Celebrate

It's Call In Sick and Never Go Back to Work Day.

Enjoy.

Or, whatever.






Hey, you knew I had to say something about it.

One small step ...

Stunning. Awesome. Cool. Wow.

40 years ago I was a 10 year old sitting in front of a black and white television marvelling at the sights from a quarter million miles away.

Here's a salute to everyone involved: the engineers who designed everything, the little old ladies* who knitted the computer memory, the women who hand-sewed the spacesuits, the thousands of people who put all the pieces together, the ones who gave their lives, the ones with the vision, John Kennedy, the ones who went there first and only watched the Lunar surface in passing - and the Command Module pilots who all did that and the two who set foot on the moon for the first time 40 years ago today.

40 years later and I still say, wow.



*Historical reference.

We choose to go to the Moon …

Forty years ago today Apollo 11 was launched from Cape Kennedy (at the time) to begin its flight to the Moon. As a child I followed the space program with a nerdy delight. I was a little young when the Mercury program began, but I caught up quickly and I followed everything through Gemini and Apollo. I read the magazine articles on various lifting body re-entry designs, the boosters that were used, the lunar lander and rover concepts, the Agena rendezvous and space walk missions - the works.

I loved it. I was enthralled. I was thrilled by the successes, angered and saddened by the tragedy and sat in rapt attention watching the launches.

July of 1969 was a magical month. It was not, as I hoped, the beginning of an age of space exploration. It was, however, the realization of an astonishing human endeavour. Was it all altruistic? Of course not. It was, however, amazing and magical and for a 10 year old boy – and avid reader of science fiction and lover of science – it was a dream come true. Well, by proxy at least.

It was wonderful to have in the world when I was a child.

VISTA SUCKS

Just so all y’all know. Vista is the worst operating system that I have ever had the misfortune to work with, and since I’ve been doing this for more than 3 decades, I say that makes it the worst OS ever.

I know that MS’s motto is ‘The world is our Beta site’, but this is ridiculous. It doesn’t network, it doesn’t recognize peripherals, it doesn’t even recognize other Windows apps. IE is not a fully functional browser. Installing updates destroys drivers and the first service pack took an hour and a half to download.

I tried to install a printer and not only did it not recognize the printer it killed my network.

Like I said. Worst. OS. Ever.

A new record

OK, so after that last post I had to go see what I’ve been doing that’s been leaving me so tired and feeling like I just have no time or energy to do anything. So I checked my calendar and my wife and I have had a combined total of more than 110 doctor visits this year. In the last 32 days we have had 25 appointments, and even with having some days when we both had an appointment, 16 of those days have had doctor appointments. So we’re averaging 1 doctor appointment every 2 days.

No wonder I never know what happened to the time.

Wringer, Been through the

Everything has been happening at once lately, or close enough together that it feels like it.

I recently had an appointment and for some reason visits with this doctor always take a lot out of me. It was just a follow-up, but they are always very comprehensive with her. So it wore me out.

I also had a full load of doctor visits that same week.

Then I got the notice about the Social Security hearing. This is a good thing, but it also sets off the worry response that I need to control and that is tiring and that makes me more frazzled.

I also had a very non-productive meeting with a State office person which went exactly as far as I expected; namely nowhere. But I knew this going in. This visit was just to confirm what I could not confirm over the phone because they just won’t do it that way. Eh. This was made more annoying because I took a wrong turn and got lost, in the sense that I sort of knew where I was but couldn’t find the office, and was late for the meeting. I did get some interesting information though, just in general terms, because even though the governmental department she worked for offered limited help, the person I talked to had something to offer.

Just before that there was a very good but very tiring meeting with a private – um – social worker type. I’m not sure what to call her. She is from a community reentry organization that works with people with brain injuries – I hate that term. Central nervous system insult I think some doctor once called it. That’s a bit better. This was paid for by the Traumatic Brain Injury Fund. Just the initial interview so far, but there’s no reason to believe they won’t fund more once things get rolling.

Anyway, she came to the house and we talked for quite a while. She is very experienced and skilled at this and much information was exchanged. More than I’ve had a chance to process yet. But she was nice, told me a lot, gave me some written info and told me about a local support group that I want to check out. I have some probably unrealistic hopes about this, but even realistically this looks like something good getting started.

On top of all of that I haven’t been sleeping. It’s even worse than usual. I did fall asleep in the recliner the other day, but all that did was mess up my neck and back. I slid down in the chair and when I woke up the nerves and muscles in my neck and back where spasming. The room wasn’t spinning, it was flipping up and down. For those of you old enough to remember it was like a TV with horizontal hold problems. My wife worked on my neck and back which helped enough to let me lie down and get some sleep. My neck cracked a bit and when I got up many hours later the dizziness had subsided.

Wow, I just looked at what I’ve written so far and boy what a self-indulgent whiny rant. Well, maybe not whiny, but I do seem to be complaining a lot. It’s just that I’ve been beaten down the last few weeks and I felt like getting it out. I’ve been much more active, just not in the ways that I had planned for June. Though what I did was probably more productive than anything that I had planned so there is that.

Now the question is this: just how far off of my track will I get if I make a plan for the rest of July? And will the non-scheduled things be productive?

Suddenly, at last

I finally got a notice for a hearing in front of an administrative law judge to decide my Social Security claim: July 29th.

For those of you playing along, I originally filed for Social Security in the spring of 2006. At the time I did it because the long term disability policy required it – I thought that I would recover too quickly for it to matter. Yeah, well, anyway.

After that there was a denial, a review, a denial, an appeal, a denial, and so forth. Somewhere in there I got myself a lawyer so he could worry about the details and I tried to put it out of my mind so I could stop reiterating how bad I had been and still was and concentrate on moving forward and getting better.

The last step, more or less, is the hearing by an administrative law judge, which will probably be the first time anyone actually looks at my medical records. If I read the notice correctly, I can still appeal this decision, but that would be it unless I want to start the process all over again and file a new claim and the clock starts all over again.

So, I am trying to not worry about this especially since there isn’t anything more to be done once I make sure that everyone has all the paperwork they need.

When I filed the request for a hearing in late November 2007, my lawyer told me that the wait would be about 18 months and he was right. Start to finish it will be 3½ years. It's taken so long that now that it's almost here it took me by surprise.