Item #89 entered by Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Dec 24 16:13:05 2003
 Sindi Keesan's Lymphoma Journal Part 3

 Third and hopefully final part of a daily description of how I am being
 treated for 'diffuse large B-cell lymphoma', a cancer of the immune system
 which was diagnose in July-August.  I probably have two more chemotherapy
 treatments, having done six already.  Also discussions of life as a cancer
 patients  and lots of drift about how I am amusing myself while waiting until
 I feel well enough to go near other people and work again.

418 responses total.

#1 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Dec 24 16:26:20 2003:
 Today I had my fourth CT scan, this one to check whether there were any
 changes in the size of lymph nodes or spleen masses since the last scan a
 couple of months ago (where nothing was enlarged anymore except the spleen
 masses).  They called yesterday to remind me it was today at 2 and not to eat
 or drink for 6 hours before and to come at 1.  I said I was not planning to
 eat after 6 am and would get up at 5 for breakfast.  Jim got up at 5 to cook
 for me and I ate and at 6:00 realized that 2 pm minus 6 hours is 8 am, so I
 ate again at 7:30 since I could not get back to sleep.  Jim forgot to eat.
 
 This sort of set the pace for the day.  We got there an hour early to pay off
 my hospital bill and discovered I should have brought the bill since they
 could only charge me for hospital expenses and I still have to pay for
 physicians' services, which I think I can do at the cancer center.
 
 We were 1/2 hour early for the CT scan.  They told me to sit down and fill
 out a form.  Am I wheezing?  Actually sometimes I am, with this cough.  I
 refused to sit down to fill out the form because it hurts to sit.  They let
 me sit in the hallway on something padded.  Then called me to drink 2 16 oz
 'berry' flavored barium sulfate suspension drinks.  The first time they gave
 me banana flavored, which stunk up my urine and sweat for 10 days afterwords.
 Second time they gave me refrigerated 'berry', which made me shiver and was
 hard to get down because it was so cold. This time they gave me a choice of
 flavors and temperatures.  They also said to save 1/3 of the second 16 oz
 bottle for use just before the scan.  Last time they opened another small one.
 First time I was there they forgot to have me drink something (actually they
 said it was not ordered) until after I got the IV for the radioactive iodine,
 then I had to wait 2 hours after drinking because they were busy, with the
 IV in my arm.  Ouch.
 
 This time they waited until just before I was scheduled to put in the IV. 
 I got the same woman who put it in the first time, and who redid it the time
 someone else botched it, rather than the woman from last time who had trouble
 and got blood all over my arm and the floor.  The IV went in right right away,
 and she taped it up, and 30 sec later the technician came to fetch me to get
 scanned.  First thing he said was that the doctor did not order the iodine
 this time so we did not need the IV.  He offered to take it out after the scan
 but I made him take it out first because it hurt and then I got to use both
 arms for the scan.  It was a lot easier with both arms.  This was a new
 machine that was about twice as fast as the old one, plus without the iodine
 it goes three times as fast - no need to inject anything and no need to repeat
 measurements with and without iodine.  He does not know if I will need an IV
 next time but I am going to make sure BEFORE they put one in.
 
 We recuperated by spending $50 on food at Jerusalem Market.  Yogurt is good
 for people who have had all their intestinal flora killed off by drugs and
 I got yogurt cheese as well.  Jim got pomegranates, figs, and a bunch of other
 things that I will probably not want to eat because most foods are tasting
 funny mow, especially fruits.  I got lettuce to put with the yogurt, because
 vegetables taste okay.  My knees started to feel wobbly again.
 
 Next Monday I get my blood drawn to make sure it is okay to have chemotherapy,
 and THEN they decide whether I need chemotherapy again (and if not, there was
 no need to get my blood drawn but that does not hurt much).  
 
 Today I made the mistake of wearing clothing with metal in it:
 a vest with a metal zipper pull that I had to take off, a hooded sweatshirt
 with a metal eyelet for the cord, which I had to take off, and sweatpants with
 a metal eyelet, which they let me keep on but pull down to my hips where I
 was not getting scanned.  I will check more carefully next time.  I would hate
 to have to switch to a summer-weight hospital gown in this weather.  
 
 The nurse who put in the IV told me to drink lots of fluids to wash out the
 dye, which they did not give me.  I wonder if I need to drink to dilute the
 barium sulfate as well.  Nobody mentioned that.  I will drink just in case.
 Last time nobody mentioned anything about drinking.  This nurse is competent.
 She is also the one who kept phoning Jim to come get me the first time, when
 he had accidentally unplugged the phone.  She remembered us both.  
#2 Todd(tod) on Wed Dec 24 16:33:09 2003:
 
#3 John Willcome(willcome) on Wed Dec 24 17:23:38 2003:
 I think Cindy should follow the example of Valerie Mates, who moved her
 on-line diary to a private place without facilities for rude people (tod) to
 post.
#4 Todd(tod) on Wed Dec 24 17:31:06 2003:
 
#5 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Dec 24 18:15:31 2003:
 For someone who reads all my posts you have a funny way of spelling my name
 ;)  I don't get the correlation between metal eyelets and umbrellas.  I did
 not realize my sweatclothing had eyelets since I never use the cords.  The
 zipper on my vest is plastic but the pull is metal.  
#6 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Wed Dec 24 20:24:52 2003:
 I seem to recall a while back you used to sign as C. Keesan, unless that
 wasn't you.
#7 Scott Helmke(scott) on Wed Dec 24 21:03:57 2003:
 (now linked to the Health conference)
#8 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Dec 24 21:25:34 2003:
 C. is short for Sindi.  That was me.
#9 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Dec 25 09:41:38 2003:
 The new machine was definitely faster.  According to the technician, I only
 had to breathe in and hold my breath for 12 instead of 17 seconds.  On the
 old machine I thought I might not be able to make it.  And the platform where
 you lie down is now motorized, which means they lower it for you to get on
 instead of asking you to climb up with a stepstool, using the arm without the
 IV in it.  
 	The technician also said sometimes they don't use the contrast dye
 (which is administered via IV) for followup exams, just original diagnoses.
 But I had it for the last exam which was not a diagnosis.  He also suggested
 that sometimes they use it every other time.  In either event, this is either
 8 or 19 fewer IVs over the next 10 years, and I cannot imagine anything nicer
 having happened to me yesterday.  The IVs for CT scans might be larger needles
 than the ones for infusions, since they hurt more and are harder to put in.
 They come with a syringe attached (containing saline solution?).  
 	Today I woke up sneezing but not coughing at 6:30 instead of 5:00 and
 my hands are hardly numb at all now.  Food tasted slightly better yesterday.
 I get to enjoy the next 4 days (it would have been 6 but I got 2 days behind
 schedule) until this starts all over again.  With luck, the cold will be gone
 (it has been 4 weeks now) before my immune system is knocked out again, so
 it won't come back in a week like it did last cycle.  
 	The berry stuff tasted a bit odd but much better than orange juice is
 currently tasting and I managed a whole 32 oz of it since it was not cold.
 The plastic mug that I brought to drink it with now smells funny despite
 repeated washings.  I wish that they had an unflavored version.  
 	Today if I stop sneezing we might attempt to walk all the way to Main
 St. (1 mile) and find some place warm to rest, maybe a Chinese restaurant,
 before hiking back.  Jim offered to make banana fritters for breakfast first.
#10 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Dec 25 19:13:54 2003:
 Today we broke the one mile barrier!  It was downhill to Main St.  This is
 the day of the year with the least cars out so we walked on Liberty and looked
 at all the mid 19th century houses there and at what was on their porches.
 Lots of swings, fewer chairs and tables, and a few benches, and bicycles,
 hoses, etc.  About 10 sleds on the slope behind Slauson school.  We wandered
 around a bit and had a quart of soup at Dinersty and hiked back uphill.  There
 were a few other people wandering around downtown and one other open Chinese
 restaurant on Main St.  Now I know I can make it to the main library.  My
 world has enlarged again.  
 	Tangerines taste tolerable again, as does bread.  Not for long.
 I am still coughing.
#11 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Dec 26 21:38:22 2003:
 Today Jim dragged me out for another walk, even though my legs are sore.
 Today's destinations were the hardware store and the dollar store to look at
 toilet bowl cleaner.  You can get it with hydrochloric acid (acts instantly,
 or dilute it if you want it to act more slowly) or sulfamic acid (whatever
 that is).  Phosphates are now a no-no so the traditional phosphoric acid is
 not used for removing 'lime deposits'.  Jim has to take the toilet up to get
 out all the deposits in the lower part, starting with a chisel or screwdriver
 on the thicker ones, but he needs to replace the gasket anyway.  I got tired
 by the time we reached the second store and sat on my folded up coat while
 he admired hose clamps.  We also got some pickled peppers (acetic acid, which
 would also work on lime buildups but even more slowly).  
 
 I am still coughing and washing a lot of handkerchiefs but my taste buds are
 nearly normal and my hands hardly numb at all today.  I have three more days
 to enjoy this.
 
 We are putting Linux on Jim's other computer so that I can use the first one.
 If you have a video chip that uses SVGA instead of an accelerated driver, and
 it is a fairly new one, what are the chances it will display more than 256
 colors?  SiS and Trio3D.  
#12 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Fri Dec 26 22:41:35 2003:
 very good, depending on (a) how you define "fairly recent"; and (b) how well
 the particular video card is supported by XFree86; SiS cards seem to be a
 particularly large minefield
#13 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Dec 27 11:02:41 2003:
 Most of the SiS cards on the list said not to run clock probe but this one
 did not say that.  They are all SVGA not accel. Thanks, we will try running
 xf86config today.  This is our newest computer, circa 1999.  I put linux on
 Jim's Win98 computer so that I could use the other linux computer while he
 learned to program in C/C++ with gcc/g++.  It also has the CD/RW drive and
 someone in the linux mail group just steered me to a site with THREE DOS Cd
 burner programs listed.  DOSCDROAST is available command line only, or in a
 much larger version (4.5MB) with mouse/gui support and it will copy music
 and data files, with or without a second CD reader, and play audio CDs and
 copy DVDs, and it is 0.85MB download without the gui.  CD Recording Utilities
 is shareware and is 1.2M download for DOS and does not do anything audio, just
 copies data from reader to writer, or via hard disk, and will finalize a CD.
 (I thought only music CDs needed to be finalized and it does not do those.)
 
 The linux group member suggested the DOS version (ported to DOS) of cdrtools.
 This is 1.4M.  I tend to start with the smallest download, which would be
 CDROAST in this case.  cdrtools might be gui.  DOSCDROAST (non-gui) is 0.85MB.
 
 You need aspi.sys in config.sys to use the writer.  
 
 I woke up again in the middle of the night coughing but in the morning am just
 blowing my nose.  Today I have a cold sore starting (herpes simplex) on my
 lip.  I have not had those for years.  I hope it is gone in less than a week
 before my resistance is gone - anyone remember how long they last?  This cough
 has been two days short of four weeks now.  
 
 
 I can feel but not see my eyebrows.  I look like Mona Lisa.
#14 klg(klg) on Sat Dec 27 22:13:07 2003:
 One good thing about losing your hair:  It's exciting when it starts 
 to grow back - even in places it hadn't been before the chemo began.
#15 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sun Dec 28 10:05:24 2003:
 Last night I did NOT wake up in the middle of the night coughing, and I am
 not coughing this morning.  I am sneezing a lot instead and have a sore throat
 but this is at least a change.  Tomorrow they knock out my immune system
 again.  I wonder what the cold sore will do when my neutrophil and lymphocyte
 counts go down by Friday.  
 
 Where does hair grow back that it used not to grow?  I read a book once about
 someone whose profession it was to create head models from skulls, and he did
 King Midas (they found his burial site in Lydia).  Midas supposed had pointy
 ears with hair on them, which is a rare genetic disorder.
 
 The SVGA driver with our SiS onboard video chip did only 8-bit color.  So did
 the S3V driver with our S3 Virge card.  The S3 Trio64V+ card with S3 driver
 for X did 'no screen' and would not display anything, so we put back the SiS
 with 8-bit color (and only 1280 max resolution tho the card does 16 and had
 8M onboard RAM).  Then someone suggested since it is VESA 2.0 it can be used
 with the xxfb frame buffer driver.  What is a frame buffer?  This should give
 us more colors.  
 
 Jim now wants me to put linux on a third computer for him.  First I want to
 finish compiling lynx and antiword and put linux on a first computer for me.
 Before tomorrow if possible.
 
 Maybe the chemotherapy will stop the herpes in the cold sore from multiplying,
 or perhaps it only acts on real cells.
#16 Mike McNally(mcnally) on Sun Dec 28 11:35:37 2003:
   re #15:  "Midas has ass's ears.."
 
   (there's actually a folk tale about Midas' misshapen ears..)
#17 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Sun Dec 28 12:48:01 2003:
 Using the fraembuffer just relies more on the video chip's memory. The frame
 buffer is used to store the images of screens. That's why, on some graphics
 cards, (like mine), the first thing you see when loading up X, when the
 graphics (as opposed to text) mode has been initialized but before X comes
 up, you see an image full of dots, or full of the last screen image before
 the graphicsw screen was turned off, if you reboot.
 
 (Note: by "dots" I don't mean "snow", like you apparently get when you use
 Linux with CGA cards, but a pretty, random, pattern.)
#18 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sun Dec 28 12:59:18 2003:
 When loading X we see a grey dot pattern.  I tried the fbdev driver and was
 told I don't have /dev/fb0.  I give up, this is beyond me for a while.  Jim
 will edit photos in 8-bit color on this computer.  
 
 How do you put aspi.sys properly into config.sys or autoexec.bat to use a DOS
 CD burner program?  
 
 The person making models of heads from skulls said he got the idea of the
 hairy ears for Midas by noticing someone in the lab had hairy ears. It is a
 rare condition.  
#19 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Sun Dec 28 14:12:20 2003:
 Re: aspi.sys: put the line:
 
 DEVICE=ASPI.SYS
 
 into config.sys (not autoexec.bat)
 
 DEVICE must be in uppercase, i believe.
 
 My Dad had chemotherapy when he had cnacer. His hair fell out; the hair that
 came back was mostly grey, but he never grew hair back in places he'd already
 gone bald.
#20 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sun Dec 28 14:58:58 2003:
 My mother's grey hairs came back brown, odd.
 When loading oakcdrom.sys you need to add a switch d:/oemcd001 or the like
 - does aspisys need this?  Only one of the two drives can write.  But we only
 had to do oakcdrom for one drive and it found two, unit 1 and unit 2.
 I will try out what we have after I package a couple of things for linux. 
 I just tried out ltools for DOS that lets you do things on the linux drive.
 The 2M download was that huge because it was full of guis and other things
 for Windows/Java/browser use, files for UNIX, and source code.  I got the DOS
 part down to 75K zipped and it works.  This will be handy on a combination
 DOS/Linux computer in case I download with linux and want to use thefile with
 DOS.
#21 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sun Dec 28 22:05:02 2003:
 I have not coughed since yesterday, the cold sore has already started to ooze
 a bit, and I expect to be done with the last but one chemotherapy tomorrow
 by 9:15 pm (or 5 pm if they don't run as late as usual).  Last time we were
 at the hospital, Dec. 24, they did not charge a parking fee even before 9:15
 pm.  I just realized I did not get a headache this cycle, and my ribs have
 not been hurting.  My left hand stopped hurting intermittently only yesterday
 so it must be high time to jab it again.
 
 Tomorrow they tell me if the chemotherapy has accomplished anything visible
 since two months ago.  If yes, I continue therapy, unless maybe there is no
 longer any sign of lymphoma in my spleen.  If no, they have to decide what
 to do next.  I will try not the think about it for the next nine hours.  
 Tune in tomorrow evening.  
#22 klg(klg) on Sun Dec 28 22:44:59 2003:
 (It is interesting to read about your experiences with chronically late 
 appointments and problems with venopuncture at a government hospital.  
 In the private sector, the experience was that appointments were kept 
 within 1/2 hour of the set time and venopuncture was essentially 
 painless.)
#23 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Mon Dec 29 01:01:13 2003:
 I thought all doctor's appointments always ran at least two hours late, at
 least that was our experience with two private doctors and afternoon
 appointments.  At the U of M, when I had an 8 am appointment it was never more
 than 1/2 late, same for 9 am infusion.  By 1 pm they are running 3-4 hours
 late.  Understaffed and too many patients for the number of chairs.  They
 started a few people on chairs from the waiting room instead of recliners.
 
 The blood draws are relatively painless but the IVs are larger needles.
#24 David Brodbeck(gull) on Mon Dec 29 09:39:10 2003:
 Doctors "overbook," just like airlines.  Their time is valuable and they
 know at least some people are likely to not show up, but if everyone
 does they run late.  The earlier in the morning you schedule the less
 likely you are to have to wait.
#25 klg(klg) on Mon Dec 29 14:12:29 2003:
 That is strange.  The Infusion Center to which we went was emptying out 
 by 1 or 2 p.m.  Lots of open stations.  And a 4:15 doctor's appointment 
 was generally not more than 15 minutes delayed.
#26 Tim P. Ryan(tpryan) on Mon Dec 29 16:16:39 2003:
 re 16:		I thought the ears where some accident with
 the early attempts at a mechanical rice picker.
#27 Todd(tod) on Mon Dec 29 16:21:03 2003:
 
#28 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Mon Dec 29 16:31:59 2003:
 Every time I had infusion scheduled for 1 pm they were running several hours
 late.  At one point 9 of us were waiting for late appointments.  They put me
 on every time at 4 pm because I need 5 hours and they close at 9.  Other
 people have to wait even longer.  The put two of us with long infusions into
 a room normally only used by very ill people because it was free.
 
 Today I had my blood drawn at 10:00, and got weighed and vital signs taken.
 Respiration 20, pulse way down to 60.  In the hospital it was 120 and on prior
 visits 70-90 or so.  I might have helped that I was half asleep because I was
 awake until after 2 worrying and the garbage trucks attack Jim's street first.
 
 The nurse asked about my cold, noticed my cold sore, and said my lymphocyte
 and neutrophil counts were down and that was either caused by the cold or was
 the cause of the cold lasting so long and had something to do with my bone
 marrow wearing out from treatment.   So they decided to postpone the next
 chemotherapy a week.  Jim was predicting I would not be treated today but for
 the wrong reasons.
 
 The doctor came to tell me that the CT scan was excellent, with no more fluid
 around my lungs.  I had guessed this because I had no rib pain and I was
 breathing normally.  My spleen had also stopped hurting and he said the masses
 there had shrunk even smaller but not disappeared.  After the eighth treatment
 they will do a CT/PET scan, which involves injecting radioactive glucose,
 which is concentrated in highly active dividing tumor cells.  This will be
 3 weeks after the final treatment, not two as before.  And then I wait 3
 months for my next CT scan to make sure things are still okay.
 
 While waiting I talked to someone in for his biannual checkup who had had
 Hodgkin's lymphoma.  Six months chemotherapy during which he was nauseous a
 lot.  He said the steroids made him hungry so he gained a lot of weight, after
 losing 36 pounds in 6 weeks before he was hospitalized and treated.  At his
 3 month checkup they found he was no longer in remission and gave him 6 more
 months of some 'more aggressive' drugs (harder on the tumor cells and on
 general health).  He could not go back to work as a research geologist for
 3 months after all his treatments, which included radiation and stem cell
 transplant, because the drugs kept him from thinking straight even enough to
 read a magazine.  I am a lot luckier, but he is fine now for five years.
 
 The doctor said to remember there is a light at the end of the tunnel and in
 my case it is a large one.  Large light or large tunnel?  
 
 Anyway, I get a whole week that I can sleep without steroids, and maybe my
 taste will become more normal.  We celebrated by eating in the cafeteria for
 $6 - one cheese pizza (made with hot sauce so Jim ate it) and three vegetables
 with roll (they let us take a brown one from the salad bar).  I am supposed
 to drink a lot the whole cycle.  My ALT and AST counts were very high normal,
 which I think means I have a lot of dead cells being cleaned away.  It can
 take three weeks or more to clean up after each chemotherapy which is why they
 are waiting 3 weeks for the PET scan.
 
 I went to the bank and cashed a savings bond (since I won't be paying income
 taxes this year and there is interest on the bond) that I will use to pay for
 the insurance deductible for 2 infusions and a PET scan in Jan-Feb.  The
 insurance pays for the next three CT scans after that.  
#29 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Dec 30 00:31:30 2003:
 I napped two hours and can think straighter again.  The nurse said my hand
 will probably stop hurting after they stopping sticking needles in it, but
 the numb area over the spleen might stay numb due to the biopsy.  I don't know
 if it is the biopsy itself or the anesthetic that causes.  It is not a problem
 - I did not even notice it until now.  
 
 Jim recuperated by falling asleep in the tub.  We unpacked the applesauce and
 mortar and pestle kit which we will use next time to mash up benadryls and
 tylenols, and the tapes and CDs and books.  
#30 Andrew J Lanagan(drew) on Tue Dec 30 02:43:38 2003:
 Re 15,16,26,27:
     Is this the everything-he-touched-turned-to-gold guy?
#31 John Willcome(willcome) on Tue Dec 30 02:55:16 2003:
 drew is a SEX CRIMINAL!
 
 Type:  PEDERAST
#32 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Dec 30 10:26:35 2003:
 Yes, according to mythology.  He probably just lived some place with good
 mines.
 
 Someone who is helping me with software says PET scans involve antimatter.
#33 bruce allen price(bru) on Tue Dec 30 10:44:39 2003:
 If there is anto-matter involved , it is because the dilithium crystals are
 out of sync.
#34 Todd(tod) on Tue Dec 30 11:08:15 2003:
 
#35 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Dec 30 11:44:09 2003:
 It is not a 'kit' - it is Jim's mortar and pestle, made of glass.  I have also
 seen ceramic ones.  Try an Indian food store?  The 'kit' is a tupperware
 container containing the mortar and pestle and some apple sauce.  The sauce
 is made from Rane's windfall apples and it is pink.
 
 I think my cold sore is healing already.  Maybe they should have given me only
 four days reprieve, but I will make sure to enjoy the whole week.  Still
 coughing.
#36 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Dec 30 21:00:05 2003:
 The radioactive glucose is made radioactive by attaching radioactive fluorine
 to it, which emits positrons.  It can also be used to study brain active. 
 Fluoride allergy is unrelated to this.
 
 Jim's neighbor brought over some clementines as a gift.  Same neighbor that
 gave us 12 packages of cheese.  Jim does odd (literally) repairs for her.
#37 Tim P. Ryan(tpryan) on Tue Dec 30 23:59:46 2003:
 	Like every other repiar, on the odd beat?  Repair #13, then repair
 #15?;)
#38 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Dec 31 00:11:14 2003:
 No, things like making her plumbing continue to work, finding child gates for
 her dogs.  The next odd job here is to make a gasket for the nonstandard
 toilet that is 10" instead of 12" from the wall so cannot easily be replaced
 and is leaking into a bucket instead.  Or do some fancy cutting of cast iron
 drain pipes and tiles and rebuild the plumbing system to take a standard
 toilet that does not need water dams to cut down the water usage from 5 gal.
 The old toilet matches the 1930s sink and tub in Jim's original bathroom.
 
 I am up coughing again.  The coughing does not start until I lie down.
 I am reading a very large book from the Dallas Art Museum deriving from their
 exhibit of American tableware of this century, which analyzes dining trends
 such as casserole dishes, barbecue, TV dinners, and other special events that
 required special dishes.  Melamine dishes were a big hit in the fifties and
 sixties.  My mother had two sets - parve and meat.  Brown and pink.  We never
 did casseroles or fondue or cocktail parties or barbecues - did you?
 The brown and white dishes matched the linoleum floor tiles, which she would
 repair with scotch tape.  Some people are more into duct tape or electrician's
 tape - does it reveal anything about their personalities?
 
 I will try again to read myself to sleep.
#39 klg(klg) on Wed Dec 31 11:46:37 2003:
 (She never served dairy?)
#40 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Dec 31 12:09:52 2003:
 I guess it was dairy and meat dishes.  At some point she read that you can
 ignore this distinction if you use a blazing hot metal rod and there must be
 one in the dishwasher somewhere so we simplified life after that.  I don't
 think our dishwasher heated water.  I wonder if the orthodox all have two
 dishwashers so they won't accidentally get particles of food from one dish
 to another.
#41 Joe(gelinas) on Wed Dec 31 12:32:22 2003:
 (We once looked at a house that had two dishwashers precisely for that
 reason.)
#42 klg(klg) on Wed Dec 31 12:45:01 2003:
 That would depend upon what one means by "orthodox."
 
 There are probably orthodox Jews who have 4 dishwasher.  Two for 
 general use and 2 for Pesach.
 
 However (so far as I know) for most people, plastic tableware cannot be 
 changed in such a manner.
#43 Todd(tod) on Wed Dec 31 12:54:07 2003:
 
#44 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Dec 31 13:13:05 2003:
 One or the other what?   You are supposed to use one set of dishes for things
 with milk in them and another for things with meat in them.  Are you
 suggesting that kosher people should become vegetarian so as to have only one
 set of dishes?  We also had two sets of Pesach (Passover) dishes, in china.
 I doubt anyone would have trouble washing dishes in the sink for one week a
 year.  Our fancy dishes were acquired one at a time for cheap (or free?) when
 we spent a certain amount of money at the supermarket.  I have not seen that
 sort of offer for a while for dishes, but I think I saw it for pots once. 
 
 My nose is not dripping and I have not coughed or sneezed since 1 am and the
 cold sore is already healed.  Let's see if my blood counts go back up by next
 Monday.  I suspect they will poison me again even if not.
 
 A friend writes that her father-in-law has surprised all the doctors, who
 predicted he was too old (78) for leukemia treatment to work, by recovering
 to the point where he has normal platelets instead of 1/4 normal and no longer
 needs transfusions.  They can't figure out why he is doing so well.  
 
 Two people just emailed to ask about my CT scan results, one of them the
 friend whose father in law has leukemia, and the other the translator who got
 radiation for breast cancer.  Nice of them to remember the date when they have
 their own problems.  
 
 I wonder if my brother would be interested in hearing about my health.
#45 Todd(tod) on Wed Dec 31 13:18:19 2003:
 
#46 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Dec 31 15:13:53 2003:
 I don't understand.  Dairy is the opposite of vegetarian?  Some vegetarians
 eat dairy foods.
#47 Todd(tod) on Wed Dec 31 15:27:36 2003:
 
#48 Lawrence Kestenbaum(polygon) on Thu Jan  1 15:47:32 2004:
 Just to be clear, there are plenty of folks who find being vegetarian
 makes it easier to keep kosher.  But I wouldn't assume they're being
 vegetarian for that reason alone. 
 
 One rationale for the separation of meat and dairy foods is that you're
 separating life from death, that is, dairy=life, meat=death.  Based on
 this interpretation, staying away from meat altogether would be a positive
 good.
 
 Michael Brooks of UM Hillel says that the difference between Judaism and
 Christianity is that Judaism prefers to separate life and death, whereas
 Christianity deliberately mixes it all up together.
#49 Rane Curl(rcurl) on Thu Jan  1 15:51:09 2004:
 ..and I think just that they are facts of our existence, ovbiously
 inextricably connected. There cannot be one without the other. 
#50 klg(klg) on Thu Jan  1 15:53:33 2004:
 (Do you eat dead fish with dairy?)
#51 Rane Curl(rcurl) on Thu Jan  1 15:59:15 2004:
 (I skip most dairy because I am lactose intolerant - though lactase pills
 circumvent the problem. But since you ask - I only eat fish that are
 dead.)
#52 klg(klg) on Thu Jan  1 16:25:01 2004:
 (Well.  We suppose that clears it up.  With the exception of monkfish, 
 that is.)
#53 klg(klg) on Thu Jan  1 16:25:36 2004:
 (Oops.  Forgot St. Peter's fish.)
#54 Rane Curl(rcurl) on Thu Jan  1 16:34:32 2004:
 (I know them as Anglerfish. Picture and facts at
 http://www.dnr.state.md.us/fisheries/education/monkfish/monkfish.html)
#55 klg(klg) on Thu Jan  1 16:38:26 2004:
 (Yes, we know.  Sneaky tactics.)
#56 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Jan  1 18:36:48 2004:
 You can be kosher and eat dead fishes with milk, but not dead chickens with
 milk,  The original rule was not to cook a calf in its mother's milk. 
 Chickens don't usually give milk, but somehow got shifted into the cow
 category instead of the fish category.
 
 Today we took advantage of the greatly reduced amount of traffic (you could
 not even hear I-94 from here) and managed to cross Jackson and Dexter roads
 to go through an area of 50's Cape Cods (most with additions) to Miller Woods.
 There were a few other people out walking dogs (one was a dog trainer and had
 a very polite bulldog) and one on a unicycle.  Only one squirrel. The woods
 were full of large dead branches and fungus and moss and grapevines.  Miller
 Woods is rather large.  It was a farm maybe 100 years ago.  Next walk may be
 through the ravine if we can get across both streets again easily.  I walked
 nonstop for over an hour, at least 2 miles.  Usually I can do 3 miles per
 hour.  This is much better than a month ago even though I have been mostly
 housebound.
 
 I am still coughing a bit and sneezing in the middle of the night.
 
 Jim's nephew came by.  Jim had asked his sister to send us any leftovers. 
 She apparently reserved a few things for us instead and we got a large
 cardboard box with a red ribbon containing grapefruits, oranges, lemons and
 limes with some of the peel grated off (to cook with), pears, apples, some
 candy orange slices, baklava, chocolate oatmeal cookies, other cookies, some
 cooked potatoes, some ham (which we put into split pea soup for his nephew),
 a cranberry pie and an unopened box of cheesecake.  Hardly leftovers.  We were
 expecting vegetables.  Jim tried to get a video camera working with the small
 BW TV that someone gave his nephew but after finally getting the right power
 supply he noticed that the VCR output was not something you could put into
 that TV via the antenna screws so now they are playing with an amp and a
 guitar instead.  I forgot the two bananas.  And a green pepper.  His sister
 is out of town for a week (gone to a wedding) and her husband is eating Weight
 Watches' TV dinners (he tells people to be sure to eat two of them as they
 are small).  We will attend the next family get together in April when I don't
 need to avoid crowds.  
#57 John Willcome(willcome) on Thu Jan  1 21:16:01 2004:
 Fish.  Not fishes.  Count nouns.
#58 klg(klg) on Thu Jan  1 22:33:56 2004:
 We know.  But that contradicts the postulated dichotomy of dairy/life 
 vs. meat/death.
 
 What kind of dog was on the unicycle?
#59 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Jan  2 09:44:29 2004:
 Nuclear Medicine just called to schedule a Feb 10 PET scan.  The doctor said
 to wait a full 3 weeks after my last chemotherapy, which is Jan 26.  The
 person who called said they usually only wait 2-3 weeks which made it Feb 10.
 But they let me choose Feb 17 (3 weeks and a day).  I have an ENT appointment
 that day at 8:15 and a PET scan appointment at 9:00.  At 9:00 I drink a bottle
 or two of something, at 10:00 they inject radioactive glucose, and at 11:00
 I do the scan.  For CT scan there is only one hour wait after the drink, for
 this there is 2 hours.  The scan itself takes under an hour.
 
 If I want to eat or drink, it has to be before 5 am.  Rather than getting up
 at 4 am I may skip breakfast this time.  The other option was to eat at 7:00
 and wait an extra two hours at the hospital.
#60 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Jan  2 17:24:11 2004:
 Today we went for a walk through the Ravine near Revena and discovered that
 most if it has no trails but is just part of people's back yards and very
 overgrown, so we walked around and looked at houses and then headed to KMart
 to walk some more.  Corelle now has a 'rice bowl' and a '28 oz bowl' with
 unspecified purpose.  I said it would be good for holding more oatmeal.  Jim
 says it is for feeding or watering the dog.  Tall with steep sides.
 
 They have a CD-R/RW boombox recorder.  We looked for a way to record CDs with
 it and finally figured out that it will READ CD-R/RW disks and RECORD to tape.
 Only $40.  For $16 you can buy 50 CD-R disks and use your computer to record
 to them so you can play them on the boombox.  They don't sell computers there,
 but a Lexmark printer is only $35.  Lexmark cartridges are $25, B or color.
 Outside K-Mart Jim was spotted by a former customer of a rival electronics
 department where we used to volunteer.  
#61 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Fri Jan  2 17:29:44 2004:
 
#62 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Jan  3 20:14:16 2004:
 Today we used the last of the spring weather to walk (1.5 miles?) via
 Eberwhite and another woods to the hosue of some friends who also volunteer
 at Kiwanis to help one of them with his Windows computer.  He had forgotten
 how to print from Netscape (first do File then Print) and will put a note to
 himself on the monitor.  He was trying to use Hyperterminal from Windows
 instead of Kermit from dos to dial grex and was entering his log with an .org
 on the end of it.  He also tried his full grex email address as a login.  And
 then he wanted to know about those 'things hiding behind the screen -
 squiggles or googles or something' which turned out to be cookies.  I tried
 to show him how to read mail with html and text in it (view attachments....
 with pine) and then how to forward mail without any text in it to his ISP
 webmail but grex would not send any mail today so we gave up on that.  We had
 a nice lunch on the sunporch and admired the collection of shells and heard
 about what interesting people all the neighbors are.  And insisted on walking
 back.  Eberwhite woods is much less full of undergrowth and has almost no
 green groundcover unlike Miller Woods.  Maybe the thick layer of oak leaves
 makes the soil too acidic.  We saw one grey squirrel and Jim found three
 gloves and a lot of used pine flooring.  
#63 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sun Jan  4 01:17:51 2004:
 Still 40 degrees F, so I may get in one more walk tomorrow before winter hits
 (and before my knees go weak again shortly after Monday's treatment).
 I have not sneezed since Wed. but I still cough a bit.  My fingertips and my
 feet are still numb.  Apples taste sour, oranges even more so, but the split
 pea soup and barley and yogurt tasted as expected (a bit sour, of course).
 Jim is thinking of letting me eat all the cheesecake.  The problem is if he
 eats one piece then he cannot stop.  He ate the cranberry pie (which I found
 sour).
 	Our friends today had trouble hearing me.  Soft voice, and they are
 both in their 80s and wear hearing aids.  Sometimes I think about which side
 effects I would like to disappear first.  Laryngitis, things tasting sour,
 weak knees, hot flashes?  
 	My oldest cousin sent a nice letter with photos of her grandchildren
 and a copy of a talk she used to give to local women's clubs.  She had breast
 cancer twice, was treated with radiation and chemotherapy, and the second time
 by mastectomy, and is fine now.  She wanted to point out to people that cancer
 is no longer a death sentence, unless you don't treat it.  Of the nine of my
 relatives who had cancer, she is the only one still alive (but her mother had
 cancer at age 86 and died two years later of complications following a fall).
 My cousin is trying to get more exercise and lose weight.  The friend we
 visited today (age 85 or so) says she goes to an exercise class three times
 a week despite her arthritis, which also does not keep her from gardening.
 They start off with chair exercises and progress to weights.  Jim wants to
 start doing pushups but I don't think I could do one real one yet.  
#64 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Mon Jan  5 20:19:01 2004:
 I got to sleep around 2 and woke up around 6 and got back to sleep just before
 the second garbage truck started, for a few minutes, and we ran a bunch of
 errands hauling things with the card, shoveled the steps of the neighbor who
 shovelled my walk.  She came out aghast that I was shoveling, in my health.
 Arrived 10:30 for blood draw (done by someone who hopes to become a hospital
 administrator after some master's program), and 10:40 saw the nurse (scheduled
 at 11:00).  Pulse around 60-70, bp 105/64 or so, no reason not to do therapy
 because my neutrophil count doubled in the past week and lymphocytes are low
 normal.  My hemoglobin is down from 14.3 to 12.5 but that it still low normal.
 Someone else in for the same diagnosis was also getting a transfusion since
 he lost a lot of hemoglobin.  He will have to stop at the end of 6 cycles.
 This is his second treatment, after 7 years remission, and it is harder on
 him than on me.  It also affects his blood sugar when he takes prednisone.
 
 I talked to someone who was about to start the same treatment and was
 terrified.  Several of us reassured him that nausea was uncommon for these
 drugs and that the worst to expect was numb hands.  For him this was pretty
 bad as he is a concert cellist, but the numbness is temporary.  He is only
 Stage II and I am Stage IV (or I was).  He is in much better shape than I was
 when I started.  He also has extreme cold sensitivity and digestive problems
 that I no longer have, probably caused by enlarged lymph nodes.  I write down
 my email adress and website URL to read about my adventures.
 
 The infusion went well and we got out at 5 pm.  The first IV in my left hand
 hurt a lot and failed, so she put a nearly painless one in my right hand.
 Everything went on time.  One of my neighbors was there for colon cancer
 treatment.  Once a week for six week, two weeks off, repeat this all five more
 times (1 year total).  After the first five treatments she spent her two weeks
 off a week early, in the hospital, dealing with a stomach problem she thought
 was mucolytis (mucositis?)>  She cannot comment on hospital food because they
 fed her through a tube down her throat.  Tubes everwhere, she says.
 
 My next neighbor was on her second round of treatments after 3 months of
 remission and has been 1.5 years on therapy now.  Every day for a week,
 repeat two weeks, a week off, etc.  They are trying different drugs because
 of teh side effects - drooping wrists, difficulty walking, peeling skin.
 
 After infusion we stopped to visit our doctor friend, who printed out my cat
 scans and explained them.  There are still a few enlarged lymph nodes but not
 many, and two spleen masses are down from 12 to 5 to 4 cm diameter.
 
 I am falling asleep, from a combinatino of benadryl and 4 hours sleep last
 night.  Got to eat and then drink a lot while taking prednisone for the next
 four days.  
 
 One of the patients, who was in there for a six-month checkup, had cancer
 caused by the immunosuppresant drugs given for his liver transplant.  The
 transplant was a year ago, the chemotherapy lasted 6 months.  Poor kid.
 He is also prone to catching colds, badly.
#65 Todd(tod) on Tue Jan  6 12:04:46 2004:
 
#66 klg(klg) on Tue Jan  6 12:22:24 2004:
 re:  "#64 (keesan): . . . Someone else in for the same diagnosis was 
 also getting a transfusion  . . .  This is his second treatment, after 
 7 years remission, and it is harder on him than on me."
 
 Did he mention the chemo agent(s) he's on?  Was it Bexxar (mentioned 
 above from an article found in CURE magazine)?  It said the drug was 
 developed by an AA oncologist (Kowalsky).
#67 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Jan  6 12:48:36 2004:
 Kaminski (my doctor) developed the Bexxar.  The other person about to start
 CHOP-R had come from N. Carolina (Duke) for a second diagnosis because he ans
 his friend thought the single treatment of Bexxar sounded better than 6 months
 of CHOP with Rituxan.  Bexxar is a radioactive version of Rituxan which not
 only attaches to B-lymphocytes that it recognizes from a protein on their
 surface (and since it is an antibody it then spurs the immune system to
 destroy those cells, which can take up to 3 weeks particiularly since my
 immune system is being knocked out by the more traditional poisons).  The
 Bexxar actually kills those cells. Unfortunately it is radioactive enough to
 kill other nearby cells, and to make you so radioactive that they keep you
 in the hospital for a week behind lead shields.
 
 He will go back to Duke University Hospital and do 6 months of CHOP-R.
 
 The person in for a 7-year remission was getting CHOP-R.  Last time he may
 not have had the Rituxan, since it was only approved in 1996 and they were
 explaining to him very carefully how it worked.
 
 My hemoglobin has also started to drop around the 5th cycle, but not as much
 as his.  They keep complimenting me on my strong bone marrow, and my nice
 veins (but not my pulse, which is hard to find).  
 
 Today Jim went to get 4 x 70 mg prednisone.  They were out of stock on
 non-expired 50s so gave him 28 10's, which turned out to cost about 1/4 as
 much because there is a lower price for larger numbers.  I wish they had
 thought of this last time.  I don't swallow the 7 pills anyway so they are
 no more bother (for me) than the 2 pills.  Jim mashes them.  The Benadryl
 tastes worse than the Prednisone. It always nearly makes me gag. I have to
 stop after the first bite and space out the rest of the bites. 
 
 It is an hour after I took them and I am already snapping at Jim.  I asked
 him to forgive me for a few days for being nervous.
#68 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Jan  7 08:32:04 2004:
 First night after therapy I slept a lot (probably from the Benadryl and
 Ativan).  Last night I got to sleep around 1, woke around 2 to urinate (force
 fluids!) and then managed a whole four hours additional sleep before waking
 at 6.  Only three more days of prednisone pills to keep me awake.  Apart from
 the prednisone effects, the other side effects have not increased.  Only my
 fingertips are numb, legs are still strong, things taste okay.
#69 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Jan  8 07:22:17 2004:
 I will probably continue to wake up earlier every day until Sunday - today
 was well before 6 am.  Eventually I got hungry and had some milk.  This is
 pretty mild compared to the stories I have heard from a few other patients
 who ended up in the hospital unable to eat, or with all their skin peeling
 off.  Most people don't seem to have major side effects, though.  
#70 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Jan  8 22:48:16 2004:
 Today the bitter taste of prednisone lingered for two hours and I thought that
 was what was making me slightly queasy until Jim mentioned that he felt queasy
 and lightheaded and stayed in bed all day.  Another grexer just got over the
 same virus and says the queasiness lasts 1.5 days and the lightheadedness a
 total of 3.  So again Jim seems to have gotten sick ahead of me and the timing
 this time is rather bad as my immune system will be conking out tomorrow. 
 Maybe I had this first and just not as bad?  Jim also has diarrhea and the
 prednisone has the opposite effect.  I offered him a prednisone but he is just
 doing mint tea today.  I am fine now.  I drank some orange juice to get rid
 of the prednisone taste.  I continue to be hungry but tangerines are getting
 more sour again.  I eat lots of raw carrots to counteract the prednisone. 
 Only one more day.  Jim very kindly got out of bed twice today to mash pills
 for me and to cook me breakfast.  I heated up my own leftover rice later.
 
 Today I discovered that older sound cards that use IRQ15 conflict with PCI
 bus and secondary controller.  The third sound card worked - it was PnP.
 The modem upgrade messed things up but finally I got back the 28.8 setting
 however the computer keeps trying to recognize a different modem now (the one
 for which I upgraded and which matches the chip but is not what Win98
 installed the first time around).  I got Realaudio to work at 28K, finally,
 with unpowered speakers, and will be able to listen to Bulgarian broadcasts.
 The idea was to do it with linux but the Lucent modem which can be used with
 linux has some hardware conflict of its own (PCI resources).  The first of
 three sound cards did not work.  The second did not work.  The third worked.
 I am learning a lot despite getting only about 4 hours sleep.
#71 Todd(tod) on Fri Jan  9 00:52:38 2004:
 
#72 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Jan  9 09:53:20 2004:
 I have not tried listening to the Bulgarian yet, just tested this on King FM
 Seattle and then I also attempted Beethoven Radio (Florida) but they use
 ActiveX and after half an hour of poking around the Opera help site I noticed
 that they do not support ActiveX because it causes security holes.  What is
 ActiveX and how does it make holes?  I wrote Beethoven Radio about this.
 It also took me half an hour to figure out that I must have checked some radio
 button wrong and somehow disabled Realaudio as a plugin.  There is another
 member of our linux list group who translates Bulgarian (to and from Spanish).
 
 Carrots are high in fiber and do not taste sour.  Prednisone is supposed to
 cause fluid retention especially if you eat salt, so I don't.  Fluid retention
 leads to dry stools and thus constipation and therefore more fiber is good.
 They keep asking me about constipation.  It is not a problem but I do have
 somewhat harder stools.  This particular nurse is interested in the topic and
 seems disappointed whenever she gets a negative answer.  I drank less fluids
 yesterday evening and all night and got more sleep.
 
 I went a whole two days before I started sneezing and coughing again
 yesterday.  Jim has progressed to drinking grape juice today.  
 
 For a few days after discontinuing prednisone there is a tendency to very
 frequent and very soft bowel movements (which I am sure the nurse would love
 to hear about).  Anyone who wants should feel free to parody this all at mnet
 and let me know so I can admire the results.  
 
 Today someone is sending me two medical translations that I wonder if I can
 learn to print out (pdf) with linux ghostscript.  It seems you can only print
 if you set up a user account to print from (except for plain text, which even
 root can print).  My instructions were for printing from ps files, so I would
 need to make the pdf into a ps and run it through a filter somehow.  I wish
 there were a linux for people without split personalities.  
 
 I also have instructions for using xvesa so that I can get more than 256
 colors out of my fancy 'new' video cards with 4M RAM.  You need to use a
 different kernel, a different batch file to load it with loadlin, add an fb
 device by installing a package full of devices, and type out a long line
 specifying things about mouse and screen resolution (instead of a config file
 - but I wonder how it determines things like refresh rates and clock timings).
 What is a frame buffer?  Our normal kernel does not support those.
 
 You can tell I got more sleep - less typos.
#73 Todd(tod) on Fri Jan  9 12:49:05 2004:
 
#74 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Jan  9 13:14:39 2004:
 I doubt anyone would get yellow skin from eating 2 carrots a day.
 I have to take Prilosec  (similar to Nexium) an hour before the prednisone
 to reduce stomach acidity.  Maybe the reduced stomach acidity in your case
 changes your bacterial flora which affects bowel movements?  
 I would eat apples instead of carrots but all fruit is tasting rather sour
 to me these past few months.  
 The prednisone is apparently hard on the stomach lining if you don't first
 reduce stomach acidity.  
 Jim went back to sleep.  It is strange that he keeps getting these viruses
 before I do.
#75 Todd(tod) on Fri Jan  9 13:44:25 2004:
 
#76 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Jan  9 14:16:18 2004:
 No, just sleeping in an unheated room.  He commented that it was getting a
 bit cold up there recently.
 I heat my room to around 60 so I won't get sick while my immunity is low. 
 I used to sleep at 36 in the winter.  50 is comfortable if you start off witha
 hot water bottle.
#77 David Brodbeck(gull) on Fri Jan  9 14:27:57 2004:
 I have to keep my bedroom warmer than that or I get very reluctant to 
 get out of bed in the morning.
#78 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Jan  9 14:34:06 2004:
 I have to turn down the heat a bit at night so that when I get my hot flashes
 that wake me up every hour or two I can cool off quicker after throwing off
 the blankets, otherwise I tend to fall asleep with the blankets off and then
 wake up cold.  A balancing act.  Luckily I did not get the hot flashes in the
 summer when I was keeping the hospital room 76 because the hospital gown had
 snaps down the back which landed just under my spine so I kept them unsnapped
 and would have been cold otherwise.  When you are very skinny snaps under your
 spine hurt even on a foam mattress.  And the mattress was plastic covered
 which would have been pretty sticky when I started to sweat from the hot
 flashes.  My timing on all this has been pretty good - I could go for walks
 because of the long warm fall, to get my strength back.  
#79 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Jan 10 11:04:35 2004:
 Today I woke up before 6 am as usual and after two hours (without prednisone!)
 got back to sleep for a bit and it really feels nice to be awake.  I am still
 sneezing and coughing a bit at 6 am but don't have Jim's virus that I know
 of.  Maybe I had it and the prednisone masked the symptoms somehow?
 
 Jim suggests that it is the poisons which are making old injured muscles ache
 again - first in three spots probably caused by excessive coughing (which I
 had worried had something to do with the spleen masses) and now in my right
 calf, which I pulled a muscle in while walking in Eberwhite Woods on one of
 the last nice days when I really should have been resting because the
 prednisone (or discontinuing it) was causing extreme muscle weakness.  I don't
 have any muscle weakness yet this cycle, just these few minor aches.
 
 My left hand still aches a bit once in a while.  Like the nurse said, it is
 probably from using it for 6 of 7 IVs and my right hand, which I used twice
 (one IV went in both hands when the first failed) did not hurt during or after
 infusion.  It is slowly getting better.  For three cycles it hurt a lot for
 up to 1 week in mid-cycle.
 
 Yesterday my hands were more numb and shaky  but this morning they are better
 again.  Perhaps I am getting better at resisting side effects?  My other side
 effects (jaw pain, thrush) are apparently not going to be back this cycle.
 Last cycle the headache did not recur.  So far things have only been getting
 better except for needing to wait a week to get back my immunity last time,
 which may have been due to the bad viral infection more than the accumulation
 of effects of therapy (which depressed my neutrophil count since the
 neutrophils sacrifice themselves to fight off infections).  I have heard from
 some people that things get better as therapy advances, and from some that
 they get worse - lower blood counts and the need for transfusion among the
 elderly.  I am again one of the luckier ones. 
 
 I wish it would stop hurting to sit, and that my voice would come back (it
 got worse again two days after treatment but is still usable).  I know the
 hot flashes will eventually end (in two years, at worst!).  Nothing else is
 much more than a scientific curiosity at this point in the treatment cycle
 and I am extremely grateful to be living in a time and place where I was able
 to be treated with a good chance of cure.
 
 No more prednisone until the next (final) cycle in about two weeks!  Jim can
 sleep late (except he starts classes Tuesday).
 
 Time off for a hot flash....
#80 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Jan 10 20:52:35 2004:
 I am pleased to announce that I don't seem to have caught whatever Jim had
 or else had a much milder case of it, and that Jim has sufficiently recovered
 that he is fixing portable CD players today.  He just drilled some holes
 larger so that he could replace the three missing ball bearings with some
 larger ones from another model.  All the faucets in the house continue to drip
 because there is nothing to be learned from fixing them.  
 
 Do any of my loyal readers know how to use Xvesa to display more than 8-bit
 color with a card that has 4M RAM and in theory does 24-bit color?
 Xvesa -screen 800x600x24  looks just like 8-bit color.
 
 What are the known advantages of using AOL 9 (which takes up twice as much
 space and needs twice as much RAM) over AOL 8?  Someone we know thinks she
 needs the latest version but it won't fit on her P133 so we offered her a P166
 and AOL 9 would require buying extra RAM.  I am trying to convince her to save
 $15/month and a lot of time by using an ISP and Opera instead.  
#81 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sun Jan 11 16:05:56 2004:
 I am pleased that I am not as exhausted as I have been on the 6th day after
 previous therapies.  I got back to sleep until 10, which helped.
 
 The poisons keep fast-growing cells from dividing, which includes not only
 hair but skin (outside) and mucus membranes (inside) - intestinal lining,
 esophagus, throat, tongue.  My tongue and the inside of my mouth feel sore
 and it hurts a bit to eat and my nose is runny, possibly because my body is
 cleaning up all the dead cells lining it.  When I took a bath last night I
 noticed that a lot of dead skin rubbed off.  One of the phlebotomists (the
 people who jab needles into me to take blood samples) commented on how smooth
 my skin is.  Maybe chemotherapy should be patented as an anti-aging therapy
 for making your skin feel younger!  
 
 This is probably my day of lowest blood counts, but this time I have no signs
 of thrush (no slime on my teeth) or low platelet counts (no blood when I blow
 my nose).  My bone marrow must have recovered nicely.  I expect to start
 feeling better in most respects tomorrow, but my sense of taste is probably
 still getting worse.  More sour oatmeal for a week or so.
 
 I have some odd muscle-type aches in my right calf and in three areas of my
 abdomen, which feel better and then worse again.  Nothing severe.
 
 I was surprised how fast my hair dried.  Hair on the top of my head must not
 grow as often because it is a little thicker.  Hair on my legs must hardly
 ever grow because I don't notice it being any thinner.
 
 Today we are making a 'new' P166 with 17" monitor and sound card for a friend
 of a grexer, to upgrade her, using pieces contributed mainly by quentin but
 also a few things from other grexers, as needed (such as sound card and hard
 drive from Leeron).  She is somewhat disabled and low-income and really
 appreciates all the donations.  I wonder how slow this will run after she
 stuffs AOL8 onto it.  I plan to give her a month's trial of my local ISP (half
 the price of AOL and twice the speed) with Opera, for comparison.  
#82 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Mon Jan 12 22:00:58 2004:
 Two fingers are starting to have shredded skin.  I had forgotten about this.
 Today my right hand aches instead of my left hand, just one week after
 infusion.  It was okay for a week.  During infusion the nurse found it
 interesting that the area around the veins in my hand and wrist turned red
 and itchy from a drug reaction so maybe it is another drug reaction.  I am
 sure it will go away.  
 Things still taste funny.  Leek and jerusalem artichoke soup with yoghurt is
 okay, but millet is really scratchy.  The surface of my tongue feels burnt.
 Bread also hurts.  Jim thinks it is the salt.  The millet has no salt.
 
 Jim's sister phoned to let us know his only cousin is in Dallas for the next
 six weeks recovering from surgery for diverticulitis and cannot travel.  She
 went there to a convention.  She is allowed out tomorrow but can't come home
 by plane or bus or car.  We suggested the train when she is stronger.  We
 compared hospital experiences.  They also wake her every four hours, and the
 snaps on the back of her hospital gown hit her spine so she also undid them
 and also the shoulder snaps so the high neck would not strangle her.  Her
 insurance is paying for a single room.  She knows nobody in Dallas.  We
 promised to call again soon.  She is taking lots of pain killers but can now
 start eating solid food.  This makes my sore hand seem so trivial.  
 
 I am back down from 113 pounds with fluid to 109 pounds without fluid
 retention, which is more than I weighed in April but less than January (112).
 
 We have four weeks or so to finish putting together all our computers.  We
 are transplanting the hard drive and CD-ROM drive and cards from a computer
 we put together for a friend of bruin's because Win98 keeps crashing on it
 at inopportune moments such as while loading drivers, defragmenting, or
 starting IE 5.  And the screen turns an interesting green pattern.  Jim seems
 to enjoy moving parts around, luckily, so we are giving her my office computer
 and moving my parts to something else, after upgrading my original cpu from
 150 to 166.  We are downgrading me to 133 temporily.  DOS does not care much.
 This way she will get a known quantity.  My office computer works if you don't
 mind turning the power on a few times when the first time does not work.
 Nice to have the time for such useful projects.  
#83 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Jan 13 09:37:42 2004:
 Today I am on the upswing, as expected.  This time the wobbly knees lasted
 only one day (Sunday) instead of a week, and my legs no longer feel like they
 have pulled muscles in them.  My voice is stronger already, my hands less
 numb, and I will find out when I eat if my tongue is still sore.  
 
 The hot flashes are worse again but that too will pass.
 
 We learned that when you change from a Cyrix 150MHz to an Intel 166MHz cpu
 (setting all the jumpers properly for speed, voltage, multiplier, etc.) the
 pci video card in the middle pci slot no longer displays a cursor or color.
 If you put it in the first pci slot it works again.  Scott gave us a computer
 with a video problem that we cured that way.  Also pci cards do not work at
 all unless you have them firmly seated and some are harder than others to
 seat.  I think we have two working computers again.  Finally.  I am curious
 if the two sound cards that crashed Win98 in the recycled PBell will do so
 in the new computer.  
#84 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Jan 13 23:40:51 2004:
 We phoned Jim's cousin tonight and tried to distract her while they were
 putting in an IV (to give her potassium, they said).  It hurt.  It failed.
 They tried another.  It hurt.  It failed.  They were going to try her other
 arm.  She suggested they get a heating pad after Jim mentioned U of M Cancer
 Center used them.  The nurse had studied here and went off for one.  The
 cousin took the opportunity to go to the bathroom.  She is supposed to be
 allowed to leave but not on her own.  Jim's brother in Colorado offered to
 drive there in a car that converts to a bed and fetch her (to Colorado?  to
 Michigan?).  He has a friend in Dallas.  She is not allowed to wear a seat
 belt in a plane.  She will lie down in the car.  It is good to have close
 cousins when you don't have any siblings.  It is a one day drive from
 Colorado.  His brother is currently unemployed.  It is also good to always
 have at least one unemployed relative.  I had Jim.  Some people are not so
 lucky.
#85 Todd(tod) on Wed Jan 14 12:33:22 2004:
 
#86 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Jan 14 22:00:46 2004:
 My tongue and lips still hurt when I eat anything scratchy, which includes
 millet and beans.  So I am eating lots of potatoes and squash with cheese or
 yogurt, and Chinese preserved eggs.  Also WHITE sticky rice that our Chinese
 visitor left.  Is this what is meant by bland foods?  I doubt that most people
 on special diets have sore tongues.  
 Only three more weeks and I will be getting better without the immediate
 prospect of more chemicals.  It gets a bit depressing to know that when I
 start feeling better the next chemo is only a few days away, but it is the
 last one.  
 
 I have number hands again but managed to type about 5000 words, including
 typos.  (numb-er)  Also numb feet.  My legs may or may not be wobbly.  I have
 not set foot outside for 8 days now.  Tomorrow my resistance should be back
 and we may go to the local library as a treat.  Someone gave us a dead
 computer with a DVD drive and we need a DVD to test it on.  What else do you
 need in the way of software?  We have a Win98 computer with RealOne that has
 some sort of DVD player.  Do you need to install a driver?  
#87 S. Lynne Fremont(slynne) on Thu Jan 15 09:35:19 2004:
 I am glad to hear that you only have one more chemo treatment left. I 
 am sure you will start feeling much better after that is done. 
#88 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Thu Jan 15 09:37:37 2004:
 Let's all think positive thoughts about it.
#89 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Jan 15 13:26:22 2004:
 I will feel even better after the Feb 17 PET scan, assuming good results.
 I am told that DVD players will also read data CDs and play music CDs so we can
 test if it is entirely dead.
 I remember someone else told me he had lymphoma of the tongue, with surgery,
 and had lost a lot of weight but could only eat liquids.  His friends were
 all coming up with liquid treats.  A sore tongue is pretty piddly compared.
 This is what support groups are for - to let you know that other people have
 survived worse and are okay now.  Thanks to all for the encouragement.
 
 Jim has started classes.  He sneaked out around 6 am and I got back to sleep
 for 3 hours around 9 pm.  We have a super-special low-flush toilet with a
 pressurized system that is supposed to keep your sewer lines cleaner, which
 you can hear all over the house (at 6 am).  Jim has taken up the challenge
 of learning to program in C for linux and DOS from a class on C++ where they
 assume you are using Windows.  He finally got Hello World to compile with
 linux gcc (g++) but djgpp complained about his 'deprecated' headers.  ???
 He was supposed to be computing volumes from known radii.  He is headed back
 from Washtenaw CC now on his bike, having learned how to telnet in the
 computer lab.  'Is telnet always this slow?' he wrote.  (Grex was going at
 a crawl until just now).  Next challenge is to set up a shell account and a
 website and I can save $8.33/month on my ISP.  For $300/year Jim can take one
 course and get free internet access - a much better deal than AOL.
#90 David Brodbeck(gull) on Thu Jan 15 16:25:22 2004:
 Test with a "real" CD, not a CD-R.  Not all DVD players can read CD-R discs.
#91 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Jan 16 11:12:52 2004:
 Jim is going to work on letting me get more sleep by finishing the
 ventilation and wiring to his upstairs bathroom and then closing up the two
 big holes in the downstairs hallway wall through which all the toilet flushing
 noise travels downstairs.  I have asked him to do this before his class next
 Tuesday so I don't get woken again at 6:30.  Sometimes there is a
 technological fix to medical problems.  
 First he is fixing the thermostat on the space heater that stays on all the
 time so that we can use it to heat the computer room and I don't freeze there
 and get sick.  Another easy fix, I hope.
 
 Today I am awake after the first night in 6 weeks of at least 7 hours sleep.
 I have not had a hot flash in 1.5 hours, my hands are less numb, my lips don't
 seem to be hurting today, and I can look forward to about 10 good days before
 this all hits again.  Sort of cold to celebrate by going for a walk.  No point
 in walking to the local Chinese restaurant as things will probably continue
 to taste funny for another week.  I should make myself eat breakfast now.
 
 Linux is progressing well.  I got Opera 7 to work by downloading SW81 glibc,
 2 hours of 24MB, and was then told I only needed glibc-solibs, 1.3M.  Jim will
 use the big library for compiling and we have an 8G hard drive anyway.
 I wonder how wget managed to download 24M in 2 hours when the browsers cannot
 manage more than 8MB per hour.  Maybe I hit a fast download mirror?
#92 klg(klg) on Fri Jan 16 12:23:33 2004:
 "a car that converts to a bed"? 
#93 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Jan 16 18:44:17 2004:
 You put the seat back down or something to convert the car to a bed.
 Today we celebrated that my immune system is probably recovered (though I have
 been waking up coughing again for a few days) by walking downtown, eating
 lunch at Dinersty (they were out of daikons and it all tasted like salt) and
 leaving me at the library while Jim walked on errands.  
 
 Jim asks 'If you're writing about me can I go in and delete your item?'.
 Or at least anything with his name in it.  
#94 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Jan 16 21:33:52 2004:
 I hope this is the low point in my sense of taste.  I took one bite of the
 oatmeal (with some nice thawed peaches in it) and it tasted sour so Jim got
 that.  He made me some potatoes and those tasted even worse so he ate those.
 I managed to eat bread with sour yogurt cheese and a very sour tangerine. 
 Milk has always been okay, and eggs.  The Chinese vegetables at lunch were
 far too salty but otherwise okay.  Frozen mustard greens and tofu were okay.
 You would think since my tongue is numb it would not taste anything but
 somehow sweet is getting transmuted to sour.  Jams are awful.  Honey in my
 cocoa is pretty bad.  Bitter things are okay, they just taste normal.  I had
 a preserved egg just now, it tastes as a preserved egg should taste. 
 
 I have been forcing myself to eat since about July.  I can do it for another
 month or so and maybe even gain a couple of pounds.  At least my mother is
 not putting butter on everything like she did for a while after I came back
 skinnier from two weeks of Girl Scout Camp where the Jewish kids got peanut
 butter and jelly sandwiches for supper half the time and I would not eat them
 because they were icky sweet.  Jim tried to butter things for me at first and
 I told him I would not eat them at all that way.  Bad memories.  She tried
 to fatten my brother by giving him the canned sugar-syrup weight gain stuff.
 It eventually worked, 40 years later he has a paunch.  Mothers are odd.
#95 Reverend Puerile Dolt(happyboy) on Fri Jan 16 22:41:46 2004:
 hey, it's not like she fed him some food that she
 found, you know...laying on the sidewalk.
 
 now THAT would be sort of odd.
#96 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Sat Jan 17 04:08:54 2004:
 It's strange how after chemotherapy, taste and the ability to keep certain
 things down are among the first things to go funny. Maybe after years of
 eating prepared food from supermarkets, butchers, etc., we don't necessarily
 need taste so much to test if somethign is harmful, so the sense has become
 weakened and therefore is more vulnerable than other things to damage.
#97 Rane Curl(rcurl) on Sat Jan 17 13:31:42 2004:
 Or perhaps, after having to eat or drink a lot of nasty tasting treatments
 our tolerance for the uneatable is raised. 
#98 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Jan 17 14:26:24 2004:
 Rane, I think you mean our tolerance is lowered.  My tolerance for bitter
 things is not changed that I know of.  It is the sweet things that taste
 funny, or maybe things that have both sweet and sour in them.  But honey also
 tastes strange.  The taste of sense is damaged because my taste buds (some
 of them) are getting killed when they are dividing.  I have no trouble keeping
 anything down, it is getting it down that is the problem because of the taste.
 Jim made me a leek omelet and brie on bread today.  They were okay as was the
 milk (witha cardamom seed but no honey).
 
 I think different types of hair grow on different schedules.  Leg hair must
 almost never start growing.  Head hair must grow frequently enough that nearly
 all of mine has been hit by one of the last 7 cycles.  I don't notice any new
 short hairs on my head.  My eyebrow hairs all fell out long ago but new short
 ones have grown back.  They must grow more often than the head hairs.  Since
 this is a public conference I will not discuss any other types of hairs ;=).
 
 My fingernails continue to grow fast and strong.  I wonder why.  I still have
 trouble cutting them with one hand.  And my legs are rather sore from our walk
 into town and back.  
 
 Today I finally got 8 hours sleep, if you add it all up.  Jim has not exactly
 started on finishing off the hole in the wall.  Instead of flushing upstairs
 he snuck downstairs, which was quieter. He says the upstairs plumbing seem
 sto be slowly freezing again so he does not want to use it.  No heat upstairs.
 I turned on some heat in the downstairs bathroom so that drain from upstairs
 would stay a bit warmer as it goes through the bathroom wall downstairs.
#99 Rane Curl(rcurl) on Sat Jan 17 14:40:13 2004:
 He better use the upstairs plumbing if it is freezing, as pipes (and the
 toilet tank or trap) could rupture.  If one is concerned about water
 freezing in pipes one should let them flow slowly. 
 
#100 klg(klg) on Sat Jan 17 18:18:35 2004:
 SK-
 Got "accepted" to a CA patient/"survivor" support group.  Starts next 
 week.  Curious to see how it is.
#101 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Jan 17 19:44:59 2004:
 Please report back on the survivor group.  The local hospital here has a
 second Tuesday evening Lymphoma support group but it is too far to walk and
 too cold.  The upstairs bathroom is above freezing, it is just that the inside
 of the vent stack is closer to outside tempreature and the vapor starts to
 freeze in there, one thin layer at a time.  The downstairs bathroom is now
 60 which should help.
#102 David Brodbeck(gull) on Sun Jan 18 12:23:20 2004:
 Chemotherapy kills off rapidly-dividing cells.  This is why it makes
 your hair fall out, for example.  Taste bud cells also divide rapidly
 because the lifespan of a tastebud is measured in weeks.  My guess would
 be that keesan's tastebuds are not regenerating and the ones for some
 flavors are dying off more rapidly than others, skewing her sense of taste.
#103 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sun Jan 18 19:23:44 2004:
 My guess is the same.  Today I managed to eat my oatmeal so I think things
 are starting to improve.  In a week they will be nearly normal and then it
 is downhill again one last time.
 
 Today after Jim gave up trying to copying a Win98 drive using a DOS version
 of llpro (which complained some path names were too long) we hiked downtown
 (1.5 miles in 35 min) to the Life Sciences Concert at Michigan Theater.  I
 read the list of performers and Mary was not there any more, but there were
 a few engineering studnets, one LSA, and some music majors or even professors
 on double bass, contrabassoon, and timpani.  I guess people tend not to
 acquire these instruments as hobbies - not too much written for amateurs.
 
 Jim tried to lure me there with the 'refreshments follow' by Hiller's.  I knew
 better.  Hillers also donated food for the Life Sciences lecture series at
 the Law School last hear and it was some really horribly sweet cookies and
 soda.  Same this year, plus ginger ale.  I got some white grape juice before
 it went into the mix - sour.  Jim finished it for me, with sour strawberries
 in it as decoration.
 
 We finished off our big day on the town with Dinersty (they left out the salt
 for us this time) after briefly (very briefly) checking out the replacement
 for Hong Kong Inn, which used to be plain and simple and give you lots of food
 cheap.  The new place has fancy oak trim on the columns, menus in fancy
 plastic folders, someone who tries to seat you, and abominable loud music.
 
 It was cold out so we stopped at Dawn Treader.  They have a lovely large $45
 English to Slovene dictionary (I translate the other direction - that book
 has been there a few years) and we found three linux books.  One was for
 dummies, the other was for dummies to teach themselves but not labelled that
 way, and the other is 1995 Linux Doctor and it explained how to print from
 the command line without lpd, using gs!  sOutputFile=|lpr filename.ps.
 Also how to set up Cyrillic, and how to use DOSEMU.  1800 plus pages.
 $7.50.  Luckily nobody else had snapped up this bargain.  We suggested that
 they add the PBell 1991 DOS 5.0 book to the free box, where Jim picked up a
 book with Windows (31) C++ game samples.  1993.  The clerk says all their
 computer books as so old nobody buys them.
 
#104 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sun Jan 18 19:26:52 2004:
 I have Realaudio working with a 33K modem, after wasting a day trying to make
 a 56K winmodem work in a Gateway that thinks it has no Com2 in Windows.  You
 can even get 32K broadcasts.  Three stations called for WMP71 so I wasted 2
 hours downloading it only to discover it is hideous looking and you cannot
 remove the skin or the 'visualization' (animated colored gif that occupies
 half the screen).  I uninstalled.  There were some other strange formats used
 for streaming MP3 - how does one listen to those?  
 The Win98 Media Player has no skin and the animated gif can be made to go away
 by changing to compact.  71 compact makes the menu go away but retains all
 the gifs.  I use the menu.  
 
 What do we need to play a DVD movie besides a DVD drive and Realaudio DVD
 player?  We want to test out a drive.
#105 Steve Whipple(charcat) on Sun Jan 18 22:28:18 2004:
 Hi Sindi, have you tried playing a dvd in the player, I think most of them
 come with a dvd playing program on them, I could be worng though.
#106 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Mon Jan 19 01:32:08 2004:
 It is not a DVD player, it is a DVD drive that came in  a dead computer that
 we need to find a way to test.   
 
 Today I was unable to get two winmodems to work with a variety of drivers.
 Both said 'modem not responding' and 'cannot read port name from registray'.
 Both automatically installed in com1.  I had one of them working in the
 Gateway computer and tried to make it work in the Compaq with the same driver.
 The other won't work in either computer.  How do I make it read a port name
 from the registry?  Which file is the registry?  
#107 Mary Remmers(mary) on Mon Jan 19 06:03:19 2004:
 How was the LSO performance yesterday?  I didn't audition for the
 orchestra this year or last.  It was a huge time commitment.  But
 I try to make their concerts and would have been there yesterday
 had I not been playing in a benefit recital at the VA Hospital
 at exactly the same 2:00 start.
#108 Coloured Folk(willcome) on Mon Jan 19 06:54:26 2004:
 Mary Remmers on M-Net?!  What WILL they think of next!
#109 Scott Helmke(scott) on Mon Jan 19 08:36:27 2004:
 Re 106:
 
 DVD software is somewhat controlled; DVDs are actually encrypted in the lame
 hope that it would reduce piracy.  You'll have to download (possibly buy) some
 DVD software.
 
 The Windows Registry is a database of sorts, from when Microsoft had decided
 that the flat .ini files weren't good enough.  You can tweak the registry by
 running regedit (Start -> Run, type in "regedit" and hit enter).
#110 David Brodbeck(gull) on Mon Jan 19 09:13:27 2004:
 Be very careful what you do in there, though.  Changes take effect
 immediately, for the most part, and it's easy to break things.  You may
 want to save a copy of the registry first, with the Registry/Export
 Registry File command.
#111 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Mon Jan 19 09:38:30 2004:
 Our neighbor who knows more about Windows says we should not need to edit the
 registry and maybe he can stop by this evening to help.  I wonder if we should
 turn off 'plugnplay os' in CMOS as the Compaq was originally working that way.
 And we may have turned it on in the Gateway.  Nothing to lose but more time.
 
 The concert was excellent.
 
 I think I once looked at the registry and it was unintelligible to me. I am
 unlikely to find modem settings in there unless I learn more first.
#112 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Mon Jan 19 09:40:30 2004:
 The Registry is unintelligible to most people. It's all part oBush and Gates'
 Fifth Reich plan to control us all.
#113 Coloured Folk(willcome) on Mon Jan 19 14:00:07 2004:
 KEESAN AND GULL"RE HERE TOO?!  WACKADOO!
 M-Net's getting more users.
#114 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Mon Jan 19 15:48:31 2004:
 Can we lay DVDs using the DVD player that comes with RealOne?  Or do we also
 need some driver?  Were they invented by 1999 (WinSE)?
 
 I got the modem working by plowing through Windows Troubleshooter to the
 bitter end, where they told you about a tool supplied by USR in the USR
 drivers directory on CD that deleted modem driver info from the registry. 
 It happily deleted info for this non-USR modem (Conexant) and the next
 installation worked.  I had used a PCI driver the first time for this ISA
 card.  THe ISA driver worked.  That will teach me to delete files that I
 downloaded which did not work.  I will try the same technique to delete an
 actual USR driver from the registry and see if this gets rid of the error
 messages when I try to install a PCTel modem in the other computer.  I like
 USR.  They made my first modem, an external 1200, used, and even mailed me
 two diodes to fix it when lightning struck.  $150 for a used modem in 1985.
 
 
 Peeling skin near one nail, starting to bleed.  Nothing else exciting is
 happening.  Discovered Realaudio 8 won't load ('not enough memory' - we have
 48M) but RealOne will load and run fine on a 200MHz computer tho it claims
 to need 233MHz.  I think I have blocked the annoying animated commerciasl (you
 just won $1000 - pay us only $300) by blocking popup windows with Opera.  
 Jim is wondering now why he cannot run Visual C++ via the WCC website.  He
 has Borland C++ and gcc/g++ and DJGPP and two other DOS C compilers.  
#115 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Mon Jan 19 23:12:49 2004:
 Our neighbor went through the last five '56K' winmodems.  Three of them work
 at 28K when you upgrade from 33K to 56K and he says those use the other 56K
 standard that our ISP never adopted.  One of them acts dead with three
 different PCTel drivers.  The last one is an LTmodem and, after we removed
 all the other drivers (I used the USR regdel program) it installed itself
 using Win98 drivers from the CAB files.  Last time it did not work.  You have
 to remove the other modem drivers, reboot, shut down, then put in this modem.
 So we used the modem to download DVD software none of which worked for the
 DVD player.  RealOne says we need the software that came with the drive. 
 Someone else got the hard drive that came with the drive and wanted us to get
 the drive working for him without it.  
 
 Apart from the hot flashes, the laryngitis, and food tasting increasingly
 worse, I am doing well.  I could not stand to eat a tangerine today, horribly
 sour.  I can manage bread, and milk and eggs are okay.  I will eat next week
 instead.  Except I still get hungry when I don't eat.
#116 Ryan(ryan) on Tue Jan 20 08:51:23 2004:
 PCTel makes the absolute worst winmodems I have ever seen.  My laptop
 came with one of these pieces of shit.  It would disconnect me after
 being online after about 20 minutes from a 'cold start'..  If I reconnected
 without allowing for a 'cool down' period of several minutes, I would be
 lucky to get 5 more minutes before I got disconnected.  I had to buy 
 a separate pcmcia modem for my laptop at the time just so I could get
 online.
 
 Additionally, the drivers for PCTel were absolutely the worst thing
 you could possibly imagine.  In order for the device to "work" (Well, not
 really work, but be functional in some situations for a liminted amount
 of time), it required that an EXE be loaded into memory (started somewhere
 deep within the windows registry) in addition to the normal "driver."
 This EXE (I forget the name, it has been too long) would cause
 Windows "Application Errors" quite frequently.  
 
 I can't believe that company is still in business.  I guess they let
 PC MFGR's say their products have "modems" in them, at a cost of probably
 around 3 dollars per machine.
#117 David Brodbeck(gull) on Tue Jan 20 14:36:48 2004:
 The obsolete 56K standard that hardly anyone supports is called Kflex, 
 by the way.  It came out because a few companies couldn't wait for the 
 official standard, and came up with something incompatible on their own. 
  The official standard that's widely supported is V.90.
#118 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Jan 20 21:46:38 2004:
 So if the modems do not say v90 we should not try to make them run faster.
 The PCTel is .v92.  Maybe we are lucky it would not even install at all. It
 came out of a dead Compaq.  The Gateway had a Telepath 56K that would not work
 - let's see what it says on it -x2 technology for Windows.  1997
 That one worked fine with the 3com-usr 28K driver from the Win98 CD.
 We have three Lucents also 1997, worked at 33K until we tried to use several
 upgrades which made them 28K.  The PCTel went with our neighbor to be studied
 more closely.  Its only advantage was that it was a pci linmodem and I have
 a computer with only two ISA slots that I wanted to use for linux and one slot
 has a HGC card in it.  A pci modem would have freed up the other slot for a
 Creative sound card.  The pci sounds cards appear to be Windows only.  So who
 needs sound with linux.
 	We now have a 56K external modem which will solve the problem of the
 shortage of ISA slots, that we got in exchange for the 200MHz Compaq computer.
 We had a really big adventure today.  Jim carried me in a car to WCC and I
 visited his class.  I corrected the punctuation in a program (The Smith's
 house should be the Smith house or the Smiths' house).  We had lunch in
 Dynasty Buffet and I could eat the green beans and bok choy and broccoli and
 two kinds of melon and suprisingly the pineapple, so we bought a pineap;ple
 and some bananas and a few other things at Kroger's.  Juice for next week when
 my sense of taste should be somewhat better and I have to drink a lot.  You
 can now get orange juice with a choice of 2-3 of the following (but not all):
 Vitamin C, Vitamin D, VitaminsE, B6, B12, calcium.  Not with folic acid.  They
 are advertised as being good for your heart or your immune system or your kids
 (who won't eat vegetables - vitamin E AND carotene).  It might have been
 cheaper to put all the vitamins in the same juice but maybe it would not sold
 as well that way.
 	We delivered the computer we had made and set it up easily for the
 printer and AOL.  I tried Realaudio with IE 5 and Opera and it worked.  AOL
 said hello you have mail.  We then tried to use Radio@AOL and it would not
 load.  The live online help said we need 128M RAM not 48M.  You cannot put
 more than 48M into that model COmpaq, we discovered (and if you could it would
 cost more than the computer is worth by far).  The live help sent instructions
 on how to clear the cache - which is on the hard drive, not in the memory.
 Of course it did not help.  I then got Realaudio working while connected with
 AOL.  In theory AOL 5 does not do Radio.  I bet it would let you use
 Realaudio, and also load faster.  But she is happy that it kept her address
 book and she can still use it.  It did not keep Yahoo Messenger.  She was not
 happy with 1024 resolution because the screen looked different from 800
 resolution so we put it back and now the fonts are all very large and she has
 to scroll.  Too many new things at once - Win98 and AOL 7.  
 	Jim then tried to put our non-Windows 28.8K internal modem into her
 old computer which the store said would only work with an external modem. 
 Com2 had a strange address.  If he changed it to the usual one the CMOS setup
 program told him there was a hardware conflict.  The modem would not work on
 Com2 with Com2 disabled (Windows seems not to like that tho DOS requires it).
 WEe had another IBM once that gave us teh same problem and we used up our only
 external 28K modem on it.  We did not have another one.  So Jim tried Com3.
 He tried Com1.  He tried enabling and disabling ports.  Our computer recipient
 wanted to make supper (it was 7 pm) so we took the computer away.
 	We stopped to pick up a few things from the grexer (qborthwi) who gave
 us the computer - 400 MB tape backup, a CD-Rewriter (is this different from
 a plain CD writer and if so I suspect it is dead),  a couple of read Creative
 sound cards with manuals and floppy disks of drivers (!!!), another 28K
 internal modem.  On the Mac monitor I noticed a PC modem.  He said it was no
 good since there was no power supply.  It was a 33K.  'Just in time'
 
 	Jim still wants to make the internal 28K modem work. To learn from it.
 We have lots of USR modem power supplies.
 
 We will be wary of 1997 56K or upgradeable modems from now on.  Thanks.
#119 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Jan 21 10:15:40 2004:
 Today Jim woke me after 6 hours sleep by getting up early to work on
 defragmenting the Win95 computer that we replaced.  Something in the 10 or
 so programs whose icons are in the lower right of the screen keeps loading
 itself into memory and starting defrag over again at 1%-0%.  He ran in SAFE
 mode and got half way through.  The drive is 11% fragmenting.  It looks
 terrible when viewed with scandisk.  This offends his sense of something or
 other.  One of the programs is checking memory usage.  I cannot find a way
 to remove it from automatically loading.  The others look harmless - Yahoo
 messenger, weatherbug, volume control.  How do we remove these things?
 She never uses them, just the start menu.  
 
 Before this I spent an hour getting the video to work again.  Jim somehow
 misunderstood when our neighbor said to change BIOS to NOT do plugnplay and
 he changed it to do it.  Then PnP conflicted with the video.  Troubleshooter
 said to remove the video driver which I did and Win95 put it right back in
 the same place.  So I removed three lines in System about PlugNPlay and
 restarted.  It put back PlugNPlay and then video and they no longer
 conflicted.  Sound is marked as not working but it works, same as in my
 computer.  We heard the Windows startup sound as we were reading about the
 sound conflict.  I removed a few icons that led to programs that were looking
 for nonexistent dll files.  There seem to be two installations of AOL 5.0 on
 there of different sizes in aol and aol.001.   This annoys Jim too.  I
 suggested we defrag and put in a modem and just give it back that way.
 
 I am coughing again and sneezed once.  My own fault for not remaining in
 isolation for another three weeks.  We have been among crowds at the library,
 two restaurants, and a concert, and now at class.  I cannot imagine what the
 bone marrow transplant people are going through - a year of this, with much
 worse resistance than I have.  They survive, I will survive.
#120 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Jan 22 08:57:20 2004:
 The computer video kept starting to conflict with PnP BIOS extension boards
 every other time we loaded Windows but we finally got a standard modem working
 (no idea how, it did not work the first few times - Jim thinks it helped to
 load Windows with no modem in there, uninstall all modems, turn off, put in
 modem, turn on and load Windows again) and at the moment the video seems to
 be working again.  Whenever I remove PnP BIOS and restart, it reloads a lot
 of other things such as IDE controllers - one each time it restarts - and PCI
 buses, and the joystick (five times now) which does not exist...  'I hate
 Windows'.  I hope we are done with Windows and then I can play with linux
 sound and two CD burners.  Is a Cd-rewritable drive different from CD-R?
 
 Jim biked off to WCC at 6 am.  It is 8 degrees at 8 am and a bit windy.  I
 hope he does not bring back any new viruses as I have been relatively healthy
 all this cycle and want to make it through one more cycle without the flu.
 
 I get to enjoy the next four days.  Hands hardly numb, knees working,
 laryngitis affects pitch but not so much the volume of my voice.  Hot flashes
 continue but only wake me every 1.5 hours for about 20 minutes.  Food tastes
 about as bad as it has for the past few months.  Next week it might taste
 better and then worse again for 2 weeks.  It is too cold to go anywhere.
#121 Psycho Freak Goalie(ea) on Thu Jan 22 22:58:08 2004:
 Sindi - to stop something from automatically running in 
 Win95/98/Me/2000/xp
 
 Open the start menu, select "run", and type msconfig in the run box.  
 This will bring up a program that you can use to turn stuff off at 
 startup.
#122 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Jan 22 23:25:00 2004:
 Wow, thanks!  I managed to get Realaudio out of Quick Launch on my own
 computer today.  I could not even find Quick Launch in the index of our Win955
 book.  I think we have conquered Windows for a while.  We plugged in a bunch
 of sound cards.  One stopped the hard drive from running (some sort of
 conflict)?  One sort of installed in Win98 but was missing something. 
 Recycle.  We kept the ones with drivers and the ones that passed the sound
 through them without having drivers loaded so you can use them to play CDs
 out the back of the computer through speakers.  People seem to prefer that
 to plugging in the front of the CD.  Soundblaster passes through sound and
 has drivers.  Most of the other cards did one or the other - the older cards
 pass through sound but are probably also 8 bit.  
 
 I just learned that Linux likes Soundblaster but not Creative Vibra16 - what
 is the difference between them?  They will work the same in DOS.  
 
 Jim is trying to learn to compile C++ for DOS in a class that teaches Visual
 C++ for Windows.  Can anyone help him?  He tried to compile a 2K file and got
 out 600K of something similar looking ending in .exe that would not run.  It
 was not a binary file.  
 
 My sense of taste is still not improved.  My hair (what is left) has started
 to come out again.  But I feel much better apart from that.  I also feel
 hungry but I don't feel like eating more sour stuff.  Ice cream might work
 but it is cold.  
 
 A friend who is a nurse said to call and talk to her any time since she cannot
 give me a hug.  I am hard to understand on the phone.  Good thing there is
 email and snail mail.  I owe letters to several people who tell me they really
 don't like using email.  Maybe I can answer Monday while my left hand is tied
 up (unless they jab my right hand again - maybe I should let them since my
 left hand has finally stopped hurting).
 
 Jim went to bed.  He biked off into the sunrise at 6 am to do homework before
 class because the WCC net was down and he could not get his homework here.
 He said it was rather windy (as well as being around zero degrees).  I guess
 there is less traffic earlier in the morning.  The bike path along the river
 is being kept clear, amazingly.  Some people think it is a path to skate or
 walk dogs on, but not in the winter.  Or maybe dogs walk there in the winter.
 
 I am told you can play DVD movies on a 33MHz computer (slowly).  I wonder what
 drivers we need to run it on our computer.
#123 David Brodbeck(gull) on Fri Jan 23 09:45:02 2004:
 If by "slowly" you mean "around one frame per second, with no sound",
 that might be right.  For acceptable quality, you'll either need a
 hardware decoder card or a faster CPU.  Anything from about 300 MHz on
 up would probably do it.  You'll also need a DVD playback program; it
 takes more than just a driver.
#124 Kevin Albaugh(albaugh) on Fri Jan 23 13:07:39 2004:
 Where would the msconfig program normally be located in Win2K?  My Win2K PC
 at work says "can't find it"; I wonder if it was deliberately removed by IT
 to keep people from turning off things...
#125 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Jan 23 21:46:02 2004:
 We have the DVD player in Realone and a 500MHz computer.  We tried to get this
 working on a 233MHz computer and it was missing some drivers.  We downloaded
 three different drivers for that model DVD drive and found nothing that
 appeared to be usable.  Two of them were some hardware identification program.
 How large is a DVD driver supposed to be?  Samsung made lots of different
 models - do they have something generic as do CD-ROM drives made since 1995?
 
 Tonight we had a visitor - jep brought over his dead aquarium lamp and he and
 Jim managed to replace the switch and then discovered that it still did not
 work and needed new contacts, which had corroded away to nothing.  We
 attempted to fix an Epson printer that required a 40 min download for the
 basic manual (on a fast modem), and tried to fix a dead cartridge or two, and
 had supper and a lot of fun hearing about submarines and fishes.  
 
 This afternoon I shoveled Jim's walk and three of the neighbors' walks.  It
 was light fluffy snow, but I was impressed that I could manage this.  Just
 four months ago it was an accomplishment to walk to the corner and back.  
 It is still work climbing stairs.
 
 Tomorrow we may have another last day on the town before I go into retirement
 again for 10 days.  The library is having a 50 cent booksale (down from $1
 or more) and we will see what they have in outdated linux books.  
 
 Jim compiled a program about how to count calories in order to lose weight.
 You are supposed to stop drinking orange juice and eat more bananas.
#126 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Jan 24 16:08:36 2004:
 Today we went to the library book sale to get linux books.  There was one
 Redhat which we left there but Jim found a lab book for C++ and I found a
 Norwegian-English pocket dictionary which I could not pass up.  I have little
 trouble getting to town but coming back it is uphill and my legs get tired
 and they are sore again.  I should do this more often.  On the way back my
 neighbor from where I usually live came out the door of her futon store so
 we stopped to visit.
 	Futons now come not just in cotton but in cotton with foam core, all
 foam, cotton over foam over cotton over innerspring, and polyester fiber over
 cotton and who knows what else.  They have one frame that incorporates a
 tatami mat for those who don't want to put their futon on the floor (and
 matching seats and bedside tables topped with bits of mat).  It counts as as
 futon if you can bend it.  One futon was on a frame which lets you crank up
 the end like a hospital bed.  One was cut in two pieces (all foam inside) with
 sort of a hinge - without the hinge it would be a 'mattress'.  The latter are
 harder to move through doorways and attic hatches.
 	No more social events scheduled other than Monday's chemo session and
 the several hours of waiting around when I talk to other people there and
 don't feel so weird for a while without much hair or voice.  My voice is
 actually a lot closer to normal today which means I am due for another session
 very soon.  It will probably be better on the day I see the ENT doctor just
 over three weeks from Monday.  Who cares, the insurance is paying for it since
 I am going to be over $8000 again.  The last CAT scan (no contrast solution)
 was only about $3000 instead of $4000.  They can charge what they like.  It
 is three times as much for abdomen-pelvis-lungs as it is for just one, but
 does not take much longer to do.  
#127 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sun Jan 25 18:19:56 2004:
 Food is tasting sort of okay today.  I had mustard greens, which are always
 bitter, and grapefruit juice, also bitter, and neither was sour.  Tomorrow
 things go back to what has become 'normal'.  
 
 I usually phone my brother on his birthday, which will be Tuesday, but I won't
 have a voice for a couple of weeks after tomorrow so I tried today.  The
 babysitter does not know when they will be back.  I finally got her to take
 a message.  
 
 Jim just made sure the car starts.  We already used it a week ago.  It needs
 the exhaust system patched at its other end and some belt tightened but it
 will get us 2 miles and back tomorrow.  Too cold to patch things today.
 The bathroom space heater died, maybe from overwork.  
 
 Jim's wcc internet connection has been dead all day.  My ISP (which I was
 going to drop but it is hardly worth it to save $5 month through Nov.) was
 running at 0-500 bytes/sec.  The file we need to download to install a small
 version of Slackware 3.5 to which we can add a small compiler that will fit
 on a small hard drive on a laptop computer is at two URLs to which the links
 are broken.  Jim wants to take DOS and linux compilers to school in his
 backback, on the bike, since they have only Windows there.  He could not get
 his assignment from the website today or Friday.  We had been planning to get
 a lot done today before I go down for the week tomorrow.  At least I don't
 have to plan my life around a 3-week cycle again after this last one.
 
 
 Jim is pleased that he got DJGPP to compile the same 1/2 page program that
 gcc and Visual Basic could manage.  He had to change PI to Pi or else not
 define it as a constant.  The output was 600K and the program that compresses
 and strips it will run only under Windows and that is what the DOS compiler
 is supposed to use.  Odd.  He is looking into linux nasm assembly language
 to write smaller programs.  I tried to compile openssl so that I could compile
 lynx with ssl and it failed some test, meaning I might need to compile some
 test program since.  
 
 It is nice all of this did not go wrong a couple of weeks ago when I was not
 getting much sleep, and that none of it is important.  
 
 Jim might rob the thermostat out of the dead heater to replace the one in the
 new heater that runs constantly in a 60 degree room and overheats it.
#128 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Mon Jan 26 23:08:38 2004:
 10:00 blood draw ran 1/2 late.  We met a woman from Alpena who took 3 months
 off her job to come here to stay with a friend who is getting a bone marrow
 transplant and is too weak to care for herself.  We met another woman from
 Alpena there with her husband who was getting a bone marrow biopsy.  She was
 very nervous.  They are togethre 54 years.  She taught music - piano, violin,
 drum, etc.  Whatever they wanted she would teach herself first.
 
 I ran into the Cuban lady who had a remissiong and is getting a new treatment
 that requires spending 3 days in the hospital each time, every 3 months.  I
 met someone I had seen before with T-cll lymphoma who had 6 treatments and
 then after 2 months a remission and this time they are doing two treatments
 if ICI (3 days in hospital) and then 1 month in the hospital for bone marrow
 transplant, maybe her own.  I gave her my phone number if she wants company
 or outside food.  I saw three small bald children some with masks.
 
 The people working in reception had hearts and cupids all over the place, even
 on their heads, and were blowing bubbles at one baby.  
 
 They were crowded so at 3 pm they gave me a bedroom and brought in a CD
 player.  I knew the nurses from my first time in 'bedside'.  One of them
 ignored my suggestion to use the large vein in my right hand that worked last
 time and tried one in myleft hand - failed (no blood backed up).  She heated
 my left hand and tried another vein (not the large one) - failed.  The failed
 ones hurt more.  She called another nurse who heated my right hand and used
 the large vein.  It was okay and hurt less.  By now my left hand also hurt
 in two places and hurt more from teh pressure of a little pad bound on
 tightly.  They sped up the rituxan to just 2 hours instead of 3 (ro originally
 5) and I had no problems with it, and then the rest was done by 7 pm and we
 celebrated by decorated a pineapple with straws and eating it.  One nurse took
 a piece.  
 
 	I talked the doctor out of making an appointment after the PET scan
 for him to explain the results.  It can be done by email. But he wants to have
 an exam after the CAT scan 4 months from now.  No more IVs in teh CAT scans
 after this next one Feb 17.  Jim will skip school to fetch and carry and hold
 my hand.  
 
 	The 1 benadryl is still putting me to sleep but I ought to eat
 something first.
 	Excuse typos.  I am too nervous to sleep much before this and the
 chemicals may also be affecting my brain.
 	We celebrated my last chemotherapy by going to the coop and getting
 lettuce, an avocado, chocolate, and tofu.  I will go eat some salad now.
#129 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Jan 27 08:12:33 2004:
 The benadryl was putting me to sleep but I stayed up until after midnight when
 Jim finally went to bed and woke about 6, probably from the prednisone.
 Today I seem to be making fewer typos.  
 
 They don't do more than 8 sessions because the doxorubicin (adriamycin) not
 only causes laryngitis but can cause heart problems due to inflammation. 
 Maybe that is what the prednisone is for, since it reduces inflammation.
 I need to take one in 1/2 hour.  They can't taste as bad as the
 benadryl/tylenol combination, which nearly makes me gag when mashed in apple
 sauce.  
#130 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Jan 28 18:47:20 2004:
 Monday my second nurse was the one interested in pawpaws.  She also walks the
 2 miles to work and lives not too far from Jim, so today we hiked over to her
 house to give her some ice cleats. She traded us cookies.  Said her home email
 had stopped working so we phoned U of M and got the mail website and figured
 out her passwords (I could now use her mail, as if I don't have enough of my
 own accounts).  She has an AMD 5x86 75MHz and we offered her something at
 least 5 times as fast with a working CD-ROM drive that is shorter.  She gave
 us a tour of the 1942 house she has been fixing up.  Jim's is 3 years older
 but very similar floor plan.  She added dormers.  Her mother has been staying
 with her while doing chemotherapy.  We invited her along to visit the guy
 making pawpaw wine when she mentioned she is interested in making wine and
 beer.  They are both quite tall - good thing I don't have to keep up with
 someone any taller than Jim when walking.
#131 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Jan 29 09:45:32 2004:
 I think my inability to remember things (old or new) was caused by Monday's
 drugs, not the lack of sleep due to prednisone, because even though I got to
 sleep after 3 am I can think straighter today.  I was having to write down
 everything yesterday or it would disappear.
 
 The winery tour is on for some time in February.  I will stay busy until then
 with linux.  Still compiling lynx - it turns out I need to compile zlib first
 in order to get the static libraries instead of the shared ones that came with
 the precompiled version.  Same for openssl - which took longer than lynx to
 compile and was tricky.  Lynx had to be pointed at the ncurses directory but
 I got a static version of ncurses from a later slackware (8.0) with the right
 libraries in it.  You need one file from zlib to use .gz help files with lynx.
 I need to ln -s /dev/hdb /dev/cdrom (or vice versa) to play CDs with linux
 and to download 22M midi patches to play midi files.  In DOS 2M RAM seems to
 hold all the equivalent wavetable files.  Real8 is said to work with links
 not just with opera.
#132 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Thu Jan 29 10:59:32 2004:
 Wavetable files are not as advanced as minid files, i.e. they do not encode
 as much info.
#133 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Jan 29 11:46:57 2004:
 Does that mean they don't sound quite as good?  They are a lot better than
 FM synthesis sound, which is like a kazoo.
 
 I compiled zlib and now lynx configure program can't find gzopen or -lz
 and still won't link zlibrary.  I can manage without .gz'ed help files, in
 fact I can manage without help files at all if need be.  What is gzopen and
 why did it not come with zlib?
 
 I am about to try getting links to play CDs again.  It is much easier just
 to push the play button on the drive but this is a test.
#134 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Thu Jan 29 11:49:43 2004:
 It does indeed mean they don't sound as good. I believe they encode sound as
 stereo, whereas a wavetable file sounds like those little pocket piano things
 you can get for kids.
#135 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Jan 29 12:48:09 2004:
 I am not sure that even good midi files are worth a download of at least 4
 hours for 22M, or 3 days at current connection speeds due to virus loads.
 Realplayer 8 for linux won't run - gives me 'segmentation fault' - why?
 It is a large .bin file.  I did chmod u+x on it as instructed.  Does it need
 to be somewhere on the path perhaps?  I am trying to run it from /tmp where
 I can run other programs that are not on the path if I go there.
#136 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Thu Jan 29 12:56:29 2004:
 /tmp is probably not a good place to run programs from. a segmenmtation fault
 is the equivalent of a windows GPF or "illegal operation".
#137 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Jan 29 13:09:46 2004:
 What makes it illegal to run a program from /tmp?  
#138 Joe(gelinas) on Thu Jan 29 13:11:54 2004:
 Not "illegal", just not a good idea, because /tmp gets cleaned out at
 irregular intervals.
#139 Phil Green(polytarp) on Thu Jan 29 13:55:05 2004:
 But only on some systems, which even I didn't know, and that caused me to
 accidentally delete /var/tmp on a work computer, and oh my gosh did I ever
 hit my forehead hard.
#140 David Brodbeck(gull) on Thu Jan 29 14:49:55 2004:
 On some systems /tmp is even a ramdisk.
#141 Phil Green(polytarp) on Thu Jan 29 15:01:02 2004:
 Wack.
#142 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Jan 29 15:06:22 2004:
 I clean out /tmp when I think it needs cleaning and I try out programs there
 before moving the working ones somewhere else.  I put realplayer8 in its own
 directory and it still gives segmentation faults.  
 
 I need to add another \ to my lynx compilation script so it will compile
 statically and then compress the output.
#143 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Jan 29 20:22:27 2004:
 It told me command not found when I added \ to the first line of the script.
 I am supposed to figure out what command was not found now.
 
 Today I have numb shaky hands, I am sleepy but cannot sleep, my legs are
 wobbly, etc.  This gets worse until Tuesday at which point my tongue and lips
 will hurt and things will taste worse again. My hair is falling out again 
 but not making much mess because there is little left to come out.  I don't
 care, it is the last time (I hope) and in two weeks I will be nearly normal
 except for the laryngitis and things still tasting funny.  Hot flashes might
 have been a little milder for a couple days but are hotter again now.  At
 least I know what to expect as it is the 8th time, and my blood counts are
 better than for the last couple times, and I am not coughing nor is Jim.  He
 is recovering from 12 hours of chasing around school by taking a very long
 hot bath.  
 
 I cooked for myself.  Hands not up to chopping but I made a peanut butter
 sandwich, and warmed some soup, and boiled two medium eggs and used the water
 for noodles and ripped up some lettuce.  The noodles taste a bit odd.  I put
 cheese on them for disguise.  
 
 Now that we figured out how to upgrade two motherboards from 100MHz to 133MHz,
 I learn that Kiwanis is throwing out 200MHz cpus.  Maybe they will save us
 some to make a really blazing fast computer for my nurse.  The one I upgraded
 to 166MHz has an F0 0F bug - what is that?  At least it does not spread.
#144 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Jan 30 06:37:21 2004:
 This week I am now consistently waking at 5 am or before (plus a few other
 times during the very short night) after getting to sleep somewhere around
 1 am.  I got up and managed to break open my own capsule and mix it with
 applesauce.
 
 I am having the usual temporary shaky hands, which are a little more numb.
 This will not last long.  The 2-day slight incontinences is over - the poisons
 must cause bladder irritation.  I have pains in my upper arms, which should
 be gone in a day or so, and sore leg muscles, ditto.  Tongue is getting a bit
 sore and that will last around a week.  Eyes are runny but that gradually gets
 somewhat better during the cycle.  
 Things that I expect to get worse - immunity and fatigue (will start to
 improve around Tuesday), sense of taste, sore tongue, mouth, and lips.
 
 Will get slowly better - laryngitis and hopefully some day the hot flashes.
 
 This is really minor compared to what many other people go through and I am
 even cheerier about it than the last 7 cycles since I expect it to be the last
 time on all of this.  And if not, people have survived worse.  
 
 Maybe I will have more hair by the time it gets warm enough to go out without
 a hat.  I may celebrate somehow around May 20 if the first checkup goes well.
 Two people I talked to did not make it that far but they had different types
 of lymphoma.  
 
 It will be nice to be able to bike again and spend time at my own apartment,
 which I have not been able to do since July.  Things are a mess there but at
 least I don't have the pile of computers any more, it is here as are the hard
 drives, sound cards......  Most of the food, many of my dictionaries, some
 clothing.  I wear the same few articles of clothing all the time so as to save
 space here (and nobody sees them but me and Jim anyway).  I still need to drag
 myself up by the banister to climb stairs and my apartment has stairs to the
 basement bathroom so it is easier here.  But my piano is there.  
 
 The two people who did not 'make it' to the first checkup are not dead, one
 of them did just fine with his second round of therapy and the other is not
 looking forward to it (two 3-day treatments in hospital, bone marrow
 transplant of her own marrow) but is feeling a lot better about it now that
 I told her that the other guy has been okay for 5 years and was in bad shape
 to start with.  So far at least 4 of the 5 people I talked to with recurrences
 had lymphoma of some sort.  My mother had a recurrence (and two radiation
 treatments) but hers was not treatable with chemotherapy and it was 20 years
 ago.  I will try to enjoy the next two weeks, hope for the best on Feb 17 PET
 scan, and assume that the next CAT scan 3 months after that will go well.
 
 The doctor expected me to come in to see him a few days after the scan so he
 could explain it to me, but agreed to let me skip that appointment unless
 there was something wrong after I told him I translate this sort of thing for
 a living and my doctor friend was sending me copies of my scan results.  I
 still have to have blood draws and checkups every 3 months as well as CT
 scans.
 
 The hospital has started charging for 6 instead of 5 units of Rituxan now that
 I have gained back 15 pounds, meaning an extra $1000 each infusion for just
 that one drug.  It would have been a lot cheaper to stay skinny.  And they
 charged me for 3 hours infusion of it most times but 2 hours once.  It took
 an extra hour to get the IV in last time - will they charge $500 extra for
 that?  They were busy with other patients while I just waited around in the
 room.  They charged for 3 kytril antinausea pills one time and I only get two,
 so I might ask them to fix that and the insurance company gives a commission
 on overcharges that I report.  
 
 I should get some more interesting reading matter.  Yesterday I sorted out
 all the pieces of paper that I keep getting from the insurance company and
 the hospital - bills, receipts, etc.  They are in sort of random order as they
 get billed at various times after things happen depending on the category,
 so that some later events went towards my deductible while earlier ones got
 paid by insurance.
 
 I paid them $8000 last time to cover both infusions and the PET scanin advance
 and I hope they don't apply it to last year as it is this year's deductible.
 The woman there made various notes about this, and a phone call.  I cannot
 phone in my debit card number, only use it in person, and only up to $1000,
 so I wrote a check.
 
 I also have a sore spot again where the spleen biopsy was - that seems to get
 worse after each infusion for no reason I can think of.  And sore spots in
 both hands where I was jabbed, with blue blotches around two of them.  The
 first needle may have missed the vein and hit a nerve as no blood came out.
 The nurse said no blood was coming into the needle of the second one so she
 removed it - I wonder if she went all the way through as lots of blood came
 out when she removed it, and lots went into my hand.  The third one worked
 but is also blue blotchy.  None of this is terribly painful, just annoying
 but I assume it will eventually all stop hurting and if not, who cares, it
 is nice to be alive and feel things.
 
 I may wake Jim (it is already 6:30) to cook breakfast, or have a peanut butter
 sandwich with my last mashed 7 10 mg prednisones.  This time they gave me a
 special non-child-proof bottle which I can actually open myself.  My hands
 are still not as strong as before.
#145 Scott Helmke(scott) on Fri Jan 30 10:18:41 2004:
 Sindi,  a couple of Pentium II motherboards from my old office are still
 available... you turned them down a couple years ago, but perhaps they've aged
 enough to be useful?
#146 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Fri Jan 30 10:33:32 2004:
 The illegality of the segmentation fault and the not-a-good-idea-ness of
 putting a program in /tmp are two separate issues. A segmentgation fault means
 the program is somehow broken.
#147 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Jan 30 11:43:44 2004:
 I am trying to run RealPlayer8 for Linux - I doubt that they would post a
 broken program.  Maybe it requires a Pentium II to run?  We have a Pentium
 II and I will try it on that next.  
 
 What I would really like is Pentium I 200MHz cpus to put in our existing
 boards.  The PII need special cases and we don't have those, but I think we
 have one that we could modify to fit by adding a panel so yes thanks, however
 our current prospective new owner of a computer wants a small case and we are
 thinking of setting her up with the PI 166MHz that you gave us a year or two
 ago, which will fit UNDER her 14" monitor instead of the 25"  486 that
 she has on the floor next to the desk now.  It will take a 200MHz cpu if we
 can find one for it.  Do you have any of those?  Kiwanis throws them out. 
 
 I got 2 more hours sleep this morning after my last (awful tasting) prednisone
 so am up to nearly 6 hours and feel relatively great!
 
 Jim did his homework already.  He switched yesterday from a morning class
 taught by someone who is not teaching the way he can understand, to an
 afternoon class.  The first instructor is learning to use the new MS program
 and posted the assignment at the 'blackboard' website.  Apparently the second
 instructor makes up all the assignments and supplies them and the answers to
 the other two instructors.  His first instructor also posted the answers, in
 fact she posted an entire directory.  Jim has been having an easy time doing
 the programming but the typing takes him forever and I need to fix all his
 spellings.  He will just change the first line in this one - he thought about
 changing a few spellings too.  His favorite spelling is volumn which does not
 rhyme with column.  
 
 I am still trying to compile lynx with zlib.  I may have an extra space in
 my script for configuring it.  openssl is at least under control.  
 
 Jim is microwaving apples to make them taste better so I will continue to
 force fluids.  Time to start gargling salt-and-soda water for a week.  If I
 can avoid catching the flu for one more week (by not going near anyone) I have
 it made.  Assuming Jim does not pick up something in class, which is not until
 next Tuesday.  His new class is full (24).  The old one was 12 and dropping.
#148 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Jan 31 09:19:07 2004:
 No more prednisone!  It has been over 24 hours.  Now I can spend a few days
 being sleepy instead of nervous.
 
 Today I got my first hate mail from someone at grex that I never heard of.
 I forwarded it to uce (spam) before bothering to read it.  Strange.  I presume
 the sender is rather young and does not know how to do 'forget'.  
 
 libncurses.a is only half-size.  I wonder how long it will take to compile
 ncurses in order to get that one file the right size.  THere must be an easier
 way to get the file.  What is an .a file?
#149 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Jan 31 17:54:39 2004:
 I decided to risk walking into town today instead of waiting until Thursday
 for my immune system to come back as it does not matter any more if I am sick
 for the next month because no more chemicals.  We had something due at the
 library.  It is still a tiring 1.5 mile hike up and down what feels like steep
 hills.  We bought one lunch at the Mysore vegetarian Indian restaurant, which
 the cooks insisted had no hot peppers, in fact no peppers, only some cardamom
 and a few other spices, and they even put it on a paper plate instead of a
 styrofoam bowl, and Jim ate most of it because it hurt.  It might have hurt
 even without the hot peppers as my mouth is sore again, by I figure it should
 sterilize as well as salt-soda solution.  
 	After we got back Scott kindly dropped off two PII motherboards which
 we need to put into cases.  And I proved that you can undo the floppy disk
 damage caused by writing a half-disk image to disk by writing a whole-disk
 image to disk.
 	The hand with the two failed IVs still hurts but the bruise is fading.
 It will be strange not to be on a three-week schedule any more.
#150 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Mon Feb  2 12:51:18 2004:
 For two days I have felt like I am catching the flu - cold, achey, etc.  But
 I recall this happening in mid-cycle before.  I thought yesterday everything
 that was going to hurt had started hurting, until I woke up with a sore
 windpipe.  The entire lining of my respiratory and digestive tracts has
 probably been killed (or cells in all of it anyway) and my body is now
 cleaning up and I have to blow my nose a lot, and also wipe my eyes a lot.
 
 I discovered that not only do I pull muscles at this time of cycle but I also
 get muscle cramps when I sit on my feet.  I have stopped sitting on my feet.
 (The chair is too low for the table on which one of our computers sits).
 Muscles also replicate frequently and muscles cells must have been killed.
 
 Tomorrow I should start to feel better.  Today I will go back to bed.
 The hand with the 2 failed IVs is still hurting.  The one with the successful
 IV is fine.  
#151 Todd(tod) on Mon Feb  2 13:10:32 2004:
 
#152 Starzburtz, King, 'n' Aerre.  good firm.(witzbolt) on Mon Feb  2 15:34:27 2004:
 i'm ejaculating on your tits.
#153 Jim Daloonik(naftee) on Mon Feb  2 16:48:13 2004:
 tod has big tits
#154 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Feb  3 09:03:24 2004:
 Which file is it that I can edit to add someone to the ignore filter rather
 than running the ignore command, which requires typing in all the old names?
 
 Today my immune system must be recovering because I have stopped blowing my
 nose continually and I am no longer freezing.  Yesterday I had the heat turned
 up (to at least 60), I was in bed under a pile of bedding, and wearing lots
 of clothing (6 layers on top including three of wool) and I still needed to
 run a heating pad.  I have also stopped coughing.  I think I can stop worrying
 about getting deathly ill during this (last) cycle now that I have an immune
 system again.  
 
 Jim's neighbor, who asked him to help with her plumbing, sent over a half
 gallon can of chicken bouillon.  The label shows carrots, tomatos, garlic,
 onions, peppers and celery.  The ingredients list shows water, salt, chicken
 fat, onion juice, carrot juice, sugar, natural flavors, and some other
 chemicals.  One cup gives me 50% of my daily sodium requirement.  I am
 supposed to be gargling salt water this week as a disinfectant and this should
 do it.  I alternated sips of this with large swallows of water.  
 
 The nurse said to let her know if I had chills or fever over 101 F so I took
 my temperature last night and it was 100.4F.  I did not know you could be
 chilled and have a fever at the same time.  I feel much better today.
 
 My mother, who was not doing chemotherapy but rather radiation for her
 cerebral lymphoma, twice ended up in the hospital with pneumonia.  One time
 the neighbor found her on the kitchen floor.  I really should not have gone
 to the library Saturday but I figured if I got sick it would not interfere
 with the next treatment as there is no next treatment (for a while, anyway).
 
 It should be all uphill starting today!
 
 Jim is going to take some chicken broth to my neighbor, who is expecting only
 a USB keyboard.  Sunday he helped us over the phone to get a Win98 computer
 to dial and connect to UMich.  We built it for my cancer center nurse to
 replace her 486.  I know you are not supposed to just move over working
 installations on hard drive, but we did that and the only conflict was between
 'two' sound cards so I removed both and reinstalled one and that worked. 
 Turns out this was set up for a network and had 3 or 4 extra 'adaptors' - VPN
 stuff, whatever that is.  The error message said something about network
 protocols not being negotiated.  I deleted ALL the adaptors and then added
 dialup adaptor and TCP/IP.  It worked.  It crashes once in a while when doing
 Opera preferences but that is probably normal.  Just don't change more than
 one preference at a time if you want to use Windows.  Ctl-Alt-Del when it
 crashes.  What is 'Microsoft family logon'?  It kept adding that when I added
 dial-up adaptor.  No families will be using this computer.  
 
 We moved over this hard drive because it had a bunch of sports games on there
 and she likes basketball.  I hope she likes these games.  It would have been
 quicker just to start from Win98 CD.  
 
 I put on IE 5.5 from an Earthlink CD and it added what it said was 70MB for
 the 'minimal installation' including a bunch of things I had gone to some
 trouble to remove (Outlook) and now if you use IE you get popup ads from
 Earthlink.  Then I used IE 5.5 to download Opera which can block popup ads.
 The Netscape 4.04 on there kept going offline after accessing one website and
 the home page could only be set to flashnet.  
#155 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Feb  3 16:09:35 2004:
 I was reading what I wrote 3 weeks ago and it looks like my sense of taste
 will continue getting worse until at least Friday.  This morning oatmeal and
 milk tasted edible, while this afternoon milk tasted bad.  I had a raw carrot
 and a preserved egg.  The chicken broth tasted bad too but a lot less salty.
 It came frozen and Jim must have thawed it partially and the part to thaw
 first contains most of the salt.  I see there what looks like a large block
 of ice with fissures in it where the salty liquid thawed.  Sort of like ice
 melter.  My tongue is now numb instead of sore.  I wonder what I will force
 myself to eat for the next few days.
 
 Temperature down to 99.2.  I would have hated to end up back in the hospital
 with needles in my arms and not being allowed to sleep at night.  Someone with
 T-cell lymphoma whose treatment failed after 2 months said she had a lot of
 fevers during therapy and I did not so maybe I am okay.  I had a continual
 high fever last summer before therapy.  This was my first fever since that
 and I would normally have ignored being sick for a day.  Glenda is certainly
 going through much worse than I am.  I think what is worst is the uncertainty
 as to whether this actually all worked.  I do feel a lot better than before
 therapy and am still alive.  I would like to keep my own bone marrow though.
 Will know more in 2 weeks plus a few days.  
 
 What do people eat when they are awaiting repeat surgery for diverticulitis?
 My mother used to run a little newsletter for dialysis patients, telling
 people how to soak canned tuna fish to remove the salt.  This week I can eat
 salt, in fact I can eat anything I want to eat, but I don't want to eat
 anything, however I get hungry....  I don't know how people manage when their
 therapy makes them nauseous.  
#156 Glenda F. Andre(glenda) on Tue Feb  3 22:35:08 2004:
 Since I don't have diverticulitis, I don't have any of the normal food
 restrictions (mainly anything that remains recognizable in the stool: corn,
 nuts, seeds, fruit peels, etc.)  I had a perferated diverticulum, you don't
 have to have diverticulitis for that to occur.
 
 I do, however, now have food restrictions because of the blood thinners I am
 currently taking for the blood clots.  I have to watch the amount of vitamin
 K I eat.  This means not increasing or decreasing the amount I get.  Vitamin
 K is found in high concentrations in apple peels and green leafy veggies. 
 There are a few other things (they gave me a 10 or so page list of foods and
 their vitamin K values, I haven't had time too really look at it yet).  I have
 to notify the anticoagulant clinic of any change in diet, exercise,
 medications, bleeding, etc.  I have to go in for blood draws every Mon, Wed,
 and Fri until the blood levels stablize, then probably once every week or so
 for the duration.  Since I have been steadily loosing weight since the surgery
 and that affects blood levels, I will probably have to have them more often
 than what they would normally do.
#157 Joe(gelinas) on Wed Feb  4 00:03:10 2004:
 I think fevers cause chills because you are so much warmer than the
 surrounding air.  Just as you shiver outside, to keep your body temperature
 up, so do you shiver when you have a fever, to keep the temperature up.
 Heat loss is heat loss, as far as the body is concerned.
#158 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Feb  4 04:46:22 2004:
 I was not shivering when I was chilled, just achey on any uncovered part.
 Temperature back to normal yesterday.
 
 The anticoagulant diet sounds pretty complicated.  What does vitamin K do,
 prevent clotting?  Are they checking for blood levels of vitamin K?
 Three blood draws a week sounds pretty time consuming but you are probably
 not a coward about them like I am.  I hope they cut back soon to once a week.
 It is the little improvements that seem to make a difference.  Is there no
 home test you can do on your own blood?  
 
 I am almost certain that it is starches and sugars that taste funny to me.
 Yesterday for the first time even milk (with lactose) tasted funny.  Today
 it was okay.  Cheese was okay yesterday and that has the lactose (sugar)
 converted mostly to lactic acid (which is also why lactose intolerant people
 like my brother can eat cheese). Eggs have been okay.  Grains and starchy
 vegetables, many other vegetables (anything with sugar such as cabbage), and
 fruits (bananas, strangely, have been okay) taste funny.  I should get some
 bananas if I feel well enough today.  (I will need to get more than 4 hours
 sleep first - woke up too hungry to get back to sleep at 3 am).  Pineapple
 has tasted okay before but yesterday was bad.  Pickled peppers tasted so
 strongly of vinegar that they did not taste otherwise odd so I made myself
 eat one for supper with half a can of (very salty) mackerel (I know it is not
 vegetarian, it is medicine at the moment).  Lunch was one preserved egg and
 a raw carrot.  Not the way to gain weight but it is temporary.
 
 Glenda, are you attempting to lose weight, or you don't feel like eating, or
 you eat but don't digest it all?  I hope you reach some acceptable weight and
 can stick with it so you don't need all these blood tests for 6 months.  
 
 Most restricted diets seem to require you to eliminate certain foods.  That
 sounds simple compared to having to eat the same amounts of things every day,
 such as what Glenda needs to do, and what diabetics needs to do.  I cannot
 imagine even having to eat at the same times every day, let alone the same
 foods.  
 
 I have mostly stopped coughing (except for just now) and the platelet count
 seems to be up again (no more blood when I blow my nose - that hit a low the
 day after the neutrophil count's low).  Since yesterday my head hurts but that
 will probably end today.  I felt queasy a bit over the weekend, only time
 since I started treatment other than that I feel like gagging when I eat pills
 in applesauce (benadryl/tylenol, prednisone, vitamins), so I am really
 hesitant about forcing myself to eat things that taste bad right now.  It is
 nice I can handle milk again.  I will attempt oatmeal in a few hours.  Someone
 is coming at 9 for computer lessons and maybe I can get a bit more sleep
 first.  Nice to have someone to 'talk' to at 4 am.  
 
 It is so nice I don't need to be fed with tubes down my throat, and that
 eating does not make me throw up, and that I have no medical restrictions on
 what I can eat, and my tongue does not hurt, and I do not have thrush, and
 this may be the last time I have to deal with this all.  
#159 S. Lynne Fremont(slynne) on Wed Feb  4 10:40:58 2004:
 I certainly hope it is the last time you have to deal with all this. 
#160 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Feb  4 13:29:33 2004:
 I won't know for 20 years or so, but it would be nice if the test in two weeks
 had good results so I can live a normal life for 3 months.
 
 This morning the nurse showed up for her computer and I taught her how to use
 bookmarks and download files and got her an unzip program for a volleyball
 game that we downloaded and it needed some other program so we deleted it.
 She will learn to play pinball instead.  She likes volleyball in real life.
 
 She says her mother has been treated several times for oral cancer over the
 last 25 years or so, most recently with chemotherapy this year, and first with
 just surgery.  Chemotherapy seems to have the best cure rate.  
 
 We are planning to celebrate by going, with the nurse and her mother, to visit
 a friend's winery where he is making pawpaw wine.  The nurse took some pawpaw
 seeds to plant and is interested in making wine and beer, also in the local
 stone-fly count done on the Huron River by 50 local people this January.
 
 There are all sorts of ways to meet new friends.  I have met two friends in
 the post office, one who worked at a school library and noticed I read
 Russian.  This is the first time I have met one by getting sick.  The winery
 owner was at a rock club meeting.  One of the people in the post office liked
 my stamps and I had bought the last of them so we traded and he invited me
 to visit.  He was a retired piano teacher and notary public.  
 
 What unusual places have other people met new friends?
#161 S. Lynne Fremont(slynne) on Wed Feb  4 13:57:38 2004:
 Hmmm. A friend of mine in high school ended up dating a guy she met 
 when he called a wrong number. That seemed pretty weird to me. 
#162 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Feb  4 20:23:55 2004:
 I still get calls once in a while that want me to tell them the winning
 lottery number.  One of the local wine stores tried to buy out my number
 because it ended in -WINE.  Have not made friends with any of these gamblers.
 
 Today I put a gallon jug under the kitchen faucet after I finally succeeded
 in reducing it from a steady stream to a steady drip.  After a couple of hours
 I showed Jim that the jug had overflowed and since it was warmish and sunny
 we hiked to Stadium Hardware bringing along a square o-ring that there were
 two of in the bottom of a rigid plastic cartridge ('washerless system' - means
 no rubber washers, just rubber rings to wear out).  The plumbing expert said
 we needed to bring the cartridge to identify it so Jim asked for the book and
 they discovered you cannot buy the ring, just the whole replacement cartridge,
 probably for more than the faucet cost new 20 years ago.  So jim spent 60
 cents on two rubber o-rings (rounded not squared) and if they don't work he
 will replace the faucet.  We bought a duplicate since they were on sale.
 
 I am astonished that they are selling faucets for which you can no longer buy
 the 'correct' 30 cent repair part, only an expensive 'component'.  Next faucet
 will be one that is reparable instead of replaceable.  
 
 I made it back despite really wobbly legs and a lot of sneezing and coughing,
 and managed to get down potatoes and lettuce for supper.  Things don't taste
 as bad as two days ago.  I am past the 2-day headache stage into the 2-day
 diarrhea stage (somehow I recall the order being reversed last time).  My
 laryngitis and coughing are worse but I am feeling okay and am glad I don't
 have Glenda's problems, or a broken wrist, or anything that really hurts.
 
 I have discovered that RealPlayer8 will install on one Slackware computer but
 not on a another, and that many other people have written the Real-Unix forum
 to state that it won't work on their Sparc or SunOS or Slackware computers
 either - segmentation fault.  It appears to be more hardware than software
 dependent.  Now I get to test 15 or so computers to find out which one it
 works on and hope it is a Pentium I because the P II's don't have a free slot
 for a sound card (only a PCI card and I don't think you can use those with
 linux, at least I don't know how, same problem as PCI modems).  
 
 Realplayer 7 worked for people, 8 does not.  They don't offer 7 for download
 now.
#163 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Feb  4 20:39:09 2004:
 Jim proudly brought me his cartridge to show how well the o-rings fit, but
 it turns out they are not what makes the seal, that is inside the cartridge
 which most people might not want to take apart.  Unfortunately he had sprayed
 a lot of solvent into the faucet while trying to unstick it enough to pry out
 the cartridge and now this room still stinks.  The hazards of living with
 someone who can't wait to fix things (once it becomes obvious enough that they
 are broken).  
 	The bathroom sink is 1930s so it only needs a simple flat washer,
 which is too simple to be interesting, so it is still leaking (a bit).  I
 think I should put 1930s faucets in my new house so I can fix them.
#164 Ryan Antkowiak(ryan) on Wed Feb  4 23:35:40 2004:
 real player 7 was before the addition of the *really bad* spystuff.
 "real one" player, more like "real pain in the ass" to use and to 
 uninstall.
#165 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Feb  5 11:42:53 2004:
 What is spystuff?  Do I uncheck the parts about sending information to
 broadcasters about my hardware?  I replaced RealOne with Realplayer8 because
 the RealOne menu was not usable without a mouse (you cannot do Alt->>).  I
 wish they had a version without the video player that was smaller.
 
 I have been reading the Real UNIX forums trying to figure out why I get
 Segmentation fault when trying to install on both Linux computers, but it does
 actually install and load on the second computer (for which I don't know how
 to use the onboard ESS sound, and there is no free slot to put in a sound
 card).  It turns out that lots of people are getting segmentation faults with
 Sparc and Linux systems, also in the alpha RealOne version.  There are all
 sorts of other bugs in the unix versions.  I don't see any Windows user forum.
 They must put a lot more effort into the Windows version.
 
 Opera acts really screwy (unusable) if I try to use Windows accessibility
 features (arrow mouse) even though it brags about being accessible.  But the
 video is also all messed up so I should fix that before more testing.  Anyone
 know how to COMPLETELY uninstall Opera?  An uninstall did not do it.  It kept
 all my preferences, for instance, and the video is still screwed up (after
 changing from 1024 to 640 on a different card back to 1024 I still get some
 text at 640 res, such as image alt tags, banner ads).
 
 Today I am sneezing, blowing my nose, and coughing a LOT (I hope it is not
 another 4 week cough) and Jim is sneezing.  Apparently what put me in bed for
 two days with a fever last weekend is the common cold.  It is nice to have
 my immune system back to what I hope is low normal.  I am sure if I asked
 nicely they would let me pay them $250 for a blood test and nurse evaluation
 of the results.  You can't have the results until a nurse looks at them.  
 
 Realaudio has posted both a version of Realplayer for Alpha and an Alpha
 version of Realplayer (for linux) and ever other posting in one forum is about
 how people cannot find the latter or have downloaded the former instead by
 accident.  Someone suggested they make things more obvious, after about 20
 of these postings, but it has not happened.  The Realaudio person who answers
 these questions just keeps repeating that there is an Alpha version for linux
 and a version for the Alpha CPU and you have to read the instructions very
 carefully.  Maybe he has to answer a certain number of postings every day?
#166 Ryan Antkowiak(ryan) on Thu Feb  5 14:07:01 2004:
 "real player one" = pop up hell
#167 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Feb  5 16:37:34 2004:
 I did not notice any popups because Opera does a good job of blocking popups.
 Lynx seems to be immune to popups (also to javascript, unfortunately).
 
 I may try mplayer for linux (does Windows media player type files) - has
 anyone reading this tried it?  I was unable to get any wave player to work
 with linux.
#168 David Brodbeck(gull) on Fri Feb  6 11:37:11 2004:
 In many cartridge faucets, what makes the seal isn't a rubber ring or
 washer, but a precision fit between the pieces of the cartridge.  You
 see this technique in a lot of modern faucets because it requires less
 force to shut off, has a smoother feel in operation, and lasts a long
 time between repairs.  (Consider that yours is only now wearing out
 after 20 years of use, which is far longer than a typical faucet washer
 lasts in daily use.)  In good faucets the cartridge is often made of
 some very hard material, like ceramic, to reduce wear.
#169 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Feb  6 11:56:55 2004:
 This must have been a cheap faucet because I think it is a hard plastic
 cartridge and there is definitely a short rubber tubelike thing that needs
 replacing.  It has been dripping for a few years now.
 
 Today Jim feels sicker than me and is spending the morning in a hot bath.
 I am coughing a lot and using cotton napkins since I ran out of handkerchiefs.
 
 Jim's sister called to let us know his cousin will be able to take care of
 herself, and to go back to work in a few weeks.  But the doctors apparently
 always lie to people that it will be 6 weeks until the surgery is reversed
 for diverticulitis.  This time they told her 3 months.  His sister checked
 and it is usually 3-6 months.  They told me 6 treatments of chemotherapy and
 at teh time of the 5th then they said it 'might' be eight.  Eight is standard
 unless you are too weak to tolerate that.  I was upset to get the change in
 plans, but maybe I would not have wanted to know it was 8 at the start.
 
 This doctor only tells me good news.  I figured out eventually that I had been
 in rather poor shape to start with, compared to many people.  I kept getting
 compliments on my blood counts going back up from near zero.  And how well
 I was breathing relative to before.
 
 
 I got a nice card with spring flowers from a friend who is hoping for better
 weather soon for all of us.  We helped her a few times when she was sick. 
 And an email from the ceo of a public health dept. in Taiwan that i have been
 writing to since we met as students in 1969.  He was supposed to be doing some
 sort of graduate training in agriculture in the D. C. area and was put to work
 15 hours/day on a dairy farm.  He and his roommate used to get up at 5 to cook
 a proper breakfast and they gave up and felt bad about it.  We met on a train.
#170 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Feb  6 14:23:49 2004:
 I have been trying for a couple of months to compile lynx with ssl for linux.
 I had to compile openssl (the directory used to compile in is now 31MB) and
 zlib and now ncurses.  I was doing really well until I got:  No space left
 on device.  The ncurses directory is now 35MB and not even complete.  I needed
 one file that was not in the precompiled version (it was too small - 249
 instead of about 500K - libncurses.a).  I bet I don't need most of what is
 in the 35MB.  THe precompiled version is 1.6M.  And this is C, not even C++.
 I wish all programs were in assembly language.
 
 Time to uninstall Ted, and ImageMagick.
 
 Someone called today about a huge translation job (from Slovene - there are
 not a lot of us who can do this) but they say they are not in a rush.  I
 cannot make any promises for two more weeks.  
#171 Todd(tod) on Fri Feb  6 19:21:14 2004:
 
#172 Jim Daloonik(naftee) on Fri Feb  6 20:50:57 2004:
 666
#173 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Feb  6 21:35:46 2004:
 Why don't you come into the store to find out?
 We have just put a Gateway board into a Compaq box and are about to use PLIP.
#174 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Feb  7 13:44:30 2004:
 PLIP worked.  I am going to test all our computers with the same hard drive
 to see which one(s) will let me install Realaudio once I get a generic Xvesa
 working.  Realaudio complains if you don't give it 24-bit color and most of
 our video cards won't do that with the regular X servers.
 
 Regarding health, I slept until 11 and feel nearly normal.  No news is good
 news from now on.  Jim is still coughing.  
 
 I think my hair has been continuing to grow in between therapy sessions.  All
 but a few of the hairs left from my haircut in September have fallen out  but
 there is a continuous 1/2" fuzz under that of new hair.  I feel like I have
 a crewcut.  Not the thing for February.  Maybe 1/4" not 1/2".  
 
 How fast does hair normally grow if you don't cut it?  How many inches or
 fractions of an inch would hair normally grow in 6 months?
#175 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Feb  7 15:04:20 2004:
 Scott gave us an unusually small P166 (which we fixed by moving the PCI video
 card to PCI slot 1) and I have a spare 233MHz cpu but could not find any
 jumper settings onboard, so I looked up the model number with a search engine
 and got to J-Mark Computer Corp. page.  Apparently made by jetway in Taiwan.
 Could not find the motherboard manual (broken link) but I found a page of FAQ
 written by someone who must have done this for the love of it.   He wrote
 practically a textbook about how to use modems with Windows, and what to do
 if your 56K X2 or 56Kflex modem suddenly stops working at full speed (check
 for noise on the phone line, shorten the line, unplug faxes, find out if the
 ISP changed standards, if so download the modem upgrade, how to do that, what
 is an IRQ, etc.).  Anyone want the link?  It is J-Mark, support.  I think the
 33K modem in there came with it.  Maybe we can upgrade it.  ISA.
 
 Lovely little computer.  FOUR ISA slots (and 3 PCI, none of which use the same
 space as the ISA).  Nothing blocked by the power supply.  But probably no way
 to change cpus as I can find only one jumper on the board (unlabelled).  Maybe
 this one also has CMOS speed settings and auto-recognized voltage settings?
 Seems unlikely for something too old to take DIMMs.
#176 Scott Helmke(scott) on Sat Feb  7 16:29:34 2004:
 Hair growth is 1/2" per month, according to my barber.
#177 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Feb  7 16:50:54 2004:
 When people used to get haircuts every week, that means they cut off only 1/8"
 each time?  
#178 Ryan Antkowiak(ryan) on Sat Feb  7 20:10:29 2004:
 i've clipped my own hair for 4 years
#179 Todd(tod) on Sat Feb  7 22:19:22 2004:
 
#180 Reverend Puerile Dolt(happyboy) on Sun Feb  8 15:15:47 2004:
 i got a haircut in 1986.
#181 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sun Feb  8 18:39:20 2004:
 Can you measure how much your hair has grown since then?  I hear it stops
 growing and falls out once in a while, thus limiting maximum length.
#182 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sun Feb  8 22:36:26 2004:
 Since it was warmer and sunny this afternoon, I suggested walking to the
 hardware store to get the rubber part for the cartridge and I practically
 forced Jim to bring along the cartridge.  We discovered they don't sell the
 rubber thing.  So he bought a matching cartridge for $13 but he thinks he got
 the old one to stop leaking somehow.  It is plastic.  The store says to buy
 Delta next time if we want to have it fixable without a lot of expense.  Not
 Kohler or Stirling.
 
 On the way to Kroger's we saw some signs, mostly in Chinese, for a new food
 market on both sides of Faz pizza.  We looked in and one of the owners,
 working on the wiring, was a former owner of Hong Kong Inn.  They remodeled
 the restaurant themselves too.  The next owners redid it all.  The Chinese
 food store that used to be in this part of town moved way south so it is nice
 to have another store nearby in case we run out of dried tofu.  
 
 Last time at Kroger's they would not give us a bag discount unless we brought
 plastic bags.  Backpacks did not count.  So we brought 3 plastic bags and
 bought enough grapefruits and carrots to fill four bags if we had had them,
 and the cashier was in a rare good mood and gave us a 9-bag discount (he said
 many people double-bag things) and while I was hunting for my Kroger tag he
 pulled one out and said we could use the store tag.  !
 
 One computer and two more hard drives have what is acting like a linux virus
 that won't go away when you reformat - once you put files from the original
 hard drive on another drive you cannot do plip connections using that drive,
 or install RealPlayer - it gives messages about translation tables and
 keysyms, many of them, on a drive that used to let you install.  Jim thinks
 it is something to do with putting a drive set to single into a machine where
 it should have been master and messing up some sort of tables.  ???? 
 Unfortunately we copied a few files from this drive (via DOS laplink pro) to
 our super-large 20G hard drive with all my DOS files and Win98 installed as
 well as linux and I would hate to throw out that drive and start over.  
 Help!  The basiclinux list group has ignored my pleas for help so far.  
 Reformatting with fdisk or PQMagic did not help at all - we tried that on two
 drives already before reinstalling linux.  ;={
 
 We ran F-Prot.
#183 Christopher L Goosman(goose) on Mon Feb  9 09:24:24 2004:
 a "format" does not necessarily wipe everything off the disc.  Could be a
 problem with the MBR.
#184 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Mon Feb  9 09:56:36 2004:
 The problem with installing RealPlayer appears to be that I forgot that I
 uninstalled one of the X packages after installing RealPlayer, to see if I
 really needed it, because I am using Xvesa rather than the complicated method
 with servers and configuration.  Realplayer still loaded, but apparently needs
 the missing package to install.  The package contains a database of keysyms,
 which was what my error messages were about.
 
 This does not explain why plip does not work but that is probably unrelated.
 I should keep better notes.  I found something about it needing the computers
 to be the same speed, but ours only differ by a factor of 2.  I recall that
 when plip did work between the pairs in question, I would occasionally get
 a message that looked like the timing was off and something needed to be
 resent.   We will transfer files via DOS and rename them back to linux.
 
 I was warned not to fdisk/mbr unless I had no interest in the data.  That is
 the case with our two smaller drives.
#185 C. Keesan(keesan) on Mon Feb  9 20:24:01 2004:
 We looked more closely at Scott's old pentium computer with the 133MHz cpu
 and you can vary the clock speed from 50......75 MHz and the core voltage,
 but I cannot find more than one jumper to do that with unless I remove most
 of the innards.  Small cases have that drawback.  We got his 266MHz Gateway
 board working in a case from a dead Compaq and installed Realaudio on a test
 drive and got that drive working in a computer where my regular linux
 installation won't install Realaudio and it appears the problem is that I hae
 upgraded the runtime libraries but not the compiler libraries, because I am
 trying to compile something that will work without an upgraded library.  It
 got to the point of not compiling 'tic' (terminfo compiler).  I first tried
 with the Slackware 8.0 precompiled binary and something was missing.  I may
 try the larger 8.1 binary for the same version of ncurses.  I have been trying
 for about 2 months now to compile lynx and first had to compile openssl and
 zlib.  It required adding a few programs from other packages that are in
 busybox, but are incomplete.  
 
 I have stopped coughing, and am not using many handkerchiefs.  My hands no
 longer hurt or look blue.  The pains in three regions of my abdomen are
 currently not paining me.  My legs are still wobbly but I can feel my feet.
 My tongue does not hurt.  My eyes and the corners of my mouth are not exuding.
 My hair is not falling out that I can notice.  Things don't taste too
 terrible.  Life is good.  It still hurts to sit and I still have hot flashes
 but maybe not quite as often.  
 
 Jim's housemate called to tell him he was offered another computer so Jim
 finally got around to fixing the one he no longer needed.  After my PET scan
 maybe he can start to concentrate on working on his own house for a while.
#186 Joe Nobody(cow) on Mon Feb  9 20:27:20 2004:
 WASSSSSSUP. Just testing this out. I love messing around. Mary Xmas.... Even
 though it is way past that time again. Later,
 -Cow
#187 Jim Daloonik(naftee) on Mon Feb  9 20:50:05 2004:
 Later!
#188 Scott Helmke(scott) on Mon Feb  9 23:49:53 2004:
 I don't recall a small Pentium computer....
#189 jerking in the alley.(boltwitz) on Mon Feb  9 23:53:07 2004:
 Jim made one out of chilled vodka.
#190 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Feb 10 08:48:14 2004:
 CCS case, J-Mark board, three round buttons in front, video problem solved
 by moving the PCI card to slot one, 133MHz, you kept the hard drive with
 Caldera Linux on it but gave us the two Caldera books and the CDs.  
 
 We have put together one of the computers from Leeron for jep to use with
 linux.  They all have DIMM slots, which makes it cheaper to add lots of RAM.
 This one won't take MMX cpus.  You can get a used 200MHz MMX cpu from MCRS
 for $7.  It won't take the faster Cyrix cpu we wanted to put in because the
 Cyrix is 150MHz, Cyrix cpus cannot do 2x the clock speed, and the clock speed
 on this board is 50,55, 60, or 66.  Some boards will do 75 or 83, but those
 did not have DIMM slots.  It will take an Intel 200 if it is no MMX.  Jep is
 getting this one because the downloaded motherboard manual cannot be read with
 ghostscript (it does not do encrypted pdf files, in DOS or in my older linux
 version) and some idiot also decided to decorate every page with a bunch of
 colored squares at the top so I cannot print it except on a printer that can
 do color. I can print it even if the color cartridge is removed, but not on
 my HP 500 or my dot-matrix printer, after converting from pdftops (because
 that program, for DOS but not for linux, will do encrypted pdf files).  What
 is the purpose of encrypting a motherboard manual? From Taiwan?
 
 Most of our other computers are also 133MHz and we could find the motherboard
 manuals for only two of them, neither of which takes DIMMs.  Some boards only
 go to 133MHz maximum (starting at 50 or 75), others go to 200 if you can find
 a non-MMX cpu.
 
 Today I have another cold, I think.  Four colds since September.  I would
 blame this on my low immunity but Jim has got all but one of them first, and
 just about as bad, other than the cough which is due to the drug-related
 pharyngitis.  
#191 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Feb 10 10:41:41 2004:
 Back to topic.  My friend from Vermont (who I met while at a Russian summer
 school in her village of 4000), is staying with her daughter in Florida for
 the winter.  Her daughter is being treated for stomach cancer.  The two of
 them usually have fun together going places, but her daughter was not up to
 going out dancing for New Year's, she had nosebleeds (probably low platelet
 count).  I still don't have the strength to go out dancing even without
 nosebleeds, and I did not even have surgery.   They tried to find her a
 dancing partner on the internet but they were all much too young, nobody over
 52.  My friend writes she is getting bored, nothing to do, her daughter is
 doing all the cooking and housework.  So I wrote suggesting that she be
 allowed to cook and clean and give her daughter a much-needed rest.
 
 Jim is still doing the cooking around here, and an occasional cleaning.
#192 Rane Curl(rcurl) on Tue Feb 10 13:33:25 2004:
 There are web sites for seeking partners with whatever combination of age,
 interests, and locations desired. Is it one of those she used? My brother
 answered a newspaper advert from a woman who was seeking a companion
 of like age - in their 60's - and they have now been together for ten years
 or so. It apparently *can* work. 
#193 Todd(tod) on Tue Feb 10 13:38:50 2004:
 
#194 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Feb 10 13:52:45 2004:
 The problem might be a shortage of 85 year old healthy men who like to go
 dancing and live in her area of Florida.  She said the neighbors had ham hocks
 and blackeyed peas for New Year's.  It does not sound like a tourist area.
 Her second husband was 12 years younger than her.  She outlived him too.
 I think she should have gone dancing with one of the youngsters.  She has been
 washing the dog to have something to do.  
 
 My friend writes that back in Vermont she has 5 boyfriends and life in Florida
 is dull.  But warmer.  
#195 Tim P. Ryan(tpryan) on Tue Feb 10 14:11:39 2004:
 	Try for some medical support groups.
 	Check out visiting nurses assoc.  Not only to get a nurse to
 visit on a regular basis (which can give the daughter a break), but
 to network to other things.
 	See if she can make 'day vists' to a retirement multiple level
 or care facility.  Even if it is to go and play cards, or maybe help,
 she will meet plenty.
 	Oh, come on!  Even Daytona Florida has it's share of 85 year 
 old men.
#196 klg(klg) on Tue Feb 10 14:41:58 2004:
 Visit funeral parlors.
#197 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Feb 10 14:57:54 2004:
 I don't think my friend wants to meet men who need medical care.  Her daughter
 seems to be doing okay taking care of herself and her mother, who writes that
 she is getting too pampered.  She has never mentioned liking to play cards.
 She likes to go hiking and swimming and dancing.  But I will suggest that she
 volunteer some place if she is still bored since her daughter does not have
 the energy to do things they usually do while visiting.  
 
 Tim, how is your mother doing at her new place?
 A friend writes that his mother still hates being in a nursing home.  They
 have taken away her junk food because her diabetes is not under control.
#198 Rane Curl(rcurl) on Tue Feb 10 15:35:28 2004:
 Florida is a terrible place for elderly women to find male companionship.
 The male/female ratio is pretty low. 
#199 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Feb 10 15:39:18 2004:
 I was starting to feel bored myself.  Then someone called about a translation
 from Czech to English.  She is Slovak and said she cannot do it herself for
 teh translation agency because she is not certified.  I am not certified
 either but I translate.  I think my English is better.  I spelled out my other
 email address when mail sent here did not get through (the agency was bouncing
 a lot of mail today for some reason) and still never got mail.  She heard 'j'
 as 'g'.  Finally I got the mail here.  For some reason she converted from the
 website format (most likely HTML) to WORD.  I could have used Lynx to convert
 Czech HTML to something that looks like Czech but is missing diacritic marks,
 that I can read and print.  Instead I used Antiword to convert the WORD file
 to text that I could read but not print.  My HP 500 can print CP852 but only
 if I have the manual for it and that is at my apartment and I am here.
 
 So I printed it out with the wrong upper ASCII characters, and some of them
 turned out to be blanks, and it was pretty unreadable, so I gave up and tried
 viewing with WORD 97, and everything except the bold text was underlined with
 squiggly red lines.  ???  I then viewed instead of Wordviewer from MS and it
 all looks normal.  Why the red lines?  This is supposed to be a viewer for
 WOrd 97 and earlier.  Maybe they have updated it?
 
 THe translation should not take half as long as it took to get the document.
 She also sent the URL but it does not contain the text that she sent me, or
 the link to it that she said to look for.  
 
 The translation has something to do with Tupperware and direct marketing.
 I wonder if E. Europe is now getting hit hard by telemarketers.
 
 Jim is still trying to puzzle out his school email address, which is different
 from his address for getting grades, which is different from his ftpspace
 login.  Today I got a few of his failures forwarded to me.  I am glad I am
 not dyslexic.  He is @stu.wccnet.org but tried @wccnet.org and
 @student.wccnet.org.  Repeatedly.
 
 Hot flash.  Got to go translate WORD to text (she cannot handle importing
 WP51/DOS either).  WORD was 50K, text 6K including spaces.
#200 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Feb 10 15:40:51 2004:
 My brother's wife's widowed father lives in Florida now and for some reason
 has a girlfriend (sic) in North Carolina.  He is in a retirement community.
 (Rane slipped in).  Is the male/female ratio worse in Florida retirement
 communities than in Michigan ones?
#201 Colleen McGee(cmcgee) on Tue Feb 10 16:00:09 2004:
 Direct marketing is not at all related to telemarketing.  Direct marketing
 is face-to-face.
#202 Rane Curl(rcurl) on Tue Feb 10 16:04:19 2004:
 Good question. There are a lot of elderly women living alone in Florida
 because because so many couples go there to retire and the man dies before
 the women. However that doesn't have to mean the *ratio* of men/women is
 lower than in Michigan. Hmmmmm.... I will have to defer to "real data",
 which I don't have. The only reason I can now think of why the ratio might
 be lower in Florida is that the equitable climate also helps elderly women
 live longer (and they are not as easily bored as men living there).? 
 
 Squiggly red underlining is the WORD automatic spellchecker. I guess
 your's doesn't understand Czech.
 
#203 Todd(tod) on Tue Feb 10 16:25:06 2004:
 
#204 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Feb 10 17:28:13 2004:
 Thanks for explaining the red squiggles.  It is an odd default to have the
 spellchecker underline words without asking it to.  It was so disconcerting
 I just hit Alt-F4 and went away.  I wish she had sent html.
 
 The Czech is literally 'direct sales' and that is what the English also
 appears to be.  It is currently engaged in in E. Europe by Lux, Mary Kay,
 Amway, and Winston International, among others.  They claim to be helping
 women and reducing unmemployment.  I was reading a library book recently about
 how Miller and Budweiser are trying to make money in Russia.  The Russians
 cannot understand why Americans don't want to import Ukrainian burgundy wine
 which is just as good as the French stuff and half the price.  But they are
 willing to pay several hours' wages for one bottle of American beer.  There
 were also people trying to sell vitamins, mouthwash, and other things ther
 Russians never knew they needed.  
#205 Todd(tod) on Tue Feb 10 17:34:43 2004:
 
#206 Rane Curl(rcurl) on Tue Feb 10 19:04:57 2004:
 Sindi, if you get red squiggles again, you can go to the Tools menu
 and then Spelling and Grammar, and be given a choice of changing the
 word (WORD will have suggestions), adding the word as spelled to the
 WORD dictionary, or just accepting the word: any of these will make the
 squiggles go away. 
#207 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Feb 10 20:19:04 2004:
 I would have to do this for every word in the document?  I don't want to
 rewrite the original, just look at it while translating it.  I don't want to
 add the entire Czech dictionary to the spell checker, with all possible
 grammatical endings for each word!
 
 Jim heard on the radio that there was going to be an NPR program about
 Tupperwear.  He owns one piece of it that he keeps tofu in.  So he has hooked
 up a TV antennas to the VCR but cannot find any mention of that program for
 this he is looking at some photos of ice instead now.  The station is weak
 so is only occasionally colored.  Which does not matter a whole lot for ice,
 but might for fire.  They are both nice.
 
 I presume there is some way to turn off the spellchecker but it is really
 easier to use Wordviewer anyway.
 
 Tonight I am going to try compiling ncurses with static programs but shared
 libraries. I ahve started reading about what this all means.  Ncurses won't
 compile properly with shared-library programs.
#208 Joe(gelinas) on Tue Feb 10 20:22:49 2004:
 You might want to see if Microsoft has a dictionary for Czech.
#209 Glenda F. Andre(glenda) on Tue Feb 10 20:26:13 2004:
 You can go to the tools menu, options, the spelling and grammer tab and turn
 spell check off.
 
 I would recommend that you try out open office from www.openoffice.org.  It
 can read and write MSWord, MSExcel, and MSPowerPoint files.  It is open source
 and free.  It is available for most OS platforms.  I have been playing with
 it a bit and am impressed with what I have seen so far.
#210 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Feb 10 22:30:48 2004:
 Thanks to all of you.  I will check out linux wordprocessors some time after
 making another linux computer.  The one I am using is filled up with attempts
 to compile ncurses so I can compile lynx.  The latest attempt told me that
 the include files were not in the standard location.  They are in
 /usr/include.  I wonder what is standard.  I have help from someone really
 persistent about making this all work on a screwy setup (old compiler
 libraries, new runtime libraries).  
 
 Abiword is supposed to also import WORD files.  I have an Excel to html
 convertor for DOS which works well enough.  The WORD to text convertor also
 works but I would have needed a second DOS computer to view the file while
 typing the translation.  I might, however, need to edit someone's WORD file
 some day.  
 
 Jim is, I think, still trying to find his ftp webspace and was hoping he would
 run into Glenda again today.  I suggested he ask in lab what ftp address to
 use.  Now he can't find his login and password info.  
 
 Running Linux page 119:  /usr/include  - Standard location of include files
 used in C programs, such as .   
 
 Jim has started having dreams again about getting lost looking for classes.
 My equivalent is to dream about having signed up for so many classes I cannot
 possibly attend them all, and forgetting to drop some before the deadline.
 
 WCC culinary arts program has opened its restaurant again.  Wed/Thurs is a
 buffet - $7.50 for soup/salad/bread/appetizer, and an extra dollar if you want
 meat and vegetables.  You can't get just the vegetables for 50 cents.
 Next week is black history month.  He asks people to make guesses at what the
 menu will be.  He says it is not grits and cracklins but he does not know what
 it is, and to see who can guess closest.  I guessed macaroni and cheese, which
 is what the Chinese buffets in Ypsi provide along with pizza for those people
 who got dragged there by their friends.  And jello.  
#211 klg(klg) on Tue Feb 10 22:40:06 2004:
 "Next week is black history month."
 
 What happened?  Has the budget been reduced??
#212 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Feb 10 22:49:05 2004:
 What I meant was next week is the black history week (or maybe month) buffet
 menu, which Jim will look at on Thursday if available then.  
 
 I was told that it is is okay for include files to be in the wrong location
 because they are from a previous version of ncurses and this version will go
 somewhere else.  I wonder what that all means.  I think that will give me a
 choice of which version to use with programs.  Or maybe this means that the
 new files will go into a nonstandard location since the old ones got the
 standard location.  I am supposed to symlink to them.  
 
 Someone east of here watched 5 min of the Tupperwear program and said it was
 not worth the bother.
#213 rational(rational) on Tue Feb 10 22:51:11 2004:
 I think I might have severe mental problems.
#214 klg(klg) on Tue Feb 10 22:55:18 2004:
 Well, make up your mind, woman.  Week or month!!
#215 Joe(gelinas) on Tue Feb 10 22:56:24 2004:
 No, it won't be cracklin's, nor chitlin's.  I'd guess collard greens,
 black-eyed peas and ham.
#216 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Feb 10 23:13:26 2004:
 Hey, klg, how come I am not 'Mr. woman'?
 I guess cornbread stuffing.  Jim guessed sweet potato pie. Our neighbor often
 shares one with us.  Her daughter the doctor learned to cook them but I think
 she buys the crusts.  Their secret ingredient is orange juice.  
 I wonder if she would like to join us for the buffet.
#217 David Brodbeck(gull) on Wed Feb 11 10:07:09 2004:
 OpenOffice runs under Windows as well, not just Linux.
#218 Ryan Antkowiak(ryan) on Wed Feb 11 11:25:16 2004:
 I've had extensive experience using Star office and it's current
 incarnation Open Office... and I've used almost every single version
 of microsoft office since the win3.x days.  Hands down, ms office is
 easier to use and more convenient.
#219 David Brodbeck(gull) on Wed Feb 11 12:36:57 2004:
 Sure, but is it $350 more convenient?  I don't do enough work with the
 advanced features of Office at home to justify paying that kind of money
 for software.
#220 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Feb 11 13:58:54 2004:
 I don't yet need to actually write or even edit any WORD files, just read
 them, and WORDVIEW seems to be adequate.  The latest .doc file they sent me
 was hopeless with Antiword.  It has several places where you are supposed to
 click on a + or - to get a list of possibilities, one of which the author
 chose, and Antiword just left them blank.  Also got the date wrong.  The rest
 of it was okay but what I needed was in the list of possibilities (things like
 the person to contact, email address, extension).  I sort of doubt that
 Abiword will even handle that.  Then there were some X's (like radio buttons)
 that disappeared in the Antiword version.  Looks like I am stuck with one
 Win98 computer unless I can get these companies to send me a 4K readable text
 file instead of 120K page of WORD that I cannot read.  
 
 Today I saved Jim a few hours debugging his program by pointing out that he
 was using highly variable spellings of his variables:  linght, weigth - they
 would have been okay except he used four variants of the first and two of the
 second.  That is why his program would not compile.  He got the ei correct.
 Now we are trying to figure out why a computer with a good battery won't hold
 its CMOS settings, and why another won't hold its speed setting but keeps the
 date okay (I think - we should check this out too).  We have one CD-ROM that
 will play music if you unplug the data cable, or read software if you plug
 in the data cable, but won't do both.  I recycled two 720K floppy drives.
#221 klg(klg) on Wed Feb 11 14:03:37 2004:
 (That could be arranged.  Ask your dr. about radiation treatments.)
#222 Ryan Antkowiak(ryan) on Wed Feb 11 14:10:28 2004:
 Student discounts rule :)
#223 Tim P. Ryan(tpryan) on Wed Feb 11 14:49:52 2004:
 	I don't think MSWord is smart enough to not want to modify
 a read-only file.
 	Mom has yet to invite her son to and pay for a $7 lunch
 at her retirement community.
 	Retrirement community / multi-care facility  is not the 
 same as a nursing home.  For a nursing home, all are under
 medical care and monitoring.  For like a place like my mom is 
 in, you can be rather independant, have staff visit on a regualr
 basis to take care of your needs, up until you need the constant
 monitoring or hospitalization.
#224 Kevin Albaugh(albaugh) on Wed Feb 11 15:48:19 2004:
 > I don't think MSWord is smart enough to not want to modify a read-only file.
 
 Dunno what version of Word you are running.  Modern day Word definitely *does*
 know about read-only files, and says "Read Only" on the title bar when you
 open such a file, and will not allow you to save back to it - you must use
 "Save As".  (caveat - this is all under MS-Windows)
#225 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Feb 11 18:16:52 2004:
 Tim, have you tried inviting yourself?  Maybe your mother thinks you are not
 interested in the food there?  
 Klg, I don't get the reference - why would I want radiation treatment?
 The cancer center nurse came by today to give us her old computer, which is
 about 24" high and needs recycling.  She traded us her HP 520 (DOS) for a
 Windows only laser printer (Win9x only).  She was telling us how she is about
 to make a batch of porter.  Scott, would you like to have a mini microbrewery
 tour involving her porter and whatever you are currently making?  She also
 does sauerkraut in the fall.  And does water-bath canning of tomatoes.  
 Do you know anyone else interested in participating, who brews or at least
 wants to see how it is done?  There was something about transferring it to
 another carboy when it reaches a certain stage.
 
 Our screwy motherboard appears to be running any cpu at some multiplier times
 50 instead of times 66 - 175 when you set it to 233, 150 when set to 200, 125
 when set to 166.
 It is usable and has the advantage of having DIMM slots and taking MX cpus.
#226 Scott Helmke(scott) on Wed Feb 11 18:39:51 2004:
 I just brewed a big double IPA on Sunday.  I might be curious what her brewing
 setup is like.
#227 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Feb 11 20:09:08 2004:
 I will try to arrange a private viewing of her setup some time soon, maybe
 after the winery tour.  What is the best few days to see what is happening
 wiht your batch, Scott?
 
 We took a look at the AMD 5x86 she traded us (to be recycled) and it turns
 out to be a 5k86, which means a Pentium I /socket 7.  For some reason the
 PR166 cpu in there was set to 100MHz in CMOS and was running at 1/5 the proper
 speed.  We now have it up to proper speed (less than half what we traded her)
 and might use this board (in a much smaller case) for another purpose.
 
 I was supposed to try flashing the BIOS of the CMOS that won't hold any
 settings but I found a flash BIOS download for the DFI motherboard 586IPVG
 and we have the plain 586IPV.  Nothing to lose but time, I suppose.
#228 David Brodbeck(gull) on Wed Feb 11 22:19:19 2004:
 Re resp:224: It knows about file locking, too.  If another user has a
 file open, you can only open it read-only.
#229 Scott Helmke(scott) on Wed Feb 11 22:40:16 2004:
 My current batch is basically just sitting in a big glass carboy bubbling.
 The fun part was brewing, since I do all-grain brewing instead of extract.
#230 klg(klg) on Thu Feb 12 00:00:32 2004:
 (Enough radiation could turn you into a "Mr.".)
#231 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Feb 12 10:38:17 2004:
 Re 230 - how?  
 Scott, let us know what days/times are convenient for you for a brewery tour.
 She is free on weekends.
#232 Scott Helmke(scott) on Thu Feb 12 12:58:58 2004:
 Weekends are probably OK.  Seriously, a brewery tour?  What kind of brewing
 does she do?
#233 Tim P. Ryan(tpryan) on Thu Feb 12 13:07:49 2004:
 re225:	Yup.
#234 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Feb 12 13:18:01 2004:
 She says she gets beer recipes from the web and she is currently making
 porter, in a carboy.  That is about all I know.  
 Jim's old housemate used to make beer in some large glass thing in the
 bathroom.  Sometimes it would overflow onto the tile floor.  He also made hard
 cider.  
 
 I asked JIm to get the black history week menu today.
#235 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sun Feb 15 10:49:49 2004:
 My most interesting recent side effect is that I seem to have more freckles
 on my face than before.  Jim asks if it is age spots, but I think those appear
 more on hands and I don't have more freckles there.
 
 The miscellaneous little aches and pains continue to occur once in a while.
 My left hand aches but less often.  Sometimes it aches where the spleen biopsy
 was.  My leg muscles are still sore but that might be because I am not gaining
 weight, in fact I might be losing again.  I am getting rather tired of forcing
 myself to eat things that taste bad.  I have been forcing myself to eat since
 at least last July, maybe June.  I probably have not gained weight since
 December or so.  This should improve soon.
 
 The laryngitis is about the best it has been but I still need to yell to be
 heard between rooms or if the radio is on.  Recently I have been having a sore
 windpipe - don't know if this is from the pharyngitis, or from a worn-out
 lining, or what.  It is more frequent than before.  Feels like a heart attack
 might feel (not that I have had one) but centralized.  
 
 Two days ago what is left of the longer hairs on my head started to come out
 again when I pull.  The hair on my legs is still not coming out.  
 
 I had a bad dream about Tuesday's PET scan.  They have me scheduled for an
 8:45 ENT appointment and at 9:00 I am supposed to be at Radiology drinking
 32 oz of barium sulfate suspension.  I have special permission to pick it up
 at 8:30 and drink it at the ENT office (assumine I am not seeing the doctor
 at 9 instead of 8:45) and then go to Radiology at 10:00 for a radioactive
 glucose injection (my last IV ever, I hope - the next 10 years of CAT scans
 should be without IVs).  I dreamed I was late to everything.  That is usually
 Jim's dream - being late to all his classes, or lost.  It is hard to race
 around between doctor's offices when you can only walk slowly.  Better than
 a wheelchair.  I hope the scan goes well.  Jim has a class at 1:00 and might
 have to take me along.
 
 He thinks he has fixed a motherboard that keeps changing its mind about the
 speed of the cpu in it by giving it more voltage from a different power
 supply.  We are ready to put together some new computers as soon as I get lynx
 compiled.  The latest attempt complained that I did not have gpm mouse.  I
 was using some ncurses that was compiled to need it.  Time to try another one.
 Or give up and let it have a mouse (which will make the program larger).
#236 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sun Feb 15 13:17:10 2004:
 Today after 2 months of compiling assorted other programs I now have a
 version of lynx 2.8.5 (non-dev - the final one came out 10 days ago so I
 had to start over) with ssl, for linux! It works to access grex over the
 web, vanilla interface.  (Which to me looks green and yellow, set to
 default colors for this lynx version). Boy, is this a slow way to read
 grex conferences.  Maybe someone is doing a backup today, but dialin was
 a lot faster.
#237 David Brodbeck(gull) on Sun Feb 15 13:50:02 2004:
 Backtalk is a bit slower than usual today.  But it's always a bit slow.
  Hopefully when the new machine is set up it'll be snappier.
#238 Jim Daloonik(naftee) on Sun Feb 15 14:05:45 2004:
 ahaha, "when"
#239 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sun Feb 15 20:44:25 2004:
 I guess the 30 sec wait to read anything was a lot faster than the 2 months
 it took me to get a lynx that would work with backtalk.
 
 Today we had a day on the town - walked to a lecture on campus, and then hung
 around waiting for a 7 pm concert at St. Thomas.  The front doors were locked.
 We walked all the way around and found a note on the BACK door telling people
 to go to teh front door and that the concert was not at 7, it was at 4.  I
 wonder how many people froze at the front door around 7 pm wondering why it
 was locked.  We were early.  
#240 David Brodbeck(gull) on Mon Feb 16 10:54:25 2004:
 Today I'm seeing more of a 3-second wait than a 30-second one.
#241 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Mon Feb 16 11:31:42 2004:
 I presume some vandal was at work yesterday at grex, causing the delays.
 
 The Nuclear Medicine department phoned just now telling me where to show up
 tomorrow at 9.  They have their insurance person do the calls.  She thinks
 I only have to drink 1 or 2 cups of a 'smoothie', not barium sulfate.  I am
 sure it is barium sulfate since I discussed this with someone else there, who
 said not to eat or drink anything after 5 am.  The insurance person said not
 to eat anything after 6 am but it was okay to drink water.  At the last CAT
 scan I went 12 hours or so without drinking anything because we were busy
 after the scan, and they did not say I could drink water before it.  This PET
 scan is only $3,909 and I have to promise to pay if the insurance won't
 because some insurances consider it experimental.  I think mine pays, she said
 PPOM was good.  
 	So I can eat breakfast if I want to get up before 5 am, and I can drink
 water otherwise.  I will take breakfast along to eat at noon since I am
 probably going to have to go to Jim's class with him at 1 unless I feel up
 to walking back about 3 miles on my own.
 	The insurance person thinks are their smoothies are cold but maybe they
 can warm one up for me.  If I get there at 8 it will have an hour to warm up
 while I am waiting for the 8:45 ENT appointment.  Or we can stick it under
 some hot water in a sink.   24.5 hours from now this should be over with
 except for a few days wait for the results (during which I will try to get
 some sleep instead of worrying).
 
 	Yesterday evening I was able to eat a grapefruit - a bit more sour than
 I recall but not unbearable like the last piece of tangerine that I tried a
 couple of weeks ago.  
 
 	It is so nice to be at home 3 weeks after the last infusion, rather
 than waiting around the cancer center to be jabbed 3 times.  And to know that
 my sense of taste is likely to get better starting now instead of worse.
 I still only ate half my oatmeal yesterday, will try to do better today.
#242 Jim Daloonik(naftee) on Mon Feb 16 11:50:29 2004:
 Caution: Vandals At Work
#243 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Mon Feb 16 21:38:22 2004:
 Jim offered to wake me tomorrow around 7:30 so we can leave for the hospital
 and chase down my 'smoothie' before going to ENT.  He thinks he needs an hour
 before that to make sure the car starts and has air in the leaky tire.  What
 a perfect home health aide I have.  He was going to make me breakfast but I
 am not allowed to eat any.  I hope the smoothie is not banana flavored because
 if it is I am going to another dept to get one that tastes less permanently.
 I wish it were possible to obtain unflavored drugs.
#244 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Feb 17 07:22:07 2004:
 We are leaving for the hospital now and this will all be over with (except
 for results) in about 4 hours.  (You can guess how much sleep I got).
#245 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Feb 17 18:23:35 2004:
 I know you have all been eager to hear the news:  WCC's black history month
 menu for tomorrow (Harlem Renaissance theme) includes fried chicken,
 barbecued spare ribs, and sweet and sour pork, and some sort of vegetable(s)
 but they did not remember what.  We ate lunch at the Artists' Gallery (their
 name for the restaurant) before Jim's class.  They had two soups (we got
 potato/vegetable), several salads (some with meat) and about five entrees
 including arborio rice with 'roasted' vegetables.  Cloth napkins, 2 forks,
 2 spoons, 1 knife, bread plate, white tablecloth, two little rolls wrapped
 in a napkin.  $4.95 for the entree and $1.65 soup = $7.00 total.  The place
 was nearly empty.
 
 I skipped breakfast because I slept past 5 am.  Took a few swallows of water
 (it is okay for PET but not CAT scan to drink some water) at 6:30, Jim put
 some air in the leaky tire and charged the battery, and we got to nuclear
 medicine around 7:45 (go left at the Pepsi machine, continue past the Coke
 machine.....) to pick up my specially unrefrigerated berry flavored (if you
 are imaginative) 'smoothie'.  
 
 Signed in half hour early for ENT and refused to let the doctor put an
 endoscope down my nose or a mirror down my throat so he listened to me cough
 (sounds okay) and hold one note for 22 sec (I don't have weak vocal cords).
 I suggested my laryngitis was drug-induced and explained how it got worse
 every 3 weeks and I don't need to come back unless it gets worse again.
 
 Drank 16 oz at 9:15, got in IV at 10:00.  She apologized that it did not go
 in quite as planned (but the blood only reached the cotton not the floor this
 time and it did not need redoing).  She took blood and tested my fasting
 glucose to be sure I tolerate glucose (84 - this is good) then opened a heavy
 metal shielded barrel of rather expensive glucose with fluorine label and
 injected that and told me to stay in the lead-lined room for an hour so as
 not to expose other people.  (This reminds me of teh infusion nurses wearing
 plastic coveralls to keep off their skin what they injected into my veins).
 Someone else explained what they would be doing - first a short CAT scan to
 show where any masses were, in the same machine as the PET scan.  The CAT scan
 produces radioactivity, and for the PET scan I produce radioactivity.
 
 I was not to walk or talk before the scan since that would make my muscles
 take up the radioactive glucose.  They asked if I had shoveled any snow
 recently.  So I sat silently in the room until called, reading about 8'x45'
 RVs with popouts (it was that or Women's Day).  
 
 The CAT scan was a very brief one.  I had to lie on my back with arms behind
 my head.  The PET scan took about 50 minutes.  I could not move the whole time
 (I did scratch my nose between scans which upset the technician).  I ended
 up rather sore and stiff by the end but it was nice that they took out the
 IV right after the injection.  It is much worse holding your arms high over
 your head with an IV in one of them for the CAT scan.
 
 The machine decided I was 7 zones long.  They scanned from pelvis to neck to
 get all my lymph nodes so it took much longer than for most people.
 
 In the waiting room (before I became a radioactive hazard) I talked to a man
 who was going to get three injections of something that made his heart beat
 faster so they could measure how well it worked in order to qualify him for
 a kidney transplant.  He was in a wheelchair but at home uses a walker.  He
 said he used to install doors in hospitals and did those for several of his
 doctors.  We talked about dialysis - my father was one of the first and it
 used to take twice as long.  It is probably a lot less fun than infusion since
 it is three times a week not once in three weeks (but at least does not make
 your hair fall out - mine has been coming out fast for a few days now).
 
 Another woman was getting a PET scan before breast surgery.
 
 Jim went to class after lunch and told me to go up two flights in the Student
 Center Building and wait in the library.  It had moved since he last visited
 it maybe 15 years ago, to its own building.  Someone sent me through 2 tunnels
 to reach it.  I sat and read near the section on Cooking, Cabinetmaking, and
 Computers.  Jim found the library.
 
 Jim said he now has a 77 average because he did not ask for extra time to let
 him finish the exam.  I said he had a C+ average.  He is thinking of asking
 the teacher for a C++ instead of a C+.  
 
 We went to Kroger and bought me some juice because I need to drink a lot to
 get the glucose out of me faster.  In 20 hours it will be decayed to very
 little but it is better to get it out sooner.  Jim was not afraid to sit near
 me in the car but I avoided people at the library.  
 
 It is nice to have that over.  Not moving a muscle for nearly an hour while
 lying on my back on a relatively hard surface with arms behind my head was
 a bit like being in a 'tiger cage' but not for as long.  They tried to find
 something to put under the small of my back - first it was a folded sheet,
 then an IV bag (saline solution) and finally they came up with a piece of
 foam.  The CAT scan people have a nice high triangular thing to put under your
 knees and take some weight off your bottom that way.  
 
 I should hear the results later this week.
 
 The IV went into the crook of my left arm instead of my hand.  She said it
 would hurt more in my hand.  It hurt more anyway but only while it was in.
 My hand still hurts from 3 weeks ago.
 
 Got to go force some more fluids now.  I hope to post some good news soon.
#246 S. Lynne Fremont(slynne) on Tue Feb 17 18:44:29 2004:
 I hope you get some good news soon too
#247 *===<  RIBBON OF FREEDOM OF SPEECH!  RESTORE IT TO GREX OR ELSE YOU WON"T HAVE FREE SPEECH ON GREX!  DANGER:  NO FREE S{EECH ZONE(rational) on Tue Feb 17 18:49:01 2004:
 HERE< SLYNNE:  TAKE THIS GOOD RIBBON:
 
    0
    |
    |
    |
    |
    ^
   / \
#248 Todd(tod) on Tue Feb 17 18:53:35 2004:
 
#249 Glenda F. Andre(glenda) on Tue Feb 17 19:50:56 2004:
 Jim may want to talk to the people in LA104 (if they haven't moved).  Learning
 Support Services.  They have ways and people that can help him get through
 the class up to and including someone to attend the class with him to take
 notes for him and going to there office to take tests (if he needs it someone
 will read the questions to him and write down his answers for him).  I started
 there doing note taking until there was an opening in the computer lab.  It
 is a free service, he may have to have some sort of medical paper showing that
 he is dyslexic.  They can tell him what he needs.
#250 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Feb 18 12:15:26 2004:
 Jim is certfied dylexic, and the last time he went to WCC (electronic repair)
 he was given extra time to finish his exams, which he did not ask for this
 time so he did not finish. He is doing fine on the programming but he is slow
 and spells things wrong.  He apparently does not care about his grades enough
 to ask for more time now.  There is no need to take good notes since it is
 all in the book, he says.  Last time he used a little microcassette recorder
 and he could listen to lectures while biking to and from class.  
 
 His main problem has been figuring out how to use his large assortment of
 logins and passwords.  This weekend I showed him how to ftp to his class ftp
 space, and then to the email ftp space (uses the email login and password -
 much easier) that Glenda set up for him, which can also be used as webspace.
 I used it once to post something I wanted to share (lynx that I compiled).
 
 I fell asleep at 8 pm, kept waking up because I am forcing fluids, and finally
 got up this morning at 11:30.  I must have been more nervous than I thought
 for a few days.  My cold is also better today.  Hair is still coming out. 
 No problem, it will soon be spring.  I saw the first two signs of it at a
 shopping center - sales on winter clothing.  And the sun seems higher in the
 sky and there was some meltwater.  
 
 A friend emailed to ask if we knew anyone with a DVD drive.  Yes, us!  All
 he needs to do is show us how to use it and find the driver(s) for it, after
 we put Windows on the computer that it came with.  Or is there some easy way
 to use it with Linux?
#251 Scott Helmke(scott) on Wed Feb 18 12:46:41 2004:
 DVD on Linux is easy or hard, depending on the application.  For data DVDs
 it's pretty easy, and I've got one.  For movies on DVD you need licensed
 software to decrypt the DVD, and there isn't much available for Linux (it's
 possible, but difficult to obtain and install the decryption).
#252 Winter Sheep(cyberpnk) on Wed Feb 18 12:59:27 2004:
 *set sindi hugs = infinite*
 
 I am a Wiccan. May I do a spell for you?
#253 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Feb 18 14:05:21 2004:
 Anyone is welcome to pray for me in any religion they prefer.  I appreciate
 the kind thoughts and support though I am not religious myself.
 
 We have for Win98 Realone DVD movie software but I could not find anything
 that looked like the correct DVD driver for the drive.
 
 How does one use linux to read data from a DVD?  Do I need support for it in
 the kernel?  What do I need to burn CDs with linux?  (Not that important as
 we can do that with DOS or even Win98.)
#254 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Wed Feb 18 14:46:30 2004:
 My experience suggests that it should be possible using exactly the same
 mechanisms used to read CDs (it=reading DVDs)
 
 To burn CDs with Linux, you need to make sure ythat your kernel can support
 scsi emulation of ide cd-r(w)'s, which i believe can be done with a module,
 and a program such as cdrecord.
 
 There are others, but i'll need to check.
#255 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Feb 18 19:57:15 2004:
 I can use DOS cdrecord, the problem was to read the DVD.  So I just put in
 a DVD, mount the CD-ROM drive, and read from it?  Sounds really simple.
 We don't have any DVDs to try this on yet.
 
 Here are my PET scan results, sent by a friend who works at the hospital:
 
 
 STUDY:  FDG PET TUMOR CLINICAL                                         
 INDICATION FOR STUDY: LYMPHOMA.                                        
 PREVIOUS STUDIES:  None.                                               
 
 
 PROCEDURE:                                                             
 
 Sixty minutes following intravenous administration of approximately 300
 MBq (8 mCi) of 2-deoxy-2-[F-18]fluoro-D-glucose (FDG), sequential      
 non-contrast enhanced CT and PET imaging was performed from the skull  
 base through the pelvis.  Helical CT was performed with 5 mm collimation
 followed immediately by positron emission tomography at multiple
 overlapping bed positions (5 min per bed position).  Registered        
 non-contrast CT and attenuation corrected FDG PET, and attenuation     
 corrected FDG PET projection images, were reviewed for interpretation. 
 
 FINDINGS:                                                              
 
 The visualized portions of the intracranial contents are normal.  No   
 abnormalities visualized within the neck.  No abnormal FDG activity in 
 these regions.                                                         
 
 Sub 1 cm left lower lobe nodules without corresponding FDG increased   
 activity.  This corresponds to a nodule previously reported.  The      
 remainder of the lungs are normal.  No pleural effusion or pleural     
 thickening.  No enlarged intra-orbital or extra-thoracic lymph nodes.  
 Normal pericardium.  No abnormal FDG activity.                         
 
 There are several low attenuation lesions throughout the liver,        
 corresponding with the findings described on the previous CT of several
 hemangiomas.  Otherwise, the spleen, gallbladder, pancreas, adrenals,  
 and kidneys, are normal.  No enlarged lymph nodes or free fluid.  No   
 abnormal FDG activity.                                                 
 
 No abnormal FDG activity in the visualized osseous structures.         
 
 IMPRESSION:                                                            
 
 1.  No abnormal FDG activity.                                          
 2.  Several low attenuation liver lesions corresponding to previously  
 described hemangiomas.                                                 
 3.  Sub 1 cm left lower lobe nodule without corresponding FDG activity.
 Finding described on previous exam.                                    
 
 ken                                                                    
 
 *** PRELIMINARY *** PRELIMINARY *** PRELIMINARY
 
 
 -------
 My comments:
 No fluid left around my lungs.
 No masses left in the spleen.
 One very small lung nodule that is not cancerous.
 My liver is fine - the ultrasound showed that before.
 No heart damage, which sometimes can be caused by doxorubicin.
 
 I can live a normal life for the next three months.  Maybe even get strong
 enough to bike by warm weather and get myself to the doctor in May.
 
 Jim wonders why he is feeling so worn out from yesterday.  He just went to
 fall asleep in the tub after fixing the kitchen sink cartridge.  Something
 that moves was stuck and he freed it up.  The rubber thing is okay.  The
 printer cartridge did not need ink, just a bit of soaking.  All's well
 with the world.
#256 Scott Helmke(scott) on Wed Feb 18 20:24:31 2004:
 Congratulations, then!
#257 Twila Oxley Price(anderyn) on Wed Feb 18 20:46:18 2004:
 This is very good news. 
#258 David Brodbeck(gull) on Wed Feb 18 22:19:41 2004:
 There *are* some free Linux DVD playing programs.  "ogle" is one I've
 used with good results.  It needs a fairly fast CPU, though.
#259 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Feb 18 23:42:04 2004:
 Someone at my linux mail group also suggested that.  How fast a CPU?
 We have no DVDs to play but the library does.
 
 First we need to see if we can simply read a DVD and copy files from it.
 
 I have probably exceeded my daily mail limit in the last hour letting people
 know my test results.  I started with three other translators who had survived
 cancer and been encouraging me and I have heard back from them all already.
 
 Thanks to all of you for encouraging me this whole time and giving me someone
 to 'talk' to when I could not sleep.  Also for the stories about people
 (including yourselves and relatives) who had been through worse and are okay
 now.  
#260 David Brodbeck(gull) on Thu Feb 19 09:18:54 2004:
 I've successfully gotten ogle to work on a 450 MHz Pentium III, but I
 think it was pretty close to its limit.  You have to make sure DMA is
 enabled for your DVD drive, as well, or you'll get skipping.  (If you
 run into this problem I can tell you how to check this.)
#261 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Feb 19 09:26:09 2004:
 How do you enable DMA?   Anyway, all we are trying to do is copy files off
 of the DVD to a hard drive, which the neighbor will bring along.  Do we need
 some special driver to do this in DOS or linux?  
#262 David Brodbeck(gull) on Thu Feb 19 09:32:17 2004:
 If all you want to do is copy files off a data DVD, you don't need a
 special driver for Linux.  Linux will mount it just like it would a CD.
  I don't know about DOS.
 
 If it's a video DVD, you can still copy the files off the DVD, but they
 won't do you any good without the copy protection encryption key
 embedded on the disc.  To get useful video copies you need special "DVD
 ripping" or "DVD copying" software.
#263 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Feb 19 09:58:54 2004:
 Do you know how many G the latest linux occupies on the DVD so he will bring
 the right size hard drive?
#264 David Brodbeck(gull) on Thu Feb 19 10:33:09 2004:
 It would depend on the distribution.
 
 A DVD-ROM disc can hold up to 4.7 gigabytes, I believe.
#265 Ryan Antkowiak(ryan) on Thu Feb 19 18:46:59 2004:
 single layered dvd's can hold 4.7gb/120min.
#266 Andrew J Lanagan(drew) on Thu Feb 19 19:25:09 2004:
 Recommendation for brand of DVD burner that will work with Fedora Linux with
 a minimum of hassle, please? Preferably a burner without copy-protection
 sabotage built in. What brands should be avoided?
#267 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Feb 19 21:13:01 2004:
 How many G is Fedora?  My neighbor needs to know how many hard drives to bring
 over tomorrow.  He is currently going to hunt for the driver for
 Samsung/Compaq SD-612.    
#268 David Brodbeck(gull) on Thu Feb 19 21:35:25 2004:
 Re resp:266: There really isn't much proprietary about DVD burners; they're
 all pretty much standard ATAPI devices, I think.  I have an NEC DVD+RW drive
 that works fine.  DVD-RW seems to be slightly more common, though.
#269 Bruce Howard(bhoward) on Thu Feb 19 23:14:07 2004:
 There are 6 iso images associated with the yarrow release of Fedora,
 ranging from 610-637megs:
 
  yarrow-SRPMS-disc1.iso           04-Nov-2003 11:39   610M  
  yarrow-SRPMS-disc2.iso           04-Nov-2003 11:39   610M  
  yarrow-SRPMS-disc3.iso           04-Nov-2003 11:38   610M  
  yarrow-i386-disc1.iso            04-Nov-2003 11:38   630M  
  yarrow-i386-disc2.iso            04-Nov-2003 11:38   637M  
  yarrow-i386-disc3.iso            04-Nov-2003 11:38   616M  
 
 You will need the three i386 images to install a working system.
 The SRPMS iso images are only needed if your friend wants the sources.
 
 I think the size of a full bells-and-whistles installation expands out
 to something in the neighborhood of 3gigs.  The lower end can be quite
 a bit smaller if you take the time to custom install only a minimal set
 of packages.
 
 						Bruce
#270 Tim P. Ryan(tpryan) on Fri Feb 20 08:59:38 2004:
 	I use F7 to spell.
#271 Ryan Antkowiak(ryan) on Fri Feb 20 09:56:43 2004:
 I have a NEC-1300A  DVD +/- rw (4x/2.4x) drive.  WOrks great in winxp,
 don't know how well it would work in linux though.  I'm sure you could
 get it to work, even if it takes a bit of effort.
#272 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Feb 20 10:18:45 2004:
 I will let our friend know to copy only the last 3 CDs (i386).  He reports
 that he took my advice and asked if Kiwanis (where he still volunteers) had
 a DVD drive, and he was allowed to borrow it for a week, and he plugged it
 in where the CD-ROM drive was and Windows recognized the new drive and
 immediately read the DVD without needing any special drivers.  For some reason
 when we plugged our drive into a Windows computer (Win98 - his may be 2000)
 and tried to play a movie using the Realone player, it wanted drivers.
 
 He offered to help us get ours to work without Windows.  Not that we have much
 use for it except to play library movies.
 
 I have received about 40 congratulatory emails in the last day, from everyone
 except my brother.  I have a date to go walking with the neighbor either in
 the am, or after her meals on wheels arrives.  She says the volunteers who
 deliver it always thank her for keeping her walk cleared.  She is able to
 clear one shovel's width by herself.  Recycle Ann Arbor has agreed to fetch
 the bin from her porch since she is not able to lug it to the curb.  Some day
 when she finds a clear spot we will get one of her computers working.
#273 David Brodbeck(gull) on Fri Feb 20 15:22:35 2004:
 Re resp:271: I never got packet-writing to work with my DVD+RW drive
 under Linux, but batch writing works fine.  I use 'growisofs' to do it.
#274 Ryan Antkowiak(ryan) on Fri Feb 20 15:36:58 2004:
 I actually only buy DVD-R media -- they seem to be more 'universal' and
 make more dvd players happy.  I don't really need packet writing
 for anything anyway -- usually do DAO.  Got the dual drive anyway
 'just incase' :)
#275 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Feb 20 15:40:08 2004:
 What is packet writing?  This DVD drive came in the same computer with a CD
 RW drive so it probably does not write CDs.
 
 I phoned the neighbor to go for a walk and she pointed out that it had started
 to rain, so we had an interesting conversation about her medications.  They
 have reduced one from 3 to 1 time a week and she no longer has to go to the
 bathroom every hour, which was a real pain at night.  She walks up and down
 the basements stairs in bad weather to get exercise, part of her strategy for
 never ending up in a nursing home again. I ought to do the same.  She is 85.
 Her problem is she cannot crouch, or get up if she falls.  
 
 I am still getting congratulatory emails from people I notified of my test
 results, and today from someone who I hope is not offended that I forgot to
 write.  The greeting was from him and a mutual friend with whom I took the
 train from Prague to Italy, and their mamas, who I am glad to hear are well
 enough to send greetings.  Another from my uncle who is in Jamaica.  If we
 can ever get a house finished I should go visit everyone while we are all
 able.  My friend from high school has not yet told me whether it is okay to
 let her parents (one is in a nursing home) know that I am better, because we
 never told them I was sick.  This sort of thing does not seem to get into
 etiquette books - who to let know you are sick, whether they will be offended
 if you don't let them know, etc.  (Someone said he was offended - I did not
 want to worry him.)  
 
 I have only told 5 translation agencies as I don't mind being on vacation a
 bit longer, at least until I finish taxes.  This year I get to deduct medical
 expenses.  19 trips to the hospital through December.  $2 parking.  I just
 cancelled the car insurance as I hope to be biking again by May.  
#276 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Fri Feb 20 15:45:01 2004:
 One of thelessons life can teach you  is htat somehow, somewhere, you are
 going to offend someone. And it is not ok, but extremely hard to avoid if you
 don't want to live your life alone in a box.
#277 Andrew J Lanagan(drew) on Fri Feb 20 16:12:30 2004:
 Fedora takes up a bit over 5G, according to du.
#278 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Feb 20 21:35:40 2004:
 I think the friend who said he was offended was actually joking.  He calls
 a couple of times a year to chat in Serbian.  He and his wife moved here from
 Bosnia after she was a nurse during the war.  My brother has not written back
 because he did not get my mail - I suspect his mailbox is full.  Another
 translator sent me instructions to stay warm and rested and eat properly, and
 not to get stressed by too many translation deadlines.  This seems to have
 worked for her as she is still in remission.  A friend who had bypass surgery
 wrote back telling me he needed a translation of my PET scan results, and that
 he had been feeling well enough to go on a trip to New Zealand.  My friend
 staying with her daughter in Florida wrote that her boyfriend (in his
 seventies?) in Vermont is upset at her for exchanging e-mails with another
 man.  She is in her 80s and says they are just penpals.  Good thing he is not
 jealous of her writing me every week.
 
 Why does Fedora take up 5G?  Can you install a minimal version of it instead?
 
 Tonight we exercised me by walking around in the rain.  Jim returned the sink
 cartridge and we blew the money on some lo mein and tofu and vegetables and
 got soaked walking back.  He has become enamored of some line voltage
 thermostats now.  It is always dangerous to go to the hardware store.  But
 rainy Fridays are a good time to get attention if you want to take apart one
 thermostat to see what the low temperature setting is.  
#279 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Fri Feb 20 21:37:49 2004:
 Arch Linux is a nice distro. it is very minal and has nice package management.
 Or Debian, which comes on eight cds (binaries only) or 14 with source, but
 which takes up only 100-odd megs if you don't install anythign but the base
 stuff.
#280 Andrew J Lanagan(drew) on Fri Feb 20 23:20:08 2004:
 Re #278:
     Part of the reason is that there are a lot of applications included. Yes,
 you can do a minimum installation, which should fit in about 512M. It would
 not include X, nor tools to recompile the kernal.
#281 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Fri Feb 20 23:23:34 2004:
 Minal=minimal.
#282 David Brodbeck(gull) on Fri Feb 20 23:39:19 2004:
 Re resp:275: Normally, writing a CD-RW or DVD-RW is an all-at-once
 proposition.  You burn all the files you want on the disc in one go, and
 if you want to change the contents you have to erase it and start over.
  (Well, technically you can add more files by starting a new session,
 but there's a lot of wasted space when you do that.)
 
 "Packet writing" is a different writing method that most drives support,
 where they can write to or erase small chunks of the disc.  This lets
 you treat it sort of as if it were a giant floppy disk, instead of
 having to gather everything up ahead of time and copy it all at once.
#283 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Feb 21 10:33:31 2004:
 Like writing one file at a time instead of an entire image?
 
 I can't imagine what takes up 512M without X, unless the libraries used for
 compiling have become really immense.  Mine take up about 120M.  With X and
 a lot of useful applications (most of them non-X) I have about 400M, including
 duplicates of some programs (used when making slackware packages), a lot of
 downloaded packages plus their installed versions, various files used to test
 programs.  The 'basic hard drive version' with X was about 12M, Opera another
 12M or so installed.  Perhaps Fedora programs are written in C++?
#284 Ryan Antkowiak(ryan) on Sat Feb 21 12:47:22 2004:
 Some commands that report memory usage may claim that almost all of
 the memory is "being used" by programs, however, many programs try to
 kind of 'reserve' memory that they aren't really using, and they are 
 good about 'giving it up' when other processes need more memory.
 
 Try running the 'free' command to report free memory -- and pay close
 attention to the swap memory that is currently in use.  If this number
 is zero or really small, you should be fine.
#285 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Feb 21 17:36:15 2004:
 My swap memory (32M disk space) is never used as I have lots of real RAM -
 64M - and don't run X programs very often and if so, only one at a time.
 
 We just got back from the house tour in Ypsi and the winery tour in Tecumseh,
 and I had a chance to talk with my nurse's mother, who has been treated three
 times for cancer.  Two weeks ago she finally got off of parenteral nutrition
 (through a port, to help gain weight) and just after that learned that she
 has a recurrence and can't have radiation again.  Feb 12 a new monoclonal
 antibody was approved for her type of cancer.
 
 We stopped to put some games on the computer we made for her daughter and the
 monitor made a funny smell and is now displaying one thin vertical line.  I
 asked someone to return a possibly unused monitor, and if they are using it,
 does anyone reading this have a 14" monitor they don't want, color VGA, 800
 res would be nice.  We gave away our last three spares in the last year.
 We lent her our dim test monitor for a while.  
 
 Also does anyone have Windows Entertainment Pack (Win3.1) on a floppy disk
 so we don't have to look at all our old hard drives and try to get it off of
 one for a friend who wants hearts and solitaire?  I think you can use it with
 Win98.
#286 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Mon Feb 23 12:31:37 2004:
 Yesterday was the longest I had gone without chemotherapy since August, and
 I noticed that my voice was quite a bit stronger.  It might help that I seem
 to be getting over my most recent persistent cold (as evidenced by starting
 to sneeze a bit).  My hands and feet are also less numb.  My sit bones and
 also the outer corners of my palms where I sometimes lean them on a table
 while typing are still pretty sore.  Hot flashes every 45 minutes - possibly
 not quite as hot but hard to tell.
 
 This is all really minor stuff.  The friend's mother was telling us how she
 had an infected port, then an infected PIC line, and all sorts of other
 complications and surgeries, and she had to take 12 kinds of medicine every
 day (mostly vitamins because part of her digestive system is gone), and she
 could not drink with meals because it would wash out the food, but had to
 drink lots of fluid with her pills.  I suggested mashing them all in
 applesauce.  The pills are supposed to be taken with food (some of them) or
 not near mealtimes.  Pretty complicated.  Two weeks after getting off of TPM
 (total parenteral nutrition - which is food injected into you) she found out
 she had a recurrence.  I tried my best to cheer her up by explaining a bit
 about chemotherapy, and her daughter then mentioned that they had finally come
 up with a monoclonal antibody for that sort of cancer a week ago.  There is
 now another antibody for a different protein marker on lymphoma cells, which
 is still being tested on experimental animals.  I hope I don't need it, but
 it is nice to know there is a backup other than the route where they give you
 chemicals that destroy your bone marrow and then try to restore it.  
 
 We went for nearly a 2 hour walk yesterday.  I am enjoying having sore
 muscles.  This time we crossed Liberty and looked at all the additions to
 houses - some were wider, some had a second story added, or half a second
 story on just one side, or some odd combination that looked about to take
 flight.  Some had windows upstairs twice as large as the ones downstairs. 
 One had been added onto on both sides, then had two perpendicular gabled
 sections added in front, one of which was twice the height of the rest of the
 house (20' living room).  We stopped at one open house and were rather
 surprised at the asking price considering the previous owner (recently
 deceased) had done the addition with a husband (who left afterwards).  There
 were not a lot of straight lines, none of the trim matched, an exterior window
 had been made into a pass-through half the size without removing the original
 trim on the kitchen wall (they filled in two sides of the window opening with
 oak floor boards, left the rest as is).  One window had sash cords.  The
 fiberglass batts were dangling down from the attic rafters.  Jim noticed a
 wet basement.  $360,000 asking price.  
 
 Today I have officially come out of retirement and have a translation to do.
 Jim is talking about working on the heating system.  
 
 I phoned my brother to tell him his email was not working.  He had received
 my email but saw no reason to answer it.  I got a very nice email from the
 wife of a Czech friend (in good English) explaining that they went to look
 at my website photos and noticed that I had posted something about being sick,
 so they wrote to find out how I was.  Got to update that website!
#287 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Feb 25 16:07:43 2004:
 Still getting congratulatory emails from friends, one of whom is trying to
 get his insurance company to pay the full $608 for his ambulance.  They are
 claiming the customary fee is $291.  He sent them a newspaper clipping listing
 another large ambulance company as charging $605, and asked if they are
 averaging in these two companies with other companies charging less than zero.
 
 My insurance company has been very good about everything, except they would
 not pay for my bed pad until after I got bedsores without it, which I decided
 not to do.
 
 I phoned a non-computer friend with my good news and we ended up also talking
 about her skin cancer of a few years ago, which was removed under local
 anesthesia.  She decided not to go back for annual checkups because they were
 not nice to her, which she thinks is because she has Medicaid.
 
 I did two translations this week.  I could not figure out the name on the
 birth certificate (handwritten) or the ending of the place name, and when I
 looked up the latter with alltheweb search engine, my second hit listed 15
 families of the same name in that place that intermarried.  Life is not the
 same with the net for help.  I would not go back to precomputerized
 translation either - fedexing documents back and forth (pre-fax days),
 whiteout and paste-on strips to type over, backspacing 1/2 spaces.  I started
 with a pad of paper, progressed to a manual $5 typewriter, then a $150 used
 electric typewriter with interchangeable keys (for [ and Greek).  
 
 Jim is doing a CAD drawing of his walls in preparation for wiring in his
 baseboard heaters (which cannot be under an outlet or in front of a vent).
 I used the net to look up info on thermostats, which turn out to be cheapest
 by far when ordered locally - $20 instead of $26 plus $5 shipping.
 
 We finished a computer for a friend and convinced her that it is okay to use
 her 'new' 24-pin printer with it, it takes the same paper with holes in it
 as the 9-pin star that she likes.  She read about this in the manual.  I
 tested it out by playing freecell until I started winning.  Also found two
 DOS hearts games (about 100K each) for her.  The two Win9x games were 2-3M
 and I think they have action figures and probably sound included.
#288 David Brodbeck(gull) on Wed Feb 25 16:51:53 2004:
 Don't skimp on thermostats.  Cheap thermostats allow wide temperature
 swings, which are highly annoying and waste energy.
#289 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Feb 25 19:59:06 2004:
 We ordered one with a positive off (double pole, 4 wire) and a heat
 anticipator.  The heaters have thermostats on them, but I notice that in
 colder weather you need to turn them up in order for the other end of the
 room to also get heat, so a wall thermostat will keep things more stable.
 We got one with a 45-75 degree range.  Jim had one housemate once who turned
 his thermostat all the way up and left it that way all the time, so we don't
 want thermostats that go to 80.  45 lets you heat unused rooms without having
 to turn off the heater.  
 
 I noticed that the Opera ad banners tried to sell me Honeywell and
 White-Rodgers thermostats when I looked at Qmark brand, and when I took at
 look at Honeywell (none were for baseboard heaters, just furnaces) the ad
 banner tried to sell me yet another brand.  
 
 JIm is trying to plan his heating so that incoming ventilation air helps to
 move the heat around the room, meaning the heaters should be above or next
 to the intake vents and the thermostats near the outflow vents.  We have a
 week to figure things out before the first thermostat arrives.  He has a
 choice of fan-forced, radiant, glass radiant, cover, embedded wire, and a few
 other things for the bathroom.  We have decided against ceiling heat in most
 rooms, but after a shower it might be nice on wet hair.  Floor heat is not
 really suitable since he already has floors.  He thinks heated walls would
 be nice but he has walls already too.
#290 Rane Curl(rcurl) on Wed Feb 25 21:13:34 2004:
 You might consider a programmable thermostat (if you haven't already). They
 cost a little more but they save energy by automatic turndown at night.
 
 I didn't think it mattered what kind of heat you have. All they are are
 switches that go on and off - though they do have to be compatible with
 the voltage on the line.
#291 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Feb 25 22:16:57 2004:
 Jim does not want to buy 7 programmable thermostats for his house, and he also
 prefers to leave the temperautre at around 57 all the time rather than turn
 it down at night and have condensation on the windows.  If someone wants a
 warmer room they can turn up their own heat.  Assuming he can find another
 compatible housemate.
 
 Today wewent for another walk and looked at the baby rats at the local pet
 store.  Non-baby rats come in small, medium and larger, for $4, $5 and $6.
 You would think the younger ones would cost more since they will live longer.
 The smallest babies are pink and hairless and look more like amphibians.
 They had pet food for sensitive skin and for sensitive stomachs, and imitation
 bones made out of corn starch withfood coloring, or potato starch, or
 watermelon or peach pulp (with some binder).  A doggie car seat belt. 
 Allsorts of toys that cost more than the $3 hamsters.  Go blue sweaters for
 your dog or cat.  Cockatiels were $20 off.\
 
 Excuse the sticky space bar on this computer.  I was tring to get it to dial
 with a newer kernel and older library and pppd - no luck.
#292 Rane Curl(rcurl) on Thu Feb 26 00:52:49 2004:
 We have one programmable thermostat for our 11 room house (including
 baths) - works just fine. What is intended to be accomplished with 7
 separate thermostats? I would think some could at least by combined into a
 common unit.
#293 Good Joyxean Wordplay(rational) on Thu Feb 26 00:56:10 2004:
 11 rooms?!  You're rich.
#294 Twila Oxley Price(anderyn) on Thu Feb 26 08:55:05 2004:
 Baby rats are more food for snakes, etc.
#295 David Brodbeck(gull) on Thu Feb 26 12:09:05 2004:
 I don't turn down the thermostat in my apartment unless I'm going to be
 gone for a couple of days or more.  The markings on it are so vague and
 inaccurate that it takes an hour or two of fiddling to get it back in
 the right spot again, so it's just not worth messing with it.  It's a
 very cheap Honeywell unit.  The classic round Honeywell thermostats seem
 to be better.
#296 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Feb 26 12:16:33 2004:
 There will be one thermostat per room, and one baseboard heater per
 thermostat.  What is the point of having the heat in one room controlled by
 the thermostat in another room?  
 
 One electronic thermostat could be set to turn the heat down 5-15 deg using a
 photocell, presumably when the light was off and the sun was down and you did
 not live near a streetlight, but there was no way to turn it down below 59
 in the daytime.  
 
 At Kroger's we stopped to get me more juice (grapefruit, with nothing much
 added to it) and looked at the eggs section.  97 cents for 18 large eggs and
 we wondered why anyone would pay $1.55 for Grade B Medium eggs but bought a
 dozen anyway and were automatically charged 69 cents.  They were brown and
 looked to me like X-Large - maybe anything nonstandard goes into the 'Grade
 B' cartons, of any size.  Does Grade B mean they are older?
 
 You could also get 'cage free' eggs, or low cholesterol eggs, or 'vegetarian
 fed' eggs which were kosher and high in vitamin E.  Are there non kosher eggs?
 What are chickens eating nowadays, pigs?  If so, does this make them
 nonkosher?  
 I did not see any green eggs.  Someone at market was selling green eggs
 claimed to be low cholesterol.  
 
 Rice is tasting better, tomato sauce still quite sour, same for apple sauce.
 I cooked yesterday - some sort of small Indian bean (mung?) with onions,
 garlic, carrots, cinnamon, paprica, sliced wood ear, and fermented black
 beans, and some tomato paste.  It tasted odd.
 
 Jim just came in to measure the walls to see if his space heaters will fit.
 We have 4, 6 and 8' baseboard hydronic heaters which can be rewired for
 permanent use, and an assortment of possible bathroom heaters.  The hydronic
 heaters sold new for wire-in use can cost up to $200.  Cheaper new ones start
 at around $30 and clank.  
 
 I have a big translation arriving tomorrow.  The agency is expected about one
 box of documents and will send me as much as I can keep up with.  End of my
 vacation.
#297 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Feb 26 12:18:24 2004:
 We are buying only thermostats with temperature markings.  One marked L M H
 was $4 cheaper but would need calibration.  
#298 klg(klg) on Thu Feb 26 12:52:50 2004:
 Per the USDA
 
 Grades
 A  grade shield  on the packaging indicates the eggs have been graded 
 under federal supervision, as most have. Some states do their own 
 grading; they can display a grade but not the USDA grade shield. In 
 order of decreasing quality, grades are AA, A, and B. All ungraded eggs 
 sold to consumers must meet B standards.  Restricted eggs  do not meet 
 B standards; their disposition is regulated to prevent them from 
 reaching consumers, although two types of restricted eggs, checks (the 
 shell is cracked but the membrane beneath is not broken), and dirties, 
 may be sold to factories equipped to process them properly.
 All graded eggs must be clean and have sound, whole shells. Grade B may 
 show some staining, provided it covers less than 25% of the shell, and 
 the shell may be misshapen or have thin spots, ridges, and other 
 textural defects. There are no color requirements.
 The main difference between the grades is internal, and mostly reflects 
 the freshness of the egg. The air cell in a grade AA egg must not be 
 more than 1/8 inch deep; in a grade B egg it is over 3/16 inch deep. 
 The egg white should be thick and clear; the yolk firm and well-defined.
 Candling placing a very strong light behind the egg can reveal more 
 about the egg than one might think. For example, if the egg white is 
 thin, twirling the egg will make the yolk move nearer to the shell than 
 it would if the egg white were thicker.
 Quality is more obvious once the egg is broken. The yolk of a grade AA 
 egg is tall; the white doesn't spread out much, and there is more thick 
 white than thin white. The yolk of a grade B egg is flattened, it has 
 more thin white than thick white and will spread out to cover a larger 
 area.
 
 Per the Union of Orthodox Rabbis:
 
 VI. EGGS
 The eggs (or other by-products) of non-kosher birds or fish are not 
 kosher. Caviar, therefore, must come from a kosher fish and this 
 requires reliable supervision. Commercial liquid eggs also require 
 supervision. Eggs of kosher fowl, which contain a bloodspot, must be 
 discarded, and therefore eggs should be checked before use. 
#299 Rane Curl(rcurl) on Thu Feb 26 13:35:45 2004:
 Re #293: you can get 11 rooms in any house: just add more walls.
#300 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Thu Feb 26 13:36:58 2004:
 /snicker.
 Including the hall and vestibule, there are 12 rooms in mine.
#301 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Feb 26 18:14:38 2004:
 Do closets that you can walk into count as rooms?  Enclosed porches?  Hallways
 with or without stairs?
 
 Klg, thanks for the egg information.  I still think they used the 'grade B'
 category to hold all the brown eggs that were not 'large'.  I looked at the
 dozen eggs and they appeared to be mostly extra large and some mediums.  The
 store sells brown eggs only in large size.  None of them looked misshapen or
 stained.  I fried one and it had the highest yoke and least runny white I
 have ever seen in any egg, meaning it was quite fresh.  
 So a fertilized egg is nonkosher?  
 
 Today I walked to my apartment for the first time since July.  I cleaned up
 a bit and organized.  Jim had for some reason put the frying pan in the
 basement and the kitchen chair on the porch when our Chinese friend was
 staying there.  I formatted a few 5 1/4" floppy disks and threw out the high
 density ones to make a lot of space.  Anyone want them before Tuesday?
 I found the tax info I needed to finish taxes this weekend.  Jim found a
 Macintosh computer and mouse and keyboard, and the neighbor gave him a Mac
 monitor for a friend who likes Macs.  He also gave him a 640 monitor for a
 grexer that we gave a monitor to, which died.  We walked halfway back with
 Jim carrying two monitors (one to dump, one for the friend) and then stopped
 at my nurse's house and she had bought a 17" used model so then Jim carried
 her monitor back here (the one we had lent her).  Lots of exercise today. 
 I carried the floppy disks and tax info and a couple of books on Win95 and
 Internet for Dummies for the friend we made a computer for to do internet.
 What we really went for was my Slovene dictionary but I forgot that.
 Jim also found a 26" aluminum bike wheel which he carried with the monitor.
 I still need a replacement TTL monitor but he could not carry any more today
 so will get one on his bike Tuesday.  A big day!  I got exhausted carrying
 a bag weighing no more than 10 pounds.  Got to do this more often.
 
 We stopped and talked to the nurse's mother (while Jim was installing Windows
 Entertainment Pack for the nurse), who used to grow and can a lot of
 vegetables and fruits from her own garden.  She still has the energy to cook
 but not much else right now.  I am thinking about whehter to plant a garden
 this spring (after Jim digs it).  Another sign of spring - two squirrels
 chasing each other in circles.
#302 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Feb 27 20:47:07 2004:
 Good thing that the agency that was going to send me the Slovene translation
 forgot to even call or email me about it and I did not need the dictionary.
 They were going to call back about it a few weeks ago and also forgot.  There
 is a shortage of Slovene to English pharmaceutical translators in the US, when
 you really need them.
 
 Today was warm and sunny again so we went for a walk to the and the hardware
 store, where Jim determined he could put three 220V space heaters on one 15
 amp 220 circuit.  He is inventorying the collection to choose the right ones.
 
 On the way back the owner of the 1200 square foot house to which a 2900 square
 foot addition with full basement and double garage is being built came out
 and let us look at the cement-fiber shingle siding, which Jim would like on
 his own house (after he finishes the wiring and ventilation and insulation
 and roofing and garage door).  She let us carry back some 4' long wide boards
 from the dumpster, where Jim also found 4 somewhat stale and sickeningly sweet
 looking donuts.  
 I felt strong enough to carry back a 6' 2x4, one block.  Tomorrow we can walk
 them over to my apartment for exercise.  
 
 Assuming the big job will actually arrive Monday (when I scheduled lunch with
 a friend who had wanted it to be Friday but I had a job coming), I need to
 finish taxes this weekend.  I added up $111 worth of drugs (the rest was
 covered by insurance) and over $10,500 of medical expenses including
 deductible, insurance, dentist, bed pad, parking 19 times at the hospital.
 If I put all my earnings (after expenses) into a ROTH IRA, I can deduct half
 of what I put in the IRA from my federal income taxes (to equal nothing) and
 pay only Social Security tax (which I may never get back).  
 
 The hospital refunded $38 to the insurance company for overbilling me for 3
 antinausea pills when they only gave me 2.  Probably 1 would have worked. 
 They billed me about 20 cents less for 1 instead of 2 benadryls.  
 
 Jim must have seen the Mikado too many times.  He figures that the main part
 of getting his wiring and ventilation done is drawing up the plans, and it
 will then be as good as done.  It does seem to be taking forever to choose
 the wattage and length of heater, and locations which will not conflict with
 furniture or electric outlets or ventilation (left over from the furnace era
 25 years ago).  He might wire in two boxes in each room so he can move the
 heater if someone wants to put furniture there.  Or have two heaters in each
 room and turn one off if it is blocked.  He wanted to put the ventilation in
 the floor but I pointed out that things fall in it that way, such as dust.
 
 I had been hoping in a few weeks to get back to working on my house, now that
 he had 6 months of free time to work on his while it was cold.  I offered to
 buy him new siding for his house when (?) mine was done.  Now he wants new
 roofing that is photovoltaic.  I pointed out that finishing the wiring would
 save him about $100/year in insurance costs, which is more than solar power
 is likely to do even if did not cost anything to install. Insurance companies
 don't like the idea of fuse boxes, or 60 amp service.  
#303 C. Keesan(keesan) on Sat Feb 28 00:01:49 2004:
 I made supper - frozen green soybeans, sliced wood ear, frozen mustard greens
 with red stems, dried lily flowers, garlic, ginger, toasted bought tacos. 
 This tasted less odd than yesterday's supper, maybe because I left out the
 cinnamon.  Things are tasting a bit better than I last remember.  Blueberries
 tasted awful a month ago and today they were good in my oatmeal.  The oatmeal
 is also tasting better.
 
 My hair has not been falling out for a week or so. I still have a small number
 of 2" long hairs dating from an early Sept. haircut, but the others are all
 about 1/2" except for a few baldish spots.
 
 We have (maybe) chosen the locations of the heaters for all of downstairs,
 which requires moving 2 or 3 of the return air vents that Jim already put in,
 rather than moving some of the electric or phone outlets that he added.  He
 had put them in outside walls which interferes with insulation so wants to
 move them anyway.  The kitchen heater will go under a short built-in table.
 In Japan they put the heat (charcoal) under the table and put a cloth over
 it and everyone's legs, but he is not considering a cloth.  It is supposed
 to keep the window over the table from fogging up and dripping.  Jim was last
 seen making multiple copies of one heater drawing and moving them through
 walls.  He picked out the best location for a heater in the room I am using
 and then I pointed out that my furniture arrangement would block the heat.
 No way you can outguess all your tenants but he will use the other wall
 instead.  People have put queen size beds in the 9x10' room so he wants to
 leave wall space for that possibility.  
#304 Rane Curl(rcurl) on Sat Feb 28 02:20:41 2004:
 They use open charcoal heaters in Japan? Burning charcoal emits copious carbon
 monoxide. Many people have been put to sleep- permanently - by using charcoal
 for heating or cooking indoors.
#305 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Feb 28 09:30:05 2004:
 Traditional Japanese houses had sliding rice paper screens as walls and were
 pretty drafty.
#306 Rane Curl(rcurl) on Sat Feb 28 16:12:48 2004:
 Just don't try it yourself.
#307 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Feb 28 17:21:40 2004:
 I don't have sliding rice paper walls.
 
 Today's hike was to the downtown library to renew my card, followed by a
 picnic at Zingerman's.  Day-old bread and older pears from market.  I looked
 at heaters and grills at Kiwanis.  They had one used 3' plug-in heater for
 $10 and one grill for ventilation for $1.  Jim wants to plan out his basement
 finishing job before doing the ventilation.  This may never happen but it will
 be as good as done. He offered to start back to work on my house tomorrow.
#308 Andrew J Lanagan(drew) on Sat Feb 28 17:34:35 2004:
 I don't remember there being a basement in the house that I saw. Does Jim have
 a second house somewhere nearby?
#309 Joseph M Saul(jmsaul) on Sat Feb 28 18:58:18 2004:
 Re #304:  It's more of a problem in Korea than Japan, but a number of people
           die from using charcoal heaters every year.
 
#310 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Feb 28 23:26:47 2004:
 The only thing we burnt recently was two tacos that Jim was trying to cook
 in the toaster oven.  They caught on fire so he took the oven outside.
 Jim's house is a 1.5 story with a full basement.  We are building a house
 without a basement under it on Felch St.  The side porch has a basement under
 it and will be used for the water heater and dehumidifier.  My apartment has
 a basement bathroom and two dead washing machines in the basement.  That is
 one reason I am staying at Jim's house, where there is a bathroom on the same
 floor as the bedroom.  I am still slow on stairs and when I get out of hte
 hospital needed help to climb even one step.  The new house will have a
 bathroom on each floor.  
 
 I just discovered that for Michigan taxes you can subtract the cost of health
 insurance but not the cost of health care from what you pay taxes on.  You
 can also subtract what you put into a medical savings account . Where do I
 get one of those and how much can I put in each year?  If I can put in $8000,
 it will save me $320/year on MI taxes.  
 
 Jim's taxes should be easy since I did not pay him anything this year - just
 apply for the property tax refund.  
#311 Joe(gelinas) on Sat Feb 28 23:41:49 2004:
 Last I heard, Medical Savings Accounts were donated to the government at the
 end of the year.  Roughly.
#312 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Feb 28 23:46:47 2004:
 I know that I will be paying $8000/year in medical expenses this year and
 next, and nearly that much for three years after that.  CAT scans are about
 $3000 each, talking to the doctor probably another $500 a shot, multiplied
 by 4 with a slight discount negotiated by the insurance company.  For this
  year (2004) add two infusions at $7000 each minus a discount.  Luckily my
 deductible is only $8000.  
#313 klg(klg) on Sun Feb 29 00:01:23 2004:
 MSAs are tax-deferred accounts that allow you to save money for 
 medical expenses. Here's how they work: Your employer (or self) would 
 take the money currently spent on your health insurance and deposit a 
 portion into your newly established Medical Savings Account, up to 
 $1,400 for an individual (or $3,375 for a family). The other portion 
 would be used to purchase a catastrophic policy that covers medical 
 expenses after you meet a deductible. 
 Using your MSA funds, you pay for your first $1,400 worth of medical 
 bills directly. MSA funds can be used to cover any medical expense 
 that is currently tax deductible. The list of medical expenses is very 
 broad. It includes (this is a partial list, the entire list includes 
 over 100 deductions): acupuncture, anesthetist, chiropractor, contact 
 lenses, dentist, eye glasses, medical doctor, psychologist, registered 
 nurse and surgery. 
 
 You have two options for handling unspent MSA funds: 
 
 you can save money (tax-free) for future medical expenses and the 
 interest that you accrue is also tax-free; or you can withdraw money 
 from your MSA at the end of the year, but would need to maintain a 
 minimum balance. 
 
 Nonmedical withdrawals would be fully taxed and subject to a 15 
 percent tax penalty. 
#314 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sun Feb 29 11:15:27 2004:
 I don't quite follow.  I am supposed to split up the amount that I currently
 spend on medical insurance and use part of it to pay for medical insurance
 and put the rest in a savings account?  Or I can use part of $1400 to pay for
 my medical insurance and the rest into a savings account that I use to pay
 for part of the deductible?  I pay about $1000 for my insurance which would
 leave $400 to go into a savings account which hardly seems worth the bother
 of saving $16.  Or do you mean that I can put $1400 a year into a savings
 account (on which I don't pay Michigan taxes when I spend it the same year)
 and then also pay health insurance?  My insurance will probably be up to $1400
 pretty soon - if i don't change policies every couple of years the premiums
 get a lot higher because there is nobody left except sick people who cannot
 change policies.
#315 Mary Remmers(mary) on Sun Feb 29 13:54:45 2004:
 Will you be able to change policies now?
#316 klg(klg) on Sun Feb 29 16:36:07 2004:
 You are referring to the willingness of a new carrier to insure an 
 individual with a personal history of cancer?
#317 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sun Feb 29 17:31:29 2004:
 No I cannot change policies, even within the same company, and have my
 preexisting condition covered.  I was just looking for some way not to pay
 state taxes on my medical expenses.  
 
 Today we walked to my apartment and the building site again and got
 congratulated by almost every neighbor on the block plus one that was out for
 a stroll (she moved a few blocks away) and two that were visiting their father
 (they moved to Detroit area with their mother).  We met a new neighbor with
 a 5 year old and introduced her to an old neighbor with a 5 year old, plus
 the 4 and 6 year olds who were visiting.  We got a tour of someone's
 remodeling project.  The doctor who was visiting her mother next door promised
 to buy me some ice cream to help fatten me up.  We practically had a block
 party on the sidewalk.  We challenged two neighbors to finish their projects
 before we got the porch glazed.  (Then they will have time to help us!).
 We offered a replacement side door to one neighbor, which we had given to
 another neighbor who got a different one.  I don't know why people keep
 putting in wooden doors, which rot because they are at ground level and get
 snowed in.  
#318 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Mar  3 11:31:06 2004:
 Monday we were invited to the latest incarnation of Country Kitchen Buffet
 (Hometown Buffet - we have been to one in Chicago with Chinese friends who
 thought it was great) and I sampled lots of foods and could eat most of them.
 I tried the 'cherry pie' to see if it would be sour, and it was peach pie.
 They have the largest vegetable selection I have seen in any restaurant
 including baked sweet potatoes, mixed fancy greens salad (or spinach, romaine,
 iceberg), cabbage, squash, green beans, zucchini, potatoes, onions, carrots,
 bean salad, sugary baked beans.  No turnips.
 
 I took a short walk around in a circle to keep from getting stiff after
 Sunday's long walk.
 
 Tuesday we pushed my limits again by walking to the Dental School (at least
 2 miles each way, no rest) to an excellent lecture on how whales evolved from
 small four-legged creatures with long tails, to rather different creatures
 with either sonar or baleen, and wide tails instead of hind legs.  They could
 see ridges where the blood vessels that supported the baleen used to be, in
 whales that still had small teeth.  I made it back.  Jim also wanted some
 exercise so he carried a 14" color VGA monitor back half of the way to see
 if it works.  Today I am really sore and stiff, so will go for just a short
 walk.  I need to climb more stairs and do more crouching so that it won't be
 so hard to get back up.
 
 My feet are less numb.  My fingertips are all still numb.  The edges of my
 palms hurt a bit less but it still hurts to sit or to lie on my left side.
 When I injured my left heel similarly, it took 6 months of wearing padded
 shoes for it to start to clear up.  I can't go 6 months without sitting!
 
 My tongue still feels a bit burnt but things are tasting better.  Rice and
 potatoes are tolerable but not good tasting, and the rice is still scratchy.
 My eyes and nose are still a bit watery.  My inner lining still needs to heal
 some more too.  My voice is worse some days than others but I can sing today,
 tho I don't sound the best.  
 
 Yesterday we saw snowdrops up in two south-facing yards, including Jim's. 
 THe probably means we are due for some more snow soon.  There is also a
 2-year-old kale that survived in Jim's yard.
#319 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Mar  4 13:20:49 2004:
 Wed we took me for a long walk and then I noticed in the Observer that a
 friend of ours (paleontologist) was giving a talk about Biodiversity at the
 Exhibit Museum, so we walked to that.  She gave us a ride home.  I never knew
 until this week how many different muscles were involved in walking.  Even
 my heel muscles are tired.  I have to be able to walk to the hospital May 18
 unless I can get back to biking by then.  
 
 People have been phoning and emailing me about work.  I turned down 75 pages
 of badly faxed bad handwritten medical Polish, but agreed to edit a client's
 translation into English of a school transcript.  Last night the scanned and
 emailed copy arrived - ten attachments labelled things like 'English-1'.  No
 file extension.  The translation agency employee must be new to the business.
 I had told her (just in case) to send a monochrome image, and NOT a jpeg. 
 These files were 300K, sort of large for 1-page mono gifs or pdf files, so
 I emailed asking the file format.  Tiffs.  They sound like pretty low
 resolution tiffs to me.  She also offered jpegs instead.  I wrote back
 explaining how jpegs are not the thing for scanned BW documents, and to please
 scan again, at 300 dpi (or HP Deskjet 500 printer setting - are there scanning
 programs that don't offer at least one of these choices?), in monochrome (not
 greyscale, or photo, or color....) and it should end up about 50K/page - does
 that sound right?  
 
 I quit working for one company that accepted jpegs from their clients.
 
 It would take me about 40 minutes to download all these tiffs, which are
 probably too low resolution to be useful anyway.
 
 I asked for gifs or pdf files.  Monochrome.  
 
 I would have her fax, except the fax machine here is old and sometimes
 interprets faxes from other machines sent on 'fine' as 'standard'.  We have
 a Canon all-in-one printer-fax-copier that is prone to paper jams.  My Deskjet
 500 is much higher quality and does not jam paper (or feed through 10 sheets
 at once).  
 
 I will wait for mono gifs, and write e-mail-less friends in Slovene and
 Macedonian, to let them know cancer therapy can work.  One has a sister who
 was treated for stomach cancer, the other a 'boyfriend' about to be treated.
 I just learned from last night's lecturer that a mutual friend's mother has
 untreatable brain cancer and can no longer talk, or eat.  I have never heard
 of any malignant brain cancer that was cured.  I am lucky.
 
 One photo at the lecture was of a species of periwinkle (Vinca) used to
 produce the anticancer drugs vincristine (the one that makes my hands and feet
 numb) and vinblastine.
#320 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Mar  4 15:59:21 2004:
 I checked for my mono gifs, and the woman at the agency decided to send a test
 attachment to make sure I could handle the format.  The first mail was missing
 its attachment.  The second one had a 168K .dat file?  What is a .dat file????
 I asked, for the third time, for a monochrome pdf or gif file.  I also
 suggested she just try faxing the ten pages, tomorrow, so that Jim can find
 the other fax machine (the thermal paper one that interprets 'fine' from other
 machines as 'standard', instead of the plain paper one that jams paper) and
 plug it in first.  It is rather complicated not working at my office where
 I have a working fax machine with fax-phone switch.  The problem with being
 semi-retired temporarily.  I will move back when it gets warmer, or at least
 work there when I can bike again.  
 
 I thought I had seen all the unexpected things that a scanner could produce.
#321 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Mar  4 16:09:51 2004:
 I did some reading on the net and it is possible she tried to scan this
 document and turn it into a digital photo format.  We are going to try faxing
 tomorrow morning and give up on the scanner.
#322 Rane Curl(rcurl) on Fri Mar  5 01:32:39 2004:
 My scanner software scans lineart, halftone and grey, plus several color
 formats. What is "monochrome"? I thought "grey" was monochrome. 
 
#323 Scott Helmke(scott) on Fri Mar  5 09:23:08 2004:
 "single color", of course.  Perhaps they included a synonym or two to prevent
 confusion and increase apparent choices?
#324 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Mar  5 12:05:38 2004:
 Lineart is monochrome - no shades of grey.  Halftone might be one shade of
 grey.  Jim looked up in 'his' (library) scanner book and .dat is not one of
 the formats you can scan to.  Black on white documents scanned in 16 million
 colors (24 bit) are still legible (if not made into jpegs) but they will be
 12 times as large as 2-bit.
 
 I have to get back to biking so I can work at my office with a good fax
 machine.  Someone else is mailing a pile of insurance documents here.
 
 Today I got a spam offering me a $300 computer (marked down from $700) to all
 nurses, health care workers, teachers and students.  I must be one of those
 since I spent some time in the hospital.  The computer has a fax/modem and
 a network card and it is also internet and network ready.  It even has a
 keyboard and a 'scroll' (?) mouse.  All you need to do (if you read closely)
 is add a monitor and software.  Too bad I don't need a 2GHz cpu or 20G hard
 drive or 128MB RAM.  What are currently manufactured computers offering?
 We just got Scott's two 233MHz boards (with 64MB RAM) into cases from two dead
 computers given to us by another grexer, and don't quite know what to do with
 all that power.  Jim will compile on them with gcc and djgpp until he learns
 to write in nasm instead.   
 
 Someone steered me to a statically compiled version of links-ssl which WORKS!
 It is 400K UPX compressed, and was compiled with diet-libc.  What is that?
 You can use this links to access grex via backtalk, or webmail, or other sites
 where you need to log in (such as driverguide, I presume, or ebay, or the
 Opera forums).  I can use it with my 2M RAMdisk linux by copying it into /tmp
 and running it from there. 
 ftp://foobar.math.fu-berlin.de:2121/pub/dietlibc/bin-i386  has this links-ssl
 (it says it is text but that is what UPX-compression must look like) and sftp
 and several other programs, all cheaper than the above computer.  
#325 David Brodbeck(gull) on Fri Mar  5 12:11:20 2004:
 libc is the standard C library.  It has a lot of common functions that C
 programs need to run.  diet-libc is a smaller version of libc for
 programs that are willing to sacrifice some functionality for size.
#326 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Mar  5 12:34:14 2004:
 A smaller version of which libc - libc5 or glibc2 (libc6)?
#327 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Mar  5 22:53:11 2004:
 I am now able to use RAMdisk linux on my TTL monitor.  I set it up with
 mdacon, which let me specify that terminals 1 and 2 use the TTL monitor and
 3 and 4 the VGA monitor.  Is there some way to get linux to display Hercules
 emulation on a VGA monitor?  
 
 insmod mdacon mda_first_vc=1 mda_last_vc=2
 (in /etc/rc).
 
 mdacon.o in /lib/modules/2.2.16/misc/
 
 I was then able to save the RAMdisk version to a large gzipped file which I
 can boot from next time with loadlin.  Exciting!  I can take linux anywhere
 on 2 floppy disks and use it to telnet to grex, or browse with links.
 
 Today we exercised me by walking to a lecture on Smetana, followed by a quick
 stop at the Washington St. Art Gallery (which has migrated to Liberty St.)
 and the library.   I made it back but my feet hurt again.  
 
 I can now eat grapes and pineapple (I tested them at the art gallery) but
 February tomatoes (part of the decoration) taste quite sour.  Bread is still
 not very tasty either.
 
 I have cured whatever imbalance of intestinal flora I had for six weeks
 starting with the last chemotherapy by eating some yogurt (organic,
 nonhomogenized, live culture).  I should have tried this sooner but yogurt
 is sour.  
#328 David Brodbeck(gull) on Sun Mar  7 19:06:23 2004:
 libc5 and libc6 are different versions of the same thing.  Which of them
 a program needs depends on what it was compiled against.  diet-libc is
 basically yet another implementation of the same thing.  I don't know if
 it was based on a specific version of glibc or not.
#329 Andrew J Lanagan(drew) on Sun Mar  7 21:36:25 2004:
 Can libc6 serve in the place of libc5?
#330 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sun Mar  7 23:47:05 2004:
 Programs compiled to use libc5 can't use libc6, as far as I know.  You can,
 however, use later versions of libc6 to run prorams compiled for older
 versions of it. So Slackware 8.1 will probably run programs compiled for
 Slackware 7.1, but not vice versa (they might, but might not run).  I was able
 to use ncurses from SW8.0 or 8.1 with SW7.1.
#331 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Mon Mar  8 18:09:22 2004:
 Today we went to check out the new Chinese food store on Liberty near Dragon's
 Lair Futons, Faz pizza, and Coleman's market.  They bought a large chunk of
 building that used to be several offices, and did the wiring and painting
 themselves - two brothers and one wife who used to have a downtown restaurant.
 Scott let us know that they were open.  They were excited to see us and let
 us come in the wrong door (where there is no shelving or food yet).  No other
 customers, so we got a grand tour of all the dumplings, and fish, and tofu,
 and vegetables (we got Chi broccoli and baby bok choy and 2 garlics for $1).
 Prices are very low - they say it is to attract new customers.  Jim got some
 black sesame seed candy, and dried tofu and mushrooms, and sesame oil.  We
 got advice on how to make soup and how to steam dumplings from some good
 cooks.  There will be even more food in a few days.  You can buy 25 lb of MSG,
 or 50 lb of rice (or 10 brown rice).  They are selling to the 5 local CHinese
 restaurants.  While we were there someone wandered in looking for a type of
 meditation chair and they steered him to us (our English is better and they
 know we like brown rice).  
 	They found us some vegetable and leek dumplings but we already spent
 all our $17 on other things so will come back again soon.
 	We then wandered through Coleman's and looked at garlic for three times
 the price, without even the nifty little plastic mesh bag.  Coleman's is
 selling sticks of forced forsythia.
 	I am still having trouble keeping up with Jim.
 
 Today I got an email from one of our small group of computer users who says
 AOL blames the modem we gave you (56K winmodme) for the fact that she is being
 disconnected increasingly often.  I used it for a while (the modem) in my
 computer and never got disconnected.  I have heard that AOL disconnects users
 when things get busy - is this true?  I suggested she keep a log of what times
 she gets disconnected and how long she has been on first.  AOL suggested her
 modem was 'outdated'.  Do outdated modems disconnect more often???
 Last tiem they told us to make more memory by clearing 'art work' (saved image
 files) from the hard drive cache.  I don't trust anything they say.
#332 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Mon Mar  8 19:54:35 2004:
 I phoned a friend who is using AOL (at $25/month) who asked me how often I
 get disconnected.  I don't.  I was on 7 hours straight yesterday.  He says
 once he was on for at least an hour, but usually AOL disconnects him 4-5 times
 an hour.  AOL will email the other person suggestions how to fix 'her'
 problem.  Our other friend said none of them work (things like reinstall AOL).
 
 We made a Win98/Opera computer for another friend who thinks it is broken and
 wants to return it because the Epson printer we gave her is printing smaller
 than the Star (both at 10 cpi) and it stoped working while she was printing
 her grex email (she always prints it all on paper).  What I think stopped
 working was grex, not the computer.  She gives up too easily.  Another time
 she said teh mouse stopped working (there is no DOS mouse driver, it works
 fine in Windows).  The other computer we gave her apparently won't do a Print
 Screen but it prints fine from Windows - what might cause this?  For a while
 it would nto print at all after 'the printer thing fell into the computer'.
 They screwed it back in but the ribbon cable was apparently loose.  Might a
 still-loose cable interfere with DOS printing but not Windows printing?
 Win98 asked her for a password for some unknown reason (I did nto set it up
 do to that).  Her Win31 broke on a third computer.  We are thinking of
 reducign her to DOS only - kermit/grex and WORD for DOS and a DOS hearts game.
 Less to break.  Our friend is probably a typical Windows user - I wonder how
 anyone else manages to use their computer at all, wihtout lots of help.  
 We fixed someone else by deleting Win31 and putting on a DOS chess game, which
 he could restart with the power button as he always insisted on doing (like
 a TV).  His grex stopped working because it said to change the password.
 
 Has anyone ever had a computer that won't do print screen on a working
 printer?
#333 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Mar 11 10:30:39 2004:
 Monday will be six weeks from my last chemotherapy (Jan 26) if I counted
 correctly.  My digestion is slowly improving and things are tasting better
 but still not quite right and my tongue still feels a bit sore.  My fingertips
 are still slightly numb (except maybe not the right pinkie) but my feet are
 not numb (or I don't notice if they are).  My legs are stronger but I could
 use more upper body strength.  I had trouble carrying a couple of printers
 (dot-matrix are heavier than inkjet).  The pains in the area of my spleen are
 finally gone and my left hand rarely hurts where they put in all the IVs. 
 My sit bones still hurt, and the laryngitis does not seem any better than it
 was a few weeks ago.  Some days are worse than others.  The hot flashes are
 no longer happening every 45 minutes, they are at least an hour and maybe 20
 hours apart.  I have not been keeping good track.  
 
 The neighbor down the street called to go for a walk yesterday while it was
 sunny but we had a visitor, someone new to grex who read this item and was
 interested in linux.  Today it is snowing and she won't want to walk.  Jim
 promised to bike in the snow (and dark, coming back) to replace the 56K modem
 in the computer we set up for a friend of bruin's.  It may be dying due to
 nearly continuous use.  THe owner now wants a cable connection or DSL - any
 suggestions other than SBC?  Does she have to pay for both DSL and AOL
 separately?  
#334 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Mar 11 11:34:20 2004:
 SBC is $35/month if you contract for a year (first year they don't require
 the contract) and I think free 'DSL modem'.  USOL is $50 and no free modem.
 The hitch is that they require 266MHz and 64MB RAM.  We don't have this to
 give her (nor would I give anything that new for free to someone who can
 afford DSL service, call waiting, and cable TV).  I suggested that she try
 Kiwanis for a faster computer and Jim would help set it up.  We already gave
 her our biggest monitor and speakers.  Where else can one get a 266MHz used
 computer, cheap?
#335 Todd(tod) on Thu Mar 11 11:48:09 2004:
 
#336 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Mar 11 22:11:57 2004:
 I forgot to mention that my hair has been growing for about 6 weeks and is
 nearly 1" long, or about 1/2" per month as estimated by someone earlier.
 I look like my father used to look in the 50s after his weekly haircut.  An
 improvement over the shaved look of last month, and it will let me take my
 cap off when it gets a bit warmer.  
 
 The DSL line is no longer needed.  Jim determined that the Compaq computer
 which we made someone for AOL has started to have a noisy ISA bus, and
 therefore would not work with either of two modems (or maybe it was PCI) for
 more than 20 minutes.  It was fine a week ago.  Maybe it is the power supply?
 Anyway, we tested the same modems in a matching Compaq and I was online for
 an hour, so we will do a trade (move hard drives) and then look at the power
 supply etc at our leisure.  A temporary solution is an external modem.  
 
 The Star 9-pin printer given to us to figure out why two computers won't print
 is not working with three other computers either.  THe owner does not believe
 it is broken - it was printing just the other day on her 486.  We will let
 her try again and in the meantime get her another printer, perhaps Rane's
 Star.
 
 There is a new version of Lynx for DOS out as of March 7 and I got it working
 already (based on my previous similar version).  Anyone want to know more?
 It is newer than one grex is using.  2.8.5 release 1.  
 
 I wonder if we can test the 'noisy' computer by putting a radio near it to
 see if there is strong static.  We had a noisy power supply once before that
 messed up several modems (not permanently) and we diagnosed it because when
 we turned it on, the music turned into a loud buzz.  Not that we have another
 Compaq-specific (mini-tower) power supply.  The thing is really close-packed.
 You need to take it all apart to add a card.
#337 C. Keesan(keesan) on Sat Mar 13 00:10:19 2004:
 I now have another version of basiclinux going - dietlibc and Kernel 2.2.16.
 It has a few bugs, some of which have been fixed in the second edition (which
 came out three days after the first one) - wrong terminal in rxvt might be
 why I don't get a cursor using cli programs like telnet.  I cannot download
 linux files - they get to about 75% and stall, with two browsers and wget.
 Every time they stall at the same place.  When I installed BL3 to a computer
 with mono VGA I could not see the numbers I was typing for a couple of menus
 but after I plugged in a color VGA monitor I saw what I typed even after
 plugging back the mono VGA monitor and again when I rebooted a few times. 
 Lynx from Slackware 4.0 with two added libraries works but there is some
 scrambling - might this be due to using an earlier libncurses.so ?  Kermit
 is not happy and wont' run, and also needs libncurses.  I cannot easily
 upgrade because I can't download files.  I used another linux finally to
 download and copied to this  one.  Most of our floppy disks wont' work on
 several linux computers, which complain about I/O problems.  I got plip to
 work finally by reversing the numbers.  Turns out I was sending to myself
 rahter than the other computer.  
 
 A week ago my fingers, two of them, started to get shredding skin around the
 fingernails, which had happend about 2 weeks after chemotherapy every time,
 but this was 2 weeks after 3 weeks after therapy (when I would have had a 9th
 if I had a 9th).  Today I noticed my hair is starting to pull out a gain, 1"
 hairs, which usually happens 3 weeks after therapy.  Odd.  Sort of an echo.
 
 Kroger's $2 Deluxe Death by Chocolate tastes good for the first time, instead
 of sour or odd.  My tongue still feels a bit sore but ice cream is not
 scratchy.  My weight is finally up a bit, to maybe 115 wiht lots of clothing.
 The hospital scale tended to weigh at least 3 pounds less than ours, but I
 used to weigh 112 on ours for 3 years before getting hospitalzed.  108 a year
 ago, 93 in August after all that hospital food.  I still need to climb more
 stairs.  Maybe one more flight every day until I can run down and up 50
 flights like Jim does without running out of breath, when he had to answer
 the questions about this for an exam.  He stopped when he could not talk and
 walk at the same time.  I am aiming at 118 or 120 so I will have a reserve.
 Bought masa harina to make tacos rather than the premade ones that are too
 thin and are only good for making corn chips because they get hard, and we
 have lots of onions and tomato paste for salsa, to use before the onions
 sprout, like the daffodils and crocus that we saw up today.  It is much more
 interesting to cook now that I feel like eating what I cooked.
 
 
 On today's walk to the library and Kroger for exercise, we stoppped at Ann
 Arbor Bedding and looked at all the 10" mattresses some of which have the
 special foam that I bought.  $1500 for a bed!  For $200 you can buy 3" dense
 foam which also would have worked for me.  I met a small bulldog behind a
 child gate.  This year's beds are white, and not as slippery as they used to
 be.  No stripes.  Our mattresses are striped cotton.  To keep from getting
 bored, Jim collected Kroger carts on the east side of Stadium Boulevard, which
 he surmises people walked across to the bus stop and abandoned, pushed them
 together, and returned them.  We got the friendly cashier who likes to give
 bag discounts.  He gave us five discounts for the five items we bought.  Says
 nobody bothers him about this unless it goes over 10 bags, and thanked us for
 saving the environment.  Last time he let us use his Kroger card.
 
 Tomorrow Jim will try to fix our doctor friend's garage door opener and I will
 try to walk back from there (3 miles?) stopping at another friend's house half
 way.  I might not make it, might be 4-5 miles.  I presume they will try to
 help fatten me up.  Nice Macedonian cooking.  
 
 We are running out of things to see on Stadium Blvd.  We still have a video
 store and a podiatrist and McDonald's.  Stadium Optical.  Toys with Noise.
#338 Todd(tod) on Sat Mar 13 08:18:03 2004:
 
#339 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Mar 13 13:07:54 2004:
 Probably a lot like a Romanian meal, including feta cheese.  What is that
 called in Romanian?  Pita (with filo dough).  Good bread.  Soup.  We are
 leaving in half hour and I am not trying to walk that far.
#340 Todd(tod) on Sat Mar 13 13:35:26 2004:
 
#341 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Mar 13 23:10:33 2004:
 We had chorba - with rice and lemons.  In Macedonian it refers to thickened
 soup as opposed to broth.  We had two kinds of ajvar (red pepper, eggplant,
 garlic, spices) one of which we made.  We skipped the bison burgers and
 enjoyed the noodles with shiitake and portabello mushrooms which were not
 Macedonian.  Jim and our friend played fix the garage door opener and
 installed a direct phone line to the computer while I sympathized with his
 wife about her brother's dying due to poor pollution controls in Macedonian
 power plants and poor medical care.  He got bladder cancer.  
 Instead of feta we had Irish cheddar and some sort of mozarella, with
 Zingerman's bread.  Godiva chocolates to fatten me up.  Herbal tea.  
#342 Todd(tod) on Sun Mar 14 11:52:13 2004:
 
#343 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Mar 16 14:32:33 2004:
 Last August we were supposed to get our teeth cleaned but I cancelled because
 I could not sit up long enough.  Three weeks after my final chemotherapy I
 was given the go-ahead to get my teeth cleaned.  Before that my platelet count
 would have been too low, leading to too much bleeding.  Usually we try to
 schedule spring and fall so we can bike.  Since I can't bike yet anyway, I
 scheduled for today, expecting improved weather.
 
 We had a lovely walk through Eberwhite woods in blowing snow, looking at
 treetrunks and one squirrel. Jim walked his bike because he had to be at an
 exam at WCC one hour after his teeth were cleaned and it is 7 miles and takes
 longer in the snow.  They asked, as usual, if there was anything new with my
 health since the last cleaning.  This time there was, so she dutifully wrote
 down lymphoma, chemotherapy but no radiation.  I asked why my teeth have been
 feeling slimy since I started chemotherapy, might it be a residual fungal
 infection.  Nope, there are two types of saliva and I have an imbalance with
 more of the sticky type, which since I had no radiation will go away in time
 (along with the imbalance in taste buds which still makes potatoes and apples
 taste unpleasant).  My gums looked like I had not been flossing for much of
 the past six months (as instructed - it might have made them bleed).  
 	For the first time since I can recall, I had 'no cavities'.  The
 chemotherapy must have been good for my teeth ;=)  Jim needs one filling.
 	I wonder if I also have some imbalance in my intestinal secretions
 which will go away, improving my digestion eventually.  The pain and bleeding
 finally cleared up about 5 weeks after the last chemotherapy, and I suspect
 was due to the chemicals preventing regeneration of the lining, similar to
 my shredding skin near my nails (which is finally cleared up again). 
 
 	Jim was up until 2 am getting the finishing details on a program about
 drywall mud.  He put in some creative spellings such as demntion which I
 corrected.  He says the teacher can't spell either and does not grade for
 that.  Today I am going to try to compile kermit and ratpoison with glibc5
 before Jim takes over the computers again.  
#344 Todd(tod) on Tue Mar 16 14:43:44 2004:
 
#345 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Mar 16 17:16:40 2004:
 Ratpoison is a small window manager that is non-graphical and does not use
 a mouse, and runs all X programs full-screen but lets you switch between them
 and write a menu.  There is an advanced version that will do split screen.
 It uses similar commands to 'screen' for console.  I am hoping Kermit will
 run in it using the regular console font, since I need to run Kermit in X in
 order to get a scroll buffer (or in DOS, which I tend to do isntead).  
 The latest basilinux (3.01) is using swm which is tiny but comes with a bunch
 of wallpaper (someone's first reaction to one choice was 'yech!) and requires
 a mouse to even get the menu to come back (or Ctl-Alt-Backspace and type
 startx again) and also to make the rxvt full-screen unless I reprogram it
 larger.  This version of linux is using xli to view images so I would need
 to run lynx or links in X to see images.  It can't be used to run Opera (at
 least not a recent version of it).  I am trying to get lynx from SW4.0 to work
 with it and might need the libncurses from 4.0 instead of 3.5 to do so.  And
 the kermit from SW4.0 has some floating point requirement which we don't meet,
 and that compiled for 3.5 does not do FTP because it is an old version so I
 might recompile without floating point support.  Kermit support sent me
 instructions how to do that.  Debian has compiled ratpoison but it is hard
 to find a source for Debian with glibc5 - what number would that be?  SW7.1
 is something like Debian 2.2 and it goes back to 2.0 if you can find it, at
 some mirrors.  I found only 2.2 so far.  
 
 I have become Windows support.  Two calls in two days from people who thought
 they broke their Windows.  One of them somehow ended up at 640 instead of 800
 res, and the other must have crashed because Alt-F4 and Ctl-Alt-Del did not
 get her out of wherever she was.  Power button worked.  
#346 Todd(tod) on Tue Mar 16 17:26:01 2004:
 
#347 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Mar 16 22:25:37 2004:
 Kermit95 won't work with linux.  I use MS-KERMIT for DOS which comes with its
 own screen buffer -just hit PgUp PgDn.  in Linux you need to stuff X and xterm
 into the computer to get a screen buffer and then Shift-PgUp/PgDn (or the
 mouse if you have a poor memory for commands).  I don't know if it is xterm
 that provides the screen buffer and whether ratpoison uses xterm.  First I
 need to compile it and get it working somehow.  
#348 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Mar 17 21:32:54 2004:
 I compiled Kermit today instead of ratpoison, since the author of the Kermit
 book offered to help.  You can compile without ncurses, and don't get a little
 graphical indicator of download progress, just Butes and percentage.  Fine
 with me.  Ratpoison needs autoconf and automake to compile as designed, and
 also you need X on the computer where you are compiling (X libraries and
 headers).  Some kind people in the mail list explained to me how to make a
 full-screen xterm and keep the menu from going away so that I don't need a
 mouse to use swm (unless I accidentally remove the menu, in which case
 Ctl-Alt-Del and startx gets it back).  But I still have no cursor when using
 pine, which is rather a nuisance.  Other people have cursors where I don't.
 Our mini-linux is also missing bold fonts in X but I can number my links in
 lynx since they are not bold.  If anyone else is interested I can provide the
 link to this 2.7M download that does not require a linux partition.
 
 I am reading a book about oxygen.  I was wondering why in addition to
 breathing fast I also had a pulse of 120 (normal being about 80) when I was
 in the hospital, which took a couple of months to go down even after my
 hemoglobin values went up and I was breathing normally (they took off 3 liters
 of fluid from around my lungs, somehow created by the lymphocytes).  A
 shortage of oxygen in the body causes the heart to beat faster and it
 apparently takes a while to go back to normal even when you have enough
 oxygen.  I had two tranfusions totalling 3 units and my hematocrit went back
 up from 24.  Normal is about 35-40 and I used to be about 45.  Scary in
 retrospect.  They were measuring my blood oxygen in the hospital and it was
 low enough until the last day that I needed a tube delivering extra oxygen to
 my nose.
 
 I still can't cut my fingernails without an effort.  Might be time to start
 doing some deliberate exercises to regain my muscles.  I shoveled snow
 yesterday but that won't be available much longer.   My nails actually seem
 stronger than they used to be.  Maybe it is all the milk I am drinking so I
 will grow big and strong.  
#349 Todd(tod) on Thu Mar 18 11:21:47 2004:
 
#350 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Mar 18 12:46:58 2004:
 My fingernails never fell out or got weaker.  Either they got stronger, or
 I am still too weak to cut them properly.
 
 The cursor now works in rxvt/pico.  Turns out that when you telnet to grex
 and have a white on black screen, with rxvt set to black on white screen with
 default black cursor, you don't see the black cursor on the black screen at
 grex. I now have a green cursor in rxvt and the next linux version will have
 a colored cursor.    I also managed to get rid of the scrollbar with +sb (-sb
 adds it, but that is the default unlike xterm where no bar is default).
 None of the X fonts I have seen is as readable as the standard console font.
 In one the a looks like an o, in another the m and w are spindly.  
 
 Different body parts apparently regenerate at different rates.  My fingernails
 do not seem to be growing at 1/2" per month.  Apparently different types of
 taste bud also regenerate at different rates because some days things taste
 better than others.  I have read that it can take 3-6 months to get back to
 normal, or even a year.  Probably depends on what sort of chemotherapy was
 used and how often and how long.  
#351 Bruce Howard(bhoward) on Thu Mar 18 18:30:44 2004:
 Re#304/305 The thing you are talking about is a kotatsu and these days is
 heated by an electric heater, not coals.  I've seen nowhere outside of the
 innaka (countryside) and demonstration museum houses that use the coal
 kind.  Too dangerous in the old days, even more so with the more cramped
 nature of current Japanese homes.
 
 Fusama with shoji (sliding doors covered with translucent paper) are still
 common in most houses and apartments these days.  For better or worse,
 modern houses are still quite drafty...a boon in the summer, frustrating 
 in winter.
#352 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Thu Mar 18 18:32:16 2004:
 Does the island Tokyo is on include some innaka?
#353 Bruce Howard(bhoward) on Fri Mar 19 03:55:04 2004:
 Yes, quite a lot actually.  
 
 About two thirds of the land here is mountainous.  Most of Japan's
 population tends to cluster in urban areas sprawled across the other
 third, primarily the Kansai and Kanto plains on Honshu (the main island)
 and a few other places on the other islands.  I believe ~ 60% of the
 Japanese live in the Tokyo-Osaka belt with (presumably) the remainder
 concentrated in areas like Kagoshima/Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Sapporo.
 
 As soon as you step anywhere outside of those areas, you are in the 
 countryside though some places are clearly more "country" than others.
 My informal measure is to count the number of warabiki yane (traditional
 thatched roof houses) in an area...the more you find, the more isolated
 and from my perspective, interesting it tends to be.
 
 You have to look carefully at the house shape, however, when using this
 method as most thatched roof houses were long since hidden under metal
 roofs (typically right over whatever thatching was in place at the time
 of covering).
 
 Realistically speaking, there are two radically different (arguably three
 -- which I'll get to momentarily) Japan's to visit when you come here.
 There are the super futuristic, highly crowded, manga-esque urban
 areas best exemplified by Tokyo.  Then there is the largely depopulated
 countryside, mainly in the mountains.  Sadly, the latter category is
 getting quite hard to find in its most pure form due to a combination of
 nonsensical powerline routing, useless public-works construction projects
 strewn randomly across the innaka and an increasing proliferation of
 pensions, vacation homes, etc.
 
 The third category I mentioned above would include Okinawa Prefecture,
 formally the kingdom of the Ryuku Islands.  Technically part of Japan, it
 historically was a distinct culture with it's own language (grammatically
 related to Japanese with much vocabulary contributed from China) until
 came under partial political control of Japan during the Tokugawa (Edo)
 era and under complete control after the Meiji restoration.  In spite of
 the best efforts of the Japanese mainland government and the US military,
 Okinawa remains a fantastically beautiful place and well worth visiting.
 
 Another interesting place to see "country" are the Ogasawara islands
 directly south of the main part of Tokyo around the same lattitude
 of Okinawa.  Legally part of municipal Tokyo but with 1000+ mile of
 separation and tropical climate, they have a rather different feel
 to them.
 
#354 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Fri Mar 19 08:13:57 2004:
 Cool. Thankyou for that, it's very interesting. Was hte culture in Okinawa
 you mention the Ainu people?
#355 Joe(gelinas) on Fri Mar 19 17:36:38 2004:
 No. The Ainu were driven north to Hokkaido.  The Ryukyuans are different.
#356 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Fri Mar 19 17:37:37 2004:
 Ah.
#357 klg(klg) on Wed Mar 24 12:34:10 2004:
 keesan may wish to check out page D1 of today's WSJ regarding cancer 
 survivorship.
#358 C. Keesan(keesan) on Thu Mar 25 13:03:02 2004:
 I don't have WSJ - is it online?  Would you summarize please?
 
 I am pleased to report that I am no longer getting hot flashes every 45-50
 minutes.  It is 1.5 to 2.5 hours between them now.  Maybe they will stop
 before the first heat wave.  I can sleep longer without waking up roasting.
 
 My saliva seems somewhat less sticky now, but starches and fruits still don't
 taste good.  They don't taste nearly as bad as they used to.  
 
 I have to get back on a bike soon.  I have a heel spur that is hurting again
 now that I am walking longer distances.  I think it hurts less than it did
 to sit, but perhaps it is the change in chairs.  We found a nice one being
 thrown out by a store, and put the one from Kiwanis at the curb (where it went
 away) because it was too wide to fit under the desk.  My hands where I rest
 them to type (on a pad) are still sore. I am trying to rest on my forearms
 instead.  
 
 It is now 2 months since my Jan 26 chemotherapy.  I read that it takes 2-3
 months or up to a year to recover from chemotherapy.  As long as it continues
 to work, I don't mind the few residual side effects so much.  Though it would
 be nice to get my voice back stronger, and the tingling/numbness in my
 fingertips is not really a problem but I wish it would eventually stop.  
 The main remaining problems are due not to treatment but to aftereffects of
 losing so much weight from the disease itself - muscle and padding.
 
 Jim was reading in a library magazine that the single biggest problem for
 women with breast cancer is that their hair falls out during treatment.  That
 one never bothered me, except for being a bit messy.  He read something about
 applying electromagnetic fields to boost growth hormones in the follicles.
#359 klg(klg) on Thu Mar 25 16:00:30 2004:
 re:  "#358 (keesan):   (1) I don't have WSJ - is it online?  Would you 
 summarize please?
 
 (2)  It is now 2 months since my Jan 26 chemotherapy.  I read that it 
 takes 2-3 months or up to a year to recover from chemotherapy.
 
 (3)  Jim was reading in a library magazine that the single biggest 
 problem for women with breast cancer is that their hair falls out 
 during treatment."
 
 (1)  If one has a subscription.  You ought to read it yourself.  The 
 library certainly has it.
 
 (2)  That would be a *minimum* estimate!
 
 (3)  Depending on whether the treatment was surgical, chemical, or 
 radiation.
#360 C. Keesan(keesan) on Fri Mar 26 16:07:11 2004:
 How long did it take you to recover, and what symptoms disappeared first?
#361 klg(klg) on Sat Mar 27 18:26:34 2004:
 (1)  If recovery is defined as 100% pre-cancer level, then it is still 
 progressing.
 
 (2)  Can't say what symptoms disappeared first because it was almost 2 
 years ago and am not into record-keeping in that regard.
#362 C. Keesan(keesan) on Sat Mar 27 18:33:02 2004:
 Do you have any vague recollections of how things progressed?  And what has
 not yet recovered?  I still have rather weak muscles, do you?
 
 Ihave heard that the longer you go without a recurrence, the better your
 chances of no recurrence.  I am glad to hear that it is 2 years.  I talked
 to 2 people whose treatment worked only for 2 or 3 months  The 3-month one
 had stronger treatment (involving transplanting his own bone marrow after
 using chemicals that destroy it) and has been fine now for 5 years.  The other
 one was sitting there worrying and was glad to hear about the first one.
#363 klg(klg) on Sun Mar 28 16:34:00 2004:
 Actually, recollections are rather muddled.  Muscles aren't week.  
 Evening tiredness & weakened memory.  Suggest you refer to WSJ article 
 for where to get more info.
 
 Radiation treatments began 3.5 wks after chemo stopped and went for 
 4.5 wks.  Then, 1 wk later, father in law died.  Two mnths later, I 
 was in a head-on crash & totalled a car.  1.5 mos. later, father 
 entered hospice and died a mo after that.  Had a lot of distractions, 
 wouldn't you agree? 
#364 C. Keesan(keesan) on Sun Mar 28 20:23:32 2004:
 Wow, you really have had it rough, klg.  
#365 C. Keesan(keesan) on Mon Mar 29 17:35:54 2004:
 I just read a study of diffuse large cell lymphoma and they give various
 statistics.  For high-grade DLCL 61% experience 'complete remission'.  Of the
 high-risk category (which I think I was in) 44% have CR and 26% survive five
 years.  Since I had CR (no nodes remain enlarged) my 5-year survival is
 greater, about 60% (divide 26 by .44).   Risk factors include being over 65
 and having an advanced stage of the disease (which I did by all measures).
 
 Of those who have CRs, in other studies, 20-50% will have relapses, which
 means I have at least a 50% chance of being permanently 'cured'.  
 Of those with relapses, the same therapy will produce another remission in
 20-35% but only for about a year or so.  A stronger therapy involving removal
 of your own bone marrow stem cells, treatment with chemicals that destroy
 these cells, and transplanting of your own cells, gives 53% of the relapsed
 patients who were originally cured a 53% chance of surviving 5 more years.
 So I figure I have a 75% chance of being around for quite a while, or higher.
 The Rituxan treatment increases the odds somewhat.  
 
 I will try not to think about this a lot, but my odds are pretty good compared
 to a lot of other people with other types of cancer. 
 
 Lymphoma can be caused by various viral infections, including herpes.  I have
 a cold sore once in a while.  A book on oxygen says that half of people with
 cold sores (herpes simplex) are likely to develop the oxidized protein plaques
 which cause Alzheimber's disease in old age.  I will be happy to achieve old
 age despite this risk.
 
 Back to my translation on oncogenes, which produce certain protein products
 that can be used in the diagnosis of different types of cancer and of the
 stage to which it has progressed.
#366 Todd(tod) on Mon Mar 29 17:48:57 2004:
 
#367 C. Keesan(keesan) on Mon Mar 29 18:22:22 2004:
 I don't understand your question.  Viral infections can cause lymphoma.  This
 might be because the body creates a lot of free radicals when fighting off
 the infection, and the free radicals can damage DNA.  Maybe it is because
 lymph cells participate in fighting infections and multiply more during an
 infection so have more chances of mutating.  Maybe some viruses actually get
 into the cell and insert copies of themselves into the DNA randomly thereby
 causing mutations.  The website did not go into this.  Sun has similar effect
 to infections, in producing free radicals, which is why overexposure to the
 sun makes you feel like you have the flu.
#368 Todd(tod) on Mon Mar 29 19:43:32 2004:
 
#369 C. Keesan(keesan) on Mon Mar 29 22:26:10 2004:
 I doubt that anyone knows.  There are still a lot of mysteries, the human body
 being a major one.  People are constantly developing cancer, except most of
 the time the body manages to kill the cancer cells.  People with poor immune
 systems, such as people with HIV or those taking immunosuppressants after
 transplants, are much more likely to not keep the cancer from getting out of
 control.  Sometimes if you have one infection, your body is busy fighting that
 and other infections, or cancers, can get out of control.  
 
 Chemicals can also cause cancer, as can X-rays - anything that damages DNA.
#370 Todd(tod) on Wed Mar 31 19:11:10 2004:
 
#371 C. Keesan(keesan) on Wed Mar 31 21:26:08 2004:
 I just read that 1/3 of cancers worldwide are caused by infections.  The
 immune system generates a lot of dangerous chemicals to fight off the
 invaders, which can also damage the body itself.  Since the lymph cells are
 part of the immune system, they are exposed to these chemicals and can have
 their DNA damaged.  The compounds in tobacco smoke also damage DNA to the
 point where smokers can have up to 50% more of these products of broken DNA
 in their urine.  I wonder if smokers are more likely to get gout, since the
 uric acid that causes it is a breakdown product of DNA.  People with gout are
 supposed to avoid foods with rapidly dividing cells such as asparagus and
 mushrooms, because they have more DNA in them (nucleic acids).  
 
 Free radicals are also what causes aging.  Ultraviolet light causes your skin
 to age faster and get wrinkled, as does smoking.
#372 klg(klg) on Thu Apr  1 12:59:12 2004:
 (Did the Chicago 7 know that?)
#373 C. Keesan(keesan) on Thu Apr  8 05:31:56 2004:
 It is now a little over 2 months since my last chemotherapy (Jan 26) and the
 side effects are mostly still with me - slight pain in the spleen area where
 the tumor was, and in my hand where I had a lot of IVs.  Bleeding during
 defecation continues (probably due to my intestinal lining not being recovered
 yet - and I still have a somewhat sore tongue and runny eyes and nose) but
 the pain has mostly stopped as of a month ago.  Hot flashes down to about once
 every 2 hours instead of 45 minutes.  I am sleeping better, on average.
 It still hurts to sit, and where I rest my hands to type, but a couple of days
 ago it started hurting less to sit, so yesterday we walked to my apartment.
 Jim is fixing the washing machine there so that I can move back once it gets
 a bit warmer.  I cleaned up some (he rearranged things when  friend stayed
 there and I found my pots and pans on the basement floor) and recycled a lot
 of papers that were relevant last time I lived there in July.  And we put air
 in my bike tires and I was going to walk it back, but I decided to try riding
 and discovered my biking muscles are still in better shape than my walking
 muscles, so I biked all the way back (which is mostly downhill).  First time
 since July I have been on a bike and now I am no longer limited to a 2 mile
 radius.  Hurray!
 
 	Food is tasting closer to normal but I am still not gaining any more
 weight - 114 after supper with clothing on.  My saliva is not as sticky as
 a couple of weeks ago.  Things are gradually returning to a balance.
 
 	My yard could use weeding, but it may not happen for a while.  I still
 have trouble getting up after I get down.  There will probably be no garden
 this year, and I don't expect to be strong enough to go on vacation or even
 swimming (2 hours by bike) but it will be really nice to be able to get to
 the river and local parks again.  
 
 	Next checkup (CAT scan) May 18.  
#374 C. Keesan(keesan) on Tue Apr 13 20:25:26 2004:
 This past weekend I was able to walk to both Scott's grex potluck and Aruba's
 grex staff meeting (which prompted offers to drive me home and attempts to
 feed me).  My legs are still weak and I am trying to do a few deep knee bends
 once in a while, holding onto something.  Last time I did 3 and I will try
 for 4.  Biking is easier.
 
 Fingertips still a bit numb, no noticeable change, no problem.
 
 My voice was worse for a week which I think is due to a cold but today it is
 getting better despite the sneezes.  I just listened to my own voice on a
 cassette tape and it sounds high pitched and weak compared to now.
 
 I did some more reading on hot flashes at several sites.  They start in the
 neck and face and progress to the chest and waist.  They start in the waist
 and chest and progress to the neck and face.  You should wear cotton and not
 wear turtlenecks.  (I am wearing several layers of wool over a turtleneck).
 You should take off layers to cool off, or stick your hands in ice water. I
 just take off one or two wool hats and unzip my wool vest.  The hot flashes
 can be several times a day early morning and late evening.  Or as often as
 every 90 minutes.   I was getting them every 45 but at last timing it was just
 over 2 hours.  They are brought on by a long list of things like alchol, spicy
 food, stress, and overheating.  I don't do any of that.  They occur at
 irregular intervals.  I could almost set a clock by mine.  They last 2 months
 to 2 years.   2-3 years but up to 6 years.  A few months to as long as 15-20
 years.  They are triggered by exercise. They are reduced in intensity by
 exercise.  It helps to have more fat cells which make estrogen-like hormone
 out of something else.  Muscle cells make estrogen-like hormone.  You should
 stay in a cool 68 degree room.  We don't have any rooms that cool, ours are
 50-55 degrees.  It is worse in summer.  I have only been through a winter and
 hope it does not get worse in summer.
 
 I get the impression that people have highly variable reactions to 'the
 change'.  Sudden menopause due to radiation, surgery, or chemotherapy,
 including prostate surgery and chemotherapy, leads to more severe hot flashes.
 
 It still hurts to sit but I don't know a good way to translate standing up,
 and besides that makes my feet hurt.  
 
 Tomato sauce still tastes quite sour.  I am up to 117 pounds with lots of wool
 and cotton clothing, after three days of feasting, which I think translates
 to about 115 without clothing or maybe a bit less and is more than I have
 weighed until now in 4 years.
 
 Tamoxifen can cause hot flashes.  You can get hot flashes when you stop taking
 tamoxifen.  Luckily I don't have to take any drugs any more.  Hot flashes
 might be useful in air conditioned buildings, I suppose.
#375 C. Keesan(keesan) on Fri Apr 16 22:00:50 2004:
 Two months since the PET scan, almost 3 months since the last chemotherapy.
 Supposedly it takes at least 2-3 months to feel normal.  This week has been
 somewhat of a watershed.  I can bike again (or I could until Jim started to
 move all the parts from my frame to one that is less worn out).  So I am back
 to walking, and today we went through Eberwhite Woods, which is full of
 patches of yellow trout lily and some small white flowers which I think are
 Spring Beauty (claytonia) or anemonella.  Two days ago we biked to Dolph Woods
 and saw bloodroot (large white flowers) and just-emerging mayapple leaves,
 like folded umbrellas.  
 	Today's trip was to bring a carton full of Chinese restaurant take-out
 boxes to the local Chinese restaurant to trade for two spring rolls.  They
 decided to give us two free soups in addition.  We walked back via another
 woods near I-94, where there is a pond full of calling frogs (difficult to
 hear over the highway racket) that might be chorus frogs.  We startled a
 garter snake.  The easements next to Maple Road are carpeted with purple
 violets that you can sometimes smell over the highway fumes, and a few white
 ones.  We stopped at the Chinese food store for vegetables.  The guy at the
 register knew the numbers in English (4, 3) so I showed off my numbers in
 Chinese and he gave us some Chinese peanuts and I said 'thanks' and 'goodbye'
 which he repeated properly.  
 	I trudged back.  One mile still wears me out, but my muscles look they
 are back.  I am up to 115 pounds after supper, which is probably about what
 I was before I got sick last year January (112 before breakfast then).  I
 wonder where it has gone as I can't see any body fat and I am still short on
 muscle.
 	This week's big progress is that my voice seems to be back.  It was
 not quite back on Sunday and I was starting to think it might stay weak.
 	I am still hoping it won't always hurt to sit and that my digestion
 will eventually recover and my fingertips stop feeling numb, but these are
 not serious problems.  Still sore in the area over where my spleen probably
 got enlarged to, nobody knows why.  Scar tissue?  I am going to try to do the
 Huron River canoe cleanup tomorrow. We might skip the mattresses this year.
 And I might just snag things with a pole instead of climbing onto the bow and
 leaning over.  With luck there will be turtles.  Today we saw orange and black
 butterflies (monarchs migrating?) and what looked like but is too early for
 a swarm of fireflies (no light).  
#376 Mary Remmers(mary) on Sat Apr 17 07:54:25 2004:
 Were the Chinese take-out boxes used?  Will the restaurant reuse them?
 
 I'm glad you are feeling so much better.  It's a long recovery.
#377 C. Keesan(keesan) on Sat Apr 17 10:51:44 2004:
 New boxes.  They were in stacks with brown paper wrapping.  The neighbors who
 were moving had bought a bunch to use somehow at their wedding.
 
 Today I plan to bike an old 3-speed into Kiwanis, and then walk to the river
 if it is not raining.  We will bring in the Japanese wordprocessor too.
#378 C. Keesan(keesan) on Sat Apr 17 21:05:40 2004:
 We biked to Argo Park where we got our canoes last year, by rather a long
 roundabout route, southeast to Broadway Bridge because Jim did not want to
 lift our bikes over the railing so we could cross at Barton Dam.  Turns out
 there is no longer a building to rent canoes from at Argo, so we had to bike
 back to Broadway Bridge (past Barton Dam, which was at some point converted
 to a walk/bike bridge with shallow ramps instead of just stairs/railing). 
 About an hour later we arrived at Gallup Park where they let us take canoes
 out for two hours after the cleanup ended.  Jim's first beercan had something
 wriggling in it which turned out to be a crayfish.  We headed towards Ypsi
 because nobody else had done that stretch, but it was pretty clean already
 and we only found a bunch of cans, plastic and glass bottles, assorted
 plastic, and part of a kite and some candy wrappers, in two hours.  We passed
 up two large dead fishes and a very heavy looking rolled up wire fence that
 looked more than the 650 pound limit for our canoe.
 	Our only interesting haul this trip was a very rusty flattened trash
 can in the water, covered with mussels, which Jim got onto the canoe and then
 out of the canoe at the other end.  When I asked what to do with our trash
 the guy said to bring it to the trash can.  I said it would take two people
 to bring our trash can there.  
 	We then biked most of the way back and up a hill to the music school
 for an early music concert.  Jim finished off the decorative collard greens
 with hummus at the reception.  Great concert.  I somehow made it all the way
 back.  Not bad for my second bike trip of the year (not counting the one to
 my apartment).  Jim picked up a few interesting finds on the way back (a large
 yellow flashing light etc.) and then someone steered us to an after-yardsale
 giveway.  We passed on both microwave ovens but got three phones, a scale,
 a nice warm hat and gloves and boots.....  This reminds me of our last bike
 camping trip when we stopped at yard sales to get dry and came back with 135
 pounds on our bikes (not counting ourselves).
 	I can't imagine biking only for exercise, not to get somewhere.
 
 	Food still tastes odd, or maybe it is just that tortillas don't go with
 Chinese broccoli and orange juice.  
#379 Colleen McGee(cmcgee) on Sat Apr 17 21:51:12 2004:
 I believe you are talking about Argo Dam, not Barton Dam.  
#380 C. Keesan(keesan) on Sat Apr 17 22:11:03 2004:
 I believe you are right.  Barton Dam is farther northwest from Argo Dam, and
 has a large power plant building with waterfall and is walkable to Bandemere
 Park and Bird Hills Park. I would love to go there soon.  What is the name
 of the third dam, where you have to cross a really bad road to continue
 towards Parker Mill when biking southeast?
 
 I hear pink is the 'in' color this year. We are both pink.  Jim wore his bike
 helmet with visor in the canoe.  I wore my new hairdo - second time out this
 year without a hat.
#381 Joe(gelinas) on Sat Apr 17 23:03:05 2004:
 That sounds like Geddes Dam, Sindi.
#382 S. Lynne Fremont(slynne) on Sun Apr 18 15:56:22 2004:
 Sindi, I am really glad that you were feeling well enough to go on your 
 annual canoe trip. You know I couldnt resist an entry into Mnet's agora 
 conference. It isnt as good as some of the previous ones but I still 
 think you might enjoy it so here it is...
 
 My parody of resp:378...
 
 
 It is once again time for our annual spring expedition into the wild 
 lands. As usual, we have chosen to travel on the river in canoes. We 
 biked to Argo where we got our canoes last year, by a rather long 
 roundabout route due to obstacles the natives have put up in the past 
 year. When we arrived at Argo, we discovered that there is no longer a 
 hut to rent canoes there. What happened to it? Did a rival tribe 
 destroy it? We had to bike to the next point of civilization on the 
 river, a place called Gallup Park. Luckily, they were able to provide 
 us with canoes even though our arrival was late. Once in the canoe, we 
 could continue our annual journey to see what offerings the natives 
 have left on the banks of the great Huron River. Jim s first beercan 
 had something wriggling in it which turned out to be a crayfish and not 
 the traditional fratboy which one usually finds attached to beercans in 
 this land. We headed towards Ypsi because that is a nearly undiscovered 
 part of the river. However, the natives down that way are not very 
 original in the gifts they leave on the side of the river. We only 
 found a bunch of cans, plastic and glass bottles, assorted plastic, and 
 part of a kite and some candy wrappers. We passed up two large dead 
 fishes and a very heavy looking rolled up wire fence that looked more 
 than the 650 pound limit for our canoe. 
 
         Our only interesting haul this trip was a very rusty flattened 
 trash can in the water, covered with mussels, which Jim got onto the 
 canoe and then out of the canoe at the other end.  When I asked what to 
 do with our trash the guy said to bring it to the trash can.  I said it 
 would take two people to bring our trash can there. The natives are so 
 naive and so innocent!
 
         We then biked most of the way back and up a hill to the 
 native s music school for an early music ceremony.  Jim finished off 
 the decorative collard greens with hummus at the reception. I am sure 
 the natives appreciated the way Jim shows them respect by eating their 
 traditional food. Great concert.  I somehow made it all the way back.  
 It was a great journey. Jim picked up a few interesting finds on the 
 way back (a large yellow flashing light etc.) and then someone steered 
 us to an after-yard sale giveway which is apparently another native 
 custom we haven t experienced before.  We passed on both microwave 
 ovens but got three phones, a scale, a nice warm hat and gloves and 
 boots.....  This reminds me of our last bike adventure in a foreign 
 land when we stopped at yard sales to get dry and came back with 135 
 pounds on our bikes (not counting ourselves).
 
         I can't imagine biking only for exercise, not to get somewhere.
#383 C. Keesan(keesan) on Sun Apr 18 18:14:28 2004:
 Jim said not a trash can, a 50 gal oil barrel, covered  with things that were
 squirting at him all the way back.  All these little worms were on there
 slithering around. It was really interesting.   They look something like
 crickets without tails.  Actually more like silverfish.
 
 Someone else this year got the couch cushions, and we passed one cleaning lady
 who found an unopened beer can.  
 
 Wow, we have been republished within 24 hours by the great Mnet press!
 
 Today the curb gods put out a real antique laundry wringer that would have
 fit on my concrete laundry tub, but by the time I got back from singing it
 had metamorophosed into a cheap kenwood receiver.  We are off to see if the
 bike with mangled front wheel is still out for trash pickup.
 
 At Shape Note Singing today I talked to someone who had intentionally lost
 30 pounds and was trying for 20 more (size 2).  She no longer has high
 cholesterol or any need for diabetes medications.  She said her mother has
 very slow lymphoma and has been treated 12 times already, once for 8 months.
 Her brother-in-law has gone back to school to get a nursing degree, after doing
 most of the care.
 Mine was a very fast sort ('rapidly fatal without treatment') but I think it
 was relatively dormant since 1995, when I started having symptoms which I no
 longer have.  Maybe 'diffuse' means it has escaped from control by the immune
 system.
 
 Sorry we could not have had a bigger adventure more suitable for parody.  It
 is flattering to know what I write is appreciated that way. 
#384 S. Lynne Fremont(slynne) on Sun Apr 18 20:54:25 2004:
 Oh well, you will probably be more healthy next year and you can go on 
 a bigger adventure then. It is just nice that you were feeling well 
 enough to go out at all this year. :) 
#385 C. Keesan(keesan) on Sun Apr 18 21:34:57 2004:
 Yes it was nice I could bike and canoe.  A real milestone.  
 We had another adventure on the way back from picking up the bike with the
 twisted front wheel (which Jim put his head through the frame of to carry -
 he is happy that it has a pair of battery-operated LEDs like what we paid a
 lot of money for about 10-15 years ago).  Near where the wringer used to be
 was a trash can with some 2x6s, and next to that another trash can (not oil
 barrel) full of interesting things like a lot of video tapes (to give to te
 library sale), two half-tubes of caulk, some antibiotic cream, sunscreen,
 shoes (too small for me), and half a bag of Doritos.  We moved some large
 metal items from the trash to the recycling bins (which were mostly full of
 returnable cans and bottles).  For some reason people don't think to recycle
 shoe racks, aluminum pots, or curtain rods, though they weigh more than all
 the cans.  We are the curb gods!  I even got two new sponges and a dustpan.
 We left the swiveling office chair (too big for me) and a large red object
 that might be a rototiller.
#386 David Brodbeck(gull) on Wed Apr 21 12:37:48 2004:
 I was amused, last Sunday, to find the parking lot at Gallup Park
 completely full, with people parking in NO PARKING zones and backing up
 traffic, when less than a mile away at Furstenburg Nature Area the lot
 was almost empty.  It's doubly amusing since the two are connected by a
 bicycle path.
#387 Scott Helmke(scott) on Wed Apr 21 13:33:02 2004:
 Are bikes allowed on that boardwalk?
#388 David Brodbeck(gull) on Wed Apr 21 22:42:21 2004:
 Not on the boardwalk, but on the path alongside Fuller Road.
#389 C. Keesan(keesan) on Thu May  6 02:17:37 2004:
 Yesterday someone commented that she liked my new haircut.  I reminded her
 that it was not a haircut.  I have not had my hair cut since September.  It
 has grown back about 1.5" in the past 3 months and looks intentional now.
 Still no eyelashes.  Body hair is returning as well.
 
 My voice is quite normal now, for the past two weeks.
 
 My sense of taste is pretty normal but fresh oranges are still quite sour.
 I am drinking orange juice. 
 
 I am now able to swallow iron capsules, now that my voice is back and
 presumably the pharyngitis that caused it is gone. I have been taking iron
 pills due to rectal bleeding which also seems to have stopped as my internal
 membranes heal.  My nose is still a bit runny, as are my eyes, but my saliva
 does not seem sticky any more.
 
 The main residual problem is it still hurts to sit.  I think I must have
 inflammation around the sit bones due to sitting so long without any padding.
 I can bike, which hurts no more than sitting on a padded chair.
 
 My muscles are not back to normal.  I can't walk fast, or run, and I hold on
 to the railing to climb stairs and pull myself up.  I need to use my arms to
 get down and up off the floor.  My hands are stronger and I can cut my nails
 easily now and put the toilet paper roller back without help.  
 
 My digestion is still not recovered, which interferes with sleep, as do the
 continuing hot flashes every 1.5 hours or so, which is an improvement over
 every 45 minutes but getting to be more of a nuisance in warmer weather. 
 Luckily the fad is for bare middles, which is where I seem to be warmest. 
 I may be the only 53 year old with my midriff bare this summer.  
 The sore bones also keep me from sleeping in any position but my right side.
 
 Insomnia is also a symptom of menopause, which is one reason why I tend to
 post in the middle of the night like right now.  I did some reading on
 chemotherapy induced menopause and as usual there are conflicting facts.
 Menopause is defined as 6 months, or as 12 months, with no periods.  Mine
 stopped suddenly last June when I was down to 103 with clothes on. I am now
 up to 113 after breakfast, which is more than I weighed for 3 years before
 I got sick.  Weight loss can cause loss of periods (amenorrhea) which is
 temporary.
 
 Chemotherapy is more likely to cause permanent menopause if:
 1.  You were close to menopause already.  I don't know if I was.  You are
 supposed to get irregular periods for a few years first.  I did not, it just
 stopped due to weight loss.  My mother kept a diary and her periods got
 irregular for a few years from about age 54-57 and then she had radiation so
 they stopped.
 2.  A larger total dose of cytoxan (which I had), or 6 months rather than just
 3 months of drugs.  
 3.  A combination of drugs (I had a lot of drugs, three of them generally
 toxic to growing cells).
 
 But it is unpredictable for individual cases.  One site said my periods could
 come back 4-5 months after ending treatment, and 6 months of no periods was
 menopause.  Presumably the 6 months of treatment does not count as menopause,
 or as part of the total 6 months.
 
 Another site said 12 months of no periods is menopause, and it could take 6-12
 months after treatment ends for periods to come back. Again,  if you include
 the 6 months of therapy, this comes to more than 12 months, in fact it comes
 to 18 months of temporary menopause followed by resumption of periods.
 
 One other site said drug-induced menopause can last months or years.
 
 If nothing changes by 12 months from the end of January this is menopause by
 anyone's definition.  
 
 The sit bones are more of a nuisance than the hot flashes and I would much
 rather have my voice than my periods back.  
 
 I am going on increasingly longer bike rides which is supposed to be good to
 prevent bone loss.  Supposedly I should worry about weight gain.  I am still
 trying to gain weight.  I don't think weight gain runs in my family, just
 cancer.  
 
 Only other remaining symptoms are that my fingertips and the soles of my feet
 are still a bit numb, as is the area where I had the spleen biopsy (which got
 infected), which is also a bit painful at times, usually just when I poke it.
 The doctor thought this might be scar tissue and not to worry.  Someone else
 said it took 6 months for the nerves to recover so the numbness would stop,
 and sometimes it still comes back.  Nerves don't reproduce, but they do grow
 new shoots.  I wonder if some of my nerves died and the others are taking
 over.  Maybe the doctor knows this.  
 Excuse any middle of the night typos please.
#390 Scott Helmke(scott) on Thu May  6 08:27:37 2004:
 Glad you're still with us, though.
#391 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Thu May  6 09:42:23 2004:
 Indeed.
#392 C. Keesan(keesan) on Wed May 19 00:05:47 2004:
 Today I had my first of many CT scans to make sure that the lymphoma has not
 returned.  They remembered I did not want my barium sulfate smoothie
 refrigerated and I was allowed to use my own cup (but the bottle has a large
 mouth so you can drink directly from it too).  I thought I was not supposed
 to have any more IVs but they had me sceduled for one.  I was told long
 sleeves were no longer allowed, they were somehow causing problems with the
 machines when people moved threw them (getting caught?).  Jim let me wrap up
 in his heavy flannel shirt while waiting, after the IV.  I got a team of two
 doing the IV and they also did my blood draw to save me a second jab and an
 hour of waiting around, and took the samples where they would be analyzed,
 and were all very cheery and considerate and said hardly anyone else ever
 thanked them for doing such a good job.  The IV hurt no more than the average
 blood draw, they put it just where I asked (after phoning the technician to
 make sure the left arm was okay), and hardly any blood got out that was not
 supposed to.  I got the new machine that takes half as long, and did not feel
 like I was going to go blue in the face holding my breath.
 
 Someone is doing a study of former and present smokers there by offering them
 free X-ray and CT scan checkups, to see which works best.  They have detected
 a few early cancers that way but no conclusions yet.
 
 I got in and out on time and we took our Zingerman's bread to the hospital
 cafeteria and had a picnic of bread and water.  At 3:30 there was no food
 there to buy except hamburgers and pizza type stuff.  At others times you can
 buy 'three sides' of vegetables as a cheap meal.  We tried to identify the
 various flags hanging from the ceiling.  
 
 I biked there and back, first time I did not need to be transported.  I waited
 2 hours on a stretcher for my first CT scan.  This time I sat and talked with
 other people about their problems.  I have graduated to a small pillow which
 friend made for me to sit on, and Tim gave me a larger foam one today that
 is higher at both sides (lower in the middle).   We had a nice scrabble game
 with him (Jim won, with a little help) as I was too worn out from the usual
 worrying to go back to work tonight.  (I don't get much sleep before hospital
 visits.)  Results within 3 days.  I am supposed to drink a lot to get the dye
 out of me.  We got juice.  
 
 I have a big translation probably related to a drug company which will (if
 I finish this batch and accept two more batches) pay for my medical deductible
 this year.  Nice to get back some money from a drug company.  My 8
 chemotherapies were $5000-6000 each for just one new drug.  
#393 C. Keesan(keesan) on Thu May 20 00:45:28 2004:
 A doctor friend sent me the results and I am not sure what to make of
 them.  I was hoping for something better than this and will know more
 Monday.  No enlarged lymph nodes is nice, enlarged thymus is a puzzle, and
 'splenic masses which .... probably represent splenic lymphoma' does not
 sound good, but last time they showed up (which I don't think was in the
 PET scan) the doctor said they might be scar tissue if they were not
 changing in size, in places that used to have lymphoma.  I do NOT want to
 be doing more biopsies now.  
 
 
 15590798  Name: KEESAN, CYNTHIA C  DOB: 06/04/1950  Sex: F  Age: 53
 Years  User Id: 0878  
 
 
 Radiology and Nuclear Medicine Results Text  
 Status Req. Nbr. Date Source System 
 FINAL   3680269   05/18/2004   RIS   
 
 CT chest, abdomen and pelvis with IV contrast.                         
 
 
 History: Lymphoma.                                                     
 
 
 Procedure: Helical CT from the lung apices to the pubic symphysis      
 
 following the uneventful administration of oral and nonionic IV        
 
 contrast. Via fovea 30 cm                                              
 
 
 Impression: Comparison with prior CT dated 12/24/03.                   
 
 
 Chest:                                                                 
 
 
 No enlarged lymph nodes. Interval increase in size and volume of the   
 
 thymus, without discrete rounded masses. The thymus is now much larger 
 
 than normal for the patient's age.  This may represent rebound thymic  
 
 hyperplasia. Thymic lymphoma is thought less likely.                   
 
 
 Unchanged 5 mm nodule in the lower left lung laterally on image 47.    
 
 
 Abdomen:                                                               
 
 
 Unchanged multiple hepatic cavernous hemangiomas. Unchanged small      
 
 splenic masses which are indeterminate in CT characteristics but       
 
 probably represent splenic lymphoma. Pancreas, adrenal glands and      
 
 kidneys are normal.                                                    
 
 
 No enlarged lymph nodes except a 1 cm unchanged gastrohepatic ligament 
 
 node.                                                                  
 
 
 Pelvis:                                                                
 
 
 No enlarged lymph nodes or other significant abnormality.              
  
 
#394 C. Keesan(keesan) on Thu May 20 01:25:49 2004:
 I just did some reading on how the thymus gland is atrophied (gets smaller)
 due to chemotherapy and then often grows too big afterwards.  It did not say
 how long things took to get back to normal size.
 
 Then I read about NonHodgkinss Lymphoma and PET scans.  56 out of 67 patients
 with CR (complete remission) according to the PET scan were still in remission
 653 days afterwards, and 11 had recurrences an average of 404 days later. 
 Of those whose PET scans showed FDG (radioactively labelled glucose) uptake
 all 26 had relapses, on the average in 73 days.
 
 So I am in the group where about 83% were okay for close to 2 years
 afterwards.  (It did not say what happened after that).  
 
 Then I read that 30-60% of NHL patients especially with large masses have
 residual masses that are fibrosis, not tumor, and only 18% of that group
 relapses (I did not see a time scale on this).  
 
 So I have a 5/6 chance of being okay for the two years, and an even higher
 chance of being okay for the next year.  I read earlier that my chances of
 5-year survival without symptoms are about 65%, and there is a second-line
 chemotherapy with 50% odds after that.  
 
 I will try to stop worrying between now and Monday so I can get enough sleep
 to do a big translation for a drug company that might pay for half my
 insurance deductible if I work fast until June 1.  Or 30% anyway.
#395 Thespian Tod(tod) on Thu May 20 13:20:33 2004:
 
#396 C. Keesan(keesan) on Thu May 20 15:00:33 2004:
 How did you know my birthday is coming up?  Happy birthday to you too, Tod.
 
 I am still waiting for the bill for Jim's insurance so I can pay both of ours
 at once.  I just noticed that one reason they give for the annual 15% increase
 is the increasing cost of drugs.  One of these costs appears to be very high
 lawyer bills for arguing about who has the right to make what.  Eight
 translators have been working on this job I am doing since maybe January, full
 time.  99% of what we are translating is probably irrelevant but lawyers have
 no interest in minimizing costs and time of other people as they get a
 commission on it.  All the jobs for lawyers are to translate 'everything'.
 One job for a lawyer insisted on translating the Polish translation of an
 English original authorizing a school to send transcripts, also the
 instructions about how to fill out the application form for admission (they
 sent ALL the school documents).  Another one sent me menus and candy wrappers
 - they must have cleaned out someone's desk.  It was not enough to tell them
 'this is a candy wrapper', they wanted every word.  I don't like lawyer work.
 
 Got to get back to cranking out 3000 words a day now about nutrient broths
 and mineral salts, a welcome change from profit analyses.
#397 Thespian Tod(tod) on Fri May 21 19:03:28 2004:
 
#398 klg(klg) on Fri May 21 22:30:51 2004:
 Drugs manufactured in Canada?
#399 David Brodbeck(gull) on Sun May 23 22:38:22 2004:
 Mostly, drugs made in the U.S., sold in Canada, and then re-imported.
 
 The drug companies have, in the past, tried to quash this by refusing to 
 supply pharmacies that engage in the practice.  The question is, is CVS 
 big enough that they can't afford to strong-arm them?
#400 C. Keesan(keesan) on Mon May 24 15:04:51 2004:
 Today I saw the doctor.  A nursing student did the weighing.  My pulse is 77
 (normal being 70-100 or so;  Jim thinks he is 60) and blood pressure the usual
 105/60 but I think she pumped it up to 160 to start anyway.  This time they
 did not measure blood oxygen.  A medical fellow did my exam and answered some
 questions.  The loss of taste is also related to nerves and they can take 6
 months or longer to grow back.  Chemical menopause has a 50% chance of being
 permanent at my age.  I won't notice any symptoms if I get a relapse, before
 the CT scan catches it.  I don't need 10 years of scans, just 5.  After 5
 years the chance of a relapse is very low.  After 2 years I have an 80% chance
 of being cured (no relapse).  After one good PET scan considering other
 factors (I was in a really advanced stage) my chances are 60%.  The doctor
 did not want to tell me this and immediately pointed out that this is better
 than half.  I told him I already read these odds and knew there was a backup
 treatment that was not so much fun.  He told me he could usually tell from
 a gut feeling whether someone was going to do okay and I was going to do okay.
 I thanked him for being so optimistic all along and not letting me know what
 bad shape I was in to start with.  
 
 We ran into the mother of the boy who was in there frequently my first few
 times and he has also gained back 20 pounds, but still has to come every week
 for blood work.  He also has hair now.  
 
 My next appointments are mid-late August.  While waiting for them we
 recognized a woman we had talked to last time.  We will see her again in
 November as they are now coming only every 6 months.  
 
 We said hello to the cancer center nurse and her mother is getting a new
 treatment and was able to go home.  I told the pharmacist that my voice is
 back.  He was the one who discovered it was probably a drug reaction.
 
 We ate our picnic of rye crackers and ajvar at the cafeteria, with some cans
 of juice Jim took from the cancer center and a plate of brown noodles with
 vegetables and white sauce.  He said the red sauce did not taste like anything
 and at least you don't expect white sauce to taste.  
 
 I have to get an IV again next time(s) because of the persistent small masses
 in the spleen but I have a slip to get the blood draw at the same time again.
 If all goes well I would like to go on vacation for a couple of weeks after
 the next followup exam (late August to early September) if I am strong enough
 in the legs by then.  (And able to sleep on a harder surface).
#401 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Tue May 25 06:54:57 2004:
 ajvar? "adgevar"? "eye-var"?
#402 C. Keesan(keesan) on Tue May 25 12:19:32 2004:
 eye-var.  j pronounced like English y.  Turkish word also used in in former
 Yugoslavia.  This jar had red peppers and eggplant, some have no eggplant.
 Usually also garlic and lots of olive oil.  Most versions are with hot peppers
 but we found two without at Aladdin's Market on Packard.  Also good added to
 beans and rice.  
 
 Today I tried to find out by a few phone calls if a mammogram is needed when
 one is getting frequent CT scans.  Someone said that if a CT scan finds
 something suspicious they also order a mammogram.  I should ask my doctor.
 
 I found another online report of 24 people with my type of lymphoma who had
 good PET scans (and 11 who did not, 10 of whom had relapse).  Of these, 3 had
 relapses at 8-11 months and one at 20 months, the rest were okay. 5/6 again.
 I will try to not worry until the third CT scan at 9 months.  PET scans cannot
 catch really small tumors, and it probably takes 8 months for them to grow
 large enough to be noticeable by CT scan.  A third study reported 85% of
 people with good PET scans were okay for 2 years.  After 2 years a relapse
 is quite unlikely and after 5 years extremely unlikely.  
 
 20/35 is about 60% of the total group who were okay for 2 years.  Of the group
 with good PET scans it is again about 85%.  In any event, over 50%.  Maybe
 I will celebrate after the fourth scan, next May (or for my 55th birthday,
 which makes me eligible for chair exercises and a senior discount card at Old
 Country Buffet or whatever they call it now).  
#403 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Tue May 25 17:52:45 2004:
 Re: eye-var. Ah, thanks.
#404 C. Keesan(keesan) on Tue May 25 19:20:41 2004:
 For the high risk group (probably me as I had an advanced stage) 2 year
 progression free survival was 60%, for the low-risk group over 90%, but the
 60% was only for those who had a good PET scan half-way through treatment.
 I did not have a PET scan until the end but I had a good CT scan after 6
 cycles at least - all the masses noted then are the same size now and were
 not abnormal on the PET scan.  
 
 The reason for the radioactive antibody in tough cases is that when tumors
 are large the antibody only kills off the outer layer, but if the antibody
 is radioactive and binds to the outer layer, it also kills off nearby cells.
 Unfortunately these are not just tumor and not even just lymphocyte cells so
 they don't like to use that method if anything else can work.  
 
 Do you have ajvar/aivar in England?  
 
#405 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Tue May 25 21:19:10 2004:
 Not that I know of. America is much more a country of immigrants than England.
 
 I'll see if I can find any mention of it in England, though. There were a
 lot of people who came from the former Yugoslavia during the wars there;
 perhaps they have brought it with them.
#406 C. Keesan(keesan) on Tue May 25 21:33:00 2004:
 Try also Turkish and Greek and Hungarian stores in addition to Macedonian,
 Bosnian, Serbian and Bulgarian.  We made our own from red peppers, baked,
 skins peeled, ground up, add fried garlic and olive oil and if you like also
 roasted peeled mashed eggplant.  The commercial ones also add salt to ajvar.
 The peppers smell wonderful when baking.  In the fall in Macedonia people
 would roast them on large flat metal pans over fires.  We used the oven and
 a cookie sheet.  You can also put them on the European style electric burners
 directly.  The peeled peppers are a favorite late summer salad, with raw garlic
 and olive oil.  Early spring salad is garlic shoots.  Anything green was
 welcome after a few months of no fresh vegetables except potatoes.  In the
 fall everyone pickled peppers, cabbages, and beets, and canned tomatoes.  This
 explains the popularity of stuffed pepper and stuffed cabbage, which can be
 made from the pickled vegetables.  Pickled cucumbers were less common there.
#407 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Tue May 25 22:55:59 2004:
 I don't think there are any such stores. I have seen Chinese foodstores. As
 I've testified in the IAHB item in aggro, even finding anything other than
 an Orthodox or Reform synagogue presents a problem.
#408 C. Keesan(keesan) on Wed May 26 00:13:44 2004:
 We buy our red peppers and ajvar in Middle Eastern stores run by people from
 Jerusalem, Lebanon, or Iraq, who import things from Greece and Turkey.  The
 olive oil from Lebanon is excellent.  Where do you live in England?
#409 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Wed May 26 08:09:23 2004:
 Up in the North, a small town called Ashington near Newcastle.
#410 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Wed May 26 09:29:56 2004:
 That's "Ashington, which is near Newcastle", not *"Ashington-near-Newcastle"
#411 Thespian Tod(tod) on Thu May 27 14:00:08 2004:
 
#412 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Thu May 27 14:00:48 2004:
 Heh. I just read "Romulan".
#413 C. Keesan(keesan) on Thu May 27 22:01:54 2004:
 I did some more reading on thymus rebound and it is apparently usually just
 found in people under age 25.  As the doctor said, my case is an unusual one.
 Nobody else had sore sit bones or a mysterious pain where the spleen got
 biopsied, or apparently a sore hand (which I think is from one of the drugs
 having leaked out a bit).    The thymus can rebound after anything that caused
 it to shrink - chemotherapy or prednisone.  It will probably go back to normal
 within another 3 months.  The prednisone could also have caused my muscles
 to be weak (on top of the weight loss).  For some reason arm muscles recover
 sooner than leg muscles.  I am doing shallow knee bends.  I can't do the deep
 ones without using my arms to get back up.  This makes it sort of tricky to
 week the garden but I will try anyway, some time soon.
 
 I still keep getting weight-loss spam, which I need just as much as the
 Vagra variety or the Windows XP.
#414 klg(klg) on Fri May 28 08:32:00 2004:
 Any current evidence of chemobrain?
#415 C. Keesan(keesan) on Fri May 28 10:07:15 2004:
 No, have you had any chemobrain?  The primary effect on my brain was just
 sleep deprivation from the hospital and the prednisone.
#416 C. Keesan(keesan) on Mon Aug 16 23:11:11 2004:
 This month I have lots of doctor's appoints.  I had a mammogram (very quick
 and only hurt for a few seconds) and a general exam with pap smear to check
 for cervical cancer because chemotherapy knocks out the immune system and
 there is a virus which causes cervical cancer and might have gotten loose.
 I was told to also get checked for B12 just in case the cracks at the corners
 of my  mouth during chemotherapy and decreasingly after that were due not to
 therapy (most likely) but to B12 deficiency, and a routine cholesterol test,
 and a tetanus shot.  
 
 I checked at hospital and physician billing today and I am way over the $400
 for which the insurance will pay 80% so I did not want the cholesterol test.
 They did the three standard blood draws for cancer checkup from the IV but
 would not do 2 of the 3 others (TSH too) without an official crossout of the
 cholesterol test so I had to go get a nurse to sign that and then get a second
 blood draw.  Ouch.  I wish it were possible to find out what things cost
 before they ran up to $795, and how much the PPOM discount is.  They told me
 45% but Jim's was nowhere near that (it just came today).  I could easily
 have postponed the tetanus shot and mammogram until next year.  There was a
 $165 charge for use of the facilities in addition to the general exam (about
 $200), a $70 charge to read the mammogram in addition to the mammogram (about
 $200).  Tetanus vaccine $30 injection $25 (it took less time than the $3 blood
 draw).  Dept. of public health might have been cheaper ($15 for flu shot) but
 it is a 3 hour round trip to Ypsi.  
 
 Next Monday I see the doctor.  A friend will email me my CT scan results this
 week.  
 
 While waiting around the CT scan area (in the hall to avoid the TV) I talked
 to someone in an electric scooter (and helped him by opening the bathroom door
 so he could get in and out because the clearance is not enough), the sister
 of someone getting checked to see how far her brain cancer has spread so they
 will know if it is operable, and someone getting CT scans monthly to make sure
 his second course of chemo is not damaging his lungs and that it is working.
 He had a relapse so they are doing something stronger.  At one point all his
 skin peeled off.  If this works he will do it the rest of his life.  I forget
 his schedule, I think it is the first 4 days of each 4 weeks and they give
 him good antinausea drugs but his blood cell counts stay low and he bleeds
 easily.  He is very happy medicine has improved enough to keep him alive. 
 We ended up getting IVs at the same time.  Mine bled all over the floor (well,
 all over a bit of the floor) but did not need redoing.  
 
 Again, I feel luckier than most of the other people there.  
 We are goofing off the rest of the day.  I learned to cut and paste with a
 mouse in Opera for linux and was teaching Jim how to use his WCC webmail and
 Opera mail when the WCC smtp server apparently died.  
 
 Taubmann Medical Center has floors numbered (from the bottom):
 B2 B1.5 B1 B.5 1 2 3.  We saw most of them going back and forth between
 billing offices, internal medicine (3 times) and CT scan (twice).  They hide
 all the construction on the half floors.  Or maybe it was B2 B1 .5 1 1.5 2
 3?  Jim was leading.  Better than just sitting around worrying.
 
 My symptoms of chemotherapy are nearly all gone.  Still have hot flashes and
 it still hurts to sit but things taste normal, my  hair will need cutting soon
 for the first time in a year, and people have been telling me how good I look
 (nobody told me earlier how bad I looked) as well as admiring my glasses
 (designed to fit under a gas mask - I lost the others somewhere).   You can
 mail order new lenses (prescription) for $36 plus $5 shipping, much cheaper
 than a tetanus shot.  Exams run $48 (Ypsi) to $80 (Main St. Ann Arbor).
 
 We had a small picnic in the 'garden' (sign labelled it that way) next to the
 hospital and Jim picked french fries and ate them.  I had to fast 6  hours
 for the CT scan.  
 
 For B12 the online site said to fast 12 hours, the doctor said 6, and the
 library book said it is usually tested together with folic acid (for
 pernicious anemia) and you fast for folic acid, not for B12. 
 
 For cholesterol the book said fast 12 hours, the online site ditto, the doctor
 6, and a friend's doctor said the fasting is only for triglycerides not total
 cholesterol.  I skipped the test.  The insurance will pay 80% next year.
#417 C. Keesan(keesan) on Wed Aug 18 17:08:29 2004:
 CT scan same as before (thymus still enlarged, probably harmless), blood
 counts similar to before (elevated neutrophils, slightly low lymphocytes,
 somewhat high AST), no results back on B12 and I am catching up on sleep
 again.  Doctors make me nervous.  If I get through the next two exams okay
 my chances of cure are pretty good.  From what I read most relapses are 8-11
 months after end of therapy and successful PET scan.  
 
 Jim's bill came and we pay 55% of doctor's bills and an average of 78% of lab
 tests.  Don't know about tetanus shots.  I could have got one cheaper ($15
 instead of 55?) at the county health dept but it is in Ypsi.  3 hour round
 trip but I can get cheap glasses at the same time.  
 
 My leg muscles are still not recovered.  Jim is making a $20 hand truck and
 some $2 used wheelchair wheels into a bike trailer (unless someone wants to
 give us a used baby jogger) so he can carry the tent next time we go camping.
 I think I would still have trouble keeping up.  
#418 C. Keesan(keesan) on Tue Sep  7 19:34:43 2004:
 Big surprise, the mammogram was paid 100% by insurance (no deductible) but
 I still don't know what happens when the preventive part adds up over $400.
 I guess the deductible on preventive is only if you have not yet gone over
 your deductible.
 
 Yesterday we reached my fitness goal for the summer.  Biked to Independence
 Lake (the closest swimming beach, about 15 miles over dirt roads and some
 hills), swam 3 laps (about 500 feet each?), walked all the trails there (saw
 lots of frogs and rabbits), left at 7:10, switched to paved roads at N. Maple
 because it was dusk and gravel roads with ruts are no fun in the dark, and
 got back at 8:40, beating our normal 1 hr 45 min timing.  Took laundry off
 the line.  Around 8:50 it started to pour.  
 My arms are still pretty weak.  I wish there were a beach closer to town.
 
 Someone gave us a used baby jogger but it is double wide.  Jim tried a
 different hand truck and says the trick is to keep the center of gravity below
 the wheel axles by using larger wheels.  
 
 I may try doing pushups against the wall, and shallow knee bends.