The coldest winter I ever spent
Archive for the ‘General’ Category.
We harvested 3 of the 19+ artichokes on our fabulous artichoke plant today! They were AMAZING!
I planted it last year and we ate 3 disappointingly bland & mushy chokes from it but got 3 amazing artichoke flowers (have you ever seen one, they are astounding!). On the second year, we truly have the “weird giant” plant I was hoping for in our front yard!
In 2016, I had a central retinal vein occlusion (CRVO) in one eye and macular edema and crosshatching in my vision to go along with it. I was treated with Avastin (that’s the brand name, no one can pronounce the generic “bevacizumab”). I got monthly-ish injections into my eyeball (yeah, squick! but it worked so…!) for a year and my vision returned to 95% normal, hurray!
On April 10th, I started having macular edema again and it was scary business. I made it to the eye doctor last week and got treated Monday (effing insurance wouldn’t cover a “same day pre-approval” so I had to be increasingly blind over the weekend). I am VERY happy to say that my eye has gotten much better over the past 3 days! Wow, what a huge relief! I’ve got more eye injections coming up and I’m fine with that! It is wonderful that this procedure exists! Until about 20 years ago, this condition was mostly untreatable and I’d have gone blind just like that. Now there is a safe and easy procedure to address it!
Macular edema makes everything look like you’re seeing through bullseye glass. I was watching a movie last week when the camera angle switched to looking through a window with bullseye glass. I panicked because all of a sudden BOTH of my eyes had the same view of the world!
To track my vision changes, I put up this eye chart in my office. On the 21st, I could read to line 3 “20/70 vision”. Today I can read to line 6, “20/30 vision” Woo hoo!
Oh and my sister-in-law Roanne has been of great help! She’s a professor of optometry and has helped me and held my hand from the beginning! Thanks Ro!
Are we flattening the curve?
Watch this video, Minute Physics “How To Tell If We’re Beating COVID-19”
and look at this live chart
In brief, when a line is moving diagonally, the virus is growing exponentially (ie. unchecked growth!). When a line starts descending, the virus’ growth is slowing down.
On 4-17-20, this graphical mathematical analysis says, essentially, “Maybe the US has started to flatten the curve as of 4-11-20”. Of course, in order to “keep the curve flat” we have to all stay home… ummm forever. Hmmm.. hmmm…. And what state is doing the best? Well, according to the state chart on the same site, all the states are doing fairly similarly.
A recommendation: We have gotten a couple grocery and prepared food deliveries from Greenleaf Platters https://www.greenleafplatters.com/. They deliver all over the Bay Area. They don’t normally deliver staples like milk but times have changed! It’s been -very- nice getting staples and some fancy foods to keep eating interesting! The staples are very reasonably priced and the fancy foods are expensive and (OMG!) worth it!
The 5 stages of grief^H^H^H^H^H pandemic:
1- panic buying toilet paper
2- spending a trillion dollars on your staycation
3 – panic buying flour, yeast, butter, & eggs
4 – baking bread
5- acceptance
8-16-20: A friend asked about the Molekule filter, this is what I had to say:
TL;DR: Scam.
I don’t own one but I had a conversation with them about the quality of their product after getting facebook bombed by their product a zillion times. They came up empty in all regards. It’s louder, moves less air, and is MUCH more expensive than any other air filter on the market. Their “unique pollutant destroying technology” is an activated carbon filter. The molekule guy said he has a report “coming out soon” showing how their filter was better than blah blah blah. I googled and found the “upcoming” report on the molekule website itself! I grabbed it and put it the report here. Performance of the filter is IDENTICAL to reasonably good filtration + an activated carbon filter.
If you want a good air filter, the best start is to get a good furnace filter from the hardware store. Spend $20 on a filter instead of the usual $8 and you’re rocking it. That worked very well for recent wildfires.
scam alert for reals.
We just paid off our 6 year car loan. Hurray!
This 6,400-word, well written article can be distilled down to “quarantine for the COVID-19 pandemic!” It’ll save lives!
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca
A month after Abigail was born, we finally settled on what we wanted her legal name to be. But the paperwork had already been filed… So here we are, 5 years later, finally getting around to making it right.
Today I went to the courthouse, spoke to the judge and got a Decree of Name Change. Tomorrow I’m mailing out paperwork to the Social Security office for a new Social Security card and to the Vital Records office for a new birth certificate! In another month, we’ll have her passport fixed. Hurray!
It would have been easier (several evenings and 2 half-days off work so far) and cheaper ($700 or so in fees) if we had decided on her name right away but I wouldn’t have had it any other way!
I just got my first pair of progressive lens eyeglasses. ARGH! It’s hard to get used to them! It’s this mix of “WOW, I can see close up!” and “AGHGHEHAH the world is spinning out of control! Make it stop!”