, but the one on her eye in particular they are checking on to see which of two types it is. If it’s the good kind, then her prognosis is basically the same as just about any other stage II lymphoma, where they will remove all the tumors, do chemo and other treatments, and there is a chance it could be cured or go into remission and she would have 3-10+ years, and may never get cancer again and instead die of old age. If it’s the bad kind, then they will remove her eye, her eyelid, part of the bone around the socket, part of the area behind the eye, put her on strong chemo, and after all that they will only expect her to live another 12 months.

And as if just dealing with the cancer isn’t enough, she has another 12 weeks or so to go on the pregnancy. But, they can’t do any treatments while pregnant. In order to do any treatments, they would have to go to a hospital with a state of the art premature baby department and hope that having the child so premature doesn’t permanently damage its lungs or other organs. Or she can wait until after the baby is full term thereby giving it the best chances of being a healthy adult, and the three extra months could easily make the difference between the cancer being survivable or terminal.

My sister…no person should ever have to make this kind of decision. People use the phrase “life’s a bitch” all the time, in many cases, I don’t think a lot of those people truly fathom just how much of a “bitch” it *can* be. We used to have a proper grasp of this concept 100+ years ago when families routinely had lots of kids because only some of them grew up to be adults. Our modern day society coddles us enough that hard situations like this are truly rare.

Most people are already back at work. I’m not. Well, I’m not supposed to be[1]. But the reality of my present situation wasn’t my point nor what I felt guilty about. It’s that at Red Hat, we shut down for an entire week between Christmas and New Years every year. And unless you man phone support or have a similar job that can’t be put on hold for a week, you are definitely off (you have to get managerial authorization to work over this shut down period)[2]. So, I normally would feel guilty that other people are going back to work now after just a day off, but this year I’m there with ya so I don’t feel so bad this time.

1. New hardware arrived Tues. of last week, and by the time I got back from picking it up, it was already time to start packing for my early morning Wed plane flight (our alarm was set for 4am in order to arrive at the airport with enough time). So, between me missing 3 days last week, and this hardware needing to be set up, I am working this week. Not to mention that there has been a long standing RHEL5 beta bug that was waiting on this hardware to arrive so I could take care of it. But, once the hardware is installed and that one RHEL5 beta bug is squashed, I’ll enjoy the remainder of my time off.

2. At Red Hat, we take a break and shut almost the entire company down from Christmas to New Year every year. This isn’t done in the name of holiday spirit though. It is a liability clearing move that we do each year at Red Hat. You see, we get lots of vacation time as part of our benefits. But, the typical employee here never seems to take it and get it cleared off the books. All of that accrued vacation time has to be shown as a liability on our books according to federal regulations. So, since the company doesn’t want that liability on the books to grow too large, and because we are bad at taking vacation, the company shuts down each year and makes all the employees use 4 of their vacation days. Your allowed to go negative in case you *have* used your vacation time, but for most people that’s not an issue. Anyway, their motives for the shut down are purely financial and making the books look good, but regardless of their motives the problem wouldn’t exist in the first place if they weren’t generous with their vacation time for employees and if we didn’t fail to use it, so I don’t mind it so bad.

There were a record 31 pandas born in captivity this year, triple the number in 2000. How did they do it, given that pandas are notoriously poor breeders in captivity? From the magazine, my comments in []:

Mei Lan was a product of artificial insemination. But conservationists are using other methods to encourage natural breeding. Unpopular females have been scented with the urine of popular rivals, so that a male thinks he’s mating with a more attractive female [what, sight wouldn't be a clue...I mean, she's UGLY]. Zhang has shown them videos of pandas breeding in the wild – basically, panda porn [Oh no, if you believe our society about the harm of porn, then next on the list of actions by these pandas will be holding up a sex toy shop]. He even gave one male Viagra–which didn’t work so well. “We’ll never do that again”, he said. “The panda was excited for 24 hours.” [OMG - ROFL]

I sit and ponder over a great many things. Physics, chemistry, biology, health care…these are only some of the things I tend to sit and think about. They’ve taken the center stage as of late, but not because they are the most important. Their application deals with the human condition, and so I consider them of value. There are other things that deal *more* directly with the human condition.

This year’s mid-term elections were, for me, a let down. The fact that the democrats stole back the house and senate was somewhat nice, in so much as I tend to agree more with the democrats than the republicans. But really, neither party suits me *well*, just the democrats suit me passably. What was really my problem with the mid-term elections was the number of states that passed constitutional referendums outlawing gay/lesbian marriages.

The history of society, from the dawn of recorded history until today, has been a story of evolution. All throughout history, we have oppressed, raped, murdered, stole, cheated, and otherwise destroyed human beings. Always, there was one or two issues that were the most horrific at the time. Genocide (multiple times, the jews in Germany, Aztec and Incan civilizations), enslavement of an entire race (multiple times, Israelites, Egyptians, African Americans), improper executions and killings (again, multiple times, the penal system in the dark ages, the inquisition, the crusades, the Salem Witch Trials, our civil war and our treatment of slaves). As we have evolved as a society, we have shed ourselves of these inhumane acts time and again. We have slowly, almost painfully slowly, loosened the grip of our fear and instinct that drives us to these horrors and instead embraced tolerance and understanding. Never has it happened without a fight though. The people being mistreated must always show the people doing the mistreating that their acts are wrong, and the people committing the crime never believe them. So the cycle continues.

I prefer to think that a person could graph this cycle in the form of a spiral, like a seashell. In the center, the earliest and most atrocious crimes against humanity. Then, as we progress as a society, the spiral moves outward, and the crimes become lesser, and society better.

Today, we still have atrocities in our society. If you look at it on a global scale, there are very horrendous things taking place. But, if you pull back to just our nation, the picture is brighter. And this is why gay/lesbian rights are now in our minds. In the 1500s, if you were a gay man, working for a lord, barely surviving on the small amount of food you were allowed to keep while working 16 hour days, you didn’t complain about the fact that society didn’t accept your sexuality. In the context of your indentured servitude, that was a minor thing to complain about. You hid it, you maybe got lucky and found someone to surreptitiously share it with, but you didn’t complain about it or ask for it to be changed. Today though, that has changed. The core layers of the seashell, the right to life itself, the right to liberty and self determination and freedom from slavery, these things are now well settled here in America. Once a person has the right to their own life, and the right to their own self determination, the single most important thing next on the list of things that contributes to an overall happy life is the choice of person that you spend that life with. Of course, the majority thinks that life is good as it is and nothing should change, but that’s only because they are already free to choose the best mate to spend their lives with. None of them have had to make a choice between spending their life with the person they both love and are attracted to, or having access to membership in an exclusive club known as society. The majority has nothing to gain by allowing gay/lesbian marriages, but they fear they have something to loose (and in truth, slave owners had something to loose by granting slaves freedom, whites had something to loose by granting minorities equal standing, the majority almost always stands to loose something when they quit oppressing another group, but the real issue isn’t whether the majority stands to loose something they value, but whether they ever had a *right* to what they stand to loose in the first place). And so the fight goes on, and the seashell gains yet another section.

But the gay/lesbian community WILL win. There is no doubt of that. One need only read our own Declaration of Independence to know why. There are three things that the Declaration of Independence claimed we all had an inalienable right to: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For all that the anti-gay community screams at the top of their lungs that the gay lifestyle is a choice and that they shouldn’t be choosing it, they miss the most important fact of all. The gay/lesbian community *DOES* choose it (no, I’m not saying it’s a choice to be gay or lesbian, I personally think that’s the way they are born, I’m just pointing out that it’s *irrelevant* whether they choose to be that way or born that way, because in the end, they are *free* to choose that lifestyle if they wish, or so our Declaration of Independence would teach us), even in the face of hate mongering teenagers that use baseball bats to beat a high school student to death for his effeminate attributes. What this means is that it is *MORE IMPORTANT* to a gay/lesbian person’s happiness that they be who they are than it is to have all the things that society currently takes away from them once their preference is known. For a person to sacrifice so many aspects of their life that contribute to happiness, to deal with ostracism and being an outcast, to willingly mark themselves a target for the scorn, ridicule, and derision of our society, all in order to be able to be with the person that suits them best as a companion, mate, life long friend, and the person that shares the ups and downs of their life, is prima facia evidence that their choice is no choice at all, but a prerequisite to their attempt to fulfill one of their three inalienable rights: the pursuit of happiness.

It is for this reason alone that I *KNOW* that gay/lesbian rights are the next thing to come on the seashell of the evolution of our society. We’ve already covered self determination for Native Americans, freedom from slavery for African Americans, civil rights for women, and civil rights for minorities. The next item on that list has now popped it’s head up and said “I’m here…let’s start dealing with me.” Of course, as is always the case, the majority doesn’t want to change. They have no need to. But that’s irrelevant. The majority *NEVER* wants to change. It is always the downtrodden that force the issue. The only question then is whether or not people in the majority have the vision, the clarity of mind, to see the movement for what it is, simply another step in the evolution of our society as we continue to wring out the injustices that live farther out on the seashell and do the right thing even though it doesn’t benefit them, or whether the people in the majority are so callous and unsympathetic to their fellow human being that they would willingly overlook their fellow human’s pursuit of happiness simply because they choose to remain blind and ignorant.

I am neither blind, nor ignorant. The time has come, it *WILL* happen. Now we need only make it come to pass.