Tuesday foliage

Not sure there's anything much to say beyond "I liked these". :)

Speaking of Frances

Since several of you have asked who she is, who keeps turning up in my remarks (and commenting on them, to boot)...

I met her and her husband when we were all students at University of Puget Sound back in the middle of the 1980s. (There will be a brief pause while some of you get off my lawn.) We shared - still do share - some geekish and other interests, and have traded others. When I had the catastrophic collapse that destroyed my college prospects, they saved my life, being the ones on the spot to see how bad things had gotten and getting the news to people who could do something about it.

(That's a long hard story I seldom tell all of. Someday, maybe.)

Things got in the way of being in touch for a decade or so after that, until Frances happened across mention of my gaming work - this was when I was most busily productive for White Wolf - and worked out that it was in fact me. We've been back in touch on and off since then. I fell mostly out of touch in my most recent big collapse a few years ago, but then I did that with more or less everyone. Last fall we finally managed to sync up again for visiting and doing stuff together.

It happens that Frances has some needs that line up well with mine. I have to be getting more exercise for weight loss, and for specific things like post-vascular surgery recovery. She's got a bad knee that needs strengthening. We are both the sort of people who are good at finding excuses when alone, but good at providing encouragement to others, and if it works to ride along, or walk along, then so much the better. So just about every day, lately, she comes over, we walk the required amount, usually have a midday meal together, and visit, and like that.

All my readers who like it when I do well, you should be glad circumstances and decisions allow Frances to spend more time with me. Mom has commented that she feels better knowing that Frances is around to nag me just the way Mom would if only she were here and feeling in good form, and that's about the size of it. It's good to have people around who really are good for you, and this is the case with Frances and me.

And now you know!

Sleep relief incoming

Yesterday's appointment went great. My doctor agrees that I sound like a classic case of sleep apnea, and has set things in motion.

There aren't many places that do good-quality sleep studies and will work with Medicaid, but there is at least one in Seattle, at the Harbor View medical center. It happens that Dave (the doc) works in the emergency room there as well as his private practice at Capitol Hill Medical, and he picked up the phone and made initial contact on my behalf. I should be hearing from their sleep medicine people sometime soon to see about scheduling.

But it's likely to take a while for that, because of much greater need than supply. So in the meantime he's prescribed a very mild anti-depressant. I forget the name of it, but will fill that in later. *blush* He says that in the dosages he prescribes, it doesn't have any actual anti-depressant value, but does help with sleep. He prefers to prescribe only what he's taken himself, and he said that this is what he takes when, for instance, he finishes an ER shift at 11:30 pm and has to be ready for office patients at 10 am the next day. I'll be picking that up today and getting started with it, and hope to have some good news of sleep relief soon.

I admit to some more moments of bitterness toward all those who've helped perpetuate this ghastly mess of a health care system instead of any of the decent, effective alternatives in use in the rest of the industrialized world, but I'm trying not to rant too much about it and would prefer not to fight that debate again in these comments. It's not really a thing I'm open to discussion about.

Music meme

Courtesy of Michelle Lyons, "Put your songs on shuffle. Write down the first line of the first twenty songs as a poem." Okay, I can do that.

I've been waiting for so long
In the year of thirty-nine

Nous somnes du soleil

Every day my metal friend
I've heard of unfaithful lovers but this is outrageous
It's not the heat, it's the inhumanity

Climbing up on Solsbury Hill
That's great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane
Justice to the left of you
Sex jibe husband murders wife
Another piece of freedom gone
In a violent place we call our country
A hand held over a candle in angst fuelled bravado

{instrumental}

Böses Mädchen
Within myself
See them standing in the foothills
Sometimes I feel like I'm the loneliest of all creatures in the universe
He was a poet, a dreamer
A man in my shoes runs a light

( Read more... )

Wednesday photos

I've said this before, but Pacific Northwest skies are so much more interesting than the ones I grew up with in Pasadena, California:



Someone was in pursuit of Frances's lunch: