I’ve already written about my cystoscopy, last year. They never found anything, but my urologist is still on a witch hunt through my insides, trying to find something wrong with me. He sends me for an ultrasound every six months, but he’s not getting enough information, so he decided last week to send me for a CT scan. (This is the one where you lie on a table, and they pass you through a big donut-looking thing. If you click the previous link to the Wikipedia article, you’ll see a picture.)
There was surprisingly little preparation I had to do, before the CT scan. I wasn’t supposed to eat for about six hours ahead of time, but I was allowed to drink “clear liquids”—which, interestingly enough, included coffee, as long as I drank it black. (If I were to put cream or milk in it, that wouldn’t be allowed.)
I showed up at the hospital, filled out the form, and signed a form that indicated I agreed to the risk that was incurred by injecting radioactive dye into my system. I then had a short wait in the waiting room, before they brought me to the change room. I changed into the hospital gown—I’ll refrain from making the usual comments about hospital gowns, but in this case I was allowed to keep on most of my clothes under the robe; I just had to remove my pants. Another short wait—I’d brought a book, but I didn’t know what was ahead of me, so I might not have been paying that much attention—and then they brought me to the room.
She had me lay down on the table, on my back, and explained to me what was going to happen, while she put the needle in my arm that would be used for injecting the dye. (I was looking away when she was putting the needle in, because I always do, but I distinctly heard her say the word “whoops” while she was doing it. Later on, when I looked at my arm, I saw two distinct needle marks, so she obviously missed the first time.)
But she seemed to be repeating herself, because she mentioned some things that were going to happen a couple of times. And she told me that when they injected the dye, I was going to feel warm all over—especially my arm, where the needle was located—I was going to get a weird taste in my mouth, and it was going to feel like I was peeing. Which is fine, that all makes sens— wait a second! Did she say that it would feel like I was peeing?!? It suddenly occurred to me; the whole reason I’m here in the first place is that I have bladder problems—what if I did pee? But she laughed and assured me, “Nobody ever has!”
She had me put my arms above my head, and then she ran the bed through the donut. When I had passed through the other side, she hooked up the drip with the dye to the thing she’d put into my arm. (When you read that, are you shuddering as hard as I was when I wrote it? Anyway…) She went into the other room, and they did a pass without any dye in my system. There was a pre-recorded voice that came from the machine, “take a deep breath and hold it,” and then, “breathe normally.” It sounded very natural, for some reason, not pre-recorded, except that the second message, to breathe normally, was a bit cut off.
I have no idea why I included that little detail. It’s not important.
After the first pass, they told me they were going to inject the dye, and I felt it entering my system. I felt myself warming up all over, and a bit of the taste in my mouth, but it really wasn’t bad at all. Another pass through the donut, and then they disconnected the dye drip from the needle in my arm, and had me lie still for six minutes.
Then came the strangest part of the whole experience: After I’d lain there for six minutes, she came back in, and had me roll over. But she had me completely roll over; not roll over onto my stomach, but roll over onto my stomach and then keep rolling over, until I was back where I started. It’s like they were afraid that the dye might have settled at the bottom of my body, and wanted to mix it up again—which is, I must say, a fairly disturbing thought.
She had me put my arms above my head again, and rolled my bed through the donut, where she re-attached me to the dye drip. So it turns out that she hadn’t been repeating herself, earlier; they were doing some things multiple times. Another pass through the donut, and then they inserted more dye.
This time it was different, though. The first time they’d injected dye, it had been a mild warmth; this time, I felt my body getting hot. I really got the taste in my mouth, and I saw what she’d meant about feeling like I was peeing. (It didn’t feel exactly like that, but it was a feeling that was reminiscent.) Not only was it stronger this time, but they just kept shoving it in. Long after I’d thought it would stop, I could still feel it pumping into my system.
Finally, I went through one more pass of the donut. At that point, it was over. She pulled the needle out of my arm, and explained that there wasn’t really anything I had to do; just drink lots of liquids, to help clear the dye out of my system as quickly as possible.
In retrospect, I hope that I did drink a lot of liquids; I don’t like the idea of having radioactive dye sloshing through my system any longer than it has to be.
I’ve changed locations at work recently. Luckily, the new office still has a Tim Horton’s in the lobby. (Actually, it has two—it’s not so much an “office” as it is a “campus”.)
Unfortunately, the people working at the new Tim’s are… somewhat forgetful. For example, following is a typical conversation:
I should have posted these a while ago. Andrea and I and a bunch of her cousins went to Niagara-on-the-Lake (NotL) a couple of weeks ago, for a winery tour/tasting, which was great.
While we were there, we went to the lakeshore, and noticed that from NotL you can actually see the Toronto skyline. I immediately pulled out my iPhone to snap a couple of pictures, only to find that the resolution on my phone isn’t nearly good enough to capture it.
Pictures with a different border have extra “notes” associated with them, on Flickr.
Andrea has introduced me to a number of artists before they ever became popular; M.I.A. for example, and Lady Sovereign. The latest artist she’s introduced me to is K’NAAN.
An excellent example video is the one for Dreamer:
I just realized that I posted a “first thoughts” post on the iPhone post, but then I never posted about it again. What about my second thoughts?
First, and probably most importantly, it’s a lot more stable than my old phone was. That’s not saying much—the old one was terrible—but still; it’s nice to have a phone that works, and just keeps on working. Every once in a while, I do have to turn it off and on again, but it’s rare. (I think I’ve only turned it off maybe three or four times since I had it. That’s including the first time or two that I did it just for fun, when I first got it.)
One thing that annoys me more and more as time goes on, though, is the “auto-complete” feature they have when you’re typing. It’s just a bit too aggressive in when it decides to “auto-complete” what it thinks you’re trying to type. It works like this:
You start typing, with the virtual keyboard, and as you go, it tries to figure out if you really meant to type what you typed, or if you typed it by accident. For example, if you start typing “thr” it assumes that you probably meant to type “the” since the “r” is right next to the “e” (and “the” is a word whereas “thr” isn’t). This is all well and good, and most mobile devices have functionality somewhat like this. The difference, though—and it seems like such a small difference, but it turns out that it really is a big deal—is this: How do you tell the iPhone that you want to take its suggestion, instead of what you typed? On most devices, you’d probably hit Enter or specifically choose the word they’re suggesting, but on the iPhone, you hit the Space bar. So if you type “thr” and then hit Space, a funky little animation will pull out the “thr” and drop in a “the” and everyone’s happy. Except… what if you did mean to type “thr”? What if you’re working on a project called the Thermite Holding Reactor, and you keep using the acronym THR? Well, then what you have to do—every time you want to type that acronym—is type in THR, remember not to hit the Space, click a tiny little X to cancel the suggestion (see the screenshot below), and then hit Space to continue on. My problem is that I am a pretty fast typer, and it’s very hard to stop myself from hitting Space when I need to, so I’m constantly having to back up and re-type what I wanted to type.
There is one nice thing, though: if you type “thr” and hit Space, which replaces “thr” with “the”, and then backspace and type “thr” again, the next time you hit Space the iPhone won’t auto-correct that word again. It’s smart enough to realize that you just un-did what it had done, so it doesn’t do it again. Of course, the next time you want to use the “thr” acronym somewhere else, it will. There are some specific examples that have been bugging me:
As I posted my last post, I just noticed: I’ve posted 926 times to this blog. (This post is 927.) So pretty soon, I’ll be writing a summary of my first 1,000 posts to the blog.
Time flies.
I haven’t written here in a long time. Whoops. Some things have been happening, I just haven’t found time to come here and write them down. (Nothing really exciting, but still, things.)
I’ve changed offices, at work. I used to work in North York, and I’m not working in Mississauga. (Same company, just a different client and a different office.) I’m hoping this is a temporary move—I miss the people I used to work with—but we’ll see. On the plus side, though, the drive is much shorter. Especially on days when I don’t carpool with Andrea, I can make it to the office in fifteen minutes in the morning, and make it home in twenty to thirty minutes in the afternoon. (As opposed to forty-five minutes to the North York location—or maybe thirty on the way home, if I took the 407 toll road on the way home.)
We had our choir concert, a couple of weeks ago. I did a terrible job, this year, of advertising it to my friends. I did send some emails out to my coworkers, but I didn’t email most of my friends. But it went very well; we did an actual musical this year, and I think the folks in the choir did a really good job. Usually, for our concerts, we have a series of skits/scenes, interspersed with songs in between, but this year we did an actual musical. (Which was mostly like a normal concert—scenes interspersed with songs performed by the whole choir—except that some of the scenes had singing in them as well.)
Shortly after the concert, though, Andrea and I got a bit rundown. And then we heard that Andrea’s sister had been “exposed” to swine flu, and I started to get paranoid. To make matters worse, Andrea got a strange pain in her left arm, and suddenly I also had a strange pain in my left arm! swine flu! Isn’t one of the symptoms of swine flu muscle pain?!? Except that Andrea’s sister—the one who has supposedly been “exposed” to swine flu—never got sick. And neither did Andrea; she was rundown for a bit, and then she was fine, even though my sore throat continued. And her pain went away, even though my arm was killing me. And then we remembered: I’d recently started doing handstand pushups; it’s pretty easy to pull a muscle doing those types of pushups. I probably just pulled a muscle.
So I didn’t have swine flu. (Not that I was worried about it in the first place. Even if I’d had it, I wasn’t worried; it’s just the flu.) However, my cold did cause me to miss a bunch of stuff:
Okay, look, I know. Rainbows are about as cheezy a topic as you can get, when it comes to photography. But I’m posting these anyway, because this was a great one. I couldn’t get a good photo that showed the whole thing—lousy camera phone—but I could see the whole thing, end to end.
Is it a bad sign when you move to a new office, and find an empty Smirnoff bottle in the parking lot?
Is it true that they advertise differently to women than they do to men? I guess it is, based on this ad for an LG phone—one that was in the men’s room of a bar.
I just realized that I never put up a summary of my RUTR winnings. For those of you who care about such things, enjoy.
My step-father Jim passed away on April 30th. He had been sick for a long time—I think I’ve mentioned it here before—so this wasn’t unexpected. My mom has now dealt with the death of two husbands; my father, who died suddenly of a heart attack when I was young, and now my step-father, who finally succumbed to a long illness.
I’m not really sure what I want to write about it, so I’ll just put down some random thoughts.
On behalf of the family, I’d like to thank you for your love and support at this time. We’re here to remember the life of a man whom I recently described as the strongest, most stubborn man I ever met, Jim Titus.
In theory, this should probably be the easiest eulogy to give. I know that Jim wouldn’t want me up here for too long, and that he wouldn’t want us to dwell on him, so I should be able to get out of here pretty quickly. In practice, though, I have the task of summing up the life of a very complicated man, and I don’t know if I could do that even if I had an hour. (I promise, I won’t be an hour.)
Actually, if any of the men in the room ever had their hair cut at Gord’s barber shop, they may know Jim better than I did. He didn’t have a whole lot of hair to cut, but what he did have, he liked to have it cut at Gord’s, because he loved shooting the breeze with the other men there. Which always shocks me, when I think of it, because Jim was a man of few words. The idea that he’d spend an afternoon shooting the breeze is surprising to me. To give you an idea, let me recreate a conversation I had with him every year, on the phone, on his birthday:
“Hello?”
“Hi Jim, it’s David. I just wanted to call and wish you a happy birthday.”
“Thanks. … Do you want to talk to your mother?”
Part of the reason that he didn’t like to talk might have been that he was going deaf. Well… selectively going deaf. It was hard to have a conversation with Jim, if you were in the same room with him, but if you were talking about him, when he was in the kitchen, he could apparently hear you perfectly. Mom had mentioned times when Jim was in the hospital, and she’d be out in the hall talking to the nurses about his medication, and he’d shout from the bed to correct them on what medications he was on.
Jim was a maintenance millwright at Eaton Yale for over 35 years. He also became the Union Steward, while he was there, and I know that this gave him a lot of pleasure. I only got to hear about issues from his side, of course, but I got the impression that Jim was very interested in fighting for what was right. He would fight for his people, and whenever he won a battle on someone’s behalf, he would come home very happy. He would get annoyed with people who wanted to fight for silly things, and I think the main reason is that these little battles would get in the way of his fighting for important things. There are a number of people in this room who I never met until this weekend, but I heard Jim mentioning your names at the dinner table, as he thrilled about the victories he won for you.
While he was at Eaton work took up much of his time, but the rest was devoted to family. Anyone who knew him knew that his family was very important to him. Jim had two sons—Eric and Danny—and two step-children, myself and my sister Susan. He also had a granddaughter, Kate-Lin. I know that Jim was very proud of all of us, and especially proud of his granddaughter. And when the family expanded—when Eric added his wife Marla, and I added my wife Andrea, and Susan added her husband Craig—Jim was more than happy to include them as part of his family. Jim also loved the pets in the family, especially his dog Charlie, whom you’ll notice in many of the pictures around the room; when Jim did relent, and allow his photo to be taken, he usually wanted Charlie—or his new puppies, Sam and Seth—in the picture with him.
Speaking of pictures, it was difficult to find pictures of Jim to put up for you, because, even though we have thousands of pictures back at the house, most of them were taken by Jim himself, so there aren’t many that include him. He had an amazing ability to capture great pictures, and although he went through a few cameras, and did trade up from time to time, he didn’t spend a lot of money on camera equipment. He just had a good eye, and skill with whatever camera he was using. Eric and his wife Marla were commenting just the other day that Jim’s pictures of their wedding were just as good as the photographer’s.
But I haven’t yet mentioned the most important person in Jim’s life, my mother and his wife, Carmen. (Jim’s nickname for her was “Charmin’.”) There were times when Jim might have been called crotchety. There are times when he might have been called grumpy. But there was never a time that I ever doubted his love for my mother. Jim was incredibly supportive of Mom: when she went back to school at the age of 37, when she opened her own law practice, when she joined the Rotary; in anything she did, he was always supportive.
As you all know, Jim had some health problems, which eventually caused him to leave his job. However, this did not stop him from living his life. Quite the contrary; whereas many people would have decided to take it easy, and catch up on their TV, with whatever strength he had, Jim used his free time to the best of his ability. (That’s not to say he didn’t enjoy his TV. I’m still ashamed to admit that at one time he used to not only watch, but tape, the Jerry Springer show.) But Jim began taking trips with Mom; he joined the Masons and the Shriners; he helped Mom out with Rotary. I’m sure many of the people in this room never even met Jim until after he’d retired, because you met him through some of these activities. The idea of stopping to rest just honestly never occurred to the man. He also took up coin collecting with a passion—which was a huge blessing for the rest of us, because it finally became easier to buy presents for him, at Christmas. Probably the strongest memory I’ll have of Jim is him on Christmas morning, Charlie on his lap, using a magnifying glass to look at his new coins. Other presents, which he was supposed to be opening, would gather at his feet, as he’d examine his new find.
All of his energy worked out to my benefit, because one of the areas in which he directed his energy was cooking. Jim was always a great cook, and my side of the family will probably miss him most when Easter and Thanksgiving come around, because he could cook a turkey like nobody’s business, and he made amazing stuffing. I’m hoping he passed on some of his recipes and expertise, but even if he did, none of us will have the natural skills in the kitchen that he did. It was just one of his gifts.
As mentioned at the beginning, this was a poor summary of Jim’s 61 years with us; it’s very slanted toward my own memories of Jim, and doesn’t even begin to touch on his life before entering my family. Everyone in this room could probably come up here and share a story or anecdote about how he touched our lives.
However, whatever your individual memories of Jim, it’s safe to say that we’re all remembering the same man. There wasn’t a “public Jim” and a “private Jim,” Jim was the same man for everyone who met him. A man so full of life that even now, seeing him in this room, it’s hard to believe that he’s not going to get up, tell a joke, and go back to the kitchen to make coffee for us.
I think the biggest testimony to his life, however, is that I’m up here talking about the many things he did, and not his illness, or his time in the hospital. He spent much of the last couple of years in and out of hospitals, and I’m very happy to note that that’s not how I was remembering him, as I wrote this. Jim accomplished a lot; he touched a lot of people’s lives, and he helped to shape ours, and I’m grateful to say that that’s what I’ll remember about him.
I might have cried, as I wrote this, but I spent more time smiling than crying. And he would have wanted that, too.
Wikked Lil' Grrrl says:
My sympathies on your omelet. My friend Jessica also commiserates.
sernaferna says:
lol
sernaferna says:
Tahnk you.
sernaferna says:
And thank Jessica for me, too. 
Wikked Lil' Grrrl says:
Done and done.
sernaferna says:
It ended up being not too bad, for taste - a little burnt on the bottom, but that was it. 
sernaferna says:
I'm sure Jessica will be relieved to hear that. hehe
Wikked Lil' Grrrl says:
I'll make sure to let her know 
makes me want eggs, though.
I’ve gotten pretty good at flipping an omelet. Sometimes it’s a little messy, but often I can just get it right where I want it, landing perfectly in the pan.
But there are other times when it just doesn’t work well at all.
Er… I think the following headline might be a bit misleading:
This might be my favourite useless sign of all time:
Wikked Lil' Grrrl says:
10.7% win rate? Cut your losses and walk away right now.
sernaferna says:
lol
sernaferna says:
Was talking to someone this morning. She rulled up her FIRST rim today, and won a coffee. 
Wikked Lil' Grrrl says:
I have never EVER rulled a rim and won.
I've ROLLED a few and won... but never rulled and won.
sernaferna says:
Hold on, I can't type for a few minutes until my laughter dies down. \
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