hallow's eve

as my concession to hallowe'en, i present this terrifying yeowling cat. (click on it to see it bigger-like.) it's the cat who lives in the driveway of our neighbors (not the neighbors who are friends with the mean man with the truck, the neighbors on our other side). the cat still cries and cries and cries. it tried to get into our house again yesterday. poor little creature. it sure has been cold the last few days and nights.

and ... tomorrow is november. tomorrow the crazed writing starts. i've certainly got the jitters today. i'm doing a bit of internet research this morning prior to my trek back to the courthouse.

antici ... pation

well i spent today in the courthouse.

i sat in a room full of other potential jurors and i read alice munro. for hours and hours. dang but she's terrific, though. i wondered if my name would ever be called, and then, finally, at about 2:30, it was.

i was assigned to a municipal court case, which felt like a bummer. municipal court means small change, traffic malfeasances, etc. not so interesting. i want me a superior court case! that's the juicy stuff. but then, a few minutes later, it was announced that that particular case went away, and i was released for the day.

i go back tomorrow. i'll bring a second book, in case i finish the munro.

man and his truck

there are perhaps things i will never understand about the human animal. i'll share a brief anecdote.

yesterday there was a truck, in addition to ours, parked in front of our house. about two feet of this truck were blocking our driveway and kara wanted to go on an errand. normally this is no big thing, especially since the truck's owner was right there. kara asked him to back his truck up two feet (there was room between his truck and our truck in front of our house for him to do this) so she could pull the mazda out the driveway.

the man appeared exasperated that kara asked this of him, but he got in his truck and pulled away. he didn't merely back the truck up a few feet; he left altogether, and kara pulled out to go on her brief errand. the man and his truck apparently just drove around the block once and then parked in the exact same spot, inexplicably again blocking our driveway by about two feet. kara returned from her errand and had to again ask the man to move his truck a little, so she could pull into our driveway.

again the man appeared inappropriately put out, but he got into his truck and peeled out down the street again. kara pulled into our driveway and, moments later, before she was even in the house, the truck returned and parked, now fully blocking our driveway, despite the fact that there was more than enough room for him to park in front of our house without blocking our driveway even an inch.

how infuriating is this? the man had trapped us in our house. he was apparently trying to make a point of some kind, but what is it?

kara was tempted to call the police and have the truck towed. the man was not someone she wanted to talk with again, as apparently he is some sort of sociopath. plus he appeared to be a guest of our neighbors and we don't want any feuds. we both stalked around our living room a while, thoroughly aggravated and yet impotent.

fortunately, about 20 minutes later the man and his truck were gone. i guess his visit with our neighbors was over. kara rushed out and pulled our hyundai (which was parked up the street a piece) into the space immediately before our house again in case the mean man and his truck returned.

this experience definitely got our dander up and raised questions about the motives behind this individual's actions.

(fortunately i do appear for jury duty tomorrow and might have the opportunity to put one of these sociopaths away for years! [maniacal laughter])

decay

okay this is gross. my friend mailman sent me this article about these aforementioned dead folks. she left the link in the comment field on the previous post but i think it deserves front-and-center attention. thanks erika.

now i don't know how i feel about this. the bodies were cool. they weren't dripping or otherwise nasty when i saw them. it's a terrific educational device. perhaps they went about it the wrong way, though. dang.

i don't want to negate the good time i had looking at this stuff. it was really excellent. but i readily admit that it was potentially horrible.

we saw dead people

i haven't blogged about this yet. so sorry. and i'm not even in a terrific mood for blogging, what with my headache, nausea, and clogged eustachian tubes. but i'll write a wee something.

on saturday, that is, 3 days ago now, kara and i and our friend kristi cruised to seattle to see this exhibition of human anatomy. thanks to kristi for driving. the bodies on display were genuine human cadavers, preserved, and in various states of repair.

it was fascinating. i think my favorite display was what is pictured to the right, the figure split in half so his viscera were visible. there were signs to help identify organs, vessels, etc.

there's controversy surrounding this exhibition, of which i was not aware at the outset. apparently appropriate permission from the families of these dead folks was not granted. the cadavers are chinese but i don't know if that's important. i can surely see how people might be upset. some folks might not care to see their loved ones treated this way after death. me, i'm all for donating my remains to the body farm, but i realize my wishes aren't everyone's.

anyway. there was one picketer outside when we went in, but by the time we left he was gone. and the displays were amazing. if the exhibition comes to your area (i think it's in seattle through the end of this year), i heartily recommend checking it out.

sorry i'm not doing this topic justice. it was really an astonishingly good show.

nicola

i finished reading this book yesterday afternoon. it is good.

i feel a special affinity toward nicola's work because i sort of kind of know her. i met her when she was doing a reading at the bookstore where i was working at the time. she was promoting stay, which is a sequel to the blue place. (the third book in that series, always, is coming out in april 2007.) we chatted a little bit before her reading and afterwards she invited kara and me to her house for a party.

or maybe we went to dinner first. i don't remember. i know kara and i went to her house in wallingford for a party one evening, and another evening we met her and her partner kelley for dinner at a restaurant in wallingford. i just don't recall which came first.

it was exciting, hanging out with published authors. i was surprised and pleased that nicola spent so much time talking exclusively to me at the party, which was a hey!-my-new-book's-out party. their house was full of people. she gave me her full attention for a long while. she herself is an interesting person, having sung in a rock band and taught self defense. plus she's beautiful and british and has a gorgeous voice. her characters are powerful women, savvy women, impressive women.

it was exciting and, for me, a little unnerving, spending time with nicola and kelley. i felt unequal. i felt they were being generous by sharing their time with us. (this was something of a point of contention between me and kara, who did not feel similarly unworthy.) more likely, however, is that they are quite social, they like people, and they are genuinely interested in other points of view.

i like to think that if kara and i still lived in seattle we would still see nicola and kelley now and again. with more exposure to them i'm sure i would have calmed down considerably. when i started reading slow river i emailed her to let her know. she wrote back quickly and asked how i liked it so far. we had a little exchange.

slow river is set probably some decades in the future. it's about a woman from a profoundly wealthy family who is kidnapped and whose family does not pay her ransom. she escapes her kidnappers and lives underground. it's more than a science fiction story or a thriller (or queer fiction), though it's all of those.

read her books, if you haven't. do it. (i confess i haven't yet read kelley's novel, solitaire. i will, though.)

and yesterday i started reading this as a bit of a change of pace. i don't read a lot of comic novels but i'm intrigued by the quantum physics swirling around in this one. plus i've heard the author on npr. plus it's short and i bet i can get through it before november. so far i'm finding it quite clever.

pick me but don't sequester me

it's 2 weeks from november! i'm 2 weeks away from writing like a crazy person. i'm excited. i'm ready. i think. i have my premise; i'm ready enough. there's a guy and his wife and his wife's friend with a troubled past. it's perfect! let's go!

scanning the profiles of other participants in this endeavor reveals lots of fantasy writers. i sort of wish i could write that sort of stuff, creating an entirely different world. i'm pretty much stuck here, though, as far as the old imagination goes.

i called our human resources department this afternoon and queried regarding compensation during my upcoming potential jury duty. excellent news. minus what the county pays ($10/day?!) my employer will pay my full hourly wage. kick ass! i was leaning against wanting to get selected until this news. now i want to get picked and i want it to be the next trial of the century! (unless that involves my being sequestered. sequestration sounds unfun.)

during the course of my workday today i typed up 3 reports for the same patient. i like that. i typed an admission history and physical examination, an operative report, and an inpatient consultation. at the end of the consultation the patient appeared to be stable, but it was a rocky day in that individual's life. but i like seeing the arc of patient care over even just a brief stretch of time. it's somehow a cozy feeling.

maternal influence

mom said she couldn't see this image in my last post, so here it is. this is what kara and i will look like shortly with continued use of our new weight machine. see? not so terrible.

and mom shared this video with me too and i thought i'd pass it on. can you see it?

anyway.

medicolegal x7

1. eliot's sutures came out yesterday. i didn't do it and he didn't do it; they were taken out professionally. the original appointment for suture removal was on thursday, the day before yesterday, but eliot apparently found out about it and hid under the porch. he was unreachable. yesterday, however, i was able to snag him and i brought him in. his scar looks good, i was told. it certainly looks good to me. he healed fine. good little elly belly. fine boy.
   
2. we bought this book, human anatomy, in seattle last weekend. i love it. it's anatomic drawings through the centuries. i don't know why but i get a kick out of these drawings. they're fantastic. if you're interested, here's the isbn: 0-8109-5545-8.
3. recently i went to a doctor for the first time in a long time, and boy was that ever a mistake. i had to get blood drawn, and i think i've mentioned my feelings regarding needles. when the lab work came back i learned that my fats are all screwy. my good fats, which are supposed to be high, are low, and my bad fats, which are supposed to be low, are high. so it's fish oil pills for me. and in a few weeks i go under the needle again.
4. i just finished working out for the day. it felt good. actually, i overdid it a bit and got a little nauseated, but i feel much better now. i'm not sure if i'll work out again tomorrow but i certainly will on monday. i will establish a routine, i pledge. it's a good machine, our new machine, and with its help soon kara and i will look like this. sweet!
   
5. veering away from medical-slash-health issues, i went and had a coffee this morning and brainstormed about the november thing. i had what appeared at the time to be good ideas. now i have a title, four characters, and a very vague story arc. that's plenty. for the next couple of weeks i'm going to try not to think about it, and we'll see how the act of breakneck writing deviates from these hesitant plans.
6. kara is out right now with a couple of colleagues, shopping at (gad) the mall, because she's been subpoenaed. it's one of the perks of being a legal clerk for the medical records department in a major hospital system. she wants something professional-looking.
7. in other legal news, i have mixed feelings about my upcoming jury duty. i recently learned that although three counties in the great state of washington have increased the monetary compensation for serving on a jury, the county in which i live has not. for serving on a jury i will receive a whopping $10 a day. i'm interested in sitting on the jury and hearing the case and learning the process, but the drastic decrease in financial gain during that time will be stifling.

that's it for now i think. i think i'll go watch a movie or something. maybe i'll read some more nicola.

e o

i do enjoy our seattle jaunts. there's just something about the city that lifts me. we were in the wallingford neighborhood, one of my favorites, last evening. kara and i ate in a pub called murphy's (where we had gone to cap off our first date, as it happens), and i do enjoy an irish pub. when we move next, to seattle or to portland, we will have to speak to our realtor about proximity to an irish pub. i consumed two pints of murphy's (what i used to drink in cork oh those many years ago) along with my turkey club.

then we were off to the u district, the university temple united methodist church (which is very churchy indeed), to see e o wilson (pictured) and kuow's steve scher have a chat.

e o is an older individual, and we were toward the back of the church, and sometimes it was difficult to hear him. there was a large man, red hair, balding on the crown, 2 pews up, who obstructed my view quite effectively.

e o's new book is called the creation and it seems to attempt to build a bridge between scientists and creationists. he wants to put the current bickering aside and work together to save the planet. sure that sounds fine.

what i suppose i have a bit of a problem with is his desire to save each and every organism on the planet. doesn't this seem to go against the idea of natural selection? more specifically, though e o didn't talk about this per se, kara and i got to talking about the advances in medicine and how folks in this country are living longer lives. (e o himself has got to be pushing 106 by now. no, not really; he was born in 1929.) sure, medicine is good stuff and all but humans aren't generally meant to live longer than 70 or 80 years, are we? it sounds cold but what with overpopulation and ecological footprints and all the other issues that surround our killing the planet, i'm thinking the human race has peaked and is in its decline.

we should be allowed to die. i don't personally want to die, not right away, because i'm enjoying myself, but the whole evolution thing is a process and homo sapiens are hardly the culmination of that process. we are interfering with that process, as we interfere with everything else. it ticks me off. the process needs to take its course and we need to make room for what's next. i guess i just don't want what's next to be robotics and nanoparticles and i don't know what all.

although, for all i know, that is the next natural step. although kara and i did agree that medicine should be more palliative than it is.

it's early in the morning and i probably didn't say well what i wanted to say. sorry. i'm tired. any questions?

so it goes

i feel like we should have done some research for the panel discussion of last evening. janeane garofalo and foolproof talked at town hall in seattle about politics and the media, focussing on newsblogs versus print and television news. i didn't know any of the panel members other than ms garafalo, and the names of local political bloggers were bandied about willynilly so we didn't catch any of them.

still, it was an interesting discussion. everyone on the panel was terribly anti-bush and against staying in iraq, and while i am too, it might have been good to have some opposing viewpoints. there were minor squabbles about this or that but fundamentally everyone agreed with everyone else.

prior to the town hall event kara and i did a little seattling. we went to few bookstores and in the first one we ran into an ex-girlfriend of mine, patti. i hadn't seen patti - who dumped me, by the bye - in about six and a half years and it was a bit of a shock. she was working at the bookstore, a different from the one where we'd worked together those years ago.

it was a friendly encounter, through brief. i wouldn't mind catching up with her, seeing what she's been up to, but i doubt it'll happen. all afternoon i had those "what-if" thoughts, how my life would be different if things had gone another way ... the only way i have to reach her is through the bookstore. we'll see.

we went on, mostly hitting the bookstores in the capitol hill area. we stopped for a drink at one point, we had some supper at another. then we went to town hall, and then we drove home. coming home from seattle is always a bit of downer, just because we'd prefer to live there than here.

so it goes.

now i know about sociopaths

so i finished reading this one. sociopaths. good stuff. there were some portraits of some chilling people. the author, dr stout, says that 4% of the population in this country are sociopaths and makes the point that there are more sociopaths than people with colon cancer in the united states of america. in east asian countries there are significantly fewer sociopaths, and dr stout says it's because the culture and religion there are based on the interconnectedness of all things, and sociopathy is about thorough disconnection.

now, i'm as individualistic as the next guy, but i'm all for human interconnexion (i like the british spelling).

the segment of the book that i think most affected me was the story of romania. i don't know why i didn't know about the romanian orphans. the former president of romania, ceausesco, was a sociopath. he didn't allow birth control or contraception and hence lots of unwanted kids were born.

lots of these kids were put in institutions where they were fed and kept alive but given virtually no attention. children suffer when they are not touched in loving and parental ways. eventually it became a big thing for other countries to adopt these romanian kids. but the kids were frequently hostile to their adoptive parents because they had never been shown affection and had essentially been made sociopathic. soon romania stopped these adoptions because it was making the country look bad.

this is an oversimplification of dr stout's oversimplification, to be sure, but the crux is that the presidential sociopath created tens of thousands of little sociopaths, a large portion of a generation. quite an achievement.

hitler and pol pot are referenced. oblique references are made to the current situation in our country and in iraq. dr stout never outright says that president bush is a sociopath, but such a conclusion is easily inferred.

quite telling are the narratives dr stout write of amalgams of sociopaths (tales gleaned from her patients - she is a psychologist who specializes in posttraumatic recovery) living smaller lives and wreaking smaller-scale havoc.

odds are we all know a sociopath or two (as 1 in 25 people have the disorder, as she repeats a few times) - though probably not me, because i don't even know 25 people. the book is a bit glib in places and sometimes repetitive, but overall i recommend it. she manages to end it on a cheery note. hope for the future. she advises we all move to east asia. no she doesn't.

now then ... what's next, reading-wise?

oh, they're coming

well that's it then. i've done it now. i've signed up to do nanowrimo again. me oh my: 50,000 words in 30 days. i don't want to think about it too much yet; i don't want to overplan. i have 3 characters starting to walk around in my head. one of them is featured in a short thing i started the other day; she will be a relatively minor character (i think) in the november thing. she's an arnp who recently survived a brutal attack and, in the thing i'm writing now, she's about to steal a book. that's all i'm giving away right now.

jury duty starts 2 days before, and while at the moment i'm hoping i am selected, i don't know what the experience will do to my writing. i don't know if it will give me more or less time - well, actually, more time in the mornings because i don't think i'll have to be there before 8:30 and these days i start working at 7. depending on the type of case and perhaps on my co-jurors, the content of the story could be affected. which is, of course, okay.

heck, i might not even get selected. it might be a one-day thing, over before november even starts.

busy times between now and then. this saturday we're going to seattle to hang out a while on our own and then visit with janeane garofalo and friends. a week from today e o wilson is in seattle. in a couple weeks we'll probably head back to seattle to see these dead athletes. toward the end of the month, on the 26th, my sister is coming to town for a conference and i'll spend a night and a day with her, yes, again in seattle. and on 11/1/2006, the first day of nanowrimo and my presumptive third day on the jury, we're going to see stephen king - i'll give you 3 guesses where.

eliot status report

drain's out. eliot and i are just back from the vet. the most proximal and distal sutures were snipped and the drain was pulled free. done and dusted! he looks good: no swelling or drainage is evident.

he's a bit of a bitch to medicate, i don't mind saying. once he knows we're after him he's hard to catch. he's a good fleer. and once he's grabbed up he wriggles and twists and resists the medication. i hold him as still as i can, which isn't very, and kara prys his jaws apart and inserts the syringe. usually we end up with more medication on us than he gets in his mouth.

in spite of all of that, he is doing well. another week and a half and the rest of his stitches come out.