Fish Fear Me

Just An FYI

Just so you know, if the quit smoking widget on the right disappears in the next few days it's not because I caved, it's because I've decided that I've crossed past the point where I need to publicly shout it out. Kind of what my friend Rob mentions in his comment here. It's done and over. Nothing to see here, move along. If I cave I'll let you all know.

But. Publicly declaring that I had quit gave me positive reinforcement from friends and family, the most important people in my life, and also put me on the spot of having to face disappointing those people if I lit up again. Both the positive and negative reinforcement have been important to me and will be going forward.

So thanks, Rob, Kate, Mr. B., Ken, Marie, ricki, and if I'm missing someone here please free to smack me upside the head and I'll add you in with my sincere apology. I very much appreciate your words of support and you should know that you are all a part of that group of people I mention above.

I Feel Good

Two weeks ago I was kind of pissed about how painful and nasty looking my hand was. What a difference two weeks can make. Some of the skin is a bit raw and tender, but the open wounds have all closed completely. The last bits of scab flaked off today and so it's the end of wound care and on to scar management.

The surgeon cleared me to skip the splint during the day and just wear it at night. It's so much easier to do exercises when you don't have to deal with the stiffness inherent to keeping the fingers immobilized for two or three hours. It varies by joint, but just in the last week the improvement in range of motion has been from 10 to 30 degrees in my ring and little fingers. I think that will accelerate now.

All of that means I'm feeling much less wounded/physically vulnerable. I need to be careful about overdoing things and creating swelling that sets back the range of motion, but it's good to feel like any bump or other incidental contact is not going to make me gasp in pain. I hate being a cringer, you know? I'm still a little wary, but that is lessening day by day.

2400 Year-old Secrets?

I have no opinion on the veracity of the claim at this point, but I hope it's true, because the very idea is pretty cool:

A science historian at The University of Manchester has cracked “The Plato Code” – the long disputed secret messages hidden in the great philosopher’s writings.

I'm looking forward to digging into this more and seeing where it goes. (via Instapundit)

A quote near the bottom of that page has me thinking about some unrelated stuff:

Plato quoted:

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

Ain't that the truth. I've got to run to PT now, but maybe I'll elaborate on that later.

Fool!...

...Ve have vays of making you talk!

Wait until I get the bill and have a chance to blog about it. This little contraption, designed to help get the extension of my little finger back to 100% plus, is rumored to cost around $75. It's about 10 cents worth of wire, foam, and plastic. Where the rest of its supposed value comes from is a mystery at this point.

Thank God It's Monday

It's been one thing after another since last Wednesday. Some has been good, some has been bad, I'm just hoping to get back into some sort of routine again. Here are a few odds and ends to start the week.

-A couple of thunderstorms Friday evening spelled doom for any shot of a normal weekend. The first one to slide through wasn't severe, but it saturated the ground pretty thoroughly. The second one was the one that did the damage. That one brought torrential rain and some fairly strong winds. The combination did in trees and power lines all around my neck of the woods. I had intermittent power and internet failures all weekend. On top of that, there was so much rain in so little time that I ended up with 2" of water in my utility room from the window wells filling up. The windows on the north and south held. The two on the east side didn't. The floor drain eventually took care of it, but the fact that it was slow means I need to get the main line rooted out. I was hoping I'd have to spend $125 getting that done again.

-The hand is doing quite well. So well in fact, that the physical therapist felt very comfortable in beating the shit out of it this morning. It's a good news/bad news thing I guess.

-Still not smoking. It's been four weeks now.

He's not really a journalist, but he played one at WaPo: I really don't have a whole lot to say about David Weigel being forced to resignfrom his beat covering the right. I thought it was a bizarre and utterly clueless choice right from the start, but I really didn't care that much. Weigel blew his credibility with me a long, long, time ago. He is one of a number of young and talented writers, left and right, who have not yet figured out the difference between intelligence and wisdom, nor have they figured out that to avoid lying to their readers, they have to stop lying to themselves.

-I was going to write a long piece defending Gen Stan McChrystal last week, but then I noticed a funny thing: The good general wasn't defending himself. Where were the protests about context or misattributions of quotes? Dude, if you're not going to defend yourself, don't expect anyone else to either. I suspect there's more to the picture than meets the eye. Here's a piece from The Independent that says just that and it was really McChrystal's opposition to Obama's timeline that did him in. Maybe, maybe not. I read another theory that says Rolling Stone lied to McChrystal and staff about what was on the record and what was fact checked. We'll see.

-Now, time to see what my blog friends have been up to.

Milestones

Today I popped over $200 saved by not smoking cigarettes over the last 3+ weeks. That number still seems ridiculous to me, but I've thought it through a number of times and I think that if anything it's a bit conservative. It's based on an average of 1.5 packs per day and I'm pretty sure that most days in the last six months I was smoking closer to 2. I've had three memorable dreams now where I caved and started smoking again. Each time I woke up and actually thought I had smoked, and I felt guilty as hell about it until a few moments had passed and I was able to realize that no, it was all a dream. Wish I had those other "vivid" dreams instead.

My second milestone today is that it's the first day since my hand surgery three weeks ago where I was able to skip something called non-adhering dressing. That's the first layer of a dressing that keeps gauze from sticking to a wound. That means that things have progressed to the point where I can get by with a light gauze wrap and probably lose that entirely in a week or less. That means it's much less of a pain in the butt to do exercises(unwrap then rewrap etc), which means that progress should really start accelerating now. Range of motion into the palm is still very much restricted by swelling and joint pain, but I'll just have to work through those. It will come with time.

Rolling BS

The big story today is the news that the US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stan McChrystal, has said a few things that should not have been said about some of the civilian leadership back in Washington D.C. I've read through the Rolling Stone article that set this off one time now and my first impression is for everybody to take a deep breath and read what has actually been said and who is actually saying it. I think a whole lot of people have been conned into thinking there is a lot more here then there really is.

Take for example, the subhead to the article:

Stanley McChrystal, Obama's top commander in Afghanistan, has seized control of the war by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House

Bullshit. I can't emphasize that enough: bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. The author provides no evidence that McChrystal thinks the "real enemy" is in the White House and I think it is simply made up(in addition, I did a page by page search for the word "wimp." As far as I can tell it appears only in the subhead, but McChrystal is now being quoted as saying that in some places). In light of that, read the article very carefully and trust nobody's off the cuff description. My gut tells me it's a hatchet job and in the end, not a very good one.

More later when I get the time. I'd just urge caution in buying into this one.

Maybe That's Why

This is ten days old, but it's the first thing that I've seen that explains the behavior of the Obama administration and BP:

First of all...set aside all your thoughts of plugging the well and stopping it from blowing out oil using any method from the top down. Plugs, big valves to just shut it off, pinching the pipe closed, installing a new bop or lmrp, shooting any epoxy in it, top kills with mud etc etc etc....forget that, it won't be happening..it's done and over. In fact actually opening up the well at the subsea source and allowing it to gush more is not only exactly what has happened, it was probably necessary, or so they think anyway.

So you have to ask WHY? Why make it worse?...there really can only be one answer and that answer does not bode well for all of us. It's really an inescapable conclusion at this point, unless you want to believe that every Oil and Gas professional involved suddenly just forgot everything they know or woke up one morning and drank a few big cups of stupid and got assigned to directing the response to this catastrophe. Nothing makes sense unless you take this into account, but after you do...you will see the "sense" behind what has happened and what is happening. That conclusion is this:

The well bore structure is compromised "Down hole".

They can't "plug the damn hole" because it's way more than the blowout preventer that has failed, it's the well itself somewhere in the three miles beneath the sea floor.

I looked for some official confirmation of this and found that Admiral Allen talked about the possibility about two weeks ago:

ADMIRAL THAD ALLEN: The reason they want to keep the production going is not what they may recoup out of that in terms of production. The reason you want that flow to continue is it alleviates pressure on the wellbore. We did the top kill. We were able to force mud down the well boar to the point where we actually suppressed all the oil, but the minute they stopped pumping the mud, the oil came back up. The reason they didn't go any further is they do not know the condition of the wellbore and the casings down there, and if you exert pressure on that, you wouldn't want to force oil out into the formation or the strata and have it come up through the sea floor. So you want to -- you want to produce the oil for safety and containment reasons.

It came up again yesterday:

ADMIRAL ALLEN: Well, one of the issues is we don’t know the exact status of the wellbore.
A while back, in fact, many weeks ago when we were discussing the top kill operation, we were having a significant discussion and we had a two-hour conference call on a Sunday, which Secretary Salazar, Secretary Chu called a scientific summit. We were going through the parameters of the top kill procedure, and they were trying to establish threshold for how much mud they can put down there and how much pressure they wanted to create in the wellbore.
And there was some discussion at that point about the uncertainty of the—of the condition of the casings in the wellbore which you would want to do is drive so much mud down there and such a pressure that you might cause a problem and the problem was they didn’t know and they still don’t know the condition of the wellbore. For that reason, they erred on the side of safety on how much pressure they would exert, and when they got near those pressures without having success in killing the well—killing the well, that’s when they backed off.
So I’m not going to use any hard and fast scientific evidence or anything like that. I think there’s a general notion by everybody that there could be something in the wellbore that can be problematic. We don’t know because there’s no way to really check it. That’s the reason they ceased the top kill procedure where it was at and went to containment, and then relying now on the bottom killer, going into the bottom of the well near the reservoir to put the mud in and seal it from there.

The reservoir that the Deepwater Horizon had tapped into was estimated at 50 million barrels. TThat first link warns that if the wellbore itself has failed it could right now be undermining the seabed under the BOP and/or exploiting any other seams it may have found. It could be doing anything, meaning it could be setting the stage for a massive collapse or even worse, the sudden appearance of gushers in multiple locations.

It may turn out that the failure of the BOP was actually a good thing? Is that how this is adding up?

I don't know about that, but perhaps it explains why no other engineering attempts are being made to plug the well at the top, which was making absolutely no sense to me. Now I guess we pray that the current system hangs on so they can still at least recover some of the oil and gas until they can attempt the plugs at the bottom of the wellbore. 

Who Knew?

Since it's Monday, let's get this out of the way early. Yes folks, it's time for another round of How Clueless Is Dave? It's a simple game. I give you the background and you decide if I've been clueless. The clueless ratings you can give me are; No, Sort of, Yes, Wait Right There I'm Getting My Cluebat.

So here's the deal. Ever since I seriously began to think about giving up smoking, the term "vivid dreams" began popping up everywhere I looked. I think the first place was as a side effect of Chantix. Someone I know who actually took Chantix mentioned it also, but I think she called them "intense dreams." Then I saw them listed as a side effect of the nicotine patch too. Now, I often have vivid dreams, meaning they seem very real no matter how weird they get and they are almost always clearly remembered. Most dreams fade away quickly, but not these, so that is what I think of when people describe a "vivid" dream. It can be about anything.

So anyway, the last few weeks the quit smoking thing has come up on occasion and I've been asked by several people if I've been having "the dreams." I've answered with a fairly casual "yeah, but no more than I usually do." The other day the same thing came up with a bartender I know who quit smoking ten years ago. She asked if I had been having the vivid dreams and I said that I had one just last night. She looked around the mostly empty bar and asked me what it was about. So I started telling her about this vivid, but pretty boring though strange dream, and she started giving me this weird look. I got to the end and she went, "And?"

Well, there was no and. That was it. It turns out that when she said vivid, she meant sexual. I went back to two other women who had mentioned it before and one said, "oh, yeah" and the other laughed and gave me a "duh."

Now, in my defense I did think that "vivid" could include sexual dreams. I just didn't take it to mean only sexual dreams, as each of those women meant it. Is it true that when they use the term "vivid dreams" in this context, what they really mean is "vivid sexual dreams" and that everybody(except me of course) knew it? Just how clueless was I?

My Life As A Ripped Off Tom Petty Song...

...would go something like this right now:

well I sure know, now don't get cold
" frown upside down", gets a little old
I'm tired of splintin' up, tired of torquing down
tired of torquing up, tired of gauze town

oh my my, oh hell yes
Got to put on that swelling dress
soak in the sink, there goes some skin,
Damn I see a knuckle! That's worth a grin!

oh my my, oh hell yes...

Ah shit. It will be no big deal at all in a couple months. Never mind.