marathon zombie

I worked 4 days straight covering a whole floor. It was like two weekends back to back. I woke up today with my eyes glued together. I just wanted to remember it here, and acknowledge myself.

where poetry and real work intersect

the real dissertation music: still Chumbawamba

My Rhapsody Playlist

performing subjectivities

It seems that my goal to perform all my subject positions in this blog has been mixed.

On the plus side, I've achieved my goal of getting back to work (somewhat) at the keyboard after prolonged medical condition that precluded typing. This is good and very good. I'm working on dissertation, and other projects I'd neglected or lost touch with. Like my backlog of email, and cyber relationships.

However, the blog lends itself to my techie subjectivities more than anything. Dunno if non tech subjectivities can get here other than as a report.

I had such high hopes, high apple pie in the sky....

email from rhapsody to blogger sucks

see last post.

email from Rhapsody has landed.

Lisa has sent you some music.

Trying to share by email from rhapsody again.

Johnny B. Goode at the top on rhadish two years in a row.

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Best of 1959

Need Help? To play the music, just click on the playlist name. Don't have Rhapsody? No Problem. You can get it Free. Just click the playlist and follow the easy instructions. What's Rhapsody? A huge (millions!) catalog of full-length songs just waiting to be played. Think of a song and play it-that quickly. Try it free and see why so many people can't live without it.

---

For questions or assistance, please contact Rhapsody Customer Support.

This message has been sent to you by the Rhapsody user whose name and email address are specified above. The contents of the message, including song selections, were not generated by RealNetworks and do not reflect RealNetworks' views. Use of Rhapsody or any Rhapsody content is subject to RealNetworks' Terms of Use. For more information about Rhapsody, please visit Rhapsody Online.

blog, cut paste html for rhapsody playlist HITS 1958

My Rhapsody Playlist

Well, last time I tried this, it somehow printed the playlist in the post. I'll give you a hint, this one starts with Johnny B. Goode tonight!

the email to blogger still hasn't made it!

at any rate, this should pick up the pace.

memes are fun: The Pharyngula Mutating Genre Meme

PZ Myers at Pharyngula started this meme as a means of demonstrating evolution in cyberspace. I found it on Sherry Chandler

If I have any readers, consider yourself tapped. If you don't have a blog, dammitjanet, start one. I'm pretty sure I broke the rules with my questions. Can we consider that a mutation?

The rules:

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”. Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

* You can leave them exactly as is.
* You can delete any one question.
* You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…”, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.
* You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.
* You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

The lineage:
*My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock.
*My great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Primate Diaries.
*My great-great-great-great-grandparent is Thus Spake Zuska.
*My great-great-great-grandparent is Kate.
*My great-great-grandparent is Finally Maturing.
*My great-grandparent is Parts-n-Pieces
*My grandparent is I See Invisible People.People.
* My parent is Sherry Chandler


The Questions and Answers:

* The best time travel series in SF/Fantasy is: The Company stories, by Kage Baker
* The best dissertation song in punk is: Tubthumping, by Chumbawamba
*The best scary movie in modern pop culture is: Alien# (For years I had to watch these movies anytime they came on, and the endings always surprise me.)
* The best high-carb food in Southern cooking is: sweet potato pie
* The best novel antipsychotic/mood stabilizer in non-generic form is: Abilify, by Bristol-Meyers Squibb

I don't think anyone reads my blog, so I will probably go extinct. I'll try tapping the blogs that I read regularly: clearcreekgirl, fossilguy.

4 things meme

Since no one to reads my blog, no one has tagged me with the 4 things meme. I had never even heard of it. I did a google for it afterI read about it somewhere, and found some blogs who have risen to the challenge. Finally, I found one that said "consider yourself tagged..." and so I begin:

4 jobs I've had:
dairy queen counter clerk
ER unit secretary
psychiatric nurse
psychiatric nurse practitioner

4 jobs I've been fired from:
dairy queen counter clerk
there is really only one. see above.

4 places I have lived:
Dallas, TX
Cedar Hill, TX
Houston, TX
Seattle, WA

4 of my favorite foods:
home made tamales
meatloaf
baby back ribs
chocolate anything

4 places I'd rather be right now:
today is a good day, none

4 vacations I've taken:
australia
france
korea
greece

4 tv shows I like:
ugly betty
my name is earl
smallville
burn notice

4 sites I visit daily:
NYT
WSJ
google
Techcrunch

long time no blog

i have been busy busy busy.

physical therapy for necks
trip to australia
getting back into the dissertation saddle
golden anniversary
working for the psychiatric hospital

this all takes more time than it might seem.

after the hunt

When I started this picture, Xena was laying at Shasta's feet with her elephant but she rolled off the bed by the time the Treo 700p caught this shot. I can see the attraction of Blogger Mobile, but phone cameras will have to get faster, better, etc.

xena takes down the stuffed elephant

She stalked this elephant out of the goodie box we keep to replace old stuffed toys as they expire, so to speak. We buy stuffed toys as we find them on sale. I took this picture on my Treo 700p and sent in using Blogger Mobile. I had to send it by MMS because the other email account repeatedly failed.

rooms to move into (in to)

I've moved my office back downstairs. The upstairs office became unbearably warm unseasonably early. And, it never had a real good fun-schway for thinking. The room was designed as a meditation room, and we had to move my office into it when we moved the birds into my office during renovation. Hard to think in a meditation room. So the desk and computers are moved down, but we left the books upstairs in the built in bookcases.

We moved me into the parlor downstairs once we realized that my thoughts had stalled. The parlor is half red. We hope the red stimulates thinking, because we are very tired of gradual school. My better half cleaned off my desk as a birthday gift. I've had trouble getting my brain restarted since recovering sufficiently from my arm pain to work at the computer, and nothing excites my thinker more than a clean desk. [The source of the arm pain has finally been diagnosed--cervical stenosis, buldging disks, blah blah, etc. I have a wonderful physical therapist who specializes in neck stuff, and am doing much better since the exercises, blah blah.]

I found a recently released discourse analysis primer from Brian Paltridge, Discourse Analysis, and am happy to say that while it's making me write funny today, the book has provided a good impetus and refresher of many reference texts that I found on my own and used in my research. I've started moving into this new office by bringing some of my books down and making little thinking stacks around me on my newly cleared desk. I've had little stacks of books around me since I learned to read. I think of the stacks as the external hard drive to my brain, and I use them to help organize my thoughts. I'd already adopted this method by the time they taught us outlining in grade school, and still find it handier for quick reference. This is also why I buy most of my important reference texts. I can't very well return part of my brain to the library.

I started bringing the books down because while reading Paltridge's overview, I started thinking of Firth, and wanted Paltridge to go over Firth, and he did not. I had to go upstairs to that hot and still messy meditation room and start looking for the book that introduced me to Firth. I couldn't remember which one it was, and started bringing down all the discourse analysis and corpus linguistics books. I kept thinking it was Biber I was looking for, but it wasn't. I did find that I own two identical copies of Biber's Corpus Linguistics.

I'm always interested to notice the books I wind up purchasing twice. These duplications tell me when different thought paths have lead me to the same book, and identifies books I've used enough to be forced to purchase twice when I've misplaced it. The Biber book actually didn't help me that much. It was Stubbs I was looking for. Stubbs was the last book I found this morning. I couldn't remember the author or title until I saw it. It's heavily pencil marked. This means I really moved into the book, because I hate to mark in my books.

But why Firth? Stubbs (1996) introduced me to Firth, who said that "the complete meaning of a word is always contextual, and no study of meaning apart from a complete context can be taken seriously." Firth said this in 1935. He suggested a "contextual and sociological technique" of semantics based on the "formal scatter" of words across contexts. Stubbs (1996) observed that this approach to study would not be possible for 50 more years, until computational approaches to studying large corpora were developed. Firth essentially suggested studying networks of meaning. According to Stubbs, Firth was trying to "overcome the dualisms of de Saussere," who divided language into langue (which de Saussere said couldn't be studied) and parole (which de Saussere said wasn't important). Nowhere much to go from there, and I was pretty stuck for a while by this logic. I now appreciate the whole problem with dualisms.

Stubbs' reference to Firth broke the spell and gave me the connector between my two seemingly disparate views of language use--discourse analysis of language use as social action, and study of language via computer assisted corpus linguistics. If Firth could have he surely would have wanted to do the same thing.

Stubbs also broke the spell of the great Chomsky, Austin and Searles by pointing out that not one of them used real data in developing their theories. For that matter, neither did de Saussere.

I have data. Lots of data.

Who is Sick?

Check out this terrific site. This is the first social network application I've seen that has important application outside of VANITY!!!

Who is Sick?

Amazing and wonderfully simple. Who knew when we were doing the bioterrorism detection stuff in 2000 and 2001 that soon the social networking thing would take off making this obvious? We were frantic to figure out approaches to early detection of bioterrorism when most medical offices and hospitals didn't even have a computer. Now many homes have better computers than the hospitals and clinician offices do, and web based social networking is much more robust in growth and novel development than any health IT project I can think of.

When I think of the time folks spend putting junk on MySpace. Maybe now they'll take a minute to document their symptoms. All we need to do is think of more ways to capitalize on this seemingly natural urge to social network apps...there is an idea for a health IT movement in here somewhere.

Like make some widgets to connect to this site, and get them more servers and bandwidth. I think they are going to need it.

now I can sleep at night...

roadtrip

 

I like to take pictures of garbage. Our garbage says so much about us. I took a picture of the roadtrip garbage. This was a banana day. We've been eating lots of bananas, apples and pears lately. Fruit is good these days. I really need to clean out the Ford.

goodie pile

 

I thought this stack of ginger cookies was very interesting to look at, and no, I didn't buy any. I'm wishing I had about now.

eris anyone

So on the way home from Skagit Valley we drove through Mt. Vernon. We stopped at the Co-op there and found where all the hippies and rainbow people went. They are all in Mt. Vernon. There was no Kombucha or blue haired clerks. They were selling Mountain Astrologer in the check out line, and I bought one. I forgot that I love astrology. I love the precision of the planetary angles joined to the vagueness of the interpretations. It has been my cure for the dangers of science-mind.

There is a new planet. There has been since 2005 and somehow I never heard. It was initially nicknamed Xena but now has been formally called Eris for the Goddess of Warfare and Strife. The moon is named Dysnomia, which means lawlessness. Frankly, I think we could have done without both of them, but they are right for the times. Eris has been in Aries since 1925. It will be interesting to figure out what that must mean.

For a funny, pick up the current issue of MA and read Orr's lighthearted article about Eris. It's good to have a sense of humor about such things.

something interesting to look at

 

I've been reading Photo.net in the evenings while the tv runs in the background. I like they way Greenspun talks about photography as "recording of light." He says all we have to do is take pictures of things that are interesting to look at. I especially like to take pictures of everyday objects with my phone camera or the little Pentax Optio S6.

We realized that we work too much and decided to take a road trip to Skagit Valley to see the Tulip Festival today. We took the dogs and the cameras. We saw fields of beauty too intimidating to photograph. I did feel up to this pile of baskets. As beautiful as this picture is all I can see is the tag in the middle.

on the subject of subject positions

Remarkably, since my mother has been ill, I've been thinking about myself. Almost every day, I hear her voice calling out the comments I think she might make as I walk along in a store or drive through the neighborhood. Ok, it's every day, pretty much all day. Who knew I was such a mama's girl?

Realization of this constant presence of my mother in my mind started me thinking about my other influences--besides my mother. Did she make me what I am? Is that it, I'm Treva's girl?

What I am is a person with a busy mind. I said I would try to perform all my subject positions in this blog. Is that even possible? Am I all of these subjects now?

Besides my never-ending trip to graduate school, I have been a writing student of clearcreekgirl, a ballroom dance student of Jim Hunt, a metaphysics student of Anne de Vore, and a follower of fossilguy. I studied Religious Science first with Gregory Flood 20 years ago, and I'm still a devout Religious Scientist. I practice daily and attend the Center for Spiritual Living. I studied Emerson, Troward, Butterworth, Emmet Fox, and many others with Gregory, and probably have a unusual view of God as a result of my work with him. No Mother-Father-God for me. God will always be It to me.

I've been a lot of things along the way. I've been a fabulous lesbian poet, and took a poetry workshop with Olga Broumas. I was called upon to drive her from the airport to Fort Warden for Centrum. I recall that she was bright and especially authentic. She's the sort of person whose silent presence is especially pleasant. Perhaps that is what makes her poems so powerful. She read my poem Sleep to the whole conference on her reading day. Where is that poem? I wrote poems, a lot of them.

I've been a bedside nurse in acute psychiatry for over 20 years, in many inpatient and outpatient settings though I favor teaching hospitals. I now work as psychiatric nurse practitioner. I love this work.

I've been in graduate school for a long time. As I near completion of my dissertation research, I've been 'awakening' or perhaps 're' awakening to the world. It seems like it's changed a lot since I took on graduate school. Maybe it is me that has changed. It was Anne de Vore who told me I had to go to grad school and earn a PhD. I hope I'm not warped.

This is only the beginning of this list of subject positions. If I enact them all will I have one subject position after all? I'm really trying to test out the subject position concept on a personal level. I know I've only scratched the surface of its full meaning and signification here.

I've been told a number of times recently that I need to work less (grad school and my beloved nurse practitionering) and get some hobbies! I used to have hobbies. I'm now looking at photography and sailing lessons to get ready for summer travel.

And my other hobby is going to be to find those poems. I might still be a poet if I took some time to do some poeting.

window to the past

This is a picture I took of a window in the old greenhouse at the Chateau Munnehorre. I took the picture with my first digital camera, a Sony DSC S70. I know nothing of the settings, but I still like that camera. I'm trying to have a hobby besides dissertation research and work. I'm trying to learn more about my camera, the early sony digital zoom, and the little pentax point zoom shoot. Today I read about LV and EV. Light Value, Exposure Value. I'll have to read it over and over a few times.

3:12, awake again

I'm awake again. I would like to get back to my next paper, so for purposes of intellectual kindling, I have reread my submission to ITHC2007. Of course I found a few typos, mostly left from cutting and pasting and then overlooking sentence changes that need to be made. I hate this aspect of professional submissions--the errors I find AFTER submission. Sooner or later we have to release each paper, and I've yet to find all typos before the first submission. I usually continue to edit under the assumption that if the paper is accepted, I'll have a short period of time to submit the revised final version. I've been using Word 2007 for this paper, and I really like it. I guess I'll have to buy a copy.

working with miracles

I've been working. I love my work. I run up and down the hallways and stairways of my hospital talking to patients about the crises that have brought them to my care, usually on an involuntary basis. I spend a lot of time talking to team members about how we can best help each patient. My job is to select and manage medications and to somewhat lead the team when I'm covering for a vacationing psychiatrist.

I think I work with miracles. Biological miracles, at least. I'm astounded weekly by what disturbed brain chemistry can make folks do, whether disturbed by natural causes, or a foreign substance like methamphetamine, crystal, or heroin. It is nothing short of a miracle.

I wish I could tell you what the brain chemistry can make folks do, but an actual story might make my patients recognizable, and violate HIPAA laws. My patients are admitted to the hospital in extreme states of vulnerability, unable to care for themselves, or control their own behavior to the degree that someone is in danger--my patient or other persons. This is the definition of grave disability, danger to self, and danger to others. Danger to property falls into the commitment criteria as well. My patients occasionally make the news before they come to my hospital.

Psychosis and mania are so stereotypical that the stories all run in similar form:

"I thought I was god...I had the cure for AIDS if I could just remember...I'm working with the FBI and I can't tell you any more...someone is trying to kill me, but they can't get into the hospital, so it's safe here..."

Such statements are the bread and butter of the assessment process of the psychopharmacotherapist. We assess behavior as well, and make inferences when patients can't talk to us coherently. Patients take their clothes off and stand on their heads, or wear many layers of clothing, perhaps with pajamas or underwear on the outside. Others wrap articles of clothing around their heads, and may wear a denim turban with a Levi's tag over their 3rd eye for a few days. Others are so fearful due to their biologically distorted perceptions that they are assaultive to staff or other patients. They may integrate us into their delusions sometimes, and all we can do is medicate, and wait for the next miracle.

The next miracle starts when I select the right medicine for the patient. If the patient will take the medicine, the chaotic brain chemistry slowly begins to stabilize, and the real person behind the biologically driven behavioral chaos emerges. I never tire of watching this process--the return of the patient to the consensus tract that more of us share.

The next miracle is when the real person with the stabilizing brain chemistry emerges, and starts asking questions, piecing together what happened. Or not. Some do not want to talk about it. Some want to know what they can do to prevent it from happening again. Some already know. They remember exactly what happened, what they were thinking as they were engaged in their respective dangerous behaviors, their fire-setting, car wrecking, self immolation, etc.. Some set out to change their lives. Some set out to change their lives many times.

I used to try to interpret all this behavior through various psych* theories and paradigms. Now I just think of all as miraculous and consider myself blessed to be present and be of service.

update

Mom is better. This is a relief to me. I didn't realize how much this affected me until I heard she could go back to rehab soon. I'm working on a digital picture frame for her, instead of flowers.

No entries here recently because I've been working working working.

this speaks for itself, baby to baby

 

ithc2007 paper submitted early!

I completed the revision of the paper and submitted it early in the afternoon on the day of the deadline. That was a first for me, and I hope the first of many more. Usually I'm struggling with the overburdened server to upload my paper at the very last minute, anxious, swearing, praying, visualizing, etc. I smoothed out the stuff the excellent medinfo2007 reviewer pointed out, and off the paper went to Australia on the wings of electrons. This is the 3rd submission for that paper, so there wasn't much left to do to it. I didn't want to add any more data to it. I'm saving the rest of the data for journal submissions. It may be that this paper is of interest only to me and my committee, though in fairness MedInfo2007 did accept it as a poster. I didn't expect that at all. This stuff is not yet mainstream informatics.

Of course, after the early submission, I reread a paper draft at 2340 and found an old reference from a previous draft stuck at the end of the paper. I had to repair that and update the submitted version. Then I found that distinction should have been distinctions...

still working on revisions

I'm still working on revisions to the paper. I'm working faster and smarter because mom is doing better. One of my brothers showed up at the bedside with a shave and haircut, and she reached up and touched his face. He was amazed at how powerful a shave and a haircut could be. No time to write more, but remind me to tell you about puppy Xena's toileting training.

3 o'clock in the morning

I started this blog (of which I am the only reader) because so many of my friends have complained that they hardly know me since I started graduate school in 1999. I did not plan to take 8 years off from friendships, but I have been driven to complete my PhD. It's as if I had to do this work in order to finish becoming myself, as crazy as that sounds. Now I'm using this blog to complete the process, return to the writer self that most of my friends loved so much. I also have not spent 8 years on the PhD. I've earned one masters degree in nursing to become an ARNP, and have almost completed a second masters degree in health informatics.

Here are some common things about me. One of my best teachers ever told me that this every-day-ness is what makes us real.

At 2:52 I was awakened by the puppy scratching my back as she stretched in her sleep. I was immediately fully awake, no chance of drifting back to sleep. My sleep is erratic as a general rule, but recently much more so. Sleeping pills make me drunk for a couple of days after I take them, without the fun of having a drink with friends. I don't take those unless I'm very sleep deprived, cranky and paranoid.

Since I have much work to do on my dissertation, paper submissions to conferences & journals, and keeping up on clinical reading, I've decided to make insomnia work for me. Earlier this week, I got up and reviewed genre analysis. I reviewed Swales, 1990, and some very recent articles to make sure I haven't gone out of date since I last reviewed genre theory. I think this review and re-review is part of what has slowed me down. Another drag on my progress is this inner notion that I have to "feel" like a "Doctah" before I want to become one. This is prolly making me go in circles. I found I'm still pretty much up to date, but saw how to use the genre analysis vocabulary more effectively.

This morning, I'm revising a paper for submission to the ITHC2007. I was in Korea for NI2006 to present the first paper based on my research last spring. It was exciting and very frightening. I loved it. I learned to love "brown rice tea," and I still drink it though it's hard to find the Korean style here. I drink an organic Japanese Genmaicha from Choice Organic Teas. To my shame it is not fair trade.

A second paper based on my research was accepted as a poster (not a full paper) for MedInfo2007. AMIA2007 took a pass on both the first and second papers. International reviewers seem to understand my work and appreciate it more than American informatics venues. My adviser tells me that I'm free to submit the full paper again to another conference, even if I present the poster at MedInfo. MedInfo is in Australia this year, followed by ITHC. I've always dreamed of going to Australia, so this trip will be one of those "trips of a lifetime." I hope. I've ordered lots of books of all kinds on Australia both as purchases from Amazon and from the library.

I'd never dreamed of going to Paris, and it's now my favorite city on the planet. If I ever have a chance to live there, I'm going to do it. However, I went to Paris with great trepidation, expecting the French to hate me because I am a dirty American. Somehow, I loved the city the minute I got off the plane at Charles de Gaulle airport. Since I've been thinking about the dreamtime and the outback for most of my life, I hope I love it as much as France. I cried the day I read that the last dreamtime shaman had no apprentice. I worried the world would stop when he died.

laptop & little heart

 This little heart came to me in a package along with my phone on my first trip to Texas in February, 2007. It was awfully sweet when it fell out of the box. I miraculously left my phone on the counter in the bathroom at 4:30 AM. It's harsh traveling that time of day.

snow on rose

 

One more entry this morning. This is a shot I took with my first digital camera, in 2003. I know it was 2003 because we had just moved into our home. It was about this time of year. Middle of the night, snow still falling.

sokcho, korea

 

Korea was so beautiful, and the people so warm. I can see why my cousin married a Korean woman and has lived there for the last 20 or so years. I think I could live there myself. This photo is from our June 2006 trip. I went there to present my dissertation research.

treva & her screen

 Here is a picture I took of mom when I was in Texas in mid February. If you recall, the surgery was canceled, and I spent 4 days with my parents at Tightwad. This picture pretty much sums up my mom. She loves anything with a screen, and she smiles a lot. I've been going through all may pictures of her, and all her pictures, and she's always got a big natural smile on her face. On the camera at least, it's as if there are no wasted moments. I don't think that's easy to do. I've got lots of photos of folks who don't have that look.

Dad said today that she's opening her eyes, and nods recognition of him. Yesterday she held up two fingers when asked to. I was relieved to hear it. They've turned the TV on for her, and I hope there are lots of westerns on. She loves them.

non-furniture looking furniture

 

Here is my new end table. A find from Earthewise. Furniture looking furniture creeps me out. I don't think this table goes with this chair. What do you think?

parrots digging the spelt

 The parrots asked why we only take pictures of dogs. I caught this picture of two of them in their dinner dishes up to their gullets. The spelt is a hit. Even Maxine likes it. She is not pictured here. I'm using Picasa to upload these pictures. This is the only way I can find to upload the pictures without first putting them on some other server. It's not as easy as I'd have thought to do the layout for more than one picture in a blog entry.

 Here we have Brocco right after he made his move on Minos' spelt. It's not often that Brocco tries to take anything from Minos, not because Minos is any stronger than Brocco (he isn't). Brocco is in love with Minos, and will do anything for him including give up his food. Minos does not return the favor.

baby Xena's first haircut

 We dropped our baby off at the groomer's today. It wasn't easy to leave her behind with a groomer we don't know. It was hard for 5 minutes at least. I thought my most excellent half had the whole day off. I had some excursions planned.

 After we left little Xena at the groomer's, we went to breakfast in West Seattle, a pet food store in West Seattle, and looked at a house, also in West Seattle. We stopped by Earthwise on the way home to look for a corner cabinet for my little LCD TV. The steel table the TV sits on is humming 24 hours a day and I think I'm getting brain damage from it.

 Here is a picture of Xena dosing in her break-room. She really doesn't like to be bothered when she's in there and she never goes in before 9pm. That's the requested pictures of Xena with her new haircut and her little pink ribbon. I didn't know she was white. Notice her little apricot ears? She has apricot spots on her back as well.

thinking, thinking, thinking

I've realized that I'm sitting and thinking in the middle of the night like old times, when I was a poet. A tragic poet. I should get some poems up here. I don't think I have any mother poems.

I'm thinking about mom, but doing expert distraction maneuvers. She seemed so helpless and fragile laying in her hospital bed with the tubes down her throat and and in her arms. This whole mother in ICU thing has been written before many times, filmed, photographed, etc. I don't much want to talk or write about it.

There wasn't much classic country music. I've moved on to crash test dummies. This has been my favorite album off and on since it came out. I actually own it. They ask all the questions I've been curious about.

1. God Shuffled His Feet - Crash Test Dummies
2. Afternoons And Coffeespoons - Crash Test Dummies
3. Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm - Crash Test Dummies
4. In The Days Of The Caveman - Crash Test Dummies
5. Swimming In Your Ocean - Crash Test Dummies
6. Here I Stand Before Me - Crash Test Dummies
7. I Think I'll Disappear Now - Crash Test Dummies
8. How Does A Duck Know? - Crash Test Dummies
9. When I Go Out With Artists - Crash Test Dummies
10. The Psychic - Crash Test Dummies
11. Two Knights And Maidens - Crash Test Dummies
12. Untitled - Crash Test Dummies

home Texas music

ok, this is what I'm listening to tonight: Home Texas Music

1. Johnny One Time - Brenda Lee
2. Sunday Morning Coming Down - Johnny Cash
3. Almost Persuaded - Johnny Paycheck
4. You Never Can Tell - Billie Jo Spears
5. Take The World But Give Me Jesus - George Jones
6. Just Because - Freddy Fender
7. I Like Beer - Tom T. Hall
8. Hey Loretta - Loretta Lynn
9. Go Away - Willie Nelson
10. When I Lay By Burden Down - Roy Acuff

i did not take this picture

Ok, this is the kind of picture I've been trying to take recently and have filled my palm Treo 700p and Pentax Optio with files and files of very crappy pictures. I repeat, I did not take this picture. It's the Hotshot of the day for February 21, 2007, from DC Reviews.

It captures what I've been feeling. Except for the cold hard water, I've been seeing a lot of trees like this in Texas the last couple of weeks.

I'm thinking of mom and naming this guy's picture cold hard tree with cold hard water.

more bad news

Mom did well in her surgery and her heart is in good shape. Unfortunately she had a stroke the next day after the surgery. Now we are in a holding pattern. Sitting in the waiting room, waiting. We wait for news of any kind, and there isn't much. We've had a parade of friends and family coming in to pay respects, show love and support. My cousins are especially upset, and they keep saying that if Treva goes, it will leave a "big hole" in the family.

They got that right. I'm not ready to let her go, but I know it's her wish not to survive with severe impairments.

bad news

Dad called this morning, chipper as a blue jay, saying mom is doing well, and will be off the respirator soon. Then later Judith called to say that mom had a seizure when they tried to take her off the respirator, and now maybe her arm doesn't move. They don't know if she's had a stroke, and she's in the cue for a MRI and CT scan. One of the scanners is down, so she's waiting her turn. I guess they forgot that time lost is brain lost when a stroke is evolving.

I've covered my days at the hospital here, and will fly back to Texas early in the morning. I'm upset. I'm cleaning my office. Dixie Chicks. Have a listen.

Packing for Texas to Dixie Chicks.

1. Not Ready To Make Nice - Dixie Chicks
2. The Long Way Around - Dixie Chicks
3. Easy Silence - Dixie Chicks
4. Everybody Knows - Dixie Chicks
5. Lullaby - Dixie Chicks
6. Bitter End - Dixie Chicks
7. Voice Inside My Head - Dixie Chicks
8. Silent House - Dixie Chicks
9. Lubbock Or Leave It - Dixie Chicks
10. Favorite Year - Dixie Chicks
11. Baby Hold On - Dixie Chicks
12. I Like It - Dixie Chicks
13. I Hope - Dixie Chicks
14. Cowboy Take Me Away - Dixie Chicks
15. Landslide - Dixie Chicks
16. So Hard - Dixie Chicks
17. Not Ready To Make Nice - Dixie Chicks
18. Wide Open Spaces - Dixie Chicks
19. Travelin' Soldier - Dixie Chicks
20. Goodbye Earl - Dixie Chicks
21. You Were Mine - Dixie Chicks
22. I Can Love You Better - Dixie Chicks
23. Without You - Dixie Chicks
24. Ready To Run - Dixie Chicks
25. Sin Wagon - Dixie Chicks

happy wed

Mom should be on the operating table by now. I couldn't stay for her surgery, because I'm due back at the hospital today. I'm covering for the next couple of weeks. I've added a few more books to my database on LibraryThing. It really is simple. They even came up on my widgets when I refreshed the page.

Off to work.

busy longhorns; still life; still objects; sun on the run

I went to Texas last week to help my mom who was to have a valve replacement surgery. The surgery was cancelled because the surgeon and transplant team were too tired from staying up partying all night. NOT! That's hospital humor. I can make hospital jokes because I am a hospitalist myself. Actually, the OR crew had been up all night doing a double lung transplant.

 These are some registered longhorns who live next door to my cousin Joanie. You can see they are pretty busy here. I had some better pictures, but they got funked up, and neither adobe nor picasa liked them.

 I took this picture on the plane coming home from Texas. I forgot to take my actual camera, so I took this with my telephone, a Palm 700p. I've been thinking about still life. Does still life have to have a fruit in it? Maybe these are still objects. I was crowded into the window seat, sitting very still to avoid disturbing my neighbor who was cranky. I read my book. I rearranged the cards in my funky new wallet. I tried not to squirm. I took pictures out the window trying to catch the sun which hung on the horizon for a very long time. We chased it all the way from Texas back to Puget Sound.

 

back to work

I've started to like my blogging. It has served its purpose and more. I'm moving back into my office, and playing my dissertation music. Today, I put some paper in the recycling! This office looks like a tornado came through and stayed for a week.

I feel like writing again. I wonder if I can get my poems up here? I'm still having a bit of pain, but it reminds me to stop, rest, reposition. I'm trying to live in harmony with it.

I wish I'd started blogging long ago, because it seems to be good for me. But I did try once a year for a long time, and it never took until now.

I'm such a geek. I can't resist trying this. Here is a link to today's dissertation music

I listen to music at my desk streamed via Rhapsody. It has a few problems sometimes but overall it's the best listening experience for me at this point. I can't think about owning music. I'm happy to rent it at this point.

I know this is Rhapsody's gimmick to get you to try their streaming music service, but how cool is this that I can share today's dissertation music with you without leaving my desk? Social networking applications strike again.

Here is the playlist. I love the whole thing, but Tubthumping keeps me going. I've been listening to this almost daily as encouragement. Today is the first time I've heard "Bankrobber." It's pretty cool:

1. Tubthumping - Chumbawamba
2. Amnesia - Chumbawamba
3. Mary, Mary - Chumbawamba
4. Drip, Drip, Drip - Chumbawamba
5. Laughter In A Time Of War - Chumbawamba
6. The Big Issue - Chumbawamba
7. Bankrobber - Chumbawamba
8. Fade Away ( I Don't Want To) - Chumbawamba
9. One By One - Chumbawamba
10. On eBay - Chumbawamba
11. Just Desserts - Chumbawamba
12. Everything You Know Is Wrong - Chumbawamba
13. Shake Baby Shake - Chumbawamba
14. The Good Ship Lifestyle - Chumbawamba
15. Outsider - Chumbawamba
16. Jesus In Vegas - Chumbawamba
17. Scapegoat - Chumbawamba
18. New York Mining Disaster - Chumbawamba
19. I Want More - Chumbawamba
20. By & By - Chumbawamba
21. Bella Ciao - Chumbawamba
22. Smith & Taylor - Chumbawamba
23. Walking Into Battle With The Lord - Chumbawamba
24. WWW.Dot - Chumbawamba
25. Pass It Along - Chumbawamba

Xena Warrior Princess Puppy

  Here is a recent picture of puppy Xena. She weighs about 5 pounds and will have to have her little operation soon. She has an aversion to toileting in the great outdoors, and so far prefers extra strength piddle pads from Drs. Foster & Smith. Sigh.

 

I'm dictating this blog post.  I'm using my Gmail account online.  This is the first time I've tried this and so far things are not working as I had hoped.  Dictation of text works perfectly, and I seem to be getting much better at this.  However using voice commands to surf through the web is not very easy for me at this point, as they dictate this I'm sitting in my office which desperately needs to be cleaned.  Bella, my cat is curled up asleep in her little cat bed, which sits on my desk.  She has almost outgrown her little leopard spot bed.  However, the little bed fits puppy Xena perfectly when she's driving me crazy and won't let me work.Xena is not as good at curling up as the cat is.  But she's learning.

Accuracy is not quite as good yet on the Gmail application.  However, I was just able to train the application to say, Tina completely through voice control.  As you can see still gives me Tina somes times instead of Xena.I guess use of Dragon NaturallySpeaking is not as seamless across all programs as they currently advertise.  However, I've tried speech recognition software almost every year since 2000, and this is the first year that I have actually found it fairly useful.  It helps that I'm motivated to get the software to work because of the way I must now limit my time at the keyboard and mousing due to to the dissertation shoulder.

I'm leaving in all of the mistakes or as many as I can tolerate.

I see from the preview that I still haven't gotten the photo embedded in the post that I am going for.



Related links:
Dragon NaturallySpeaking

photo in profile test update

I did manage to get a photo uploaded to the profile this morning. That is the last thing I'll tinker with until I've done some real work. I promise.

I uploaded the photograph from Picasa using the BlogThis button. It went right into a blog entry where I Did NOT want my profile photo. However, doing this gave the photograph a web address within the nether reaches of Google. I then cut and pasted that web address into the profile, as directed by the Picasa how-to. What the Picasa how-to didn't mention is that there are two slightly different addresses, and you want to cut and paste the one that says "src" or "source," I forgot which.

Then I deleted the post, and as promised, the post went away, but the photo remained in the profile. TADA!

This photograph is years old and will surely stump my web stalker. It was taken by fossilguy, and is from my bohemian poet years. It is my favorite photograph of myself. If you look closely, you'll see clearcreekgirls fingertips on my shoulders. I don't think she was choking me, but it's hard to remember, what with my AGE=64 brain and all.

photo upload from picasa using blogthis button

 

I had to buy a new computer last week because my faithful lyndel has a death rattle in one of her drives. Since the rattle is in the primary drive, rebuild is going to require finesse, time and courage because this machine is where I've been doing primary data analysis.

I bought a refurbished Vaio VGC RC210 with WindowsXP Media Center, 1 gb RAM, 2 hds with room for 2 more. I named the new machine ziva, and she is RAID capable. I'm not sure that I am. Ziva is duo core this and that, and she is fast. The old machines (lyndel and isaure) were fast when I bought them, but they both choke on Picasa, Google's photo management software. Ziva says "bring it!"

Today I'm testing the "BlogThis" button on Picasa, which so far is the easiest way I've found for someone like me to simultaneously upload and format the placement of a photograph in the blog entry. I've set the photograph to be "medium" size and off to the right, embedded in the type. This is a picture I took this morning of one of my journal covers from the 90's before I quit carrying my journal everywhere. This actually is not a journal that I carried everywhere, but a larger one that I used at home during special meditative journaling and painting. (This was before the "scrapbooking" craze, which drives me crazy. These new scrapbooks are becoming too much like homemade hallmark. No grit. They bore the tits off of me. If you know me, you know that's serious boredom.)

I don't know who took these pictures of me, but I suspect it was either fossilguy, or perhaps a downstairs neighbor at the time.

When I saw this cover this morning, I remembered how I always thought there were never enough Whoopie Goldberg movies. I still think that. Isn't she articulate? I think so.

Preview is telling me that this picture is not in fact placed as I wanted so I'll have to try again. If anyone knows how to take a picture so that the flash doesn't do that, please tell me.

related links:
Picasa
VAIO VGC-RC210
Whoopie
Whoopie Pie

blogger, picasa, photohosting not ready for primetime

I've been messing around trying to upload a photo to the profile. I've been around the bush and back with picasa+hello (bloggerbot is dead, don't try it), picasa+blogthis, (work-around currently posted in picasa "stuff we know is broke" section also doesn't work).

for now, no photo in profile.

I did finally get a widget from Google Reader to work. I'm amazed at how much I read from how many sources.

Back to real work for me. No pain.

widgets in play today

Another recent NYT incident that re-piqued my interest in blogging was the article Bling for your Blog, which introduced a number of new and interesting widgets that I wanted to test out. Even though a new blog is born every two seconds, NYT makes it sound sooooo interesting!

LibraryThing is by far my current favorite. I have secretly wanted to catalog all of the books in my personal library for as long as I can remember. There was no reasonable way for me to do the cataloging or use the catalog until now.

TADA! Check out my books on the sidebar to the right. This should really help Homeland Security keep an eye on me! I had some "duh" moments when I couldn't see the obvious of how to insert the LT widget into triggXR but I simply experimented until I got it right. This kind of tinkering makes me feel very brave. At home I'm not permitted to use the power tools or the stovetop for very good reasons.

(To add LibraryThing to your blog, cut and past the code provided by LibraryThing right into a blogger 'page element' for outside scripts.)

I set up the tags on my personal library collection on LibraryThing so that I could easily display the books that I read and the conditions under which I read them. I have never read just one book at a time. As a child, as soon as I learned to read, I had the feeling that books were changing me as I read them and I was terrified and tormented by this feeling from first through third grade. Then I had an idea for holding the books at bay. I started reading several books at one time in order to maintain control over "who I am," or "who I become." As a third grader, this seemed to be a sure fire way to protect myself. It's interesting to note that I didn't feel threatened at all by television. TV was something we did as a family when I was young, and watching TV included running commentary on what was going on between the characters, including speculation about whether or not a real person would do that, how stupid it was. There was nothing scarier than books, which I faced alone. Given that I grew up in a very violent family in a very violent southern culture, I'm shocked and awed now to realize that I thought books were the scariest thing I faced.

Another widget I've enjoyed this weekend is from Blogrolling. They have a feature that lets me make different blog rolls and add to them automagically by pushing the "Blogroll It!" button I've added to my Firefox browser. What is a blogroll you ask? Look to the side panel at the "stuff I like" section. Blogrolling also provides you with code for each of your blogrolls, which you insert into a blogger page element.

The puppy is telling me it's time to start "bird time" which is the quality family time we have each day starting around 5pm. It's a time when I'm joined for dinner in my beloved TV room by the avian, the feline and dogine members of the family. When my better half isn't home, we sometimes eat popcorn for dinner. Do not tell the vets...

related links:
www.libarything.com
www.blogrolling.com
I can't share NYT: Bling for your Blog today because it is from early in January, and I now have it in my TimeSelect account, but you might not. I'll tell you about TimeSelect and why I use it some other time. Remind me.

P.S. if you visit the widget folks, and like their apps, make a donation. These developers make far more code than they ever get paid for. We need them, and we need to keep them in caffeine and RAM.

hello world! email post

I can't resist trying out the different features available in the blog. I've studiously avoided blogs and blogging until now.

I've had a variety of different reasons to avoid it since blogging might:

• become addicting and I plan to finish my dissertation and graduate. In my twenties, when I was a poet, I wrote at least one letter every day to the same friend, who graciously seemed to read them all for seven years. She said it was her contribution to my becoming a writer. (I wrote other things besides letters as well.)
  
• expose too much of my life. What if Homeland Security is looking me up?
  
• expose too much of how boring my life is. What if no one wants to read my blog? This must happen to people all the time.
  

There are a number of reasons why I should experiment with blogging:

• Seven years of letters seems like fine preparation for blogging, however, I'm not sure how motivated I'll be without a specific audience or reader.
• I've been having trouble getting back to work on my research since I had to take so much time away from the keyboard, due to dissertation shoulder. My keyboard time is limited for a while longer, and I get frustrated when my research thoughts are repeatedly interrupted. These bloglet entries are just about the right length to make me feel like I'm doing something, but not spending so much time on it that it triggers much pain.
• It will be a an interesting challenge to "perform all my subject positions" in one blog.
  
• Exploring social networking software seems like a very good thing for me to do, given my health informatics interests.
• The hardest thing about blogging seems to be coming up with a pithy name for your blog, and get going on it. It'd be a shame to let triggXR go to waste!
• I always feel so powerful right after I solve a tech problem, even if it's a little bitty one.
  

Check out the emailed post!

hello world!

I've started this blog as brain exercise after I scored "AGE=64" on a recent brain training activity. It's been on my mind since a website added years to my age based on a crappy little test.

I attribute my low score to (or is it a 'high' score?) to the fact that the brain-age exam is based on activities I have found boring for most of my life. Somehow, I've gotten along anyway, but I'm getting a little tired of all this pseudo or not quite ripe science telling me what to do from the pages of the NYT. However, in case the NYT is correct, and I need to train my brain, I decided to do so using activities that are of more interest to me and might benefit me in other ways.

Ergo, a new blog with the challenge to myself of integrating my many interests and occupations.

I'm not taking the braintraining too seriously yet, but I have had a lot of fun searching out suitable widgets and representative content for my blog.



related links:
Happy Neuron
MyBrainTrainer