Treason of Words

At Stonebench, Christmas 2009

To All Sharing Our Genes or Journeys,

The final year of the Aughts found us once again in the thick of it, meeting challenges both expected and unexpected. We count ourselves supremely fortunate to have a family and a family of friends to share our adventures with.

Not long after last year’s letter was in the in the postman’s hands, Russell checked into the hospital as planned to have a benign meningioma excised. Several hours later, 98% had been successfully removed, leaving only a calcified trace clinging to parts too tender to touch. All was well until his temperature began to climb dangerously. Many tense hours later, he awoke to begin a course of Dantrolene, the only treatment for his newly-discovered Malignant Hyperthermia. Within a few days, having bested both tumor and hyperthermia, Russell was back home. By Christmas, the painful phlebitis caused by the Dantrolene had faded as well. With the results of his annual MRI check-up pending, the only reminders of the surgery are the impressive but fading scar and a slight numbness in his right shin.

January saw Christina return to the classroom as a student, beginning her first semester at the University of Texas School of Information (or “iSchool,” as all the cool kids call it). Now finishing the third semester of courses for her master’s degree, she has risen to the challenge of balancing her studying with her teaching, the assignments she completes with the assignments she grades. If all goes according to plan, she will be a licensed school librarian by end of 2012.

As if being a teacher and a student weren’t enough, Christina is now also a president as well. From the start of her term this July until 2011, she leads her graduate chapter of Zeta Phi Beta, presiding at meetings and representing them in the community.

Following on the hardscape project of last year, in August we removed the last of the carpet from the floors of Stonebench, and set about staining the concrete that lay beneath. Much to Russell’s (budgetary) chagrin and (powertool) delight, the quarter-century old beige overspray from wallpainting needed mechanical removal with a heavy-duty hand grinder. The result, is a leatherlike tan finish bordered in burgundy in both office and master bedroom. Soot & Smoke’s upset tummies are easier to deal with now, but keeping a grip on breakables is more important than ever.

This year wasn’t all hard work, though. Spring was punctuated with a refreshing Hill Country getaway, wherein Russell introduced Christina to the charms of Fredericksburg and Luckenbach on a drizzly Memorial Day weekend. We enjoyed strolling, shopping, snoozing, strumming & singing, Shiner, sausages and even some ’splosions (of the professional, controlled variety). Without that relaxing interlude, summer might have proven unbearable.

This season finds us busily baking and organizing for events with colleagues, comrades and clan. Making a whistle-stop en route to Arizona, we’ll host Christina’s parents for her birthday weekend before celebrating with the Zetas as we kick off Christmas week. Come Christmas Day, we’ll visit Russell’s family, followed the next day with some old friends. When the calendar makes its next flip, we hope to be in a good spot over Lady Bird Lake to watch the fireworks. Work and school will dominate Twenty-Ten, but we do plan to visit Big D for the Zetas biennial Boulé come July. Wherever you are and whatever you have planned this holiday season, we wish you safety, health, and happiness.

And of course,
A Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Living with cats brings with it many joys: a steady stream of vomit to clean up, little pink anuses in your face while you fall asleep and litterbox duty, to name a few of the more popular ones. Occasionally, though, I discover a new source of cat-related wonder. It is amazing, for example, just how many things around the house can easily be mistaken for a lurking feline.

This is a phenomenon abetted by my poor eyesight, which is bad enough that without correction, this text resembles ant trails on my screen. Another accomplice are my glasses, which, in the name of a snappy look, sacrifice peripheral vision. Glancing down shifts my field of vision into the uncorrected area, which is why I move my whole head to glance at the keys while I hunt & peck.

One common not-a-cat in our household is the stray pair of boots. I own a single pair, pictured here, but it’s far more likely that the cat that won’t answer in the half-light of the bedroom is one of Christina’s many vastly more fashionable and less country-western pairs.

The smaller of our two critters is Smoke, a female who enjoys perching close to eye level. Our dresser is about the perfect height, and since she doesn’t get in trouble for being there, she’ll often hunker down there or sit up, begging for attention, which is what I thought was happening when I saw this instead:

Among the places the wee beasties aren’t allowed are the kitchen counters, a policy I instituted when I entered their lives and put the kitchen to regular use, in order to cut down on my cat hair intake. When cooking one day, I saw this in the fuzzy periphery and yelled at it to get off the counter:

When Soot & Smoke play, there are two phases: the mad chase and the stalk. The chase ranges from one end of the house to the other, punctuated with clawless slap-fighting and interludes in which one seems to call time-out or quits the game while the other silently stalks and observes from a higher vantage point, or, as in this case, from around a corner:

I’m not a music guy; I don’t consume a lot of popular music, nor do I profess to be a connoisseur of the art. Mostly, I stick to artists and songs I know. The result of this is that my music collection consists primarily of country from before about 1990 (approximately the time middle school peer pressure drew me onto the sounds of the era), popular alternative rock from the early 1990s through the early 2000s (about the time the chief driver of my music acquisition departed), plus various and sundry pockets of music by groups that I’ve stumbled upon by chance and taken a shine to (influenced primarily by occasional splurges at Cheapo Discs; Man or Astro-man, I’m looking at you).

Nonetheless, even with such a heretofore circumscribed musical universe, although supplemented with Christina’s collection replete with 1990s hip-hop and neo-soul, one of the driving factors in dragging our entertainment system into this century with the addition of a HDTV and an HTPC was to increase the accessibility of our tunes. However, what do we listen to each Saturday night between 7 and 11pm? Not the Johnny Cash & Jay-Z Party Mix, that’s for sure.

It’s an organic outgrowth of a habit begun in the fall of 1993 when Mrs Alves, my speech & debate coach, informed us n00bs that we would be listening to the news on NPR every day. Morning or evening, she didn’t care which, so long as we learned the ins and outs of the domestic and international issues of the day and could produce Chechnya as well as a BBC correspondent.

The news habit outlasted high school, and, with a few gaps, has persisted for a long as I’ve had a radio and somewhere to prepare to go to in the morning or come home from at night. When I remarried, I got my lovely bride hooked on news radio as well. Such serious news is vastly preferable to the fluff pawned off as local TV morning newscasts, and is less likely to make me roll my eyes in disgust than commercial radio morning shows.

The radio, however, doesn’t always get clicked off when the disembodied talking heads fall silent. While Eklektikos doesn’t usually float my boat, returning to the car at the end of a stay-at-home Saturday exposed us to the radio still tuned to the familiar news station, but now pouring much different sounds out of the speakers. Classic R&B, rock, soul and rockabilly, linked together by some often tenuous connection. It’s called Twine Time, and it’s become an addiction. My father-in-law, being a great fan of his generation’s music, conveyed quite a bit of knowledge on to his daughter, who is ever so much better at picking out the artists before they’re announced than I am. The hits (and misses) of the 50s and 60s have become the soundtrack of our weekends, the background sounds to our laundry folding and test grading and blogging. It’s been known to elicit singing-along and even the occasional rhythmic shuffle on my part (dancing would be an overstatement). If it can do that, it’s something mighty cool, indeed.

I’ve never been much for the outside. The woods, creeks, hills & mountains, even out on the porch and down on the street, sure, but not the plain ol’ outdoors, where things that bite and disperse their reproductive effluvia are. As a sneezy, bookish lad, I had dreamed of how wonderful it would be to simply laminate the outside, preserving it for observation, but keeping its more unsavory bits from contacting me. This past Autumn, I got my chance. The long, parched summer, unlike 2007’s long, saturated summer, was my accomplice. After a few rounds of watering on the prescribed evenings, I decided to be a friend to nature and cease the senseless sacrifice of our precious water resources and stopped watering the lawn entirely. Predictably, the ground cover yellowed, then browned, then gave up the ghost, setting the stage for my machinations.

In the back yard, where we decided to test our mettle, Christina and I sketched out a plan. The south face of the house has a large and newly improved deck jutting out to within 8 feet of the back fence, and spanning 3/4 of the way to the western fence. A slender mulched bed clung to the perimeter of the yard, holding a few assorted rose bushes. We’d also recently acquired a hand-me-down steel shed from my dear brother that almost filled the gap between the deck and back fence. Between the deck and shed, we posited a patio, on which the grill would stand. We overlaid a path of stone on the current red pavers leading to the gate by the front door. The rest we’d blanket with river rock, mutihued and walkable, save two areas around our small mimosa trees.

Measurements in hand, we shopped for rock. The first purveyor we visited helped us convert the one and two dimensional measurements we has into mass. Pity, then, that we didn’t buy his rocks. Instead, we went with another, closer, stonemonger. Two tons of native limestone chopped into edgers, and another two in broad, flat, patio form. After covering all the exposed ground in the back yard with 6 mil black plastic sheeting, and securing it with lawn staples, we laid the edgers along the deck and the shed, then at the extent of the patio, around the trees, and HVAC unit. As we hauled and arranged these stones, we slowly realized that there were far too many still on the pallet to work into our plan for the back yard. Since we planned to do the front yard eventually, we started trimming it with the extra. There were just enough to outline it neatly.

Next came the patio, starting with many bags of fine sand poured and graded with levels and small planks of wood. After much scruching about on the ground, I was almost happy when the time came to haul the exceedingly heavy patio slabs around to lay them out, starting in one corner and building out from there, looking for tidy, interlocking neighbors as I went. Again, we found ourselves with too much stone for our purposes. However, a deadline loomed: I was scheduled for my brain surgery in just a few weeks. Rather than attempt to find a place in the front yard for the patio stones, we switched into safety mode, and hauled them all around back into a neat stack for storage.

The back yard had to be finished, though. On a Friday morning, I ordered 7 cubic yards of washed river gravel, and was greeted by the driveway-spanning mound when I got home. That weekend was spent shoveling and dumping, while Christina manned the action hoe (cue theme music: Action Hoooooe!), spreading the mounds I dumped evenly. Some of the stored slabs became stepstones from the deck over to the gate, down the sideyard. To no one’s surprise, the river rock estimate ended up extremely generous, leaving more than half the width of the driveway blocked by the mulithued gravel.

A week remained before I would be out of action for an indeterminate span of time. Staring down this reality, and not keen on possibly leaving the garage inaccessible, materials strewn about, and generally leaving things half-done, we devised a plan to apply the resources we had to the front lawn in a way we hoped wouldn’t end up looking bizarre. It was our good fortune that our neighbors liked the work we had done already, and invited and encouraged us to apply the same look all the way up to the side of their house and front drive.

The week of December 8 turned out to be the coldest of the season that far. Each night, we’d arrive home from work, change into work clothes, and grab lanterns to illuminate our progress. It wasn’t easy; laying black plastic sheeting in the dark presents some unique challenges. Fortunately, our yard is replete with right angles, and is pretty smooth. A few night’s work, and the front yard had reached the dominatrix/cenobite look that the back yard had achieved several weeks prior, outlined with chopped limestone. On the remaining evenings, I carried patio stones from the pile behind the gate to form a collar around the small stand of aspiring trees. Saturday was taken with familial commitments that involved tasty little fish (and what I feared might be my only Christmas-like gathering). Sunday, though, I got very familiar with my shovel.

When we bought the house, I had long divested myself of most of my tools accumulated during my first bout of home ownership, especially those for yardwork. Ever the tightwad, I bought a pair of inexpensive shovels, one square and one pointed, from Big Lots! in order to dig and spread mulch. The spade was irreparably broken and replaced some time ago, but the transfer shovel is still with me. Starting at about 8 in the morning, when decent folk are sleeping, and decent-er folk are heading to services, I was making indecent scrape-dump-ring noises out on the front drive. Christina emerged from the house a couple hours later on her way to have her hair braided, an all day affair. I continued to shovel, taking time out to saw off the bottom of the gate to the back yard so it would open over the river rock. Pile to wheelbarrow, wheelbarrow to yard. Load after load, carting each to a new location in the front yard. By noon, the pile finally started to look smaller. By early afternoon, a small remainder of the original heap remained, and the font yard looked like some very industrious fireants had moved in.

Bushed, I stowed my gear and collapsed in an ungraceful manner on the office futon. I didn’t hear Christina return or enter. She woke me urgently, concerned for my well-being after seeing the amount of stone I had moved. She urged an early dinner, and afterward, we both returned to the yard. Once again seizing her weapon of choice, she set about spreading the piles, directing me to the places that needed a bit more rock to cover evenly. I placed the two largest remaining flagstones in front of the gate leading to the back yard, and our neighbor’s gate as well. In the end, the stone we had was just barely enough to cover the ground. The cheap-o shovel showed its use from hundreds of aggressive scrapings against the cement drive; the leading edge was no longer flat, but rather concave from the angle at which I had pushed it into the rockpile.

In the end, we got the yard we had wanted since moving in. Better yet, we got it sooner than expected, and at half the anticipated cost. We rock.

I’ve only ever really worn two bits of what might be considered jewelry: a watch of some sort, since middle school at least, and a wedding band, for most of the time since about the turn of the century. Neither, however, sports any actual jewels. I’ve recently added another piece to my daily parure:

Crafted of titanium, to match my watch and ring, the top bears my name and the eye-catching red Star of Life, along with eight syllables that have come to be more worrisome than anything so terse and explicable as mere “brain surgery.” Malignant Hyperthermia, sensibly abbreviated MH, is a rather logical nomenclature for the condition. It’s malignant, i.e., potentially deadly; a thermia, a condition concerning temperature; that temperature being hyper-, in this case meaning elevated. It’s plain to see, then, that with this condition, I could somehow get hot enough to endanger my life; to be specific, when anesthetized with certain gasses. Which I of course did, in the early afternoon of December 16.

I, of course, was unconscious, and as a result missed all the excitement that followed. I’m told my relatively incidental neurological procedure had just concluded with the addition of 28 stainless steel staples to my shorn pate when my temperature started to rise. It kept rising, to everyone’s horror, to the neighborhood of 105F, and my heart rate followed it, accelerating madly. The doctor managing my anesthesia recognized the symptoms and called the number that’s now etched on the underside of my new accessory, 1-800-644-9737, and reached an expert at the Malignant Hyperthermia Association of the United States (MHAUS). Subsequently, I was bathed in ice, and administered a drug called Dantrolene, a substance with which I developed a love/hate/hate relationship, and which sounds like a brand of motor oil.

I returned to the waking world some time later, my wife and parents having whiled away the afternoon and evening in fear for my life. About twelve hours after my last recorded memory of swoopy and bright operating room lights and technicians joking about the freezing temperatures, I woke groggily to the sensation of my limbs uncomfortably bound, and my breathing being haltingly interrupted. “Quelle heure est-il?” I asked in writing, for some reason in French. It was 10pm, a solid eight hours later than I had anticipated, an early indication that something was definitely wrong.

I had been indicating my displeasure at just about every annoyance in the room by liberally flipping it off, in particular the breathing tube that was trying to help me breathe, but was mostly just frustrating my own attempts to do so. Its continued presence was another clue that something seriously bad had transpired. With my family briefly out of the room, I was extubated, which was every bit as unpleasant as it looked on ER. Finally able to talk, I could answer important questions, like what my pain level was on a scale of 1 to 10. “Pi,” I croaked. Suspecting brain damage, the nurse asked if this was my usual personality, and my father apologized that yes, it is. Curious at to how things looked at the site of the original area of concern, I had Sean snap a shot of the scene upstairs.

I had no real idea of my location, other than that I was in ICU. For some reason, my mind filled in the unseen areas to either side of my bed and behind it not with walls or empty space, but with nigh-endless rows of dimly lit beds, similar to my own. The next day, I got to see the extent of my space.

Never having been under general anesthesia before also meant that I’d never experienced other wonders, like having a Foley catheter, or an anal temperature probe, or the astonishing disorientation that comes from spending almost 24 hours lying down. Nonetheless, the next day found me hobbling down the hall in doubled-up hospital gowns, pee-bag mounted on my walker, probe cleverly arranged so it didn’t trail behind me like a brontosaurus’ tail in some 1950s stop-motion SFX extravaganza.

It was also on the second day that I took stock of my situation, became more completely informed about my allergic reaction to the anesthetic gas, and learned about the downside of the lifesaving Dantrolene. The Evil Bastard Juice, as I came to think of it, was urine-yellow in color, and had to be formulated on-site, as it degraded too quickly for storage or transport. It arrived in a translucent brown IV bag, indicating to me that it was also photosensitive. For all its chemical fragility, it packs quite a punch once it enters the body.

When I was wheeled into surgery, I had one IV on the back of my left hand. Eventually, that was joined by another on my left arm, and five exhausted IVs on various spots on my right arm. After a few uses, a given vein became too damaged to administer the drug though. In fact, once I was past the fog of painkillers, I could feel the Dantrolene entering the vein in a very painful manner, as if a burning knitting needle was being forced into its minuscule diameter. Yeah, I cried. On the third day, though, that came to an end, as it was suggested that I get a PICC line.

A PICC line is essentially an IV writ large. Using ultrasound, the very pleasant nurse whose job it is to go about inserting these time and pain saving devices found a large, deep vein and inserted a surprisingly lengthy tube into it, ending with a trio easy-access screw-top ports through which drugs and saline could be administered, and from which blood could be drawn. Life was good. There was, however, the small matter of my temperature.

My bout of hyperthermia had mightily fouled up my temperature regulation. Dantrolene attacks the root cause of the symptoms, an imbalance in my calcium level, but in order to bring my temperature down to normal levels, other means were necessary. On the evening of Decemeber 18, I had the unique frustration of watching my family grow more and more anxious while they visited me and got to see my temperature gradually rise above 102F on a monitor behind my head, which I couldn’t see. Frightening though that was, it did bring about my introduction to yet another nifty bit of technology, the cooling blanket. With one on top and one below, I slept the night away in 55F comfort. I need such a device for my side of the bed this summer!

These efforts were rewarded on Christina’s birthday, Friday the 19th, with my move from ICU to a normal recovery room. I had my Foley bag removed, in the process discovering that it was kept in place by a small balloon of sorts, leading me to be even further weirded out by the thought of a balloon in my nethers seconds before it was gently-as-possible slipped out from my urethra, causing my external organs to retreat to approximately my sternum. IVs removed and personal effects collected, I was wheeled up to my new room.

Now, all this time, I had gone without a shower, my last one being the morning of the surgery. The intervening time I had spent mostly laying down, but often running a fever, or being generally clammy. This had left me in a less-than-fresh state. To make matters worse, the damage the Dantrolene had visited upon my various superficial blood vessels had left me with a left hand that cold not grip and a right arm that could not bend. One arm’s worth of usefulness spread across two arms makes doing things like showering well-nigh impossible. Fortunately, I was told I could get help with this from the tech who did other such wonderful things like refreshing the sheets, taking vitals, and checking in hourly to ensure my comfort. They rocked. When the overnight tech popped in, I chickened out of actually asking her to help me wash up, but Christina had no such compunction.

The family evacuated to the waiting room, and the tech helped me undress. No sooner did she disentangle the modesty-preserving doubled-up gown than she took note of something unusual. “Sir, what,” she asked, “is that?”I looked down and to the side toward my right hip area, and rested my hand on the faint grey shape I could just make out there without my glasses on. Stuck to my behind with a small patch of tape was the lead to my still-firmly-in place anal temperature probe.

Note that in the events leading to my being wheeled up to the new room, I never mentioned “had the temperature probe removed from my ass.” That’s because that step never happened. In the rush to get me out of ICU, someone forgot that step, and it’s not like the thing loomed large in my mind, either; I hadn’t been awake when it went in, and for the most part, it just felt like a minor wedgie, a condition endemic to lying around in a loose fitting garment. Plus, I hadn’t had more than a few bites of solid food since the night before surgery, so there certainly wasn’t any urgency that might have sped its discovery.

This was all made so much worse somehow by the fact that a) the tech was black, which despite my being married to a black woman, and not being especially liberal, still managed to stir some White Liberal Guilt™ over her scrubbing my hairy pale ass; b) she was also young and quite attractive, an inexcusable condition in which to be subjected to my rapidly aging and decidedly not-as-attractive physique in its full ingloriousness, which was in turn exacerbated by c) my family (wife included!) being in the next room.

Much to the credit of the young lady (whose name is withheld here to save everyone a bit of mortification), she not only soldiered on in assisting my hot and refreshing shower, helped me into a fresh gown, and made my bed while cheerily chatting and complimenting both my mother and my wife (between answering her phone tersely with her full first name, a decidedly de-ethnified version of which appeared on the dry-erase board in my room), she also managed not to laugh about my grey “tail” until out of earshot. Shortly after she left, the nurse entered to inspect the situation. Dignity long lost at this point, I parted the back of my gown like stage curtains, revealing the source of the problem. She ducked out, made a call, and returned with a pack of warmed towelettes and closed the door before she instructed me to relax and take a deep breath. A firm tug and an awkward and prolonged wiping or three later, and I was tail-free and able to relate this story, in the first of many re-tellings, to my family, who seemed to take a great deal of pleasure in my humiliation.

In the night, after the last saline IV for the day was spent, and I was wholly untethered, I made my move to recapture a semblance of dignity. Having expected a much less exciting recovery, I had packed normal bedclothes for my stay. It was these real, live underwear and undershirts that I pursued as I struggled to lever myself out of bed, using my left arm to push down on the rail and my right hand to keep me from falling out of bed. I shed my gown and gingerly maneuvered the garments. Never has so much strategic thinking gone into putting on boxer-briefs. In a fit of hubris, I even slipped on my lounge pants. Now I was recoverin’ in style.

By Saturday, word had gotten around that I was back on my feet, and so I received a giant bouquet of flowers, the sort that a man never receives unless his life has been in danger; a potted, leafy tropical plant from my colleagues, the sort that makes you regret any slacking you’ve ever done; and a tome of brief biographical sketches of great philosophers, the sort that lets you know the giver doesn’t know you too terribly well, but thinks you’re pretty bright…or at least the sort of nerd to enjoy it (which I am).

I proved to the occupational therapist that walking was not a challenge, and that the actual brain surgery had not had any meaningful impact on me insofar as moving my limbs. With Christina’s help, I refocused all my caregivers’ attentions to the wreck that my arms had become. I became a big fan of chemical heating packs, and learned exercises to promote blood flow and fluid drainage in the affected areas. There were rumblings that I would be released the next day.

Sure enough, on Sunday, December 21, after a fascinating ultrasound of my right arm meant to check for potential blood clots causing the swelling and pain, I was cleared to head home. Christina retrieved real clothes for me to wear, far in excess of what was needed to get me the five yards from the door to the car, while mom and dad went ahead to prepare our house for my homecoming. While Christina brought the car around, I chatted with the lanky African lady who had wheeled me down to the door. “I was a little afraid I wouldn’t get home for Christmas,” I mentioned. “So this is like an early gift, then,” she replied. I nodded my agreement. “Who from, do you suppose? Santa Claus? God?” I felt myself become slightly annoyed by what I took to be an opportunistic grab at proselytizing. I was too happy to be too snarky, though. “Hard to say; Mom’s always said I was bad at checking gift tags.”

The air was cold, but fresh. The car rattled, but was familiar. The house wanted tidying, but it was, at last, home.

To Our Familiar Friends & Friendly Family:

A year cannot help but look frantic in retrospect, dozens of important events and scores of only somewhat less vital ones all clamoring for mention in the space of a few hundred words. Contrary to last year’s message, we kicked off the year in Plano instead of Austin, the first of many changes-of-plan.

The primary object of our discretionary time and treasure has been the new dependent we took under our wing last spring, the recently christened Stonebench, aka 1905 Rainy Meadows Dr. Spring Break brought the first Big Project . Master-izing the guest bath didn’t sound so hard, but the plans went from walling off the second door, to replacing all the doors in the hall, to remodeling the hall completely. We made it over the finish line just in time to rest before work the next day. Other such endeavors saw the creation of a built-in book case, re-garage-ification, and the rehabilitation of the deck. Currently, we’re finishing the job the dry summer and Russell’s “water conservation” began, and are replacing our grass with hardscape, replete with limestone and river rock.

We didn’t spend all our time at home, though. We hit the road to east Texas twice, exploring a new city each time. In June, Christina’s sorors joined us in a van piloted by Russell to the energy hub of Beaumont for their Regional Executive Board Meeting. We, being the Regional Zeta Male Network Coordinator and a Male in said Network, took the other fellows about town for a morning. They both seemed to enjoy themselves, but we wound up organizing an outing to see The Hulk that afternoon with a Male Network of one. On the other end of summer, we changed plans several times, but ultimately ended up heading to Galveston for a weekend, exploring the island by foot, car, train, and retired DUKW assault vehicle. As always when we visit a new town, we not only see sights, but also eat bites. We’d heartily recommend the delights of Benno’s crab cakes and new potatoes, as well as Leon’s smoked meats and stepped-up rice. That is, if they’re to be found following the widespread obliteration wrought by Hurricane Ike, which hit the lovely barrier isle a week after we did.

Not only did we visit, we but hosted as well. As July turned to August, the Allen side of Christina’s family came to town - enjoying local flavors and sights including a personal tour of the state capitol given by Russell, testing how well he paid attention during the many iterations he heard on school field trips. The clan reached the southernmost extent of their road trip in Russell’s parents’ home, conversing and enjoying his father’s grilling skills.

The New Year will bring with it many wonders, among them Christina’s first coursework toward her master’s degree in Library Information Science, Russell’s continuing adventures with tools and various kinds of goo intended for Home Improvement, and everyone trying to pronounce the years twentyXX instead of two-thousandXX. Wherever you are and whatever you have planned this holiday season, we wish you safety, health, and happiness.

And of course,
a Very Merry Christmas,

and a Happy New Year!

As a result of the many intertwining strands of fun, obligation, entertainment and pain currently afoot in our lives, this is late by a month now. I’m determined, however, to get this up before the next holiday, so I’ll be brief (too late, I know). As Marc Anthony and Cleopatra, we made the rounds Halloween week. On Tuesday, I picked Christina up from work, where we changed into costume in the Teachers’ Lounge before darting out to the car.

Before our failed attempt at sneaking out undetected

We were not quite fast enough to avoid being spotted by one of her students, who later noted that I had shut my cape in the door. Quite embarrassing, but, then, my garments generally hew much closer to my form than that. The Zeta Game Night consisted primarily of Bingo, Chips and Dip. I was much better at the Chips & Dip than I was at Bingo. Being both the youngest and male-est present, though, I wasn’t exactly pining for the prizes, which I knew to consist primarily of spa sets compiled from Target’s Dollar Spot. Our costumes went into hiding until Friday, when we finished up distributing candy to the youths who braved our punkin-lit path, and headed out to a party with less bingo and better snacks.

After the fete

Christina, I believe, is generally used to the feeling of being the most dressed-up person in any given situation, be it the Post Office or High Tea, just as I’ve become comfortable knowing and relaying more information than is expected in most circumstances. However, excesses like mine are invisible until I open my mouth; hers are hard to hide. So it was at both our All Hallow’s Week celebrations, I got a rare taste of being overdressed, being one of few in costume, and one of only two in something so elaborate. I’m not sure how she manages the burden of self-consciousness that comes with it, but m’lady looks great doing it.

We’ve expanded our legion of carved pumpkin-like hollow foam decorations by 75% this year, fielding seven such orange lanterns. The grizzly creations line the path from the sidewalk to our door, in such shapes as a vague impression of a human skull, an angry cyclops, an unnatural abomination wrought by the new Prometheus, a kittycat, and a trio of traditionally styled faces displaying the expressions Happy, Angry, and Scared Shitless.

The great shame, though, is that while they are to be lit from within by the latest in flickery LED technology, they will also be lit from without by the latest in motion-sensing, mood-killing, bright-ass floodlights from not one, but at least FOUR sources that I can think of. Safety factor: eleventy-bajillion; Spooky quotient: zero. It does make me a bit sad for the kiddoes who won’t know the tinge of terror from walking up a long, dark drive, with only the hint of a lit pumpkin or two to suggest that there might be candy to be had at the door, and no guarantee that older kids wouldn’t frighten the hell out of you before you got there. Okay, that never happened to me because mom & dad escorted us around the block every year, but the fact is it could have, and that’s what’s important, right?

Anyhow, we’ve almost got our costumes together, and many photos of our coordinated getups shall follow. Well, as many as Christina will allow me to take.

Friday was reserved. From months out, the fifth of September was claimed, set aside for a special event due to the receipt of an adorable postcard bearing the likenesses of our friends Monique and Nathan, a young couple we know through Christina’s role as Monique’s Undergraduate Adviser in Zeta Phi Beta. They planned, at long last, to wed. Certainly, they were already hitched in the eyes of the state (and Facebook), but before friends, family, and the church? Not so much.

Rather than tie the knot locally, Galveston was the destination wedding’s destination. We’d never been to the island, and so planned to make a weekend of it, staying an extra night to see the sights, and taking advantage of a deal from Southwest Airlines that made spending the time and gas money it’d take to drive there seem like sheer folly.

As the date neared, complications arose. The wedding was canceled, for one. A glance at Christina told me that this was not sufficient reason to also cancel our trip. We kept our reservation at Avenue O Bed & Breakfast for a few more weeks. We blinked, though, at the point when Hurricane Gustav had a probability cone that included Galveston Isle and the deadline for a full refund on our lodgings coincided.

After Gustav took it out on Louisiana instead, we made new plans, getting a room at Grace Manor, just off The Strand. With plans set and now unavoidable, I discovered the joy of online check-in before we headed to the remote lot at the airport. Once shuttled to the terminal, it was smooth sailing from there to Houston Hobby, to the rental lot, all the way to the island.

Grace Manor is an imposing structure, even among its imposing neighbors. The long red front stair leads to a grand front door, secured by what Barbara, the helpful and enthusiastic (but not cloying) owner tells me is a lock and bolt in the Huguenot style; that is, it turns backwards. It sits at the southwestern corner of Postoffice and 17th behind a green iron fence and lush tropical gardens. Our home base for the weekend was the Bird of Paradise, with beautiful blinds and copious amounts of room to move about.

The first night, we located some toothpaste, as TSA regulations had left us dentifrice-less, then dined at Benno’s on the Beach, enjoying immense crab cakes, spicy shrimp, and the most awesome potatoes of all time. Planning to hit the beach at some point, we strolled down Seawall until we found a surf shop. We didn’t go far though, as there was one practically next door to Benno’s. We left shortly thereafter with a tiny sunscreen and two beach towels. The rest of the night was spent exploring the Strand…what little of it was open, anyhow. We strolled and perused tourist traps, casually gathering ideas about what we wanted to see the next day. We wound up at MOD, where we had a cookie and took unfair advantage of their awesome premium iced teas (with free refills, hewing to standards of southern hospitality even in the midst of massive hipness).

We woke early, even without an alarm. The only criticism I could level at our B& B experience is the late hour of breakfast. Not that we were starving, but we were quite ready to start our day, trying desperately to make the best of the opportunity to sleep in, but instead tossing restlessly like kids told to go back to bed on Christmas morning. The French toast was awesome, though, and to have a selection of desserts for breakfast is truly an indication that one is on vacation.

We worked our way southward along the Strand, popping into whichever shop caught our fancy. I was in the market for a hat to shade my shorn pate, while Christina was looking, as ever, for an elusive pair of shoes to fit her specifications. We both had struck out by the time we reached the far end of the district, finishing the browsing spree in a great antique shop that featured very pricey antique Texan cartography. It was a little past noon when we entered the Galveston Railroad Museum, a destination I had discovered only days before.

Many, many, locomotives and passenger cars awaited our inspection. But first, we had a train to catch. There is a brief ride available on Saturdays aboard a Missouri Pacific caboose coupled to a diesel loco, down a siding along the port and back again. We got a good look at the grain loading system for ships, as well as scores of flying insects busily propagating their infernal species while in mid-air. Get a room, already! A lucky young lad (who, I might observe, arrived AFTER we did) got to ride in the cab of the engine and work the train’s horn. I did my best not to shoot any dirty looks his way.

We lunched on gyros at a Mediterranean cafe, followed by heaping cones from the ice cream parlor across the street, which we licked as we walked back to the room. The next tour was Christina’s suggestion, a multimodal exploration without leaving the tour bus, or, in this case, tour DUKW. We caught the Duck Tour of Galveston on Seawall, and enjoyed an hour long loop of the city, including an excursion on Offatt’s Bayou, where the tour guide let it be known that the replica steamboat Colonel is in fact just a gussied-up diesel barge.

On Barbara’s recommendation, we tried a Tex-Mex place around the corner from the Manor, The Original. The enchiladas we had were nothing to write home about, but the salsa was extremely tasty; modestly spicy with a strong cilantro flavor.

We retired for a nap before the night’s activities started. When we left the house, we crossed paths with another couple just coming in. We took little heed of their warning that the island’s mosquito population was out in force. After all, we had sprayed down with OFF that morning…surely that application was still effective, right? Not really, no; as the still-healing bumps on my leg even now will attest. We pulled into Moody Gardens just after sundown, and got directions from a young lady bored to the point of doodling behind the counter at the Information Center. She drew us a path on a map, a line showing us how to get to the star party I was eager to attend. By the time we arrived, though, my dear wife was almost at wit’s end from being bitten. A few minutes and nary a skyward glance later, that end had been passed, and we beat a hasty retreat, calling it an early evening.

I realized that between packing and driving back to Houston, that we would have no time on the beach. Ever the romantic, often to the point of schmaltziness, I suggested we visit the shore in the cool, uncroweded morning. Ever the nerd, often to the point of insufferability, I consulted the US Naval Observatory’s table of sunrise times for the continental US, which listed a sunrise time of 7:00 am for Galveston. Sure enough, we were up by 6:30, out the door by 6:50, in the cool predawn gray, flying down 19th St toward Seawall. There was just enough time to park and make it down to the sand before the solar disk broke the horizon.

We walked along the beach, watched seagulls, sandpipers and pelicans, as well as intrepid surf fishermen, until the sun was warming up, and it was time to head back for breakfast. Mmm, quiche and mimosas! After a very long and rambling chat with the other couples, in which I let Christina talk while I enjoyed breakfast dessert, we packed up and headed out.

We returned to Moody Gardens, this time for an indoor attraction: the aquarium. We trekked from ocean to ocean, up ramps and down, watching aquatic critters of all sorts swim about. One chinstrap penguin in particular caught our attention, swimming ungracefully at the surface of the water near the glass, as if attempting to put on a show for us. And a memorable show we had, as he demonstrated in vivid yellow and white chunks the manner in which the denizens of the antarctic answer the call of nature, thereafter performing a flip and swimming back through the dissipating cloud of penguin poo. It may have been this encounter with avian cheekiness that prevented us from ordering the Yard Bird from the menu at Leon’s World’s Finest BBQ. The brisket was great, but turned out to be the least impressive offering we sampled; the spare ribs, downtown link, and homemade link du jour were all extraordinary. I’d also suggest any visitor with room to spare try Leon’s Stepped-Up Rice, full of jalapeno-y goodness and the individual-sized sweet potato pie.

On the way back to Houston Hobby, we took a detour to Johnson Space Center, as Christina had never visited. It has changed a bit since my last visit in high school; the Saturn V is now enclosed in a big steel shed, and spiffied up a bit as well. There’s a playscape in the visitor center, as well as a large food court. They even have a new control room, the old one abandoned and restored to its moon-landing era appearance shortly after I last saw it. We endured the numerous kiddoes on the tram tour and perused the artifacts before we continued on our way to the airport.

Once in the care of the rental agency, the gears turned smoothly to return us home. Shuttle to terminal, terminal to plane, plane to terminal, terminal to shuttle. I had planned the trip to maximize our time to explore, so we returned home with only an hour or so before we had to hit the sack to be rested for Monday. After a busy summer and the stresses of a new school year, we were happy to have turned what seemed like a lemon into one last refreshing round of lemonade.

Madam Speaker, Mister Vice President, members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow cephalids: It had been a year since my last MRI, and in the strange way of memory, the noisiness of the tube had become exaggerated in my mind. This time, I almost managed to snooze through it, the rhythmic buzzing and knocking and whirring lulling me into drowsiness. But, then, I can sleep almost anywhere, especially when I’m bereft of anything to hold my attention.

A week later, this past Monday, m’lady and I met with Dr Stovall to compare and contrast the new with the old. It seems that in the intervening year, my meningiomic mind mite has been busy. Although I’ve experienced no change in symptoms (yay, carbamzapine!), I’m carrying around even more non-brain material in my head. It’s now approaching a size that raises concern, having grown along all axes. It would seem that now is the time to act, or at least, to plan.

The preferred treatment is surgical removal. While it may seem that having open-brain surgery seems a touch extreme as a first choice, the high probability of a positive outcome seems to merit an aggressive approach. Meningiomas, the literature tells me, tend not to attach themselves to the brain, but rather their source tissue, the meninges.

As you can see, that leaves it a few layers above the actual cortex, although, since it takes up space, and none of the tissues below are what you’d call “rigid” compared with the skull, it exerts pressure on the brain. They are, however, ugly bastards:

from woodcreeper’s flickr set on his own meningioma adventure

Naturally, I find this development is terrifying nonetheless. Lumpy and problematic though it is, I fancy my head, and in fact all my constituent body parts, to be as incision-free as possible. Of course, I equally wish them to be free of dangerous, ever-expanding blobs of doom. So, you can see my dilemma.

Where there is a first choice, though, there is often a second. In this case, the second-line treatment option is radiation. This path would grant me superhuman powers, perhaps permitting me to expel the bugger by force of will alone. Additionally, it will fracture the DNA in the tumor cells, killing them when they attempt to divide. Since it grows at a fairly leisurely pace, divisions clearly don’t happen all the time; therefore, it would take a while before it dies off completely. Of course, it would still be pressing on the parts it presses on now, and may still resume expansion later. There’s also some very, very small chance that it might give rise to other abnormal cellular behavior, likely not the sort that would require great responsibility on my part.

Next week, I’ll be subject to another MRI to see where my brain’s oxygen concentrates, better defining the edges of the tumor. That information will be added to the stack of facts and probabilities that I already have, and over the course of the next several weeks, work its way through several stages of Bloom’s Taxonomy en route to a decision. Watch this space!