Treason of Words

Almost every day, I sit down (because my balance isn’t that good) and put on a pair of socks. Unique among garments, in my experience, socks absolutely must be tumble-dried in order to be wearable. No amount of mere hang-drying will ever render them quite arid enough to comfortably wear for any length of time. I had, at one point, purchased a shiny white GE electric dryer from Sears that did the job nicely. It’s gleaming alabaster drum was lit, and it even had a buzzer that was noticable but not alarming, that told me when it was time to retreive my fluffy, dry socks for folding (of all the things to fold in the world, folding warm socks is my favorite). Alas, it had to go in order to make room, both physical and budgetary, during some rough times several years ago.

My socks still get dry, though, in a far more roundabout manner. My dear Christina’s ex-husband’s mother’s ex-husband (may he rest in peace) takes care of it. At some point in the early 1980’s, in Dallas, he bought an ancestor to my old dryer. The years progressed, load by load, cycle by cycle. It’s owner passed on. His wife and her son both found mates and homes in Austin, leaving the old house empty, and the dryer unused. The younger couple inherited the idle dryer; when their marriage faltered, she got the appliances. A bit later, I, despite my manifold shortcomings, got her.

The drum is not lit, nor is it alabaster. The buzzer could wake the dead, if we ever used it. That’s not necessary, though, because whenever the dryer is in use, it squeaks continually, sometimes loud enough to drive us from our home. We know the load is done when we can think again.

Soon, though, we will have no more use for it. Our new home uses gas for heat, and we’ll need to buy a compatable dryer, lest my socks remain damp. Since noone has paid a cent for this dryer in over 20 years, we don’t think it would be right to start now. Look for the old warhorse on Craigslist in a month or two, probably in the Free section. Perhaps a nice deaf couple could use it.

Renting has gotten old. As the pain of my previous home-owning experience fades from glaring beacon of folly into finely resolved lessons learned, my lovely bride, full of patience, wisdom, and desire to indulge her home-improvement-show fantasies, suggested that now may be the time to go about buying a little piece of Texas to call our own.

And so, after poring over hundreds of listings, calling upon our realator friend, tromping about other people’s yards and bedrooms, and at least one close call, we’ve found ourselves a home. The evening I spotted the listing online, we drove by to see it. She called it The Gingerbread House, for the slightly-too-precious architectural details of the facade. It’s my brother’s age, built in ‘83. The exterior has grey brick and siding, with crimson accents. The lot is small, as is the structure, a hair over 1300 square feet. Enough space for the two of us, the critters, and our collection of assorted objects. The interior was painted in anticipation of sale, a slightly darker than medium tan. The floors are tiled in a sandy hue, except in the bedrooms, which have a light berber carpeting. The garage has been converted, and will be converted back before too long. The inspector’s list of problems is mercifully brief; primarily, the water heater needs seeing-to, and the oven is hosed. Otherwise, it’s full speed ahead to Mortgage City for us.

See photos of the new Chez Taylor over in snap.

I just got back from my appointment with my neurosurgeon, Dr Stovall. In his opinion, the tumor (yes, it’s officially a tumor now) and the seizures may in fact be related; an EEG, he tells me, is good for identifying seizures, but not for locating them to a high degree of precision. Not only that, he also believes that the growth is a benign (albeit abnormal) meningioma. Extracting it now would carry a 10-to-15% chance of a negative outcome (most likely decreased right-side strength or dexterity or complications arising from compromising the nearby sagittal vein). Therefore, what he recommends, and what I had actually concluded was the best course of action before he suggested it, is to treat the seizures with the Tegretol I’m already starting, to watch the lesion for signs of change, and to monitor me for any further symptoms. To that end, I’m scheduling another MRI for mid-April to see if things have changed.

There are relatively few who have had the awesome privilege of witnessing my glorious nakedness. This is probably in the best interest of the public’s mental health. There are even fewer who actually aspired to such an honor. This is probably, IMHO, indicative of prevailing poor taste. You, however, good reader, are in for an even greater thrill. Behold!

Yep, that’s me. Not merely au naturel, but rather sans peau. The red-tinted bit is the mysterious growth I mentioned previously. As it turns out, it may not be the thing causing my seizures (yes, we’re calling them seizures now, although I favor the more folksy “spells,” since there’s none of the motion usually associated with seizures) after all. The periods of disorientation I have seem to emanate from my left temporal lobe (the front-ish part of the brain), while this ominous-looking lump is nestled into the top of my left parietal lobe. I’ve got a prescription to treat the seizures (yay, drugs!). As for the bump in my noggin, here’s what we know about it so far:

• It may be an unusual sort of meningioma (a benign sort of growth, rich in CT scan lovin’ calcium)
• It’s not leukemia or lymphoma
• It could still be schwannoma or neurofibroma
• It’s been there long enough to slightly thin the skull just above it.

Here’s another shot of the critter, from the front.

Just try looking at me head-on next time and not imaging this thing perched in my skull.

In other news, the MRI revealed that I have a deviated septum, which explains why my right nostril is always more stuffy than my left:

As for the inevitable “how are you handling this” question, I’ve decided not to let this interfere with my life. Oh, there were a few days when it weighed heavily on my mind, and from time to time I’ll dwell on it a bit longer then I should, but on the whole, I’m taking it better than my wife and my mother (who, for all I know, are the only ones who actually read this thing. Hi Christina! Hi Mom!). All my plans are full steam ahead.

This new year seems intent on sticking around for a while, so I’m trying to get comfortable with the 7. The 6 was just so nice, easy to write or type, but the 7 is up on the top row of the number pad, far from the 0 and 2. Alas!

You may have heard, as those I’ve told have all manner of communications at their disposal, that I have a new job. Not a promotion per se; in fact, I have a smaller “office” with no window and no weekly VPN day. I am, however, back in a field that I know fairly well: Geographic Information Systems. I’m a GIS Technician, working to improve First American Flood’s ability to automate determinations. I hope this change will in turn make other plans and events easier to deal with.

One of those other plans is to continue my education. Sure, every day is a new lesson in its own right, but a more directed and formal discipline would probably get me further. I’ve long been interested in libraries, having done a quite bit of work for and in them, on both side of the circulation desk. Christina has caught the eye of her campus’ library staff, and even has a bit of a pedigree of librarianship. The notion we’ve hit upon is to go to grad school together at UT’s College of Library and Information Science. She’ll be looking to get a master’s in order to be a school librarian, and I’m still considering which field I’m most interested in, although archives is an early frontrunner. This year will see us writing applications and pestering contacts for recommendations. 2008 will hopefully see us in the classroom together.

There is one other thing afoot that’s newsworthy, if not quite as pleasant as other developments. Over the past six months or so, I’ve occasionally experinced strange periods of disorientation. They last no more than a minute, but during those seconds, my thoughts are jumbled, my vision brightens, my body sometimes tingles strangely, and I often wind up with a headache. I’ve had an MRI, an EEG and a CT scan; after the first of those three, I was told there is a lesion or mass on the left parietal lobe of my brain. Tomorrow I go for a follow-up appointment to see just what all this means in practical terms. I will be requesting the digital files that resulted from my time served in a tube/coated with goo/being moved lewdly through a high-tech doughnut, so come back soon for real live images of this crud in my head.

Treasured Family & Friends:

This has been a year of milestones; although, it’s all the little things that make it complete.

After not quite a year of marriage, we finally worked in a honeymoon–a tropical vacation in March during Spring Break. Greater Ft. Lauderdale and Orlando, Florida as well as Nassau, Bahamas endured an exploration and thorough retail scouring. Our culinary horizons expanded a bit more to encompass the wonders of the plantain (in chip form), the conch (cracked), and other Floridian, Bahamanian, and Cuban tastiness.

Following a stressful Spring semester and a languorous summer, we once more moved Christina’s classroom, this time into the midst of the English department. Once again team teaching for one out of six class blocks with the capable Colleen Frerichs, Christina judiciously applies newfangled technology to the task of bringing literature both ancient and recent to the seemingly intractable mind of the modern freshman.

Russell’s Spring was also tense, due to the unexpected flux in his Portfolio Services department at First American Flood Data Services. Having weathered the storm, though, he found himself named Employee of the Quarter this Autumn.

With an eye toward eventual home ownership, we’ve made some economical lifestyle changes. Some have worked out, while others have not. Take, for example, our transportation arrangement. Our workplaces are both about four miles from home, in opposite directions, and being homebodies, we don’t travel much on weekdays apart from commuting, so it made sense to consolidate down to one car. To that end, we sold Christina’s Nissan Xterra. Additionally, Russell, for reasons now not quite clear even to himself, wanted to get a scooter. With an M endorsement in hand and a used 4-stroke in the drive, it seemed scooting fun was at hand. However, an early and painful (although thankfully minor) crash, coupled with a busy schedule and more than a little reluctance to get back in the saddle have left that plan on the dust-heap, much to the relief of Christina (and Russell’s mother). The one-vehicle arrangement, though, has worked out well enough that the scooter was never really necessary in the first place.

It’s been a full decade since Russell graduated from Jack C. Hays, and so we attended the class reunion in October. Held at a new Austin hotspot, it attracted alumni from all walks of life and afforded Christina the opportunity to put faces to some of the names from her dear husband’s rambling stories about his childhood in Buda. The next morning there was a picnic in the park where Russell demonstrated his (lack of) skill at washers.

Christina got help this year in her advising of both Austin undergraduate chapters of Zeta Phi Beta in the form of new Austinites Tynesha Boomer and Tenea Lowrey.  As she’s been advising for well nigh on forever (4 years actually), this help brought welcome relief!  She’s even learning to not only ask for help but to also relinquish control and delegate responsibility.  Who said you can’t teach an old–make that “seasoned”–Zeta new tricks?

The year also saw the passing of Russell’s Grandmom & Grandpop Taylor. Although rarely seen, their absence is keenly felt.

We’re looking forward to the New Year, with plans for a western road trip vacation during spring break; Zeta events hither and yon, including the Regional Conference in Fort Worth; and maybe some house-hunting. You can keep up with our adventures online through Russell’s blog at ret3.net. This Christmas we’ll once more be celebrating with Russell’s family, then driving up to Plano for a relaxing week with Christina’s parents. 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! 

There Ought To Be, in My Opinion, and in the opinion of every Right-Minded Citizen of This Great Nation, a one-week moratorium on festivities between holidays. A few days to cleanse the palate, to pack away the decorations, finish the leftovers, and to return to some sort of “normal” before the next wave of celebration. The Hallothanksmas effect smears one occasion into another, leaving the anticipation, the much-vaunted “season”, of each holiday not only a bit muddied, but stretched out over too great a time. A two-week buildup whets the appetite and excites the senses; a two-month barrage of indistinct sentiment leaves one weary when the big day finally arrives.

What I’m saying is, the Christmas decorations won’t go up ’till Saturday.

We needed yellow paper. It was a bit past 10pm and we needed yellow paper. In suburban America, it was a bit past 10pm and we needed yellow paper.

Naturally, we headed out to Wal-mart.

We went the “back way” to avoid construction. Even the “back way” to Wal-mart is six lanes wide. We sat in the left-turn lane as cars rushed past on the right and the left. The three oncoming lanes were busy with cars travelling from the shopping centers beyond the new tollway before us to the neighborhoods behind us. One truck, though, was in a hurry to get to Wal-mart.

It was a Ford F-150 King Ranch Edition, sage green. Such was its hurry that it deemed it necessary to turn into the parking lot from the center lane. For a moment, the small, nondescript black sedan in the right lane went unnoticed. We saw the truck as it was intercepted by the car, its forward motion interrupted by a force that sent it back into its original lane, then into the left lane as its front axle collapsed and its frame rails gouged the asphalt, emitting a shower of sparks. It finally came to rest just feet from us, on the other side of the grassy, concrete-bound median. The truck had traveled just far enough down the road that from the turn lane, we could finally see the source of the unexpected force vector. In the right lane, the black car sat, overturned.

All over, flashers came on, and men emerged from cars. Cell phones appeared. We converged on the dark, dripping, disheveled heap. A dozen hands on the scarred sheetmetal lifted. The passenger slid out, dazed. Petrochemicals were dripping, filling the air with fumes. From my position at the front of the car I looked right, toward the cabin, as the former vehicle stood on its side. A dark, glistening blotch spreading on the arclit pavement turned my stomach, and I quickly looked back at my own car, still in the turn lane beyond the now empty truck. I recruited a replacement and recrossed the road, directing traffic as I went.

The pebbles of glass crunched under the tires as we finally parked. Christina went to complete our errand, and I walked back to the site as sirens drew near. Under a small tree, neatly ringed with wood chips, I met an old friend in an new uniform. APD Officer and Hays High alumnus Eric Deba took down my account of the accident. We left just as the trucks carrying the remains of the vehicles did.

On my next commute to the office, a small gray woman in a large red van almost reenacted the same scene with me when she mistakenly believed her lane permitted left turns.

Be careful out there.

Yesterday, I worked from home, performing labor that would scarcely be recognizable as work to a man whose career was spent in a chemical factory. On my way there, after dropping Christina off at school, mom called to let me know he had passed in the night. It’s not as if it was unexpected; on the contrary, the only suprise in his declining health was that Grandmom preceeded him in death. I started to calculate how to sort out my schedule to make the inevitable trip back east. I had a pretty clear picture by that evening when mom called again as I stood on the wind-whipped western steps of the Carver Library. She commented slightly cryptically that there wouldn’t be a service; for a moment, part of my mind raced to bizarre soap opera/comic book possibilites, while another part readied a quip about checking for a pulse. But it wasn’t some dramatic misjudgement. His body has been left to science, I was told. The memorial won’t be held until they’re done and the ashes are returned, a morbidly ironic state for such an avid producer of ash.

We only ever had one real conversation. They came down to Cape May the summer of 1998, when Angie and I were there on vacation at the house her family rented for a couple weeks each summer. Grandmom stayed inside to talk my future parents’- and grandparents’-in-law ears off, as she was given to (and quite skilled at) doing. We walked out on the porch, he and I. The afternoon was overcast and warm, but a steady breeze blew in off the Atlantic, only yards away at the end of the block. Away from the chatter, we talked. In those fifteen minutes or so, Grandpop and I spoke more than the rest of the 28 years we shared combined. My world must have seemed rather alien to him, but he soaked up the answers to his questions about my studies and my work and my life in general. His voice was always quiet, creaky and rough, beaten into submission by a smoking habit adopted in early adolescence. I think he approved of how I’d turned out, even if the details of how exactly that was were a touch hazy. By the time Grandmom emerged from the front door to suggest that I take Angie and get lost until dinnertime, we had fallen silent, watching the breakers and enjoying the breeze.

When I was young, before the idea of college, any real science, or even geography had appeared on the horizon, I wanted a job with a cool hat. In a way, I suppose, this was a symptom or manifestation of the general tenor of my early childhood. Aside from the cartoons I watched and underoos I wore, I could very well have been a 4 or 5 year old at any point in the previous 30 or so years, what with the stay-at-home mom and small town environment. In that era, it seems there were more jobs requiring hats.

Flash forward a few decades, and hats are by and large gone. I wear one when I can get away with it, but it serves no functional purpose other than keeping the sun off my shaved pate, and does noting to identify me beyond branding me as a guy who likes to wear hats. With professional hats, it seems, have gone simple job descriptions, though. A colleague of mine aspires to be a fireman firefighter; I suspect he just wants a job that’s easy to explain.

What is it that I do? You know, for a living? Everyone in my department understands. many people in the company do, too. I suspect that elsewhere in the industry there are some that get it. It’s not too hard to explain to those in related fields. My parents, I think, almost know. Other family and friends have some vague notion. My grandparents are pretty much a lost cause, though. It needs a name, though, one better than “Data Analyst,” as well as, I think, a hat. I favor Dataherd for the name. I manage database data, telling it where to go and what to do by the thousands and hundred of thousands of records. I have helpful programs, like sheepdogs, that corral troublesome bits, and take care of the details that I can’t deal with efficiently by myself.

As for a natty chapeau, I’m told my great-grandfather was a shepherd in Italy before coming to the US; I’m not sure what sort of hat was involved there, but this being Texas, I’m thinking cowboy hat.