Me at the half point, sort of

Me at the half way point, sort of
2011 is just over half complete. The year has certainly gone by fast or so it seemed for me. I suppose the second half will be just as fast.

I thought I might take a look at the year in review.

Me and the Cancer
It has been a very good year for me so far with my colon cancer.

I am still going to Harbor UCLA Medical Center once every three weeks. I am now seeing two new doctors, Dr. Dilruba Haque and Dr. Deepu Maddurri. Dr. Kwan and Dr. Wang have moved on. Strangely, all of my doctors at Harbor UCLA have been women.

I wonder why.

I finally went out to the City of Hope, a major cancer research center, for a second opinion about the cancer treatment. The oncologist I have been seeing likes to take an aggressive approach to my treatment.

He will be operating on me at the end of August and perform what he calls a minor liver procedure. I think it is a major procedure but, then, I haven’t gone to medical school and all that stuff so I’ll take his word for the procedure.

I’ll get another scar, about six to eight inches or twenty to twenty five centimeters long when he removes part of my liver. The liver will grow back completely. The portion he will remove has two small lesions or masses that are probably dead cancer cells that originated in my tumor in my colon. Once they are gone, Dr. Kim has said I will be cured and can go off chemotherapy.

Excellent.

My future is bright and hopefully in a few months after the operation, my hands will start healing to the point that I can take up golf again. My hands are badly cracked and dried out like the Mojave Desert from the three and half years of chemotherapy.

eHarmony
I signed up for eHarmony because the Princess had been nagging me to do so for years.

I can’t say that I have found a match yet. I thought I had come close twice last month but the women changed their minds I guess and decided I wasn’t what they were looking for.

Now, I have some new matches and some actually look very promising from my point of view.

After reflecting on over three hundred closed matches, closed by either her or me, I decided to change my approach. I’m going to take my time working through the new matches and see what develops. I’ll also allow the matches to have a longer time to respond to me since this is the vacation season. I’ve learned a few ideas since I’ve been with eHarmony.

Women who don’t have photos are hiding something.

Women that only have head shots are probably hiding something.

Women that have undated photos are probably hiding something.

Women who say they love foreign travel, fine dining, shopping, and long weekends at five star beach front resorts probably want me to pay for everything.

Anyway, I will have something to do this Summer.

Teaching
I am now into my fifth year of teaching at ITT Technical Institute. I guess I must be a good teacher since i am still there.

This quarter I have four courses, two of which are new ones. That means I have a lot of work to do this quarter and then I can coast for the next several years while I make minor changes in my lecture notes. This quarter I am teaching American Government [complete new course], Business Law and Regulation [new text and new curriculum], Overview of Digital Technology, and Introduction to Project Management.

Next quarter, ITT is beginning to offer two new degree programs in business. I am hopeful of being able to teach more business classes. That would be sweet for me.

Writing
I tried my hand or fingers at writing a novel. I chose science fiction since I like the genre and it allows you to make things happen without having to explain why like, for example, how do dilithium crystals help the engines mix matter and antimatter in the combustion chambers.

The first book is just over five hundred pages long.

Doug looked at it and said I should have less narrative and maybe explain some parts a bit better. Since I have so many pages and I feel that I need to write a prologue, it will be easier to cut sections out than it will be to write more material.

At this point, I have no idea if it will have any commercial value.

If nothing else, I have kept my mind active and my fingers limber as I wrote or typed it out.

Things I won’t be doing or events I won’t be visiting
I don’t think there is much likelihood that I will put in an appearance at the tattoo expo this month. Body art is nice up to a point. Unfortunately, this event goes so far past that point that I couldn’t see if I used the Hubble telescope.

The adultcon.com show won’t have me as a patron. This is the annual or is it semi-annual adult film entertainment industry show. Doesn’t matter which one it is since I won’t be there. I was reading in the local newspaper that this is second largest annual event at the Los Angeles Convention Center and it draw just over 30,000 visitors.

I didn’t realize the adult entertainment industry had so many open admirers. Maybe the big draw is the opportunity to meet the actresses and actors from the films.

The Month in Numbers
June was an excellent month for top down driving in the MINI. I managed to improve my suntan with 23.75 hours of open top driving and none of the driving was joy riding. My year to date total open air driving time is 85.50 hours. With any reasonable luck, I should be over 100 hours by the end of the month.



Epic.

The blog continues to draw visitors. June had 178 visitors and the year to date has seen 1,120 visitors. June was the first month in five years where January 1, 2007 was not the most viewed page. In June, September 1, 2007 was the most viewed page with 28% of the visitors. January 1st was a sort of close second.


Be well and stay happy.