Ponderings and Musings

A couple of weeks ago the groundhog said we had six more weeks until spring. Apparently he looked the wrong way when he was looking for his shadow because Mother Nature has decided to bless us with unusually warm weather this week.

Getting out in the sunshine has been doing wonders for my psyche. I’ve been feeling kind of blah, which is typical for me for this time of year, and being between my two surgeries hasn’t really helped the situation. Luckily my second surgery is a week from Friday and then it’ll be just a few weeks of recovery before things should be normal again.

Stepping out onto the lawn today and not going up to my knees in snow in the latter half of February was very refreshing. I don’t see any signs of dandelions yet, not even the precocious ones, but they can’t be that far away.

Because of the beautiful weather I’m in the mood to look for bright spots and one of them is that as a result of the Trump Administration, we’ll probably be having shorter winters and less snowfall as time goes on. Hopefully I’ll be checked out before the rivers boil.

In the meanwhile I’m just going to enjoy the warmth and sunny skies.

I’m starting to really feel the effects of SAD or Seasonal Affective Disorder. Every year I go into the winter determined to not feel the winter blues but sure enough we go with three straight weeks of grey skies and I start to bum out a little bit.

There is some sun today, and I feel a little brighter for it, though it is still 17ºF with a wind chill of 8ºF at the moment. This weekend is suppose to be up around 40 and I find this encouraging.

To help counter the winter blues I occasionally start marching around the United States via Google Maps and look at sunny landscapes of places I’d like to visit or visit again.

In 2003 I drove home from Emmetsburg, Iowa after completing a computer training class in that lovely part of the world. I remember driving across the Iowa-Minnesota border on Route 4 and so I just picked a random spot along that route to gaze at for a few moments. I could almost feel the sun and warm breezes on my face again. The smell of the surrounding farms brought a smile to my face.

Every little bit of something helps.

I follow a lot of aviators on Twitter. I follow musicians, I follow fellow bloggers, I follow friends both from real life and those I’ve met online. I follow politically minded people.

This morning I decided that I needed to shut down Twitter for a few hours.

I noticed that I’ve been checking Twitter upon waking each morning to see if there’s been some sort of global catastrophe, because my spidey sense is worried about what looms on the horizon and let’s face it, the country has been a bit of a dumpster fire since the Inauguration.

My Twitter feed has been all about politics. Well, that’s an exaggeration. My feed has been about 98% politics. My tweets have followed the same ratio. My handful of followers know how I feel on any given subject.

Today I just had to step away from it all for a little while and just practice some breathing exercise to get my head back to center.

The reboot helped. I no longer feel overwhelmed and I feel ready to continue the quest to do my part to make the United States the best it can be.

Onward and onward. Now if we could just do something about the dumpster fire.

I am having surgery today. This surgery is part of the saga that has been going on for most of my life, and the subject matter might make some readers uncomfortable. I share these things so that others that share my issues may read about my experiences. I will not be offended if you do not complete this blog entry.

For some reason, many doctors suspect that it was because I might have rammed my parts into my bike when I was young kid, I have scar tissue that likes to grow in my urethra. This is not hugely uncommon among men; the scar tissue is called a stricture and it makes it difficult to urinate. Don’t worry, everything else is functional and I’m happy in the sex department.

I have had four surgeries to remove the scar tissue to open things back up. They started back when I was 13 years old so, with surgery in 1982, 1986, 2005 and 2015. Since the last surgery in 2015 I have used a catheter on a daily basis to keep things open. In the back of my mind I knew it was a stop gap measure and there have been times that I’ve had to use the catheter two or three times a day to keep things feeling and working the way they should. Shortly before Christmas the catheter went the wrong way, I had a lot of blood come out and then scar tissue started filling in the gap again.

In the 2015 entry I mention that there is another procedure that they can do that should correct the problem permanently. This involves taking some skin from the inside of my mouth and grafting it where the scar tissue is in my urethra, thus completely eliminating the scar tissue instead of just cutting it back and hoping that it doesn’t come back. My urologist wanted to do this procedure the last time but it was summer time and I wasn’t in the mood to be down for the count for 10 weeks or so during the summer, so I opted out. It wasn’t a mistake, but it ultimately just delayed the inevitable.

So this morning I am having what is called a Supra-pubic catheter put in so things can “calm down” in my urethra. This catheter will be a small tube between my belly button and my junk. I figure if folks fighting cancer can have ports installed to go through chemotherapy, I can run around with a pee tube for five weeks. So after today and through March if we talk face to face, I could be peeing in your presence and you wouldn’t even know it.

In March, if all goes to plan, I will be having the second surgery, where they’ll do the skin graft thing and rebuild the parts that are currently damaged. I will then have two catheters for a few weeks, a traditional one that makes some men shutter and the other pee tube that I’m getting today, the latter being the backup plan if something goes wrong after the reconstructive surgery.

When all is said and done, I should be as good as new. I should be able to pee across a football field and if I don’t have one of those handy, at the very least blow toilets off the wall like a superhero but without the laser beams.

The success rate of this type of procedure is 90%-95% for long-term success and as all the medical information I’ve read on the Internet says, “should be considered the gold standard as a solution for this type of problem.” The previous surgeries have a very low long term success rate so it’s comforting to know that my body is behaving just as doctors expect.

I’m apprehensive about the length of time for the procedures and the recovery; when all is said and done it’ll be like 11 weeks of prep and recovery time. But, other than a couple of weeks after the reconstruction part in March, I should be able to carry on just as I do today, albeit with just a little extra hardware. I did it before in 2015 and I can do it again in 2017.

I’m looking forward to not living with this issue anymore; all my life when I’ve had to go the bathroom I’ve had to say a little prayer, “please let everything work”.

From now on I know that everything should just work.

In November 2013 I took a solo trip to Minneapolis because I had never been there and it was a non-stop flight from Syracuse on Delta. It was the first time I ever sat in First Class.

I planned on just exploring the city and picked out a reasonably priced hotel downtown. Much of downtown Minneapolis is connected by the Skywalk, which allows one to walk from building to build throughout the downtown area without ever going outside. When I left the hotel on my first exploration of the Skywalk, I suddenly realized that I was staying adjacent to the IDS Center, which was the location of many shots from the opening to The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

I found the escalator that Mary had used.

I had to take my own photo.

Then I looked up and saw the restaurant where Mary and her then husband Grant Tinker are having lunch in the opening credits.

I ate lunch in the “Mary Tyler Moore booth” that day.

I was absolutely delighted to find this piece of Americana while visiting Minneapolis. That trip was life changing for me, for it was during that trip that I decided that it was time to become a private pilot.

Mary Tyler Moore passed away at age 80 today. I’ve always enjoyed her show and hearing the theme song and seeing clips from the show has made me smile today.

Love is all around. Thanks for the smiles, Mary. RIP.

The following is a blog entry written 15 years ago, 12/29/01. I find it amusing to go back and read my old blog entries from time to time. I guess I haven’t changed much.

Resolution Revolution.

With New Year’s just around the corner, it’s time to completely revamp one’s life with what I call the Resolution Revolution. I tend to take New Year’s Resolutions very seriously. With the dropping of the ball and the birth of a new year, its the best time to take a new lease on life, slip into the body that I’ve always dreamed about, clear my skin, become more spiritually focused, get involved in civic affairs, become a cook, a gardener, a sky-diver, a nuclear physist, the list goes on and on.

But seriously, I do have hopes of improving my life and well-being around the New Year’s holiday. The holiday holds so much promise.

Last year, one of my major New Year’s resolutions was to become a full-time vegetarian. I had been dinking around with being a part-time vegetarian for a couple of months beforehand, mostly when it was convenient, but I told myself I needed to become dedicated to the cause. If it had the ability to take a dump, I wasn’t going to eat it. That lasted until we went out west for vacation and I discovered “Sonic” and “In and Out” burger. So much for that.

Another resolution I made last year was to not spend unnecessary money. In celebration of this event, I went crazy on ebay and purchased a cash register system from a defunct department store. I guess I needed a place to store all the money I was saving.

One of my better resolutions of last year was to learn to speak French. I did the whole CD tutorial thing, along with “French for Dummies”. Earl and I headed up to Montréal for a weekend, the perfect opportunity to test out my French. Trying to be friendly, I tried to strike up a conversation with a nice older woman in the mall. Since it was July, I simply said “Boy, it’s hot”. After she slugged me with her purse I realized that I had said, “I’m in heat.” So much for French.

The first resolution of this year is the only one I am going to share. I’m not sharing my resolutions with anyone. After years of making promises to myself, and announcing them loudly to everyone within a 50 mile radius of my mouth, people tend to not take me seriously anymore. But after my Resolution Revolution of 2002, suffice it to say that I’m going to be rich, famous, a contributing member of society and absolutely gorgeous to look at. At least until January 15.

I was volleying instant messages back and forth with a colleague at work today when she asked if I worked in New England. I replied to the negative and told her that I was sitting in Central New York, more specifically to the east of Syracuse. She then commented on something on I had said earlier in the conversation which made her think I was a New Englander. I had written, “oh, he’s wicked smart about those things.”

Yes, I use “wicked” as an intensifier. “He was wicked mad about being short changed.” “The bar was wicked busy tonight.” “Wow, that meal was wicked good.”

I’ve said wicked for as long as I can remember. At first I was thinking that I picked the habit up when I lived in eastern Mass in the late 1980s (I can say ‘Worcester’ like a native without even thinking about it) but then I remembered having a conversation with my sister and her friend Tammy when they were in junior high school about the use of the word wicked. Apparently Tammy had used the word wicked in an essay or something and her English teacher didn’t like the use of the word in her prose.

What a wicked mean thing to do.

Since I can remember the conversation about use of the word wicked from my high school years, it must have been part of my vocabulary for longer than I originally thought. Now, as I try to fall asleep (I’m actually wicked tired tonight), I’m trying to recall if my cousins used the word in the same way. I’m pretty sure that my city cousins didn’t, but I’m not sure about the country cousins. I remember high school friends at our lunch table using the word wicked a lot, perhaps it migrated from New England to our area in the 1980s or something.

Whatever the reason, the word has remained in my vocabulary for the last 30 years or so. Its use has been a wicked good time.