I gained a few extra pounds in Germany, which pushed me to rethink my weight-loss strategy.  I finally decided to go back to the only thing that worked well before, which is going low-carb. I had been trying to reduce my carb intake since August, but I found that having flexibility in my diet plan actually made things more difficult.  Picking a rule and trying to stick with it reduces the amount of struggling with myself I do.

First couple of days last week I felt really miserable and cranky.  It took me until Tuesday night to realize that it was because I abruptly stopped eating sugar (at Dagstuhl I kept a daily regimen of cake and chocolate); as always, finding an underlying cause for my feelings made me feel much better.  My mood has stabilized, but towards the weekend, I entered a "hungry all the time phase."  Usually, it's OK, but, of course, if I have food around (esp. high-density stuff like meat and nuts), I tend to overeat.  Yesterday, I ordered in room service around 6pm, and then went out again for a burger at 10.  Today I had a huge lunch (I even exceeded the cafeteria coupon allowance they gave us), and a normal-sized dinner, but was feeling too hungry to work in the evening, so stopped by Safeway to pick up some snacks.  Ended up eating 4 (!) bananas and about 5oz of pistachios, and probably would eat more if I were staying up much longer.

I really do wish that there was an easier fix for the fat accumulation bug... spider88 , I'm looking at you!

As usual, we left the packing to the last minute, since we were too tired to stay up and wait for the laundry to finish. We ended up rushing out the door a bit after 7, and I came up with three things we forgot: some DVDs to watch, the Beijing and Shanghai Guide, and Tylenol. I was able to find the latter at O'Hare; I wanted to have some on hand to bring my temperature down if needed. But it looks like overloading on C helped keep things at bay. When we got onto the plane to O'Hare, the attendant asked us whether we were OK with sitting in the exit row and then took a look at fanlain and asked her "wait, how old are you?" I guess it must have been the teddy bear she was holding. I couldn't get exit row seats on the long flight to Shanghai, but turns out the flight was mostly empty (quarantine fears?) so we were able to sneak to the bulkhead row after takeoff. The attendant there tried to give us free alcohol because I was able to restart her crashed iPhone—apparently she had asked a few people before me.

The flight took us over the northern arctic—the display even switched to a polar map when the Cartesian projection stopped making sense!  We actually went much further west than we needed, going through about the middle of Mongolia, before cutting back east towards Beijing and then Shanghai.  The winds must have been favorable, since we arrived a full hour early.  I got a whole lot of writing done on my CAREER proposal; it's amazing what being stuck with a computer and no Internet for 13 hours can do.  They fed us three meals; the last one was the best: some noodles and dumplings!  We also got chopsticks with our food.

We made it through quarantine and customs quickly; people inspected our documents but did not ask a single question.  Once past customs, you go through a long passage where people are holding up signs with names.  We contemplated making a sign for Russell, but decided that we were pretty easy to spot in a crowd in Shanghai.  We tried to spot the Canadians coming out, but had trouble distinguishing them from other white people until we saw a maple leaf.  Russell was a bit later than everybody; he made the mistake of declaring that he had a runny nose on the health inspection form, but they let him go through eventually.

We took the maglev out of the airport, traveling at a blazing 430 km/h, though for all of a few minutes.  It was a bit surreal going through turns, as those were intensely banked.  Probably the funniest feeling is slowing down from 430 km/h—250 km/h feels so <em>slow</em> in comparison!  Our next adventure was the subway.  The car started out empty, but got gradually fuller, culminating at People's Square where everyone, including us, got out.  The walk to change lines was very impressive, as we were swept up in a giant mass of people, all moving along, and periodically being squeezed through a bottleneck of an escalator.  They cleverly set up separate area for people walking in each direction, because trying to get this many people past each other seemed near impossible.  We certainly weren't in Kansas anymore!

Finding the hotel was a breeze because everywhere seems to have signs in English.  We waited for the rest of our crew to arrive but eventually one by one drifted off.  Finally woke up after a nap and ventured out in search of food.  The restaurant we arrived at had excellent menus: not only did everything have photos, but there was even an English version.  Unfortunately, the waitress was standing over us while we ordered, so I didn't get a chance to memorize the characters for "hot and sour soup."  The pictures also didn't tell us just how large the portions were, but it turns out that at least a few of us were quite hungry, so we polished off four rather big portions.  The wait staff barely spoke English, so I tried to request some water and rice in Chinese, but this only reminded me why I didn't choose to study Chinese before coming here: being understood through my terrible accent and complete ineptitude with tones was not going to happen.  I finally was able to mime "water," and the waiter knew the English word for rice, so it all worked out.

Our bill came out to 142 ¥, which is about US$20.  They say Shanghai is no longer very cheap, so I guess costs were even lower before.  Now we're winding down by getting everyone set up on the Internet.  For all my worries, a simple SSH SOCKS proxy bypasses the Great Firewall completely (well, after I convinced Firefox to use SOCKS for DNS as well, since they seem to rewrite DNS for twitter and facebook).  All in all, most of this trip felt almost disappointingly easy.  I hope I stay disappointed!

I left my house just after 7 to catch the 7:40 train to Brussels and eventually meet fanlain at Schiphol airport at 11. I made it with almost 10 minutes to spare to buy tickets, so I felt in good spirits. The train was a local one, so it took its time. I finally got off at Brussels-Midi and tried to transfer, but there was no train leaving to Amsterdam, as there was supposed to be. Well, there was a Thalys train in 20 minutes, but those require a different ticket and advance reservations. And, as it turns out, a regular train to Amsterdam about a half hour after that.

Eventually, I realized that I was supposed to transfer at Brussel-Noord, a couple of stops earlier, and that my intended train and I had crossed paths. I tried to decide whether to take the Thalys to be only slightly late to meet fanlain (in fact, she ended up getting her luggage around the time the Thalys was supposed to arrive), or to take the normal train and be another half hour later. But they wanted €51 for the Thalys ticket, and I decided that my time with fanlain was not quite that precious.

So I got on the next train and made it to Antwerp, where we caught up with the Thalys, and then the train got stuck. They explained that there was a problem with the track, and we had to take another train to Kappelen, then a bus to Essen, and then another train from there. Just as I was figuring out where to go, I ran into another faculty member from ECE, who was in Brussels for a couple of days and decided to take a short trip to Amsterdam before returning. I think his company was the only thing that made the next four hours bearable.

The train to Kappelen was crowded, but manageable. There we found a huge horde of people, waiting for buses. One bus came, quickly filled to capacity, and went on its way. 15 minutes later, another bus came. The driver of this one was more strict and would only allow people who could get seats onto his bus. While we were figuring this out, a second bus pulled up and filled to capacity as well. Finally, a city bus was recruited into the shuttle effort. That driver didn't insist that people sit down, so we all packed in like sardines and were on our way.

The distance to Essen (Belgium, not the one in Germany) was less than 20km, but on small roads and through cities with traffic, so it took us most of an hour to make the trip. When we arrived, we saw a local train just pulling away from the station. The next one would be in 30 minutes, they told us. We at least got some water and chips; our hopes of finding some actual food were dashed when we discovered that every place in Essen was closed.

30 minutes later, the local train arrived, dumped a crowd of people who were going through the same hell, but in the other direction, and filled up again. We even got seats! The train then proceeded to sit on the track for another 20 minutes, waiting for some indeterminate event, while we all started to bake on the inside. When the train finally closed its doors and pulled away, everyone inside applauded.

Arriving at the next stop, Rosendaal, we were directed to another track, where we could see a train to Amsterdam just pulling away. Fortunately, at this point things were a little more organized and they sent an extra train to Amsterdam just for us. The train had to wait on the track a few times, but it did get us to Amsterdam, four hours after we were originally supposed to arrive. A had graciously gone to pick up fanlain from the airport at that point, so I got to meet them at a cafe near Centraal.

That will show me for raving about the great train service in Europe! At least the train ride back was uneventful...

It's been really hard to get myself over my jet lag, between being sick and having no obligations until noon. I couldn't get to sleep until 4am last night, so I snoozed from 10 until nearly 11... got up for a bit, read, ... and fell back asleep for another hour and a half.

Finally decided it was time to drag my sorry ass outside; met up with maradydd and went shopping. Came back with a new kettle, bodum, coffee, and strawberry-lychee green tea. Also stopped in at Café Manger to have lunch and a couple of beers. Mmm... I haven't had Belgian beer since my last time in Leuven. Strike that, haven't had any beer since then. (I'm finally off oxycodone and tapering off my other painkillers, so drinking alcohol is safe.) We enjoyed some of the beautiful weather and discussed being back in high school (it's actually odd to talk to someone who was in high school at the same time as I was, as so many of my friends were not).

Now I'm enjoying some of the aforementioned tea. I need to make a quick run to the local grocery store to resupply for the rest of the long weekend. I also bought a new Belgian SIM; I just need to get it working with my phone. I already unlocked the iPhone, I just can't unlock the SIM compartment for lack of a safety pin. Off to the store!

I woke up early to get myself and fanlain to our respective doctor's offices. fanlain went to get some oral surgery done, and I was going in for a CT scan. I dropped off fanlain and arrived at the clinic a bit before 8—they wanted to get some blood tests done to make sure my kidney function is good enough to deal with the IV iodine contrast. Well, turns out that they didn't have the order for it, and they still needed to get it from Indiana. I waited for about half an hour while they spent time tracking it down. I went upstairs and gave some blood, then went back downstairs to wait until the lab results.

A bit before 10, they called me in, told me my kidney function was good, and were about to start the IV. But they wanted to double-check: did I drink the barium suspension? Turns out, no; I didn't have to do it last time, and no one told me to do it this time. Well, they said, you have to go back out, drink the tasty "berry shake" (which I now think is better than the banana-rama), and come back in 90 minutes. This gave me enough time to drive fanlain home after her surgery and have a shower.

I finally got out of the CT scan that was scheduled for 9am at 12:15pm and rushed to our noon faculty meeting. I stopped back around 4pm to pick up the CD and any lab results that may have been ready. Turns out that LDH was done: this was my high tumor marker that, for whatever reason, has not been tested since last July. It looks like it's within the normal range. The radiologist report was not ready yet, but then I got home, I finally took a look at the CT scan.

Unofficial verdict: the tumor is still visible, but looks distinctly thinner. It looks like it's about 1.5cm x 1cm in cross-section (down from 2.4cm x 1.8cm in November). It's still about as long as before, but given it's elongated shape, it would make sense that it would lose volume in the cross-section before shrinking lengthwise.

So, even though some data is still outstanding, from what I can glean, things are progressing as they should be and there's no reason to think that I have any active cancer cells left. I still want to talk about surgery when I see the doctor on Monday, but now that I'm getting back into the swing of things, I'm less gung ho to go back into the hospital. I've been thinking this week about how I'd react if the CT scan turned out badly, and I had trouble picturing it, but I was pretty sure that this wasn't going to be a fun weekend. I guess I can put away that thought until my next scan now and focus on getting better again.

Yesterday, I found myself wondering if there were personal finance cloud-computing services. I already keep my mail on GMail, my calendar on GCal, and my records in Evernote. Shifting finances online seemed like a good idea, too.

Turns out that there are quite a few; I had time to try out the most popular ones: mint.com, wesabe.com, and geezeo.com.

Mint.com is by far the most polished. The site looks nice, with rounded transitions and flash animations. While in most cases, the interface simply makes the experience a bit more pleasant, their spending trends visualizer is great, letting you drill down into a pie chart of spending categories and see the corresponding transactions. (It also feels more responsive than Quicken on my computer, but that's saying more about Quicken than about Mint.com.) Wesabe.com seems to have pretty good visualizations, too, though it feels less polished and responsive overall. Geezeo is the least pleasing to the eye, and I actually could not find any visualization tools.

The coolest feature of the online sites is that they can automatically download the financial data from your accounts. It's been my job to regularly download transactions from all of our banks and put them into Quicken. With the sites, they will actually do this automatically and will always have up-to-date information. So with the Quicken method, it was pretty infeasible to check our budget progress more than once a month (in fact, I'd often go many months without the downloads, even when I wasn't in the hospital), with the online sites, you can really check your budget progress weekly or even daily.

The process of linking accounts is slightly different for each site. Mint.com has a large list of financial sites it supports and you simply enter your login credentials. They don't have a login for our home bank; I'm starting to suspect that this is because it uses a (world's dumbest) CAPTCHA at login time. But they seem to support every other bank in our area, as well as every other financial institution (loans, IRAs, mortgages) we use. Wesabe.com can download transactions from a limited number of sites; for everything else, you can get a Firefox plugin that can record your login and download interactions and upload data to Wesabe. Clever, though more cumbersome than simply supplying your credentials (and it still won't work with our home bank). Geezeo's solution for unsupported banks is simply to let you upload an .ofx file manually, which might be the best approach.

Once the transactions are imported, the sites let you categorize them, with some automation built in. Mint.com has the best automation right off the bat, classifying probably 80-90% of our transactions automatically. Wesabe requires that you enter your own tags, but will apply them to similar transactions in the future. Geezeo follows a similar system.

The tag structure in Wesabe and Geezeo is free-form: you enter as many tags as you want for a transaction, and Wesabe will even display all your tags in the familiar tag cloud format. Mint.com, on the other hand, has a more rigid structure, with some user extensions built in (reading online reviews, it looks like the extensions are a recent addition). It has a fairly detailed two-level category hierarchy. You can add your own categories, and it even comes with a large bank of suggested ones, but you can't delete the built-in ones. It also allows you to assign tags to transactions; tags can span multiple categories and a transaction can have multiple tags. So in the end, you can get a similar structure to Wesabe and Geezeo, but there's a separation of primary and secondary properties of a transaction.

You can then use these tags and categories in visualization tools, or to set up a budget of spending targets. Here, all three sites leave a lot to be desired. Mint.com allows to create a spending target for a category or a sub-category. Wesabe lets you use a tag, and Geezeo lets you combine two tags (using an OR). So, for example, Mint.com allows you to tag things as Reimbursable (it's even part of a default tag set), but you can't create a budget for non-reimbursable travel expenses. (Though you can query them in the visualizer.) And in Wesabe and Geezeo, I was hoping to create separate budgets for "clothing nikita" and "clothing lenore," but neither will let me do that. (I'd have to basically tag things as "clothing clothingnikita" and "clothing clothinglenore.") My hope is that, given that all of these sites are fairly recent, at some point at least one of them will get around to implementing some decent search operators.

We finally settled on Mint.com as our main site. It has a nice interface, it painlessly supports all of our accounts except for the checking one (we actually looked into switching banks and found a better deal at another bank in town that is "minty"), and it has an iPhone interface which looks pretty slick. It seems like it would be pretty useful for day-to-day planning. One nice thing about the budget display in Mint.com is that it not only shows you how much of the budgeted amount you have spent so far, but also a line that shows where you should be given how far into the month/year/etc. you are, so we can see, for example, that our food expenses for this month have actually been lower than expected.

I'll have to see how well it will work for a monthly evaluation of spending, but I'm pretty sure it will save me time over using Quicken. And it's pretty cool to see all of our financial accounts added up in one place to calculate our "Net Worth" (which is heavily negative, since it includes our mortgage).

Thanks for all your votes and comments. I think I'm going to keep the paisley shirt, black pants, mock turtleneck, belt, and tie. The designer jeans, striped shirt, and patterned shirt are going to go back. I was almost going to keep the striped shirt; I showed a picture to my sister and she thought it looked good, and I thought I kind of liked it, too. But when I put it on again, it was just too much: a photo softens the contrast and loudness of the stripes. And I'm still a little torn on the patterned shirt; it's interesting, but a little loud. fanlain (and many of you) says it looks better with a sweater, but I don't think I want to get a shirt that I can only wear with a sweater over it. If nothing else, I get hot easily and like being able to take the sweater off. I actually don't mind the designer jeans too much, but I don't wear jeans very often in general, and I think they're the most expensive item in the collection.

Overall, I decided that Cool Nights was the wrong profile for me. I chose it mainly because many of the pictures showed solid color shirts in bold colors, which is something I like. But the description says that "The Cool Nights selection can be described as going-out clothes with a youthful flare." But I don't do very much going out, and while I'm interested in an update to my wardrobe, "flare" is not what I'm looking for.

So I decided to switch over to Tomorrow's Boss for my next shipment. The description still mentions "youthful flare" (it looks like they didn't break the bank on their writers), but it also talks about building "sharp wardrobe for a day in the office or a night out." That's definitely more of what I'm looking for; from what I can see, the styles are not too conservative, but I don't think I'm likely to get loud patterns from this collection.

I went for an acupuncture treatment yesterday, since I read that it might be an effective way to help recover from my neuropathy. (The chemo treatment damaged the nerves in my feet and arms, and as a result I have chronic pain and lack of feeling in my feet.) Everyone mentions how acupuncture doesn't really hurt, and it was true that the piercing of the skin felt like a painless prick (when I could feel it at all). However, my acupuncturist then would try to find a nerve, which makes sense since she was trying to treat my neuropathy. But she would try to use feedback from me to figure out when she'd reach the right place. From my perspective, I would feel nothing for a bit and then there would be a sharp shooting pain going through my arm or foot. Often times I would literally jump. It's possible that my neuropathy, or my painkillers, make it difficult for me to feel low-grade pain sensation and only alert me when the pain gets extreme. But it definitely wasn't the painless and sometimes euphoric experience that I was led to expect.

The good news is that my nerves seem to still be alive, even in my feet. Also, I confirmed that the soreness I feel in my wrists & arms is in fact nerve pain. But I'm really not sure if the treatment was a good idea. My wrists and arms have been hurting quite a bit more than they did before the treatment, especially around the time the painkillers run out. For my feet, the sensation did eventually become a pleasant one, but I'm not sure if there's any lasting benefit, and there's definitely some pain around some of the puncture points there, too. So even though I made an appointment for next week, I'm not sure I will return, especially if the pain persists for more than a couple of days.

At least the cost of the session should be tax-deductible. I noticed during my accounting that we will probably exceed the 7.5% of AGI floor for medical expenses this year. This motivated me to go and pay off the balance of my hearing aids—I had only paid for half of them when I bought them. The staff was a little confused as to why I wanted to give them money sooner than they required, but after I explained that I effectively get a 25% discount if I pay out the money now rather than next year, they were more than happy to accommodate me.

While browsing Facebook a month or so ago, I came across an ad for OutfitEZ. "Hate shopping for clothes?" it asked. Why yes, I do! I checked out the website. It's a service that picks out and sends clothes for you to wear once every quarter. The idea is that someone with more taste than you picks out outfits that are coordinated and they get delivered right to your door. A dream come true, right? What I found funny is that the makers of the site decided there's no point even mentioning that the service caters exclusively to men. (Though now, fanlain is a little bit jealous.)

It sounded tempting, and I decided to try them out. The price isn't cheap: $100/month, but it works out to roughly $40 per item of clothing, inclusive of shipping and tax (well, there's no tax charged unless you're in Colorado). They also have plans for $50 or $150, though the per-item price stays the same. You get to select your size, your profile (I picked Cool Nights), and some other things, like whether you live in a warm or cold climate, your complexion, etc.

My first shipment arrived a couple of days ago, but I finally got to look through it this evening. The collection includes:

• A striped shirt
• A paisley shirt
• A patterned long-sleeve shirt
• A mock turtleneck
• Black pants
• Designer jeans
• A tie
• A belt

One of the reasons I liked the idea of OutfitEZ is that it would be a way to leave my comfort zone and try something new; this shipment definitely did not disappoint in that respect. I think other than the pants, and maybe the belt, I would not have bought any of the rest of the things myself. But I'm pretty sure I'll keep most of these things. You're allowed to return items you don't like, but they recommend you get a second opinion before discarding an item. So this is where you come in.

fanlain and I decided to do a photo shoot to get comments. I put all the photos in a Flickr set. What do you think? Rate them from 1 to 5, where 5 means "ooh, snazzy!" and 1 means "ow! my eyes!"

Poll #1319233 rate my new wardrobe
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 17

Patterned shirt

... with a sweater

Striped shirt left open, with mock turtleneck

Striped shirt, buttoned up

... buttoned all the way up

Striped shirt with tie

Paisley shirt with black pants

Paisley shirt with jeans

Designer jeans (keep or not?)

Mock turtleneck, tucked in

Mock turtleneck, not tucked in

( our thoughts )

It occurred to me that I never posted about my experience with my hearing aids. When I first got them, it was both exciting and disappointing. I could certainly hear a bunch of new noises, and some conversations were definitely easier. The most dramatic effect was rustling of papers; it went from something I could not hear at all, to something that was easily audible clear across the room. I'd almost cringe at having to open an envelope. Hearing other people was also easier, but the effect was not quite as dramatic. I could hear fanlain sometimes, but a lot of the times she'd still be virtually incomprehensible. For people whom I could hear OK beforehand, I had to ask them to repeat themselves fewer times. But people whom I could not really hear largely stayed that way. The worst, other than fanlain, was my new postdoc, who has a combination of an Indian and British accent, and speaks softly on top of that.

After a week, the loud noises from papers and such stopped being so jarring. But I was still pretty frustrated at not being able to understand people; I'd have real trouble in meetings, especially if they included more than one person. Since that's a large part of what I do, I was pretty sad, and hoped that the hearing aids could be adjusted. Fortunately, it turns out they could—initially, they turn them down a bit to make the background sounds less disorienting to people who had not worn hearing aids before. And even though I had only had significant hearing loss for less than four months, it was definitely helpful for me. The audiologist adjusted them using this machine that actually measures the sound levels inside my ears, and afterward a lot of the harsh high-pitched sounds that became less noticeable over the first week and a half I was wearing the aids popped out again, though not quite as dramatically. I started to hear more noises, like our microwave timer and my feet shuffling. More importantly, speech recognition became much easier. It's still not perfect, but I can understand most people without much effort, and for the really quiet people, like fanlain, I still have a hope.

I find these days that if I increase the volume by 4–6 dB using my ($500!) remote, speech recognition becomes pretty good, but being in a moderately noisy environment gives me a headache. But I'm still adjusting; I think I'll learn to ignore the background sounds a bit more with time, and the plan for next Monday is to do another, fine-grained adjustment. I might try to bring fanlain with me as a test subject. (When I told this to my coworkers, they were impressed and explained that they weren't so sure that their spouses would ask the doctors to help hear them better; they postulated the opposite might be true.)

I'm still not sure if I want to try the higher-end model. It supposedly has somewhat better noise suppression, with a feature that clamps down on sudden loud noises, which could be pretty nice. It also has a neat directional control, where I can choose to focus on sounds to the left or right of me (or even behind), rather than the default front. This is intended to help when you're in the car, or walking along with someone. I'm also trying to decide if I should get an in-ear model rather than behind-the-ear one I'm wearing now. I don't mind the hearing aid hanging off my ear; the little piece that's inside the ear bothers me more (though I'm mostly used to it now). And it's hardly noticeable, from what I've heard from others; the transparent tube is hard to spot unless you're looking for it, and the piece behind the ear gets masqueraded very well by my glass rims (and eventually will be hidden by my hair). But it gets in the way when I take my glasses on and off (e.g., when I switch to my prescription sunglasses for driving). And it's uncomfortable to lay my head down on a pillow without removing the aid first. I'll have to discuss that on Monday.

One thing that I've realized from the hearing loss is just how much of spoken language you can infer from context. I discovered that I had the hardest time understanding people when they changed the subject, since it was much harder to predict what they were saying. Numbers were also difficult, and I would confuse "two" for "three" and "nine" for "one," since it's usually not obvious from context which was used. But trying to predict what was said and reparsing the audio stream based on that takes a lot of mental energy; I found that I was tired or not focusing my mind on what they were saying, I could hardly understand people at all.

On other neat thing about hearing aids is that you notice pretty quickly that your hearing is now controlled by a computer program, as it suddenly detects a situation change and adjusts the volume, or detects a speaker and isolates them so that they come through clearly. It's a little disorienting at first, but when it works well, it's actually pretty nice (and I can sometimes make adjustments with my remote control). I guess it's good practice for when more of my senses become bionic!

I'd like to think that I'm ready to go back to work full time, but my body is telling me "not quite yet." I woke up a little before 7 today and worked pretty solidly until 6, but at the end was falling down tired. I had to drink a third cup of coffee to stay awake for my 4pm meeting, which I'm paying for now. And I think I'm going to have to take tomorrow morning off to recover my energy.

But it feels good to be at work and to be productive again. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to clear my list of overdue items by the end of the week! Of course, it will just fill up again when the next semester starts...

I was supposed to see Dr. Williams today, but he suddenly became unavailable, so I was rescheduled to see his partner, Dr. Hahn. We ended up being a little late for the appointment because I discovered in the car that I had somehow lost the battery from my right hearing aid, so we made a stop at our favorite CVS in Indy to pick up a replacement. But once again, we didn't get in to see a doctor until about 45 minutes after the scheduled time anyway.

At first, a yet another doctor stopped by. I gave him a brief update on how things were going, he listened to my lungs and heart (I believe this is required during any doctor-patient contact), and went away. Both fanlain and I decided that we didn't like him; he just had this air about him as if he wasn't sure what he was doing. A short while later, he returned with Dr. Hahn, who projected confidence and was much better about asking and answering questions. He examined me a bit more thoroughly, and then we discussed the way forward.

The main question was, and remain still, about whether I should have surgery to remove the remaining mass in my retroperitoneal lymph node. He pointed out that the mass had shrunk quite a lot since July, and that it was not unusual for some tissue to remain, but the question of what to do about it was still open. His plan of action is to a) get an updated measurement of my tumor markers (I got blood taken after the appointment), b) discuss my scan with other doctors, and c) perhaps do a PET scan to see if there's any activity. I'm supposed to see him again in January to make the final decision.

I also talked to him about my painkillers and whether I should be worried about addiction. I take fewer of them than before, but I still need about two pills (5 mg oxycodone each) a day, and when I don't take them, I end up in pain and unhappy. He said that as long as I'm taking the pills for pain, and not for the high you get from them, I should be OK, and wrote me a prescription for more. This is reassuring and should improve my quality-of-life a bit, since I had been waiting until I feel pretty miserable to take the next dose, but now I feel OK about not letting it get that far.

By the time we left, it was nearly 5 (Eastern), so we decided to stop for dinner at Blu Martini, where individual75293 and fanlain had had good sushi while I was in the hospital. We hit rush hour traffic and it took us an hour to get there, but we were still there in time for their half-price sushi, which was lucky, since the place is a bit pricey. The place had a nice lounge atmosphere with ambient electronic music (focusing mainly on base tones, so well-matched to my hearing!), blue lighting, and a projector showing movies (we caught the tail end of "Hancock" and the first half or so of "Elf"). The sushi was quite good, though the quality of the fish was better in Alabama. I packed away three rolls and still had room for a chocolate mousse for dessert.

It's a bit disappointing that the visit wasn't more productive and I'm left with the same uncertainty. I guess I'll call next week to get my tumor marker results; if they're back up from what they were, that would be scary, though, as the doctor explained, not yet a death sentence. For the last few weeks, I've been feeling like my life is returning back to normal, and I'm very ready to put all of this behind me, but this visit was a reminder that I'm not out of the woods yet. Realistically, even if all the tests come up perfect, it will still be a year or two before I can breathe that sigh of relief that the cancer is likely not coming back. I just have to try to remain optimistic until then.

I had an appointment with a vascular surgeon yesterday morning to see about getting my dialysis catheter removed. I was really happy about the prospect, since the catheter gets in the way and frequently pulls on the stitch that's used to hold it in place, making the skin around there really sore. Plus, I couldn't really have a shower with the catheter in place. I could wash normally from the waist down and had to use a washcloth for the rest. (During our trip to Florida, I used some duct tape and sandwich bags while taking a shower, with limited success.)

I figured the appointment would be to discuss the plan for surgery to extract it, get my consent, that kind of thing. I arrived a bit late, but turns out it didn't matter, since the surgeon was running much later himself. I spent some time getting breakfast at the hospital cafeteria (a pretty poor choice, but they told me not to leave the hospital/clinic); by the time I got back, they led me straight in to see him. When we got in the room, he asked me to lie down on an exam table and take off my shirt... so that it doesn't get bloody. I blinked—was he going to cut out the catheter right there? He removed the bandage and said "let's see if I can pull this thing out." My eyes went wide as he went YANK! and said "it's done." I barely had time to say "ouch!"

After that, the nurse put some pressure on it for a few minutes, and then bandaged it up. My instructions were to check for bleeding a few times during the day, and to not lie down for the next 4 hours. But I could have a normal shower the next day! That was exciting, since I've had a catheter in that spot since mid-August.

I went back to work for a bit, then came back in the afternoon to meet with my nephrologist. He was a little disturbed, telling me that I looked tired, when I was supposed to be getting better. I suggested it was because of the long drive back from Florida (I still haven't recovered, I don't think). He ordered tests for my blood and urine to see how things were going. Impressively, he called me back personally in the evening and explained the results—usually, you just get a note in the mail a week later saying things were fine. Apparently, everything was fine: my creatinine was down to 1.9 (2.2 at last measurement), my hemoglobin stayed at around 11.5, despite not receiving any more Epogen, and the protein leakage into the urine was only slightly above the norm. He did mention that I need to be drinking more fluids. My plan was to bring my camelbak water bottle to work, though somehow it didn't happen today. But overall, good news.

I also stopped by to get a flu shot, being already at the clinic. I've never gotten one before, since I was never in a high-risk group. I'm not sure whether I'm in one now; I think my immune system is working fine again, though if I happen to need chemo again, it would obviously help not to be sick. But if I understand these things correctly, the flu shot has significant positive externalities, so I decided to do it. It was pretty painless, though they made me wait around for 10 minutes to see if I'd have an allergic reaction. (And the arm was a little sore today.)

I realized that when I try to write a good narrative for a trip, it takes me forever and I never finish it. So this time I'm trying just posting some highlights:

• Plan for leaving: pack up Thursday night, leave work at 3, grab Soba, and get on the road by 4 at the latest.  Actual: didn't finish packing despite only getting five hours of sleep and waking up early.  End up leaving at 6, and coming back at 6:30 because we thought we forgot fanlain 's phone.  Turns out we did have it, but we had left one of the lights on, so I guess it was good we came back.
• Learned a bunch of geography on the way down: we saw some barge traffic on the [[Ohio]] and  [[Tennessee]] rivers (the latter of which we, of course, had to cross twice), passed by the [[Land Between the Lakes]] (formerly Land Between the Rivers, until the dams were built), saw the [[Red Mountain]] in Alabama, at the tail end of the [[Appalachians]] (though it was too dark to see the color).
• Didn't stay in Kentucky long enough to experience their famous southern hospitality, crazy accents, fried chicken, or jelly.
• I had trouble getting sleep at the LaQuinta in Nashville because of my feet hurting (and I had left my painkillers in the car), so I was up with Soba at 6 a.m.
• We remembered that Soba doesn't like elevators.  She was a little iffy with the stairs, too, because her feet don't have a good grip on painted concrete, but eventually she learned to be OK with it.  I had a little trouble taking the stairs back up to the fifth floor, especially on not enough sleep and before breakfast, but I made it, which I think is a very good sign.
• Visited the Grand Ole Opry (on the outside only) and also tried to find the waterfall from my second wedding.  The Opryland Hotel has been redecorated and expanded; I found a waterfall, but I'm not sure it's the right one.
• Stopped at REI to buy myself a nice winter coat.  I bought a different jacket in Champaign, but it's way too bulky, if really warm, so I'll be returning it.  This one is very lightweight, and still feels pretty warm.  And it doesn't look too much like you're wearing a sleeping bag, even though you are.
• Left Nashville way to late, so ended up driving really late and arriving at the beach house past 1 a.m. Central, which is past 2 a.m. local time.  Still trying to get back to a more regular schedule.  (Yes, we're on vacation, but it's annoying to have the sun set a few hours after you get up.)
• Stopped for food in Dothan, AL at one of the three (!) Japanese restaurants there.  The sushi was better than what you get in Champaign, probably due to the proximity to the Gulf.

While speech went through subtle changes, a lot of background noise went through more dramatic ones. I noticed that the chair had squeaky wheels, and that the audiologist's keyboard made clicking noises. I also heard very clearly the sounds when she opened up desk drawers and rustled papers. And when she dropped something on the table, I almost jumped. I can see why people like my dad might be tempted to leave them off a lot of the time, even though they work better if you leave them on for longer.

It will be interesting discovering what noises I have been missing. Some have been obvious: I don't hear beeps from things like the microwave very well now. And I realized this morning that I can barely hear our alarm clock, even when fanlain says it's blaring. (In retrospect, I realized that when I use the iPhone for an alarm, I hear the buzzing from the vibration, rather than the actual alarm.) But, like the paper rustling, I think most of the noises I can't hear now, I simply don't realize that they're gone.

I went to an audiologist to try out hearing aids today. For during the visit, she gave me a pair to put on while we talked. It was weird; when she put them in and turned them on, I expected everything to get louder, but it didn't. Her voice stayed roughly the same volume, but was somehow a little bit clearer. Turns out that this is because the aid was "open fit": it lets exterior sounds pass through and in fact does not amplify anything below something like 1000 Hz, letting my own hearing do that. After that, she toyed a bit with them, fit them back in, and the left one started buzzing. She was able to fix that, but then it was still sounding staticky. She then told me that this is something that could be fixed with adjustments as well, but there wasn't as much point since I wasn't going to keep them.

We discussed my options. The basic question was how "active" a life I lead. I clearly fell into the "very active" category (remember, most people who get hearing aids are a bit older than I), which would indicate that I should go for the premium, top of the line hearing aids. But we discussed the differences between the high-end and mid-range aids and it wasn't clear that it would make a big difference. Since I get a 30-day trial period on the aids (required by state law!), the audiologist recommended that I try the mid-range ones, and if I'm a little disappointed in their performance, I can try the premium ones for another 30 days to decide if they're worth it.

The costs are a little daunting. The pair of mid-range hearing aids costs $4900. This is a little higher than the prices I had seen (e.g., from Hearing Planet, but the difference is exactly the amount that my insurance would cover, and I figure it's nice to have a local audiologist. The little remote that controls some of the functions is priced at a ridiculous $500. Hopefully I'll find I don't use it that much and return it, though I thought it might be nice to have it along for the trial. And the premium aids costs $1400 more. Plus there's a non-refundable $150 fitting fee.

But the prospect of not having hearing aids sounds worse, so I asked the audiologist to order a pair for me. They'll be ready for me right as I get back from Thanksgiving, so I'll report more then.

When I was at the hospital, they would take my blood at least twice a day and have results back within a couple of hours. The dialysis clinic is a bit slower. They apparently do a full metabolic panel, which tests, among other things, kidney function, only once a month, and then it takes a couple of days for the results to be returned to them. They took my blood on Thursday, and still didn't have results on Saturday...

... but once they got the results, things sped up considerably. I got a call yesterday afternoon that I should go to Carle clinic for a blood test before dialysis this morning. Having done that, I got hooked up to the machine as usual and was waiting out my time (with an increasingly full bladder)¹ when a phone call came in from the nephrologist saying that my blood test results came back, and I didn't have to come back for dialysis, and in fact they could let me go straight away.

I was, of course, very excited. I was pretty sure that I was not going to be among the 25% for whom the kidney function does not recover since I found out from my oncologist that my creatinine levels were dropping, but it felt great to be officially off. And now we can go to Florida for our vacation next week without worrying about driving an hour+ to the closest decent size city to get dialysis there.

As icing on the cake, they told me that my potassium levels were actually low and I should be less restrictive with my diet. So I had a burrito for lunch to celebrate! fanlain was in a meeting most of the day, but afterward we decided to celebrate by going to Ko Fusion. I had some sushi and fanlain had a nice pork chop; we also saved some room for dessert.

As one of the nurses said, it's one more step towards returning to a normal life. I found myself with a bunch of free time for Thursday and Friday, so I spent today filling it up with meetings I hadn't thought I'd have time for. Tomorrow I have an appointment for a hearing aid fitting. Once I get those... oh yeah, and once I'm declared in remission (fingers crossed), I should be able to put these last few months behind me.

¹ On a couple of previous visits, I asked to go to the bathroom while on dialysis. The first time, they disconnected me and it was OK, just added a few minutes to the time I had to spend in the clinic. The second time, my blood pressure dropped low enough that I started feeling nauseous and my hands started shaking, I was quickly surrounded by all the nurses in the room, and I spent the rest of my time on dialysis inclined backwards so that blood would flow back towards my heart and brain. After that, I've learned to wait until the end.

I had my CT scan today. The radiologist report won't be available for a little while, but I was able to get the scan itself. It took me a while of panning around using a DICOM viewer, but I eventually found the tumor. It's bigger than I expected, actually: about 5.8cmx2.4cmx1.8cm (these are the longest measurements in each dimension; its volume is much smaller). But I think it started out much larger, something like 7cm x 5cm. Hopefully it's all dead tissue; last time I had a PET scan confirm if it is.

When I met with Dr. Williams in July, we discussed what to do in such a case. He said it's a tough decision. Normally, if there is a large residual mass, they do a PET scan. If the PET scan shows up no sugar uptake activity, they typically leave it for observation; otherwise, they perform surgery to extract the remaining tumor tissue. The main reasoning behind this is that, in case of a negative PET scan, the odds of recurrence are pretty low, and the surgery is a major one, requiring 3-6 days of recovery in the hospital (and many days of recovery at home, I'm sure). On the other hand, I am (or rather would be, if a PET scan showed up as negative) in the exact same spot I was 8 months ago, when I had large residual masses that appeared not to have any live cancer in them. It's pretty likely that, had I gone for the surgery then, I would not have had the recurrence and would have avoided this whole second round of treatment. So the question is, do I do something unpleasant and slightly risky to hopefully avoid a low-probability event in the future, considering that the event is pretty scary? Or do I simply stick with observation and hope for the best? I have a feeling it will be a tough meeting in December.

ETA: fanlain points out that this post might be more scary than it was intended to be. I should mention that because my tumor was so large before the second round of chemo, this is the expected scan result for a successful treatment; it was always unlikely that my body would be able to totally absorb all of the dead tissue. So the CT scan is not an indication of anything bad, it just presents a dilemma.

Another factor that I thought of later that might influence this decision is how my insurance company feels about all this. I don't think this is a cheap surgery, so if they won't cover it, that might help make our decision.

I had my hearing checked Monday morning.  Turns out I'm not just imagining my hearing loss; I'm down 60 dB across most frequencies, except for the very lowest ones.  My word recognition score was 48% (was 100% before the last round of treatments).  The doctor expressed sympathies for my loss and said I'd definitely need hearing aids.  He explained that there were three appointments: one to select a hearing aid, a fitting once it comes in, and an adjustment after I've had it for a while.  I told him thanks and went to the receptionist to make the first appointment; it turned out that they could not see me for a month!  So I wouldn't be able to get a hearing aid until Christmas.

I then decided to check with the other clinic in town.  It's covered less well by my insurance, but it turns out that the maximum benefit of $500 remains the same in both cases.  Turned out that they could see me next Wednesday (19th).  I figured that's better, even though I still won't get an actual hearing aid until December.

I had settled on getting a Phonak Versata or Exelia, but then, reading the hearing aid forums, it turned out that people were generally happier with the Bluetooth transmitter / remote on the Oticon Epoq.  I was conflicted for a while, but then discovered that the closest place that sells them would be in Bloomington.  Reading the forums, I realized that people often make many trips back to the audiologist for adjustments (and probably more so for a first hearing aid), so I figured it's better to work with someone local and live with the inferior transmitter.  I'm still undecided on what style I want—behind the ear or in the ear—but I'm told the audiologist can make a suggestion based on my hearing test.

In other news, my health continues to improve.  I've had quite a bit more energy over the last few days; I can tell my hemoglobin must be up significantly.  My feet are starting to improve, too; they still hurt, but the pain is now manageable, sometimes even without painkillers (though I still take them regularly).  I've also started sleeping a lot better, so I'm not feeling exhausted all the time from lack of sleep, either.  This has helped me become more independent: I started walking by myself, and I've even driven the car a couple of times.  Other than being a little rusty from not driving for a couple months, it seemed to go OK.  This really helps, since I can now go to the office, or to various doctor's appointments, on my own schedule.

I woke up this morning feeling much better. My fever was gone, I was feeling rested, and ready to face the world. Of course, what this means is that I'm spending the day starting chemo. I'm back in the clinic, hooked up to the IV machine again. The actual chemo doesn't start until around noon, and, from past experience, I won't feel nausea until about 1 or 2, so I'm trying to be a little productive until then, listening to the beeps of the IV machines and the TV shows.

We stayed up too late on Friday night to make it on the hike Saturday morning. Turns out it was for the best, since the hike got rained out anyway. Instead, we slept in late, met up with groggy people for lunch, napped again, and then discovered Flanders Sings happening in Oudemarkt. They handed everyone a newspaper with a list of song lyrics for a giant sing-along. We played along for a while, even trying to sing some songs in Dutch Flemish. But the highlight of the event was "YMCA". ("Summer nights" was fun, too.)

We woke up again at 5:45am, to make the 7:09am train to the airport. This was ridiculously early for my flight at 11:05, but that way I could ride with cypherpunk95 as well as a couple of other conference-goers, and I promised fanlain I'd get to the airport early. My flight was uneventful; I slept for part of the time, and then watched "Hitched," which was actually not bad. We landed early, but it took me a while to get through the passport control line. They didn't give me much trouble, but (!) they fingerprinted me for the first time. I'm not sure whether the policies had changed or whether the guy didn't realize he wasn't supposed to fingerprint Canadians, but I've learned not to argue with border control agents.

On the drive home, I started to feel a lot of muscle and joint pain. At first, I thought it was from the long flight, but then it started being a bit more extreme. I finally realized that this felt very much like it did after Bleomycin injections, when I would get a fever. Indeed, when I got home, I measured in at 100.0F. That would probably explain why I was freezing on the plane, too. I guess a week of drinking beer and not sleeping enough caught up with me.

I took a couple of tylenol and I'm feeling better now, down to 98.3. fanlain made me a yummy dinner, with a low-carb dessert. Tomorrow I'm supposed to start chemo, but I wonder if they'll make me wait a bit in case I'm coming down with something. I guess we'll see tomorrow.

I was listening to Tim Harford's "The Logic of Life" recently, and he discussed how the rent premium of large cities is justified because you have much more opportunity to meet interesting people and learn from them. He also included a discussion of how communication technology, rather than changing this, amplifies the effect. Well, I felt like I was living out this chapter today. I met up for lunch with a friend of mine from high school (& college, too.) He normally works for Google UK, but was in New York for a visit. How did I find this out? He kept mentioning New York on Facebook.

Then, in the evening, I met up with another friend from Amsterdam. I found out that he was going to be visiting NYC the same time as me by using Dopplr. Turns out he was there for the NANOG conference. So I crashed their reception, had some drinks and hors d'oeuvres, and caught up with my friend for a while. (As I got to the reception, I asked the bar hostess if this was where the NANOG party was. She said yes and proceeded to put an orange wristband on me, explaining that this way, they'd know I was part of the group and not some guy who just walked off the street.) While there, I also got to meet the directors of two of the largest internet exchanges in the world. According to their projections, they should together be forwarding over a terabit of traffic per second by this time next year. Interesting people.

Finally, to finish it off, I had a brief video chat with fanlain and Soba, using Verizon's wireless Internet. Soba actually recognized some of the commands I gave her over the chat channel, and when we switched to video chat, she tried to jump at the computer. I guess that's as close as I'll get to a Soba tackle until Friday.

fanlain insisted that I have to do this.


1. Go to www.flickr.com
2. Type in your answer to each question in the "search" box
3. Choose one picture from the first page of results
4. Insert the image for the answer

( answers )

For extra credit, guess the answers without clicking on the picture links.

I found a package today on my doorstep. A little surprised, I went to try to figure out what and from whom it was. Inside, there were two model cars from the Franklin Mint. I checked the packing list, and there was no name listed other than mine. But it did show that the cars weren't cheap—about $150 each! Now, we'd gotten anonymous gift packages before, but this one made no sense: first, who would spend $300 dollars on such a surprise, and second, why model cars? I've never shown a particular interest in them or anything.

I discussed this more with fanlain when she got home. She pointed out that these were likely for me, because one of the cars was a model from 1977, so someone knew my birthday. But on the other hand, they must not know me very well, since otherwise they would have picked something more appropriate. We considered it coming from fanlain's family, but they would never spend that much money on me (fanlain and I both get $5 for our birthdays from them.)

Seeing as the "Bill To" address on the packing slip was myself, I decided to check my credit card statement. Lo and behold, there was a charge from the Franklin Mint for $300. This made even less sense. I certainly didn't remember ordering these cars, and though last week was tough and confusing, I seriously doubt I would have ordered model cars by mistake. I thought that maybe someone had stolen my card number, but then why use it to ship cars to me?

Finally, a dim recollection had entered my mind... my sister had asked to borrow my credit card number because she wanted to buy something for a friend but the site would only accept a US shipping address. She asked this the same day as fanlain's sister went into the ICU, so I didn't really pay attention or remember what she wanted to order, but the cars sounded plausible. I checked my email, and indeed, that was what she had done. I gave her a call and we both had a good laugh at my lack of memory. Mystery solved.

After a month-long absence, fanlain is finally home! I drove over to Bloomington airport to pick her up from her much-delayed flight. (In retrospect, it would in fact have been faster for her to take the shuttle from Chicago, but I didn't think that through when buying her tickets.) Then it was home for a reunion with Soba, who was excited to see her, and who still remembers her name, though "go to fanlain" doesn't work as well as it used to.

We celebrated by going out to Yellowfin Restaurant — a new Japanese place in town. One of their distinction is the presentation of their fancy rolls, so I decided to order the Champaign roll, which was baked spicy snapper around crab and cucumber. The roll was disappointing because it turns out they bake the whole thing, so you get something that tastes very little like sushi (rather than, say unagi, which is baked separately before being added to the roll). Plus the supposedly spicy sauce was more sweet than spicy. But everything else we had was quite good, so I think I might try going again sometime (when our budget allows) and try something more conventional.

It started snowing this morning and has been steadily increasing throughout the day. Driving back home after my final this afternoon was slow going, and driving home after a dinner party tonight was a veritable challenge. I literally could not see more than about 20 feet in front of me. Good thing it was only about 3 miles.

The dinner party was held by my colleague who works in the office next door. He's Indian, so we had a number of yummy dishes, including a very nice coriander lentil sauce. Now our stomachs are happy and we can enjoy a quiet evening at home for the rest of the night — perfect for a snowstorm.

I was planning to go grade exams tomorrow morning, but given the snow, I think I'm going to stay home. We're still planning to go to Chicago tomorrow afternoon to celebrate our 8th anniversary of dating at Japonais and then pick up my mother from O'Hare. But by that time the snow should have been cleared. I'm really glad she's not flying in tonight!

We've been spending our down time watching some movies. This weekend we saw Water and Murder on a Sunday Morning. The first movie documents the life of widows in India around 1930's, when they were sent to a convent after their husbands died, often very young and without having even met their husband, to lead a life of self-denial; to make matters worse, the convents supported themselves through prostitution. The second was a documentary about a teenage black kid who was arrested for a crime due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time, was beaten into signing a confession, and was put on trial without any physical evidence (or even any investigation thereof). Both the movies were interesting, but kind of depressing; even though "Water" was set 70 years ago, apparently this practice still continues to this day, and "Murder on a Sunday Morning" happened less than a decade ago.

I've been kind of in the mood for something more light and fluffy, like comedies or action flicks. Unfortunately, everything I can find in those genres seems like complete crap. My latest failed attempt was Firewall. From the preview it looked like a fun action movie with a silly premise. But the movie itself was so terrible, I seriously thought about turning it off in the middle. I can't tell whether the movie makers have simply gotten lazier, or whether my tolerance for bad writing, wooden acting, and cheesy plots has gone down with years, but I do yearn for the days when I could enjoy spending two hours watching something that's not at all serious. In hopes that it's not all just me, I'm asking you, my dear readers, for suggestions. Seen anything lately that has been shallow but fun to watch?

I felt better by the time fanlain woke up (or rather, by the time I delivered her Sobalarm clock upstairs), in part because I got a few things done, like totaling up our expenses for the last month (October was expensive, it turns out) and making some small progress to getting more of my group to use subversion. We went out for lunch at Paradiso with some CS profs, who go there most weekend, and then took Soba to the puppy park. She was good and happy but exhibited slightly aggressive tendencies a couple of times. It was sad to see; it wasn't out of line with what other dogs do, but she had been so sweet and happy up until now. But, as the training books told us, dogs are in fact dogs.

After the park we crashed out for a few hours, then went out to a Mediterranean restaurant where I had some manti. I had thought that it was just what I wanted, but turns out what I wanted was the manti we had had in a small place near Ephesus, and not the second-rate substitute we go here. Afterwards we watched "Pieces of April." I hadn't realized that cancer had a central theme in that movie, but it wasn't so bad. I liked it a bit better than Hedges' new movie "Dan in Real Life," though fanlain disagreed. Anyway, made for a pleasant evening.

My mother and sister are both on a big supplement kick and talked about preparing my body for tolerating chemo. I tried to look up some studies and found a few useful ones (Selenium, Magnesium, and Vitamin E), but there also seems to be debate about whether antioxidants help your body or interfere with chemo. More research is needed.

I managed to spill coffee on my laptop on Monday. I think this is the first time I had a serious spill since half a bottle of wine got poured into my Vaio in 2001. The Vaio recovered after a few days' hangover and some cleaning. The MacBook Pro wasn't quite so lucky. The good news is that the spill only affected the keyboard and it's relatively simple to fix. The bad news is that it's going to take the store here 3-5 business days to do it. I'm really hoping that they fix it by Monday before I head out on another conference trip.

Living without a computer at home has been really weird. I've been able to devote more time to things like laundry, stretching, reading, and video games. It's refreshing, but after a few days I felt too antsy and finally broke down and borrowed fanlain's laptop last night to catch up on three days of livejournal. I can't wait to get my own laptop back, but perhaps once I do, I'll make more of an effort to put it away into the office and use it only for an hour or two at night.

I've decided to succumb to a marketing impulse and create a brand for my research group. I decided to call it "HatSwitch," because we do research into both intrusion detection and privacy enhancing technologies, and we often use the same tools, just switching hats. Any brand, of course, deserves a logo as well, so fanlain and I spent some time this weekend working on one. Here are three versions:



Poll #1029847 Hat switch
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 48

Which logo do you like?

We both have different favorites, but we're not going to say what they are to avoid influencing your votes!

I watched the Google Tech Talk given by Merlin Mann of 43 folders on "Inbox Zero". Inspired by the talk, I finally cleaned out my inbox. Actually, it was a bit easier because I've tried a couple of times this month to clear out everything that came in July, so there were only 30 or so messages to deal with, but this time I officially created a DMZ tag and moved everything prior to July there (1165 messages, including 162 unread — thank god for gmail's new "select all" feature). I almost didn't make it because I fell down the trap of starting to do something an email message reminded me off, but caught myself in the middle when I realized it was going to take at least half an hour and made myself a note to finish it later instead.

It's really weird to see Google tell me "No new mail!", since I don't remember seeing that message in a long time. But it makes it a lot easier to remind myself to actually deal with email rather than leaving it in my mailbox, since it's much more manageable to deal with 1-5 messages than to look at a huge big inbox. It also makes email checking a less rewarding distraction, since when I get no new mail (it happens sometimes!), I see an empty inbox, rather than 1100 messages that I could be doing something about. I've done this once before, though, and it devolved back to a full inbox, so I'll report back in a couple of weeks how it's going this time.

fanlain and I almost had to answer that philosophical question last night; we were starting to lose hope when it turned past 6 p.m. and no guests had arrived. But finally the two people who RSVP'ed held true to their word and arrived bearing ice cream and wine. We had a nice evening, mostly focused around Soba in both conversation and activities. They really liked the chicken (between brining and using the rotisserie, it ended up being super-moist!) and were surprised to learn that I, and not fanlain, had made it.

I guess the other side effect of holding a party, whether anyone comes or not, is that we got to clean the house. Our kitchen is finally uncluttered (though some of the clutter moved to the office) and the floors are cleaner than they have been in months. The hard part about cleaning our house is that Soba relentlessly tries to attack the mop, broom, or vacuum, and will throw a huge tantrum if we lock her in her crate or outside while we clean. We're seriously considering throwing technology at the problem and getting the Scooba, not as much to save us the work (though that's certainly a welcome bonus), but to be able to run it while we take Soba to the dog park or the farmer's market.

I've been really enjoying how trips to the farmer's market have become our Saturday morning routine. Soba gets to enjoy a nice long walk and lots of attention, and we get to enjoy some tasty treats from Mirabelle's and some fresh stuff from the market. Our trip Saturday was prolonged by delayed baguettes: apparently, Mirabelle's had a power outage in the morning and were behind schedule. They kept promising that the baguettes would come first at 11, then at 11:30, and they finally put two baguettes (still hot!) into my hands just before noon. But we got sit outside, have a leisurly lunch, and talk with an ECE prof and his family, and even say hello to our dean (who didn't remember who I was). I guess that's one of the advantages of living in a small town.

Only three days late! I spent yesterday fixing a leak on the faucet, which involved trying to shop for a replacement part, failing, then putting the original part back together and stopping the leak. But then I discovered that the instant hot water dispenser used a 1/4" pipe and I had a 3/8" fitting, and it took all of today, including 4 trips to 2 hardware stores, to get a fitting that would let me convert things. (Well, not all of today — I also went to the gym, did some work, saw a doctor, had dinner at a new Japanese restaurant, and watched "Sicko"...) But it's finally working and I'm off to enjoy instant hot tea.

Well, as I predicted, the sink ended up eating up way too much time. I finally got it mounted, after a trip to the hardware store to pick up a jigsaw (which included a 10 minute wait while they tried to find it for me!). I wasn't smart enough to move all of our kitchen stuffs out of the way while enlarging the sink opening, so everything got covered in sawdust, but it was only a minor setback. I was able to get half of the sink working, plus the dishwasher, so we can have our kitchen back. The garbage disposal and our new instant hot water dispenser will have to wait until another day.

We made a todo list for the weekend and have made remarkable progress on it. I think usually we're over-optimistic and end up less than halfway through our list by the time our weekend is over, but perhaps we've started to learn. Our list for yesterday:

• Farmer's market with Soba
• Give Soba flea & tick meds
• Lunch at J's
• Install sink (N) (halfway done)
• Put together filing cabinet (N)
• Put together IKEA desk
• Buy salmon
• Buy letter files & Soba food (L)
• Plank-grill Salmon (L)
• Water front lawn (N)
• Make travel plans for August
• File (L) (halfway done)

Our list for today was less ambitious, with lots of time allocated for work on my proposal. Unfortunately, the unfinished sink installation is likely to eat up a good chunk of that time, but it will be nice to have running water in the kitchen again. Plus I managed to sneak in an hour of work yesterday, so that's progress.

We spent the day walking around San Francisco, from Bernal Heights to Crissy Field, with a stop for brunch in the Castro. Watched a game of wink (and took over 300 photos!), walked back to Van Ness, and took the bus back to Bernal Heights, with entertainment provided by cute kids, using the bus as monkey bars and showing us their sand dollars. Finished off the evening with a dinner at Firefly, a repeat anniversary spot but a favorite. As the Turtles say, happy together.

During the semester I kept to a pretty good schedule, waking up around 6 most mornings, sleeping in until perhaps 7:30 when I was really tired. And it was nice, especially on weekends, because you could have a lazy morning, slowly going through the motions of making coffee, feeding Soba, catching up on LJ, and showering, and once you're done all that it's still only 9 or 10.

For the summer, my initial thought was to go to a later schedule, not having classes or other things to wake up for. But then again, it should be even easier to wake up at 6 in the summer, since it's light out by then, and since we don't have a social life to speak of, why wake up any later and miss the sunshine? So my plan was to stick with the earlier schedule... but the best laid summer plans always go awry, and between spending a week on the west coast and getting sick, I'm now very time-shifted. We're finally ready to get out of the house and get stuff done, and it's 1pm already! Ugh.

When we got back from Texas in late March, the weather was so lovely that we decided that we should get a BBQ and start grilling in our backyard. The project quickly acquired scope creep, as I started shopping around more grills, searched all over town for the elusive Weber model that seemed likely, and finally decided we should go for natural gas. This, of course, required running a gas line to the outside, which precipitated a string of calling contractors and never getting called back. Well, Thursday I finally got a hold of someone who was actually willing to talk to me and come and install the line, and Sunday we dropped by the new ACE and they just happened to have exactly the model we were looking for.

So I spent last night putting together the grill, and today the gas guy came and drilled lots of holes and put a fitting outside. Finally, everything was set... just in time for the first rain of the month. I didn't give up hope, and there was a clearing just as I was heading home, so I decided to be ambitious and picked up a couple of grass-fed steaks. It started pouring as I got home and I tried to convince fanlain that it was still worthwhile to grill, but I got soaked just taking Soba for a quick potty run. She thought I looked funny with my hooded raincoat, looking like a griller from South Park.

Fortunately, the radar showed a promising lack of clouds to the west of us, so I stalled for another 30 minutes and the rain passed. (That's one thing I like about midwest weather: don't feel like getting wet? just wait 20 minutes.) I fired up the grill and cooked the steaks in record time; actually, I ended up overcooking them, but the middle was quite tasty. I also had some asparagus fresh from the farmer's market with my dinner, fried with olive oil and garlic. A yummy way to finish off the day. And yet another small step in the transition to suburbia...

We're pretty much finished our gardening redesign for this year. We got more plants to fill out the flower bed and some more veggies and herbs to put in the garden bed. We ended up re-buying the bee balms that we had ripped out from the old garden bed, but they were getting unruly, and at least we know they will grow well in that area. I also discovered that not only do they attract hummingbirds, but they're also a relative of bergamot, so I can make home-made Earl Grey tea!

It's hard to believe that less than 3 weeks ago, both the flower bed and the veggie garden were a mass of overgrown weeds! Our next task is maintenance of the rest of the landscaping, including weeding, mulching, watering, and maybe pruning. As a first step, I ended up pulling out the two trees (!) that grew at the corner of our house. It's amazing; I think they weren't there when we moved in and now they had deep roots and were over 7 feet tall. I'm not sure what kind they were — perhaps oak? — but they sure are fast-growing.

I took Soba for a jog today. It actually worked better than I thought. She's normally not that great about walking on lead and pulls a lot, mostly because we haven't spent very much time walking her since we got the electronic fence. But things are a lot easier when you're moving quickly "at her speed." She gets distracted by things (puppy? distracted? quelle surprise!), but usually a quick pull on the leash gets her back on track. There were only 3 or 4 times when she got really excited by something or just got tired of following and would stop and hold her ground. But it wouldn't last long, since after a while of looking at me, she'd realize "I don't actually want to be just sitting here — I want to run!" and we'd be back at it. Anyway, the stops were good for me since I'm not in great shape for jogging. And she's good and tired now — mission accomplished!

This weekend's project was turning our weed garden into a vegetable garden. After a day and a half of back-breaking labour, we seem to be done. Yesterday we started the day¹ by going shopping at a nursery, where we bought some flowers, veggies, and herbs. The flowers are going to go into our landscaping in front of the living room, but turns out that there was no way we could have time to plant them. We also picked up some fencing at Lowe's to put around the garden; it's labeled as decorative, but I have some hope that it will keep bunnies away from our garden. We spent the rest of the afternoon digging up the weeds and the grass that had taken over our garden plots.

This morning I woke up around 7 and after some breakfast went back outside to work. I turned over the soil, added some "garden tone" and turned it over once more. Unfortunately, the soil was kind of wet and clumped to our tiller, so I ended up doing this all by hand with a trowel. Then it was back to Lowe's to pick up some mulch. After lunch, we decided that today would be a good day to get patio furniture, so we stopped by World Market to pick up a set we'd had our eye on. They only had one chair in stock, and they sold us a table that ended up being cracked, but at least we have a bench and a chair to sit on outside, and more stuff is on order.

After putting those together, it was time to turn back to the garden. I laid out all the veggies and herbs. It turns out we still have a fair bit of room for stuff, but there's a herb fest at the nursery next week, so I'm sure we'll find some way to fill it up. Then I layered on the mulch (and appreciated why some people use plastic sheeting as mulch: it took nearly a full Prius of mulch to cover our 100 sq. ft. of garden) and finally turned to the fencing. That turned out to be a daunting job and I finished only after sunset. The fence looks reasonably OK; it's crooked in places (esp. around the gate), in part due to our uneven ground and in part due to my inability to nail the stakes in completely straight. But it looks significantly nicer than Homer's spice rack, and much nicer than chicken wire, which was our other alternative. Of course, it remains to be seen if it in fact accomplishes its main goal, which is keeping bunnies away.

As I was lying exhausted on the couch after working basically sunrise to sundown, I turned to fanlain and said that we better get some kick-ass veggies from the garden this year. But I have high hopes: our weed garden thrived pretty well with minimal attention from us, so with a little bit more work, perhaps veggies can grow as well. And I think this weekend was the hardest part...

¹ Well, actually, I started the day by going to work out at the Mettler Center, which turned out to be completely superfluos given the rest of the weekend activities, but I hadn't been to the gym in about 2 weeks and was feeling guilty...

Our scheduled departure time of 2pm ended up turning into something more like 5, which was not entirely unexpected. Fortunately, we made good time on the drive, arriving at Memphis by 11:30 including a couple of pit stops. Soba did quite well on the drive, sitting calmly in the space that was left on the backseat after we packed everything but the kitchen sink into the Prius, and she didn't even bark at the Wendy's drive-through people. She was excited to get out of the car, though, and she was positively thrilled at all the new smells and sights inside our hotel room. She especially likes the low mirror that sits at her eye level; she spent some time checking out the puppy on the other side, so we think our suspicions are correct and she would like another puppy around.

Tomorrow's drive will be longer, but we're starting earlier and we're going to take her on a hike first, so hopefully it will go about as well.

Soba turned 9 months old today; she's been with us for a little over two thirds of her life now. We didn't give her a toy to celebrate this time — I gave her a couple of new toys earlier in the week, both of which are well on their way to destruction. We took her to the dog park instead. It's funny; when we first took her, she was one of the littler dogs in the park, getting put in her place by all the other dogs. But these days, she's among the bigger ones and she's not as scared anymore. She had a great time, chasing dogs, meeting people, and her favorite — taking a bath in a muddy puddle. We hosed her off before returning to the car, but I think she'll need a real bath later today.

fanlain had her wisdom teeth pulled today. I expected to only miss a couple hours of work, but her recovery is slower than mine was 9 years ago, so I ended up staying home for the whole day. We're still trying to stop the bleeding so she looks like a little chipmunk stuffed with gauze, and sometimes it's hard not to laugh when she looks all sad and plaintive. But I try not to! I surprised myself by nearly fainting in the recovery room after seeing all the drugged out and bleeding patients. I guess being that kind of doctor is really out of the picture for me.

---

I'm dreading the switch to Daylight Saving time. It's funny, because when I first heard it announced, it sounded like a great idea, and it brings us closer to my oft-stated ideal of year-round DST. But times have changed, and these days I am up before sunrise. It is just getting to the point when it starts getting light around the time of my alarm, and of course, by Sunday, that will all be screwed up again. "Stupid farmers."

---

fanlain and I are trying to make plans for Spring break. Seeing as there aren't any eclipses this year, we figured we'd stay in the country and take a road trip with Soba. I thought it might be nice to go somewhere warmer and with a beach so that she can learn how to swim. However, we're faced with several difficulties. First of all, the places within a (long) drive that might be plausible beaches are within Texas and Florida, both of which give us pause. Then there's the concern that many nice beaches aren't as dog friendly as one might hope (at least if one were, say, a dog owner), so this definitely merits more research. And the last problem is that, although I'm a bit removed from the undergraduate culture here, I heard some rumors that heading to the beach for Spring break is not an entirely original idea and some college kids might have similar plans. I guess we'll figure something out.

I went jogging in the morning today and yesterday. Generally, I can't keep my heart rate in my target zone when jogging, and so it gets very frustrating — jog for a minute, have heart rate get too high, walk for 45 seconds, have the heart rate go too low, and so on. So I decided to bring my HRM, but ignore it and just keep jogging. My heart rate was indeed too high — between 158 and 168 — but my endurance levels held out for a 40 minute jog yesterday, and most of a 40-minute jog today. (Towards the end this morning my calf muscles started getting too tight and cutting off blood flow to my feet, so I had to stop and walk for a bit.)

As I was jogging around Mission Bay, enjoying the freah air and the sunrise, I passed local residents jogging, walking their dog, or just out for a walk, and thought to myself "man, what I wouldn't give to live in California again!" And then about five minutes later I realized what — my current job. As stressed out as my life gets sometimes, I can't imagine doing anything that I'd enjoy more. I just wish every once in a while that it wasn't in central Illinois, but you can't have it all.

The big snow storm was well under way when I got up Tuesday morning. I saw a bunch of school and business closings, but the university was still listed as open, and I had to go back to my PC meeting anyway. I called the gym and they said they were open, so after some coffee, I jumped into the Subaru and headed out. Driving was kind of fun, between the lack of traction and the high winds, you kind of floated from side to side. When I got to the gym at 7:05, I found a notice saying "we're closed as of 7am." I went back home to grab a shower before heading in and finally decided to cancel my midterm later in the afternoon, with encouragement from fanlain.

I arrived into the office to find everything dead — no cars in the parking lot, no people inside. But my meeting was on, since it was mostly attended by outside guests who were staying in the hotel across the street. (Most of them ended up being stuck for another night, since leaving CU just wasn't going to happen.) At 8:50, I got the email that classes for the whole campus were canceled. This seemed like really poor timing, seeing as some classes started earlier than that. (In further display of administrative genius, it was explained that people who called in before the cancellation would have to take the day as a personal day, whereas everyone else got the day off.)

I went home after lunchtime and made it almost all the way home, but got stuck on a small side street. The people who lived there pushed me back out and I tried to drive home a different way, taking care to drive slowly enough to maintain control but quickly enough to not get stuck again. I actually missed the turn onto our street, since it was hard to see, so I turned around and powered through the snow to about halfway up our driveway. Then it was time to get out the shovel to clear a path to the garage.


In the evening, we got another message from the chancellor, canceling classes for Wednesday as well, even though the snow had stopped Tuesday night. When I woke up Wednesday morning, I saw that the plows had already been down our street, but there was a huge snowdrift in front of our garage. I spent about two hours in the morning digging a path wide enough for one car through our driveway. Since the Subaru got damaged when it got stuck in the snow and started leaking antifreeze, we ended up taking the Prius to work this morning, which required making an n-point turn inside our garage so that it could go out the clear part. I finally decided to clear up another chunk of the driveway so that we could actually access both cars. Tomorrow's project will be clearing a path to the front door.

---

Tonight we had a power outage so we got to curl up on the couch by the fireplace while Soba ran around looking all agitated. It's funny how little of our house works when the power is out. We thought about taking a bath, since the water heater still works, but the forced air heater does not, so it would have been really cold getting out.

Well, that didn't work. I did manage to wake up by 6 (I actually woke up a short while before the alarm), but it nevertheless took me until 6:45 to start my workout at the gym. Part of the problem was that I forgot my water bottle and decided to go back for it (in retrospect, I should have just bought one at the gym), and I also took 10 minutes or so to have coffee before starting the workout, since I find otherwise I don't have the energy to make it through. Anyway, I got back home a little before 8, but with shower, more coffee, and breakfast, I didn't leave until just after 9, so it was actually 3.5 hours from waking to arriving at the office.

So I think I'll take everyone's advice and stick with having breakfast before going to work out. I'm still not convinced it's completely necessary: I made it through my workout fine this morning without food, and unless I have a really big breakfast, it's unlikely that I can get enough energy to get me through my workout anyway (at least if you believe the calorie meter on the elliptical that read out 600 for this morning), but I think the timing will probably be better.

Morning time line:
6am - alarm goes off
6:10am - alarm goes off again, gets turned off
6:55am - finally drag myself out of bed, feed Soba, make coffee, have breakfast
8:05am - arrive at gym
9:15am - back from gym, shower
9:40am - leave for the office
10:05am - arrive at work (took a bit longer than usual due to snow)

So the good news is that, had I actually gotten up by 6, I could have made it to the office by about 9. The bad news is that it takes me over 3 hours from waking up to being in the office, which seems like way too long. Certainly the 6:55-8:05 period could have been compressed quite a bit. I wonder if things would be faster if I went straight to the gym and had a coffee there, and then had breakfast upon coming back. Maybe I'll try that tomorrow. Of course, actually getting up at 6 would help, too.

I was reading something on the computer and noticed that I couldn't see Soba and the house was all quiet. I went to investigate, went all around the main floor and couldn't find her. "Soba?" Immediately, I hear a big crashing noise as Soba barrels down the stairs and pounces on me. She was playing hide and seek!

fanlain is thinking she should start spending more time in Iowa, if you catch my drift. What do y'all think?