Newsy bits...

[senoritafish]

Gods (insert your pantheon here), it's November already. My Inuyasha calendar at the office has Naraku leveling a malignant smirk at me; boy, I would've thought he would have been more appropriate for October, evil demon that he is. I'm not sure I really want him looking this direction all month. So if Billy Joe Armstrong and Peter Gabriel wear guyliner and manscara (thanks a_hollow_year, I did not know those were the correct terms), what do you call eyeshadow on males? I'd say guyshadow but that's a bit repetitive. What did Spock call it? 'Cause dammit, he wore a ton of it. Yes, Lord Naraku, the purple looks good on you, meant no disrespect...

Anyways...

I've been reminded that I haven't really made a proper post in awhile. ;) So, what's the haps?

• School - the kids started 3rd, 5th, and 6th grade. Strangely enough, while Angus isn't real fond of school, he seemed to kind of be looking forward to middle school. One, it's back in a familiar neighborhood, next door to his old elementary school, and two, there are old friends there, his friend Connor from 1st thru 3rd grade for one. He's having to get used to doing homework every night, though, which his 4th-5th grade teacher didn't seem to require, and that's a little tough for him, and us. Changing for PE also required some getting used to, as well as the requirement that he needs to start wearing deodorant every day. Gareth somehow got placed in a GATE class - he hasn't taken that test, but apparently, if there are spaces, they will put kids in if they think they can do the work. He's there for everything but math, which he has with a teacher who weirdly enough was my brother's 5th grade teacher (my brothers turned 45 in August). I'm not sure, but I think she's the only one still there from our years at that school. Avalon is starting 3rd grade, despite her 2nd grade teacher's trepidation, and it turns out she got a 100% on her first math test (adding triple digit numbers) and despite low test scores in reading last year, she is reading chapter books on her own at home. Her teacher agrees with us that it's more a matter of finding the right motivation for her, which seems to be easier said than done.


• Health - at the beginning of October, I was getting ready to head to the docks at 5 am one morning, when John sat up in bed and told me his chest hurt, as if someone were trying to shove their fist through it somewhere between his sternum and his clavicle. He aslo felt extremely anxious, like if I left something horrible was going to happen, and clammy all over (not uncommon - he sweats like crazy in his sleep). I thought about Beth, who narrowly averted her brother's heart attack by calling 911 when he thought he was fine, and my grandpa - who complained of just feeling mucky and heartburny all afternoon and passed away on the couch watching TV with my grandma. I looked up symptoms and he had several on the list - in addition, he's gained quite a bit of weight recently and was recently prescribed high blood pressure medication - so I insisted we go to the emergency room. They checked him out and gave him an EKG and a few other emergency room tests - then said everything appeared normal, but they couldn't rule it out completely on the basis of emergency room tests. So they admitted him overnight. They gave him blood thinners among other meds, which left huge black bruises on his stomach, then a stress test the following morning - turned out his heart is fine, but they had to call the respiratory therapist because he started wheezing so bad.
  
  They'd put him in a room with two other people - one was a younger guy suffering from what we normally wind up there for - asthma. He'd tried to walk to the pharmacy to refill his inhaler and wound up collapsing on the street. He'd recovered and left the same afternoon. The other guy was older, but not so old as we originnally thought. He was quite clearly delerious; kept trying to get out of bed when he wasn't supposed to, talking and moaning, and kicking the covers off. Social workers and doctors kept trying to talk to him, but couldn't get much sense out of him -I did hear once "And how long have you been doing the heavy drinking?" Made it a little difficult for John to sleep, hospitals not being the easiest places to sleep in any case. The nurses only tried once to wake him up by shaking his shoulder - he has a rather violent way of waking up, especially in an unfamiliar place - and from then on woke him from three feet away, calling "Mr. Walton..."
  
  Anyway, he finally got in to see his own doctor, who did a bunch of bloodwork and gave him some Nexxium for his near constant heartburn (caused by other meds). We haven't heard back about any results yet - I need to get on him about that because he WILL NOT do it himself. It also made him angry that the blood thinners he was given caused the Red Cross to defer him donating blood for a year.


• Work - not hugely busy since the Management Team finished the SAFE document, and another Council meeting behind us. This time it took place at a hotel in Costa Mesa, the next town over from me, so I didn't really have to travel. I was especially grateful for this as it turned out to be over Halloween/Gareth's birthday. I guess the Council hasn't gotten the message CalCOFI did, when so many people complained that it was scheduled over Halloween, they finally stopped and moved it to the first week of December. Another issue coming up, that of Annual Catch Limits, promises to wind up being way more complicated than it should be, especially since the US only catches a fraction of HMS species in the Pacific and management is actually handled by international agencies. Eh, I still have problems getting my head around it, sometimes.
  
  I need to get the desk cleaned up -I tend to let things pile up when I'm working on a particular project. Also need to get started on mackerel otoliths for the year. The fishery's been pretty slow for them, partly because of a lowered Harvest Guideline, but also because the larger fish that are mostly in demand are just not coming close enough to shore, or shallow enough, that the boats can target them. There's only a about 2 dozen samples for the entire year, divided between the three of us who read mackerel, so that's not too big of a burden. I kind of enjoy it anyway.


• Home - ech. Must get areas cleaned up - my dad called and ordered FIOS installation, and I've put off the appointment a couple of times already, because I wasn't ready. Need to get back on the FlyLady track (I haven't found anything else quite comparable, and I have to have an outside kick in the butt apparently) - but it's also frustrating when the other person doing housework has his own method and refuses to listen to anyone else's. Also that the third adult does absolutely nothing. I would excuse him for being 84, but he didn't help much long before that.
  
  Avalon is out of the bedroom with the boys now - we set up my old twin bed for her in a corner of the living room. We're not quite done making a "room" for her - involving moving some of the larger furniture around so she has "walls" - a disadvantage of six people in a 3-bedroom house, but that's the goal in the next couple of weeks. John's looked into getting something like cubicle dividers, but they're just too expensive, but we do have a tall hutch and an upright grand piano to be moved around.


• Other - I've been hauling my camera around religiously although I haven't been keeping up quite with the mylife_onceaday thing. I have been wanting to do something creative other than photography, but just totally lacking in the inspiration department. Somebody give me an idea for a holiday card and you get a free one. Well, you would, anyway. Just send me your address. What, do I have to smack you upside the head with a hint? ;p

So there's a nutshell. Long stretches of fairly boring punctuated by a few moments of high anxiety. Rather like real life, I suppose.

Time to plug in the pod and get something done...