Tree Pruners of Doom!

DISCLAIMER: This entry is NOT for the faint of heart. If you're squeamish, skip it, and go here instead.

If anyone ever asked, I'd have to agree with them that I'm a "city" person. I grew up near Norfolk and Virginia Beach, VA. I get uncomfortable in cities smaller than 100,000 people (except the five years I spent at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, but you can't count college towns). When I was younger, I used to go fishing and hunt deer with my dad, but it's been years since I cleaned my shotgun, much less used it. That's why no one really knew what to expect from me when my inlaws invited Carrie and I up to Frankfort, OH for a chicken butchering. I think several of them - my wife included - thought I'd get freaked out by the experience.

First off, you have to understand my inlaws. Robin and Roy are what I'd call survivalists or hoarders (sp?). Roy has always vowed to be prepared for any type of catastrophe - war, weather, or economic in nature. Mom's music room is divided between her organ and several racks of canned vegetables and dry goods. Their garage is the same way - bottled water, sodas, canned and dry goods from the store, canned home-grown vegetables, several freezers of meat and frozen fruit, and bushels of produce. Roy looks for sales at the local grocery stores and then stocks up on whatever's on sale. He frequents local farmer's markets and auctions where he buys corn and squash in ten-bushel lots. He's always told us and the rest of his kids that he'll help us keep stocked up with food for our own houses in case of emergency. Frankly, after Katrina and the mess on the Gulf Coast, I'm starting to come around to where I think he's got the right idea. So when Robin and Roy told us they were going to buy a truckload of chickens and butcher them to put them away for the winter, Carrie and I figured it was a good idea. When my local Kroger has cut-up chicken on sale for $0.99/pound and we could get chickens for $0.75 each, you're talking about a savings of a couple of dollars per chicken. Add in the value of the time spent with family (and I've always said I could have done a hell of a lot worse when it came to inlaws), and it makes for a profitable opportunity.

My dad laughed at me when I told him what we were doing, and told me stories of how they used to catch a chicken, hold him down under a board, and pull his head off (I told you this entry wasn't for the squeamish). Then he told me how much it sucked to have to pluck feathers for hours to get them clean. That got me to wondering just how do you kill and clean a chicken? I got my answer at 10am on Saturday when they handed me the Tree Pruners of DOOM! That's right. Of all of the jobs they could have given me that involved working with dead chickens, I got to be the one do the killing. With tubs and sharp knives at the ready behind us, my wife's brother pulled the first chicken out of the back of his truck shell by its ankles, grabbed it by the neck to stretch it out, and held it there for me to cut its head off.

I'm sure you've all been told at one time or another that you were "running around like a chicken with its head cut off". I now know just how true that phrase is. After cutting the head off and dropping it in a trash can, Mike would throw the body 10, sometimes 15 feet away to let it bleed out before cleaning and dressing. Can I just tell you that those suckers hopped 3-4 feet in the air, and came bouncing right back at us most of the time? One chased my nephew across the campsite as if he were still alive. Pretty funny stuff if you don't stop to think about it too hard. In the end, I was the executioner (one of my brothers suggested I needed a black hood) for 48 poor chickens. My mom jokingly threatened to call PETA when she heard the story, but I'd say the tree pruner method got the job over quick. I won't venture to say it was painless, but it should have been quick. Once I'd cut the heads off, my brothers went to pulling the skin - feathers and all - off each one, and then handing them to Roy and the women to clean, dress, and cut each one in a process that probably would have rivaled Perdue for efficiency.

In the end, we came home with twelve chickens (48, split 4 ways; there were supposed to be more, but I think we're going to do another batch at Halloween). We also ended up with a carload of produce - 8 whole pineapples, another 5-6 cut-up pineapples in containers, squash, zucchini, a ten-pound box of bananas, bell peppers, hot peppers, banana peppers, home-grown tomatoes, a box of apples, and probably some other stuff I'm missing. I don't think we'll go hungry any time soon, and we'll get more servings of fruits and vegetable than we've had all summer. We've also decided to split a hog with one of Carrie's sisters (netting us something like 200 pounds of cured ham, sausage, bacon, and ham steaks), and we're talking about splitting a beef four ways.

It's a good thing we bought a new freezer...

Windfall Taxes for Oil Companies

Welcome back to another episode of "Search for Understanding". I'm Ted, an ordinary, middle-class white guy with very little formal training in politics or economics but a thirst for knowledge and a desire to keep up with what's happening in the world, even while admitting both privately and publicly that there's probably nothing I'll ever be able to do to change one damned bit of it. Today's topics are Capitalism and Democracy.

Not long ago, my good friend Freshboy blogged about an attempt to ban smoking in public establishments in the Washington, D.C. area. We got into an argument about the rights of American citizens and the ability of government to regulate their freedoms, where I realized I was no longer the do-gooder consitutionalist I had once been in high school. At the time of this argument, I wasn't ashamed to say that I thought the government's regulation of smoking was a good thing because I personally could care less for smoke and enjoy being able to walk into a public place without coming out smelling like an ash tray. I went so far as to say that if government ever threatened to further regulate bourbon, or poker, or Chick-Fil-A sandwiches - You know, something I care about - then maybe I'd worry about it, but until then they were welcome to regulate anything that didn't personally affect me. Even as I said it, there were alarms going off in the back of my mind and the old Ted was turning in his comfortable middle-class grace, but we left the debate unfinished, agreeing to disagree as we usually do.

Well, a few weeks ago, I heard a suggestion by Robert Reich - former Secretary of Labor under Clinton and regular commentator on the Marketplace Morning Report - that now might be a good time to reign in oil companies with a 'Windfall Tax'. Since his initial commentary, I've heard at least one congressman talk about the same idea. I'm no expert, but the way Reich justified this was in saying that the oil companies were reaping huge unexpected profits - proverbial windfalls - by charging Americans more than they had expected to spend for gasoline and heating oil. In order to recompense Americans for their unexpected expenses, Reich reasoned that the government should levy windfall taxes on oil companies and use the money to help Americans pay for those expenses. Now I'm no expert, but this suggestion sounds like one way of artificially controlling the country's economy by putting a price cap on one of the world's commodities, which goes against my understanding of the law of the invisible hand that controls markets. In a pure capitalist society, the law of supply & demand reigns supreme, and suppliers are going to sell product at the price that maximizes their profits. If demand drops off because the prices are too high, then the supplier usually has to drop their price to increase demand and profits. If prices remain elevated for a long time, then it usually pushes the demanders to seek other alternatives.

The U.S. is far from a pure capitalist society, despite what Cold War Communists and modern-day Islamic fundamentalists would have us believe. In a pure capitalist society, the main function of the government is to protect the people so the market can continue to function. In our case, the governments - local, state, and federal - spend large chunks of the taxes they raise to help the people live at a higher standard than they would were they left to their own devices. Still, with all that the government does for Americans, there's something that causes those alarm bells to ring in my head again when I think of government levying 'windfall taxes' on top of the normal corporate and personal income taxes they already get. That's like changing the rules in the middle of the game, isn't it?

Walmart has had a great decade of expansion; they've bullied their suppliers into selling to them at lower prices; and yet you don't hear any talk of 'Windfall Taxes' on their earnings.

How about America's defense industry? "Wow! No one expected a War on Terror this year, and you guys have sold so many tanks and made so much money that we're going to go ahead and take some of that off your hands."

Personally, I'd rather see more encouragement to pursue alternative fuels and technologies. I know the Bush administration championed the Energy Bill, which includes money for research and incentives for using agri-fuels, but we can always do more on all levels. Hybrid vehicles have been on the horizon for the last ten years or more, but they're still priced higher than gasoline-powered cars and not available in all areas. In my case, it makes more sense economically for me to drive my paid-for Jeep Grand Cherokee with its inefficient V8 engine than it does for me to switch to a car with better gas mileage. I average 50 miles a day during the week before switching to my wife's Impala for most of our weekend running around, so let's say 300 miles a week.

• @ $3/gallon for gas, in a Jeep that gets 15 mpg, I'm spending $60 a week or $240 a month on gasoline. At that rate, I'm spending another $200 a year on oil changes and maintenance.
• If I were to switch to a car that was twice as efficient, I'd still be spending $120 a month in fuel and close to the same amount in maintenance, but I'd have a $300+ car payment each month for the next five years.

I know there's some forumlas for carrying this example out to five- and ten-year cost-benefit analyses, but from my point of view, there's not much incentive to change.

Nevertheless before I get too far off my original train of the thought, I wonder what you - my few but faithful readers - think of this idea of 'Windfall Taxes'. Is it fair? Is it a good idea? Is it up to Uncle Sam to keep its people's heads above water in the first place? What do you think?

Let the Healing Begin...

Happy Thursday to you, and to those of you who AREN'T recovering from arthroscopic surgery on your right knee, then consider yourselves lucky. Compared to some of the facial surgeries I had as a kid to repair my cleft palate and cleft lip, this one has actually left me with very little to complain about. If anything, it's more of an inconvenience, but it still sucks.

The surgery went fairly smooth, with the exception of my doctor showing up a half-hour late for her own party. By the time she showed up, I'd donned the latest in hospital gown fashion, been asked at least a half-dozen times when was the last time I'd eaten or drank anything, and been examined by three separate anesthesiologists, the last of which explained rather frankly that I weigh twice as much as I should, and therefore they needed to make sure I had a good enough airway so as not to die during the surgery. After five minutes with the doctor and an introduction by my attending nurse that reminded me of being served at O'Charley's - "Hi, my name is Rhonda, and I'll be your attending nurse today. Can I start you off with a valium cocktail, or maybe a plate of Celebrex?" - my own private army of medical personnel arrived to wheel me into the operating room. With all of the hustle and bustle, I was starting to feel glad that they made me put my initials on the knee they were supposed to be fixing, just in case someone forgot mid-incision.

Once in the room and scooted onto an operating table, the frank anesthesiologist placed a mask over my mouth saying she wanted to make sure my lungs had plenty of oxygen before they knocked me out. The next thing I knew, I was laying on a gurney in the recovery room, hearing from the doctor that she'd been able to save the cartilage and that I'd be on crutches for 3 or 4 weeks. UGH.

That's where the inconvenience part comes in. There's just NO good way to get in the shower using only one leg and a pair of crutches. There's no easy way to navigate a set of stairs on crutches, either at home or at work (and my company is one of those remaining few that's never heard of the Americans with Disabilities Act, as they still have no elevator to my office on the second floor). There's no good way to stand in front of the stove to cook dinner, nor is there any easy way to carry things while you're on crutches. I know this for a fact, and would submit the video (if one existed) of me holding the Coleman-cooler-like CryoCuff water bottle in my left hand, with the phone receiver in my pocket, and the handle of the empty Crystal Light pitcher tucked in the waistband of my shorts while using my left armpit to stabilize one crutch and my right hand to work the other one. You want pizza for lunch??? You better figure out how to hop on only one crutch.

Lord knows I'm not a good patient. When I'm sick, I just want to curl up in a ball in a room with no lights in front of the TV or the computer. I don't need nurses, or flowers, or cards sending happy thoughts. Just leave me the hell alone and I'll come out when I'm back to my normal fat, cheerful self ready to be optimistic and full of life. My wife is getting tired of hearing about it, but one of these days someone needs to invent a Fast Forward button for life, because I'd buy one and extra batteries for the times when I'm sick. I'd have to restrain myself from using it to escape other hard times, but it'd come in damned handy during those times - like this one - when I was going to be stuck on crutches for 3-4 weeks with no way out but to hurry up and heal.

I suppose I should be very thankful that I will be able to use my leg again in a few short weeks, and that I'm not one of those people who has to get around on one leg for the rest of my life. And I suppose I should stop asking Carrie if she's found a fast-forward button yet, or she'll kick me in the bad knee. It's just hard to be sore and cranky when you're usually a happy person. And try as I might to force myself to be happy mentally even though my body is in bad shape physically, it's just not going to happen, I don't think.

So if you're not recovering from surgery to repair a torn lateral meniscus, smile damnit!

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.