Absquatulate

One reason why I changed careers.

If you've never done design, you may not appreciate how DEAD ON THIS VIDEO IS.

Super David

super David, originally uploaded by Fusionqst.

Off to save the world!

Isn't this kid adorable?

Meet Boomer

Hello new hotness!, originally uploaded by absquatulate.

She's a frackin' toaster. And my new car.

Meet Boomer

Hello new hotness!, originally uploaded by absquatulate.

She's a frackin' toaster. And my new car.

Testing iphone

Sitll like the nomad dream nailpolish from this past weekend !

Lost Dog Found Amherst MA

This grand old dame was wandering around the neighborhood tonight, looking pretty lost and for a little help. She peeked out from the roadside trees when I rounded the corner by Puffer's Pond and I nearly hit her. I stopped, and she approached the car and peered in, very sad like. I got her home and I'm hoping to find her family!

If you know this dog call Amherst MA police. They'll know how to get in touch.

UPDATE: Success! Lying in bed I heard off in the distance someone whistling and calling for a dog. Turns out it was her pack! Everyone was happy, much tailwagging was had. NOW I can go to bed. :)

Happy Father's Day

Dad and the Girls2, originally uploaded by absquatulate.

I love you Dad.

Blog Tag! Books...

Whitney tagged me, so here I go:

• Total Number of Books I've Owned:
  OY. Two degrees and a lifetime of Stephen King? How could one quanitfy? Well let's see.... If one presumes an average of 2 books per college course taken. and I've taken about 60 college courses (!!!), that's about 120 books right there. Add in pre-college purchases and gifts, and post college indulgences, and NOT including the countless articles and journals I've read, and I'd say well over 200? But who can really say? Some I've sold back, some I still have, some are lost, some on loan...
• The Last Book I Bought:
  There were four books bought at a local used book store (Amherst is a town of 30,000 and there are THREE used bookstores. Not including University bookstores. That's alot of used books!): Two from the Penguin Series of Good Ideas: Darwin's On Natural Selection, Orwell's Why I Write, Edward Gorey's Donald and The ... and a collection of papers on cognition.
• The Last Book I Read:
  I'm in the last 5th of LOTR: ROTK, at the end of Kitchen Confidential, and at the beginning of Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter. I usually read one book at a time, but due to travel and illness schedules (The Godel etc. book, while good, doesn't lend itself to airline reading quite like Kitchen Confidential, and LOTR is a bi-annual comfort read) I'm in the middle of three!
• Five Books That Mean Something To Me:
  UGH, hm, okay, only five? LOTR, 1984, The Hay Day Country Market Cookbook, Do Andriods Dream of Electric Sheep, The Princess Bride, and while not a book per se, the 'book' of hand-drawn comic book characters my brother made for me when I went away to college, and this isn't counting graphic novels like the Watchmen and Ronin, . Yeah I know that's six. So sue me. :)

Happy Blogiversary

Today marks the 8th year of the birth of this blog. With any luck, my new niece or nephew will also be born today. Hopefully, that's auspicious! Come quickly little one; we're all waiting to meet you!

Edit: OMG, just got the news about 10 minutes after this was posted. Welcome David Robert, 7lbs 6oz.!

Belated

Belated, originally uploaded by absquatulate.

This was a belated gift but when it's this cool, how can you care about the belated part?

And it was belated for a great reason... the artist asked people to send in requests and he would paint them for free. Why? So he could become a better painter. Can't argue with that either.

I love my robot.

Nesting

Not quite the type of nesting my sister is doing for sure, but since being felled by pneumonia I've created a nest for myself on the couch in the living room. Within a 3 foot radius are the following:

• A tank of oxygen, just in case
• A box of tissues
• Every remote control known to man
• Two empty glasses, each of which once contained ginger ale
• My digital camera
• A heating pad that also vibrates
• A down comforter
• Three blankets
• A thermometer
• The stuffed tiger my sister got me when I was in the ICU
• One pillow from the bed
• My DS Lite
• Get well cards from the Cedrones and the Belangers
• My discharge info from the hospital
• Jess's wedding invitation
• My machine, on which I am spending TOO MUCH TIME booking flights to Pittsburgh, looking at www.nau.com, and reading blogs
• A copy of The Smithsonian Magazine
• Thank you notes waiting to be written to all the kind people who sent their best wishes to me over the last two weeks

Why get up? My only wish was that turning on the WII or the PS2 didn't involve getting up and bending over, which makes me very dizzy.

Perspective

Before this illness rececdes into that murky fog of memory there were a few things I wanted to jot down before I forget them that I also thought you might find amusing or interesting.

During my hospital stay, especially the first three nights, I was incredibly sick. My kidneys had started to shut down, I was very dehydrated and had a very hard time breathing. I also hadn't slept more than three hours in four days. I wish I could say I was exaggerating, but I don't think I am. Every time I would doze off I would wake myself up coughing. Repeat every 30 minutes, and you end up a little delirious. By the time I was in the hospital I was out of my gourd. Mind you I was still quite lucid, but the hallucinations! My god, I had no idea they could be THAT real. In the room there was an observation window which was covered with a curtain with some sort of tapestry pattern on it. I spent hours during the night watching the pattern of the curtain flip in and out, sort of like an advent calendar, watching characters out of Hieronymous Bosch paintings look to me, wave hello, and morph into something else. It was fascinating yet quite disturbing as the characters became more grotesque and more evil as my stay wore on.

The second night I was there I asked for something to help me sleep; between the full re-breather mask and vitals being checked every 2 hours I was hardly sleeping at all. They offered me some Ativan and I took it, and rather than make me more sleepy it made me hallucinate even MORE. The turning point came when I was describing to Steve and the nurse, quite calmly, how in the reflection of the window there was the three of us, the hospital bed, and then two children right behind the nurse. A boy, about age 4, from the early 20th century perhaps, wearing a tweed hat, white shirt, knickers, and his sister, just behind him, both of them talking to each other (although I couldn't hear them) and looking directly at me, smiling and waving. When I looked back to the nurse and to Steve their eyes were are big as saucers. I told them that wasn't the HALF of the stuff I'd been seeing over the last few nights. I'm not sure if they administered something to either make me go to sleep or what, but after that I think I blacked out, and as my hydration returned to normal and my kidneys kicked in, the room wasn't quite as terrifying as it had been those first two nights.

What was absolutely amazing to me was how REAL the hallucinations were, and how LUCID I felt looking at them. I was clearly conscious, I was oriented for almost the entire time (at the end I had trouble telling people where I was or what day it was), and it was just a fact that I was seeing all this STUFF, all these people looking in and out of that window, peeking from behind that curitain, standing off in the corner. It was was, similar to how we assume that London exists even though we might not have been there ourselves.

Reality is so incredibly tenuous, tied so closely to a couple million cells packed into our cranium that only shares the same reality as all the other craniums in the world because biology makes it so. Mess that up and reality becomes a whole different matter. What is real? What we see? What we measure? What we believe? In those 48 hours reality was kids coming to visit, old guys with evil smiles and long fingers passing in and out of that curtain, medieval peasants walking to and fro across the window, and that brother and sister, stopping by to say hi.