End of the Year Update

End of the Year Update
It really is the end of the year, all 365 days.

Wowie kazowie.

Time went by almost as fast as my MINI Convertible takes turns on a dry road. Of course, we haven’t had much in the way of dry roads where I live lately.

I took some time off from the blog in December. I ran into a spell where I had the time but no inclination to write a posting. I suppose I could make one of those New Year’s resolutions to post on a more consistent basis. I could; but, I won’t because I know that I would break it rather soon, before February started, I think.

Part of my spotty posting in December was caused by my dull live style. There is no drama in my life to speak of. Since I am between girlfriends and have been for four years now, I am not certain that I want to use that term. It is very difficult to find a way to create something worthwhile when all I have done that day is two loads of laundry, completed the daily Sudoku puzzle [moderate difficulty], and read in a book. If I stretched that as much as I could, I might be able to fashion a four or five sentence blog posting.

As I have said before, I have no drama in my life.

One can always hope for a more exciting 2011. I will.

Doctor D and Me
I went to see Doctor D this month for my once every three weeks visit.

Doctor D said I am fine and that is about all she will say about my medical condition. Doctor Karen said the same thing for almost two years.

Being fine is good I guess, especially when you consider the alternatives.

We talked about the City of Hope Medical Center second opinion regarding my condition. Although she wouldn’t come straight out and say, “go ahead and let them operate. Remove that portion of your liver and we won’t have to worry about it,” she certainly came very close to saying that.

She also said she would have a third opinion before she had surgery. All of which raised questions in my mind about surgery and surgeons.

Doctor D gave me a Christmas gift of sorts.

She said since I was doing so well and all that we could skip our regular schedule appointment between Christmas and New Year’s and go back on schedule in mid-January. I could even skip a prescription round of the Xeloda if I wanted to skip it.

I skipped it.

When I saw Doctor D, I also saw the oncology clinic nurses. Wendy and Vhrunda each gave a bug hug; Vhrunda gave me several big hugs and that was epic. They loved the Fairy Tales brownies [brownies. com] I left with them. The brownies are among their favorite sweets that I leave with them from time to time. I think they reluctantly agreed with my request that they consider sharing the brownies with Doctor D and Doctor Maddurri.

Nurse Jackie and Me
I see Nurse Jackie once every six months when I go to the Colorectal Surgery Clinic for a follow up appointment.

This time around I ended up seeing an annoying resident doctor. I don’t think he is a bad doctor. He just had an annoying habit of saying everything was “fantastic.” That was going overboard; not everything can be fantastic; a traffic jam can never be fantastic for example. He said I was doing fine, just like Doctor D said I was.

When he finished up, I asked to see Nurse Jackie.

Nurse Jackie was surprised when she popped into the examination room since she wasn’t scheduled to see me. I said that I was fine and that I wanted to give her a Christmas card and some brownies. This was totally unexpected and she greatly appreciated the brownies.

Nurse Jackie gave me a big hug and she left the room with a great smile on her face.

Christmas
Doug and my former wife came to my flat for Christmas Dinner. I went to their house for Thanksgiving.

I cooked another great turkey. I would have preferred to have tried a ham for Christmas. Unfortunately, Doug doesn’t like American hams; he only likes Spanish hams which he says are cured much better.

Being the good father that I am, I went to several specialty markets in search of a Spanish ham. I knew I was in trouble when almost all of the butchers that I spoke with either had a completely blank face or quickly said no. They said they had some truly wonderful and flavorful American hams.

We had a Butterball turkey instead and it was perfect.

I could tell it was perfect because no one spoke while we were eating and Doug had a healthy sized second serving.

I couldn’t find a frozen mince pie to bake this year. I ended up with a semi nontraditional Christmas Dinner dessert. I had a slice of fudgy wuggey cake from Giuliano’s Delicatessen. Everyone else had pumpkin pie.

Fixing the Flat
I had chance to meet Dave the Plumber this month.

Dave is a very good, professional plumber who knows what he is doing. That is refreshing.

I finally decided to make some plumbing repairs to the flat. What I thought were simple repairs turned out to be rather complex work. Most of the repairs had to do with replacing faucets and valves that were almost fifty years old. The old stuff came when the building was built.

The repairs took Dave two separate sessions to complete. I would have preferred a shorter time but I’m very happy Dave took his time and did the jobs correctly.

Dave probably saved me from a hot water heater failure. The last plumbers who weren’t really plumbers used a combination of hot water copper tubing, perfectly fine, but connected the tubing with a zinc fitting, very bad. The connection was well along in electrolysis and would have failed sometime soon. Part of my flat would have been flooded.

Dave also replaced all of the parts with American made, solid brass or solid copper fittings. These parts were more expensive; but, as Dave said, they will last much longer. He figures that ought to last another fifteen to twenty years.

That’s way long enough for me.

Perfect.

I celebrated my new plumbing repairs with a long hot shower.

The MINI and Me
It was Christmas time and I couldn’t forget Alex the Sales Pro from South Bay MINI.


Alex and I share many loves in common, mostly driving fast sporty cars and chocolate. I could have to order of fondness inverted though. I had thought about brownies but reconsidered. The brownies would be loved, savored, and enjoyed by Alix and at the same time would have possibly wreaked havoc with her New Year’s Eve party dress.

Instead, I gave Alex a Hershey’s chocolate tee shirt. It is dark brown, naturally, with the words chocolate printed all over it. Alex loved the tee shirt.

The tee shirt was a much wiser decision.

The Novel
I think I mentioned that I stared writing a novel once before. At this point, I have absolutely no idea if this writing effort can ever bear fruit or outside readership. I finished what I thought was the first novel and asked Doug to give me his thoughts on it. Doug has worked as a writer so he should know something about writing.

While I was waiting for Doug to give me his comments, I started on a second novel. Right now, I am about 580 pages into it. I think I will need another 300 or so pages to finish everything that I wanted to cover in this book in the series.

Doug finally got back to me with his thoughts. He thought I had too much dialogue. That was a great suggestion. I can either take some dialogue out or add more narrative. I will got back and add more narrative to the first novel.

I had already planned to write a prologue that set the stage for the beginning and provide some background. My initial estimate of the prologue was probably close to one hundred pages. I’ve also been writing more narrative in the second novel as I go along now.

My plan for the novel is to finish the second one first and complete the rewrite or add narrative to the first. Then, I will rewrite the second novel with a goal of finishing both by the end of March.


Happy New Year


Be well and stay happy.