The software project team that I am a part of recently reached a major milestone, our first release candidate. As a thank you and ‘reward’ the project leader setup a lunch out for all of us. I put reward inside quotes because for personal reasons eating in a group setting is difficult for me, and at times embarrassing.
You see I have what doctor’s have diagnosed as a Shotski’s ring in my throat. This a narrowing that can, at time, make it extremely difficult for me to swallow. When I have an episode I am unable to swallow food or even liquid. Sometimes relaxing at the table eases the narrowing and I am okay. Other times I am forced to visit the bathroom and throw-up to release the tension in my throat.
Over the 10 or so years that I’ve suffered from this affliction I’ve had six surgery’s. At most each surgery brought me a week or maybe two respite from the symptoms. Rather than continue to subject myself to the surgery I have instead tried to understand the emotional and situational conditions that exist around an episode. My belief is that by taking care of myself and modifying those habits or behaviors that seem to bring on an episode. I’ve learned that drinking lots of water before hand makes a huge difference, almost as if I am training my throat to swallow before each meal. I eat very slowly and cut my food into small bites to assist myself in eating.
Emotional control over the meal setting and company is a large factor as well. If I am stressed or upset about something my throat is tense and I will have great difficulty in eating. Fear also can bring on a reaction. Eating with other people is difficult because I don’t know if I’ll have an episode or not. And once it starts I cannot talk or explain. When an episode starts my face flushes and I often hiccup loudly. My mouth and throat fill with heavy saliva and mucus preventing me from talking. When this happens in public I feel as if everyone is watching me, which only adds to my upset and makes the episode worse. Therefore I tend to avoid group eating situations.
So having a group lunch, for me at least, is less a reward and more an ordeal to be endured. Will I be able to eat? Or will I have a bad reaction and have to leave the table one or more times to throw up? Will anyone say anything?
I debated all morning today about not attending the lunch. My fear was that I would draw unwelcome attention to myself by not going. Since everyone else in the group was attending my absence would stand out. I felt pressured to attend. The choice of lunch spots is not a place I enjoy eating. These two strikes were soundly against me and I was completely unable to eat my lunch. I had to leave the table twice and ended up asking the waitress to box my lunch. I couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes as I was afraid of seeing the questions and fears they might hold.
I left as soon as the lunch broke up and came directly back to my desk. So far no one has asked me about my difficulties at lunch but I am apprehensive about someone stopping by this afternoon. I am paying for not taking better care of myself this morning. I know now that I should have declined the invitation and lived with the consequences of not attending. At least then I wouldn’t feel like I created a scene in front of my peers in public.
The next time there is a group lunch I will simply decline to attend. I will ‘reward’ myself by doing what takes care of me and my needs.
In switching to Apple, and Mac OS X, I have been introduced to several new software applications that I like and use frequently. Being a software developer by trade I understand that it is impossible to produce software that is all things to all people. Still, there are features that I’d like to see added to some of my new favorites.
iSync This gem is from Apple and allows me to synchronize my Palm m515 with the calendar (iCal) and address book (Address Book) included with Mac OS X. It works very well except for one annoying detail: lack of support for multiple addresses. The Address Book in Jaguar allows me to store multiple addresses for a contact. However, the Palm address list only stores a single address per contact. I would like to see a change made to iSync Conduit to allow me to configure which address is transferred during a synchronization. Better, it would be nice to have the option to create multiple address entries in my Palm from one address entry in Jaguar. A contact for whom I have work and home address information would be one card in my Address Book and two cards in my Palm.
Proteus This multiple protocol chat client is very nice. I am used to Trillian on Windows platforms and I very much like this equivalent on the Mac. However, it doesn’t work when I am at work and connected through a proxy. I understand from reading the support forums on the Proteus web site that this is not as easy to implement as one might suspect. However it sounds like a feature that will be included in a future release of Proteus. Until then I can limp along with the native AOL and MSN Messenger clients.
Safari This is a wonderful browser, Apple has hit a home run as far as I am concerned. I know that most people are clamoring for tabbed browsing, but since I am migrating from Windows IE and therefore never had tabs before, it isn’t a major concern with me. What I am concerned about is the manner bookmarks are accessed. Having to open a book mark viewer and then double click on the reference I want is about 2 clicks to many. How about a drawer so I can see my bookmark list and single click the page I want?
We have a 9-year old Tabby cat named Abby Normal, that my wife got as a kitten in Tampa. Abby is a beautiful tiger tabby with golden eyes and long whiskers. She was an only cat until 6 years ago when we acquired our second tabby, Nekko. Abby grudgingly accepted the interloper and now they are fast friends.
Every since Abby was a kitten she has had respiratory issues. She sneezes. A lot. Prodigious amounts of snot are produced in many of these explosions. There is enough velocity to fling some of this output to the ceiling from the back of the couch. A trip the vet early in her life indicated that there was a medicine that could control some of her respiratory distress but it came at the steep price of shortening her life span. Michele opted to love Abby for who she was and deal with the snot-factor.
There are times when her breathing is obviously labored, and these times seem to be increasing in frequency. She is also starting to have difficulty with her bowels. We first noticed this almost 5 years ago and in that time she has been constipated several times. Once, two years ago, we resorted to taking her to the emergency animal clinic overnight. Since that episode we have carefully monitored her diet and helped with oil-laced cat food when she seemed to be constipated. This past weekend she had a rather bad bout that included a first, urinating on the furniture.
Our fear is that Abby’s condition is starting to deteriorate. Between the respiratory trouble and now increasingly frequent bouts of constipation we wonder what about her quality of life. On her good days she plays and romps with Nekko. However, we are seeing a slight slowing in her activity. Abby has always been a tremendous jumper. At times we called her Air-Abby for the deft lightness she has when jumping from the floor to overhead objects. This past weekend, before she passed her blockage she was unable to jump to the desk, an easy distance for her most days.
We talked, often with tears, about letting her go, at length on Saturday. It is agonizingly difficult to discuss rationally. In the end, we decided to monitor more closely her general health, and to track her respiratory and bowel difficulties. If we feel that they are happening too often, or that they are seriously degrading her quality of life, then we’ll have to prepare ourselves to let go of our dear sweet Abby.
Abby is my cat, even though Michele originally had her for 3 years before me. Abby has adopted me as hers and eagerly follows me though the house waiting for me to sit so she can be in my lap. At night she sleeps on top of me, and during the day she reclines on a pillow on my desk. I never had a pet of my own growing up and my attachment to Abby is very strong. I’ve always known that I would have to let her go someday, I just didn’t think it would be so soon.
Taking the responsibility to euthanize her when her quality of life is no longer good will be very difficult. I am not looking forward to that piece of growing up. Little Mark is scared and afraid of what it means to lose Abby. I can feel his despair when I think about her. I know that some people would say it’s only a pet. To me Abby is a far more than just a pet. She is unconditional love. She doesn’t care whether I’m tall or short, smart or dumb, tired or active. She just wants to be near me or on me. To have her on my chest knitting her paws and purring loudly is wonderful. To imagine never having that wonderful sensation again is awful.
I know that I am far from done sorting this issue out, but it has helped to write this much today.
I’ve been doing some light site cleaning. I’ve removed some links from the ’elsewhere’ menu that I no longer frequent. When I have the time and inclination I’ll add some of the other links that have found their way to my daily visit list.
I also added two RSS feed links to the bottom of the menu panel. One for 0.91 and one for 1.0. I downloaded NetNewsWire Lite today, and have been exploring the possibilities it represents. Since moveabletype, the site management software I use, provides the necessary formats for these aggregators, I went ahead and added the syndication links for your use.
Anita Ramasastry, a professor from the University of Washington School of Law, has a commentary on the Domestic Security Enhancement Act (aka Patriot II), Patriot II: The Sequel Why It’s Even Scarier than the First Patriot Act. There are a lot of scary things highlighted in this article, too many to even know which to select as an excerpt. But do note two things: this document wasn’t publicly released, it was leaked, and apparently Congress has played little to no part in its drafting. (from megnut)
This past weekend my wife and I traveled to Manteo North Carolina to visit my mother-in-law. We had scheduled this trip some time ago last fall and in the time since then there have been some complications with Virginia’s health, so our trip had a sense of urgency.
She was admitted to the hospital briefly just after Christmas, showing signs of extreme fatigue and shortness of breath. In the end she was given 3 pints of blood and released after a couple of days. Her sisters all took this as a sign of impending death and shifted into high panic and berated my poor wife for not dropping everything in our lives to come and live with her mom. My wife has struggled with how best to help her mother while keeping her own life. In the end we felt that with family on the ground there our coming earlier than planned wouldn’t help. In fact, by keeping our mid-February date, we arrived after some of the panic had died down, and we were able to evaluate Virginia in her normal setting.
Michele also had time to prepare herself to ask her mother some very difficulty questions. Michele wanted to discover her mother’s wishes concerning heroic measures in the hospital should she be admitted again. Also we wanted to learn what her wishes were for a funeral and service. Talking to ones parent about the end of their life is not an easy task. Michele handled it beautifully and I was very honored to be a part of the bonding that happened between mother and daughter that evening. Virginia has survived a difficult and often hardship filled life largely on her wits and savvy. She is reluctant to expose her self emotionally to anyone, and she does not like intrusions into her business. I think, however, she did appreciate the concern and love Michele was showing, and she was able to talk about her wishes.
Knowing that my own parents are both in their seventies I realize that I will be faced with this same discussion in the near future myself. I understand the value of laying out your responses to emotionally charged situation ahead of time, but I am not looking forward to actually discussing it out loud with my parents. Somehow saying it out loud makes it more real.
I have the utmost respect for Michele for facing her fears about losing her mom and setting those aside so that she could create a safe place for Virginia to open herself emotionally. She treated her mother with dignity and respect, accepting her wishes even though she doesn’t agree with all of them. Too often we try to take care of ourselves by imposing our wishes on someone else, Michele refused to do that with her mother. Instead she worked out her needs and issues separate from her mother, so that she was able to leave control of her mother’s live with her mother.
I hope that when my time comes I am fortunate enough to have someone in my corner who sets aside their needs in order to respect my wishes.
Back in the day, when I was first exposed to computers, I played a text game called ‘Star Trek’ for hours. While my buddy (whose father had brought home from work the thermal paper terminal we were playing on) was enthralled with the game, I wanted to know how it worked. I had found my niche in life, and now, some 27 years later I discovered that the venerable ’emacs’ editor included in most Unix distributions has several games embedded.
One of these is an adventure game called ‘dunnet’. To play just open a terminal window and type (without the quotes) “emacs -batch -l dunnet” That’s a dash el in the middle.
Don’t blame me if your productivity goes to zero for the next few hours as you try not to get eaten by a grue.
I haven’t posted anything about the loss of Columbia until now. This was included in my weekly Palm Digital Media newsletter. I was touched and wanted to share it here, with you.
Out ride the sons of Terra, Far drives the thundering jet, Up leaps a race of Earthmen, Out, far, and onward yet –
We pray for one last landing On the globe that gave us birth; Let us rest our eyes on the friendly skies And the cool, green hills of Earth.
The Green Hills of Earth – Robert A. Heinlein
I have added a Creative Commons license to my work here on zanshin.net. If you manage to scroll all the way to the bottom of this page you’ll see the icon and attribution line. Please feel free to follow the link and see what it is all about. Or, run the licensing wizard yourself and create a license for your own works.
One of the things I like best about my new powerbook G4 is the operating system it comes with: Mac OS X. Being based on the FreeBDS flavor of Unix gives it incredible stability. My laptop has been to work with me and back everyday, and to my parents one weekend. I have not turned it off and on in over 16 days.
The problem is Safari, the new beta release browser from Apple. I’m hooked on it and and it won’t run now. It starts and then immediately “unexpectedly ends.” Phooey. I’ve tried re-installing it, and restarting my machine, all to no avail. I am left with re-booting as a last resort. This means my 16 day uptime run is over.
I’ll just have to start again.
UPDATED (8:39 p): I re-booted and Safari is working once again. Also Proteus, which had gone flaky on me is working smoothly again as well. Uptime 10 minutes and counting.