Cut Me Open...Make Me Bleed

No, I haven't suddenly turned Goth. I went to the doctor this morning. As expected, the MRI confirmed I have the meniscal tear that three other professionals had already said I had. The MRI also showed that I'd lost a good bit of the cartilage on the end of the bones from wear and tear, but there's not much they can do with that other than smooth it out. I'm in the upper 300's here - if there WEREN'T some cartilage loss, I'd probably be a case for the medical books.

As it is, I'm set to arrive at 6:30am at the Healthsouth Lexington Surgery Center. It's supposed to be a 30-40 minute surgery, with another hour or so spent in the recovery room, and then they'll turn me loose again. According to the doc, if she can save the torn cartilage, then I'll be on crutches 3-4 weeks while the cartilage heals. If she decides the cartilage isn't worth saving (which is my bet, considering I've been walking on it and grinding it into pulp for the last two months), then she'll cut it, smooth it as best as possible, and turn me loose without the crutches. I know in the long run I'm better off if she can save the cartilage, but I'm certainly not looking forward to another 3-4 weeks back on crutches.

And for anyone in the medical field, when did surgery become something that inspired it's own facility??? The last time I had surgery (broken ankle - 1996), they did it in the hospital. Every time I've EVER had surgery (cleft palate/lip repairs, tonsilectomy, jaw surgery), they did it in a hospital. As if Lexington doesn't have enough healthcare professionals with its 3 large hospitals, it surprises me that Healthsouth has figured out a way to make money by outsourcing surgical services.

Nothing Much...

• Had the MRI on my knee yesterday, which involved 25 minutes of laying on a bed with 3/4 of my body inserted into a rectangular machine (much smaller than the ones you see on TV). Fortunately, my visions of a couple of MRI techs pushing me in like they were stuffing a sausage did NOT come true. The hardest part of the whole ordeal was trying not to tap my toes when Outkast's "Hey Ya" came on in the headphones. My follow-up visit is scheduled for tomorrow at 8:30, so I should know more then about when they're going to fix my knee. I'm just ready to get it over with!
• Grandma's still in the hospital as of this morning. They patched two big holes and she's feeling a lot better, but she's spiking a fever at night. There's no visible infection in the incision, but they're not going to let her go home until they track down the troubles.
• Between my knee, work, and a decided lack of funds, I haven't done much travelling this year, with the exception of my ill-fated trip to Vegas at the beginning of June. A guy I used to work with is going to GenCon in Indianapolis at the end of August, and I'm considering going with him. GenCon is a gaming convention that's been going on in Geneva, Wisconsin for as long as I can remember. For four days you can find booths from every major roleplaying game, card game, strategy game and video game manufacturer as well art, demonstrations, and of course non-stop gaming of all kinds - D&D, Pirates of the Spanish Main, and tons of games I've never heard of, I'm sure. When I was a geeky roleplayer, GenCon was my idea of Nirvana, and while I'm not the gamer I used to be, I've been playing a fair bit of Pirates and I could dig spending four days reliving my gamer days. I've gotta see what the doc says about my knee - when she's gonna scope it, how long I'll have to be off it, etc. - before I make my decision.

Three Posts In One Day???

Okay, so this one doesn't really qualify as a full post, but here's a couple more updates on the Daniels saga:

• After waiting for an hour in the orthopaedist's waiting room on Tuesday, the doctor looked at my leg for ten minutes, basically said "Yep, you've got what the other two healthcare professionals before me have said you've got" and then sent me to schedule an MRI. The MRI's scheduled for 3:30 next Wednesday followed by a return to the office (and another $25 copay) two days later. Assuming the MRI comes back positive, it's off to arthroscopy-land I go. If it comes back negative, there's no telling where this road will lead.
• After a year and something like another $15k in student loans, Carrie's schooling appears to have finally paid off! She had an interview yesterday afternoon with a Carlson-Wagonlit affiliate in Danville, KY and was all but offered the job as long as her references pan out. It'll be steady work (1:30-close M-Th and all day Friday) until she graduates, and then move into full-time after graduation in September. The drawback is the 45-minute drive from Lexington to Danville, but the pay will be decent and Carrie thought very highly of the agency owner, so it could be fun. Woohoo! Here's to no more working in retail for Carrie!
• For those who came to our wedding, or otherwise have met my Grandma Freda over the years, keep her in your prayers if you do that sort of thing. She's either in the operating room as I write, or already out and recovering from a surgery to patch a hernia in her bowels. Without getting into any of the gross details, let's just hope things go well.
• Finally, Carrie and I are making an attempt to be more active. Call it crappy summer TV, call it a need to feel healthier, but for whatever reason we've joined the local YMCA and spent four out of the last five nights working out instead of vegging out. Other than some sore triceps the first two days, it feels pretty good to be active again. Keep your fingers crossed that we can keep it up.

Live Entertainment Smorgasbord

As the so-called entertainer trapped in the body of an engineer, it should be obvious that I know and love the importance of live entertainment. Lately, though, it seems like I've gorged myself on a nonstep buffet of the stuff, and my only complaint is that I wish it were spread out more and that it would never end. Besides "The Foreigner" in May and the Michael Buble concert on Sunday, Carrie and I have seen all three shows of the Lexington Shakespeare Festival and we'll probably see Swingtime Canteen in the next couple of weekends. There's also a BBQ Cookoff and Blues Festival this weekend outside of Morehead that I may try to convince Carrie to check out with me. I don't know what it is, but it seems like we can go weeks and even months at a time without any good, quality live entertainment, and then all of a sudden there's so much that our bank account can't keep up.

Then again, the term "good, quality entertainment" can be very much in the eye of the beholder. For instance, the first show (and the only actual Shakespeare performance in this year's festival) of the Shakespeare Festival was "As You Like It". Though I'd never seen or read the play, it's pretty typical Shakespeare fare - Rosalind and Orlando meet and fall quickly for each other before going back to their own family squabbles; separately and for different reasons, the two find themselves exiled; Rosalind disguises herself as a man and offers to teach Orlando how to woo his lady-love while fending off the advances of a woman who falls in love with her masculine identity; and in the end, it all works out rather cheerily. Of course, I don't think Williams Shakespeare ever pictured Touchstone as a travelling clown, Audrey as a pair of siamese twins, Phoebe as a bearded lady or the banished duke as a cross between Colonel Sanders and a tent revival preacher. I was surprised - to say the least - to hear Rosalind break into "Send in the Clowns", Dave Matthews' "Satellite" as the background of Orlando's & Rosalind's (disguised as a man still) dance instruction, and Touchstone's renditions of "Unchained Melody" as he sang for the circus crowd and "Tears of a Clown" during the curtain call. The whole thing has started to grow on me the more I look back on the performance, but my first reaction was to describe it as "Shakespeare on LSD", because the whole thing was pretty strange at first glance.

If I considered myself more of an artist and less of an entertainer I might launch here into a commentary about artistic purity versus artistic license. Is there a requirement to perform a piece exactly as the author wrote it, or does the performance become the work of the director and performers, allowing them to make changes as they see fit; to turn the original work into their own piece? It's funny to me, though, that this seems to happen a lot with Shakespeare, a playwright so well-known and widely read as to be considered one of the greats. Hollywood gave us Leonardo di Caprio in "Romeo and Juliet", true to Shakespeare's dialogue but set in modern times. One of my least favorite versions was "Much Ado About Nothing" done by Sweetbriar College a few years ago where the setting was a New York pizza parlor and the various factions included mounted police and bicycle messengers. Does Shakespeare's work have to be changed and re-packaged to make it entertaining to today's audiences? Or is it the audiences that need help these days? Do we need music and special effects to make a story worth hearing, or are we all so determined to be different that we can't do things the same old way?

Dang if I know. Maybe I don't have a clue what I'm talking about and this is just another excuse to write instead of work.

Music Makes the World Go 'Round...

Music DOES make the world go 'round, and anyone who doesn't believe it has never been to a really good live concert. Some people romanticize their jobs or their lives. I like to romanticize about the fact that I'm a little more of a romantic than the next guy. To keep that fantasy going a few months back, I bought tickets to see Michael Buble at the Louisville Palace and had them e-mailed to Carrie, then called and woke her up to tell her to check her e-mail. (Note to future Cassanovas - any brownie points gained by surprising your wife with tickets to a romantic concert will be more than slightly diminished when you call to wake her up earlier than her normal waking hour.) Carrie and I had never heard of Michael Buble a year ago, but we got into trading CDs with a friend she worked with - Nicole also turned me on to Ben Harper with a live CD - and one of the ones she said we HAD to hear was his self-titled CD debut. Now, my musical tastes have always run older than my age - everything from doo-wop and beach music from the 60's, to electric blues, to jazz and show-tunes - so right away I liked this guy's music. But given how young he is, the smooth image he portrays (I read one review which described him as a jazz singer with boy-band looks), and the fact that he doesn't play his own piano, I was prepared for him not to be much more than a singer with a polished but uninspiring act. Sunday night, I was proven so very wrong.

I don't know why it seems like no good acts come to Lexington, and that's a rant for another time, but Carrie and I found the Palace in Louisville when it was the closest place to catch B.B. King a few years ago. We couldn't believe how cool this place looked once we got inside, nor how intimate the setting was for a live concert. It's almost like being in an ampitheater or an Italian piazza the way the ceiling's been painted and the walls have been carved.


Our seats were 12 rows back from the stage in one of the two center sections, so when the curtain came up, we had a great view of the 12-piece band - no, orchestra is almost a better word - backing the man up. An eight-piece brass ensemble on an updated version of a bandstand, plus drums, stand-up bass, guitar and piano launched into Buble's opening song while we took int the lights and the ruffled curtains that transformed the stage into a jazz club I'd have expected to see more in Atlantic City or Vegas in the days of Sinatra and Martin. The lights came up and there was the silhouette of a man behind a larger-than-life picture frame at the back of the stage. From that moment on, it was a rocking, swinging night of jazz standards with a few new songs thrown in. He may not have played his own instruments, but the man's voice and his body were his instrument. Moves that had to be at least part Elvis were guaranteed to make the ladies swoon, but the music had everybody in the house dancing in their seats. From faster numbers like "Come Fly With Me" (the song you probably recognize from the Starbucks commercials) and a jazzy version of Queen's "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" to a sexy version of "Fever" to slower versions of "You Don't Know Me" and "Try A Little Tenderness", and the original song "Home" (that Buble co-wrote with his pianist) the worst thing for me was trying not to sing along with EVERY song. Halfway through the show, he threw up his hands with a grin and announced his retirement from jazz - "Jazz sucks. Jazz is like a good blues band that fell down the stairs," - then made fun of Josh Groban's style as he started an operatic version of "I Will Survive" and entertained us with covers of Maroon 5's "This Love" and Michael Jackson's "Billy Jean" before coming back out of retirement. When he closed the show, the band stopped and Michael stood on the edge of the stage, singing the last verse and chorus a capella and without a microphone, yet he could be heard in the very back of the room.

What amazed me the most, though, was the rapport this guy seemed to have with the audience, thanking them at almost every break. At one point, he paused to thank the guys who'd brought their wives and girlfriends, reminding us all that he and the band were just there to "put a little air in the tires," and that we were the ones who got to "go home and ride the bicycle all night long." Though the theater and the tickets clearly say no flash photography, Buble stopped after one song to make fun of a guy in the front row who seemed to have no problem with snapping pictures, then said to go ahead and snap away all we wanted. And just to make sure we got enough, he hopped down offstage and ran up one aisle and down another, high-fiving and shaking hands with the folks in the aisles, ending with an impromptu dance with one woman in red who thought nothing of grabbing his butt while he spun her around. It was obvious to us at least, that here was a young man and his band - none of whome were probably older than their early thirties - who were doing nothing more than living their dreams, entertaining people and playing some great music, and that really showed in everything they did, even in the little things like the way he thanked each and every member of the band individually before walking offstage.

Carrie and I left the theater that night smiling, singing, dancing and raving about how good the show was. I also left feeling a little jealous that Michael Buble was living out one of my dreams and I was still designing mining equipment. But like he said in one of his segue's, the jazz standards are still around and people still like them because they're good music, and because they give us hope - maybe just hope that you'll fall in love and life will end happily ever after; maybe hope that you can live your dreams; maybe just hope that life could really be as good all the time as it seems to be in our favorite songs. I know I certainly can't complain...

Short Tidbits

• Work has definitely picked up in the last two weeks. I'm still a clueless rookie compared to the other design guys here at Stamler, but I'm managing two projects requiring document submittals to our customers six months before the machines are ever built, and I'm riding shotgun with one of the other new designers on a couple of machines that are similar to each other. On top of that, our IT guy installed a new server this weekend which frees up space for the rather crude (at least compared to a similar application built in Access or another database program) but working system I designed to take out part numbers electronically. It's been a couple of months since I designed the system in Excel, so I've got to remember how it works and go through the part number books we currently use to update my program with the numbers that have already been taken out.
• The knee is better than it was (I'm up to 3 degrees of extension versus the 6 degrees of bend I started with), but the therapist thinks there's still something in the knee keeping it from going back to normal. I've got an appointment next Tuesday with an orthopedist to see what she thinks.
• I'm working with a new computer at home. The upsides are a faster processor, a lot more memory, and enough new games to last me for a year and a half. The downside is that my old computer conveniently stopped working before I could get everything transferred over. Thus, I've lost ALL of my e-mail addresses. If you're reading this and you know me, e-mail me.

The Economics of Education (as seen by neither an Economist nor an Educator)

Try as I might to write and think happy thoughts, I find myself realizing that most of the things I want to write about relate to things I've recently heard on NPR or read on other peoples' blogs. I'm not 100% positive, but I think it goes back to the unspoken agreement between my wife and me not to speak about politics with each other unless she brings it up and I can count the number of times that has happened in four years on one hand. We can talk about pop culture, school, the drama amongst our less-squared-away friends and family, our future, and even work (moreso hers than mine), but politics is something usually to be avoided. So without Carrie as an outlet, and without polished debaters like my buddy Freshboy to banter with on a regular basis, I usually find myself thinking about this stuff in my own mind. Now, I've got my blog and its phantom readers...

Anyway, this week's mental struggle is with the cost of education in the United States and two or three things have combined to get me on the warpath. For the last year, Carrie has been attending Sullivan University in pursuit of her Associates degree in Travel & Tourism. You can't know how proud I am of her for putting in the time and effort at our age to go back to school and finish a degree, any degree. So with 10 weeks left in her studies and without wanting to take anything away from that accomplishment, we got to talking about whether she would pursue her Bachelors degree in Hospitality Management. All I'm worried about is her finding a full-time job in her field so we'll be able to pay off her previous student loans as well as the $15,000-or-so she's racked up this year, preferably with a company who will also pay her to go back and finish her Bachelors work. On the other hand if she keeps going to Sullivan to finish her degree without taking any time in between, we probably end up racking up another $15-18,000 in loans but her current loans stay on deferment and her tuition stays locked in at last year's level. I'm not sure if Carrie will continue or if she even wants to, and I'm not going to push her in either direction, but I'd be all for the higher tuition if the bill gets paid by her future employer instead of us.

While we're on the subject of student loans, yesterday was the last day for past and present students to take advantage of the 2.77 percent interest rate on government-subsidized student loans. From here on out, we'll all be paying interest at 4.7 percent. That means an extra $2300 we'll pay in interest on a $20,000 Stafford loan. I can't decide if the loan providers have started to believe the media hype about student loan interest rates being "the lowest they've ever been" and simply want to make more profit on the same service they've provided for decades, or if it's a case of having to raise the rates to limit the number of loan requests (remember your supply-demand curves and how fewer customers will demand a product at a higher price?) because financial resources are already being used elsewhere.

Finally, when I picked up my prescriptions for this month, I got to thinking about the cost of healthcare. For every $25 I pay, there's another $100 or so of cost related to seeing the doctor and another couple of hundred dollars in tests that all either have to be paid for by my insurance company or passed back to me when the insurance company decides at random intervals that it's not going to pay. Meanwhile, one of the reasons prices are so high is the cost of guess what?...insurance. Then I heard a clip from the Dave Ramsay Show in which a doctor's wife was asking Dave how to clean up their $100,000-plus student loan and credit card debt because they were getting ready to go from a guaranteed $270,000 a year in income to $180,000 now that her husband was finishing up his residency and going into private practice. Seeing as how that family will still bring in more than 3 times what Carrie and I make in a year I have little sympathy for them, but I do have to wonder why it costs so much more to educate doctors than it does to teach engineers. The website for the University of Kentucky medical school says in plain English that a new resident student can expect to spend $120,000 in tuition, books, fees, and living expenses during a 4-year MD program. Tuition for an undergraduate engineering major is $6,000 per year. Even if you're generous with living expenses ($1000 a month), a four-year engineering degree is going to cost you $72,000. Medical equipment is expensive, I'll grant you, but so are CAD equipment, computer measurement systems, and lab testing rigs. I have to wonder if the reason that medical school tuition is so much higher isn't something as simple as having to pay the good medical professors higher salaries so they're able to pay off their own loans and continue teaching.

Like I said in the title, I'm neither an economist nor an educator, but I like to think that I know enough about life and our world to be dangerous. I've said for a couple of years now that our knowledge is one of the few things Americans have left, and it's probably the "product" we should be focusing on the most. Manufacturing jobs are going offshore because the Chinese can live off of pennies compared to even the poorest American worker. Materials can be gotten anywhere in the world and shipped to anyone who wants to buy them. Where America has always prospered is in its application of knowledge - nuclear energy, space and sea exploration, automation. We are quickly losing the race for knowledge because we don't have enough teachers and enough institutions to pass that knowledge on to our younger generations. Here in Lexington, KY - the second largest city in the state and one of the best-known for its horses, bourbon, and history - the city's government can afford to spend money on condemnation of the water company while there are public schools without enough money to provide books for their students. Parents cry bloody murder that they are no longer allowed to smoke in bars and restaurants, but rarely talk about the fact that most teachers make less than restaurant and bar managers. More and more students are going to college because you have to have a degree for even the most menial of jobs outside of food service and custodial work, but our first- and second-year students find themselves in chemistry classes with 500 other students. Education and knowledge are the only treasures Americans have left, and yet on one end of the spectrum we're not putting enough emphasis on teaching our young children and helping them want to keep learning, while at the other end we're pricing their education right out of their reach.