Heather's Surgery

Heather went in for surgery this morning and is doing very well. It was a scheduled, voluntary surgery to implant a hockey puck-sized pump into her abdomen that will deliver baclofen medicine directly into her spinal fluid. At the trial, the medicine helped tremendously with her spasticity (muscle stiffness), and having this pump should help her muscles relax enough to learn to walk. After undergoing anesthesia, the hospitals in Phoenix always kept her overnight as a matter of course, and we expect Huntsville Hospital to do the same. However, they took some special precautions because they know she reacts poorly to anesthesia, so she is doing much better than she normally does after surgery, and is happy and talkative. Of course, it not being the usual emergency surgery due to brain swelling also aided her recovery.

Books You Have Read

I found this on my cousin Beth's blog and thought it was interesting.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.

2) Italicize those you intend to read.

3) Mark in a different color the books you LOVE.

4) Reprint this list on your blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them.

The premise of this exercise is that the National Endowment for the Arts apparently believes that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below.

1 - Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen, only got through a couple chapters
2 - The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 - Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 - Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 - To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6- The Bible most of it anyway...
7 - Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 - Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 - His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 - Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 - Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 - Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 - Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 - Complete Works of Shakespeare ok, so I haven't read the complete works, but more than half so I'm counting it!
15 - Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 - The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 - Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 - Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 - The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 - Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 - Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 - The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 - Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 - War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 - The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 - Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 - Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 - Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 - Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 - The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 - Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 - David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 - Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 - Emma - Jane Austen
35 - Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 - The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis, part of 33
37 - The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 - Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 - Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 - Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 - Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 - The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 - One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 - A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 - The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 - Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 - Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 - The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 - Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 - Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 - Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 - Dune - Frank Herbert
53 - Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 - Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 - A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 - The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 - A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 - Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 - Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 - Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 - Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 - The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 - The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 - Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 - On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 - Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 - Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 - Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 - Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 - Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 - Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 - The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 - Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 - Ulysses - James Joyce
76 - The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 - Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 - Germinal - Emile Zola
79 - Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 - Possession - AS Byatt
81 - A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 - Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 - The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 - The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 - Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 - A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 - Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 - The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 - Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 - The Faraway Tree Collection
91 - Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 - The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 - The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 - Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 - A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 - A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 - The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 - Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 - Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Best Hard Drive Crash Ever

My hard drive crashed Wednesday night, but I'm so excited because everything automatically gets copied into two identical hard drives on our computer, and the other one is perfectly fine. I set that up after the last crash, and the extra cost of a backup hard drive really paid off.

Refinancing!

We are refinancing our home mortgage to 4.75% on Monday! That puts our monthly payments below $600, which is less than the rent we paid for our little apartment in Phoenix 10 years ago. I encourage everyone to refinance into a fixed rate or buy now if you can afford it, before the Democrats "help" save people from foreclosure with the almost certain side effect of skyrocketing interest rates for everyone else.

Facebook

I'm now on Facebook. Don't know much about it, but one of my missionary companions said there were some people from our mission on there, so I signed up. I think I “befriended” most everyone I know who is already on there, but let me know if I missed you.

Healthy Stuff

I get a lot of compliments on the fruit bowl on my desk, so I thought I would share a picture of it with you. The wooden bowl was around $10 at Target, and contains what I eat when I get the munchies at work. Sometimes I have apples, bananas, or oranges, depending on what's in season. Right now clementines are popular, which are small, sweet, seedless, and yummy citrus if you haven't tried them. Not to be confused with tangerines, which I also like but many people find too tart.


I also thought I'd share a recipe I really like. We were craving one of Arby's™ pecan chicken salad sandwiches. However, it is a whopping 18 Weight Watchers points out of my current daily 37. That's 769 calories and 39 grams of fat. This alternative is 6 points, and I think it tastes just as good. That begs the question of why doesn't Arby's™ make it the healthier way in the first place? A medium roast beef sandwich and small curly fries together is better than this sandwich alone. We eat out quite a bit, and it annoys me to no end that I can't order something with the words “chicken” and “salad” in it and expect it to be one of their healthier options (the highly refined bread and full-fat mayo is the problem).

Makes 4 sandwiches
1/4 cup fat-free mayonnaise
1 foil packet of chicken
1/4 cup diced pecans
1/2 cup sliced grapes
1 diced dill pickle
salt and pepper to taste
1/4 cup sliced celery (optional)
1/4 cup diced apples (optional)

---

1 leaf of lettuce
2 slices high fiber multigrain bread

You know how to make a sandwich. Mix all the ingredients together and put it on the bread.

I'm curious about your healthy alternative recipes for fast food favorites. Share your best one in the comments.

Good News for my Personal Economy

Even though my job is interesting to me, there are not many aspects of my job that a layman can understand, but this is one of them, so I thought I'd share.

My company has mostly sold to customers in the United States. I am among the first to make a product for the international market. Here's a picture of it. A colleague of mine designed the hardware and I'm responsible for the software. You plug cables into the front to provide internet service through a certain kind of phone line to special modems for up to 32 business customers. Up to 22 of these cards plug into a rack designed for them, so that's up to 704 customers per rack, although you usually group more than one together per customer so they can have a faster connection. That's enough total bandwidth per rack to carry 22,528 simultaneous phone calls or dial-up modem connections.


So anyway, I've been working on this since September, even though we didn't have a customer for it. That has been a little nerve-wracking because of the economy and things like one of our big competitors filing for bankruptcy yesterday. I'm still one of the newer employees in the company, so I would likely be included in any layoff. However, I found out this morning that marketing sold some of my cards to a telecommunications provider in Australia!

What's In Your Newspaper?

I was watching Babylon 5 the other day, a science fiction show set in the future, which was produced before mainstream commercial use of the internet. A couple of the characters went to a kiosk, told the computer their preferences, and it printed out a completely customized newspaper for them.

That was interesting to me, because I read a completely customized "newspaper" every day over the internet using email and google reader. What I like is that many of the "articles" in my "newspaper" are released directly by the source, instead of being filtered through a journalist. A futuristic idea from a TV show is now a reality.

I have a regular news "section," but I also have comics, technology, politics, history, education, linux, programming, business, roleplaying, ham radio, aquarium keeping, parenting, government, columnists, and my favorite, the family section where I read all your blogs.

I'm interested to hear what is in your "newspapers." Let me know in the comments.

Heather Meets a Puppy

Michael was too scared to touch them.