Jan 25 2013

Cat Scratch Followup

Took my mom for a followup doctor visit to check on her cat scratch wound from last Saturday. After waiting only about five minutes we were ushered into one of the exam rooms by a polite and very friendly new nurse named Regina who basically narrated everything she did, including which buttons she clicked on the computer monitor when inputting my mom’s vitals. Blood pressure, blah blah over blah blah…blood-ox level, blah blah…left arm…patient seated…female…temperature, blah blah…favorite novelist, not E L James…tattoo of Richard Nixon on left butt cheek…two strange carotid punctures on the left side of neck…patient arrived wearing Wonder Woman bustier…one glowing red bionic eye..and so on. She also talked about her now two-years deceased husband whose mother had tried to call right then, probably because Regina’s son’s birthday was today. She decided as well to tell us that when she was a little girl she had to have her frenulum linguae cut because it was restricting her tongue’s movements which made it very difficult to take her temperature.

Paging Dr. Toomuchinfo…

A n y w a y . . . my mom’s regular primary care doctor wasn’t available so a very nice, and newly arrived to the hospital from Dallas, Dr. Gupta spent a friendly fifteen minutes examining her and making sure she was overall ok. She thought my mom’s arm was healing very nicely.

After the exam was completed we decided to go have breakfast there at the hospital. We were surprised to find that it had been completely remodeled since the last time we ate there. It was a lot more open and bright and modern. Plus, they named it “The Cove”. Ooooh.

We each ordered an omelet, hers a cheese and mine a veggie, along with some bacon and hashbrowns. We also ordered one pancake to split. It’s been a really long time since I’ve had a big American breakfast like that. There was a really loud 40-something year-old visiting German doctor sitting at a nearby table comparing procedures or something between Thornton and his practice back in the Fatherland.

Except for learning about poor Regina’s late husband, hearing about her sliced frenulum, and then having to listen to that volume-impaired Teutonic treater of the tortured, it was overall a very positive visit to the doctor’s office.

Clinic at Thornton Hospital
Empty waiting room
Chatting about the case
Examining the wound
Scabbing in progress
The Cove (cafeteria)
Inside the cafeteria
That’s the guy
Mine

Jan 19 2013

Mami Vs. Mr. Blue

So before she went to church, my mom stopped at my brother’s house to drop off a kitten calendar that was a gift from my sister. My brother has five cats, three of which are black siblings and one of which is named Mr. Blue.

My mom reached down to say hi to Mr. Blue and for whatever reason he clawed at my mom and tore open her left forearm. My mother, being of an advanced age, has very thin and brittle skin so even a slight bump or scratch can do some serious damage. Her wound bled badly enough that my brother advised her not to go to church but to go back home to take care of it. She instead went to church.

Some events happened after the service that included a trip to a local CVS Pharmacy Minute Clinic and also at an ironically closed neighborhood after-hours urgent care clinic, but suffice it to say that when she got home and I saw the wound I took her straight to the ER at Thornton Hospital up at UCSD.

We arrived around 7:00pm, registered with reception and sat on comfortable chairs in the waiting room. I ended up watching most of a two-hour special documentary on the TV about Lance Armstrong while we waited. The sound was turned down so I had to read the closed captions for the entire episode. We waited for almost an hour and a half.

Among a room full of people waiting to be seen were two loud couples talking and laughing about wine country trips and how to correctly use smartphone apps, a younger visitor who occasionally would take off his glasses and bury his head in his arm while he cried for someone in one of the inside rooms, a younger girl and her girlfriend who was there because of a sprained ankle, a group of younger kids who were there for an non-obvious reason but who kept going in and out of the waiting room getting drinks or food, a husband and wife (who wore a mask the whole time) and their two young daughters, and one guy in his late twenties who could hardly breath or stand up straight because of kidney stone pain. He showed up last but rightly went in first. I did my best to Dr. House all the conditions that everyone was presenting with.

After we were finally escorted back to room 17 we ended up waiting another half an hour for a nurse to come by. She told us who the doctor was who would eventually see my mom and I saw from the computer monitor that he had seven other patients to take care of. This was going to take a while.

The nurse eventually returned and gave my mom a tetanus shot with a whooping cough booster. Then we waited some more. After two and a half hours the doctor finally could come by and take care of my mom. He rinsed her wound, cleaned and disinfected it, and finally wrapped it up in non-sticky dressing.

The nurse returned with one amoxycillin tablet to take immediately, instructions on how to care for the wound, and a prescription for six more days of antibiotics.

Everyone we dealt with was extremely professional, friendly and polite. We just happened to go there on a busy night and after a little more than three long hours we were finally able to go home.

My mom never did leave that kitten calendar at my brother’s house.

ER at UCSD Thornton
My sticker pass to enter
Hallway inside the ER
Waiting for the doc
The wound
Patient list on the room monitor
Still waiting
Nurse Brook giving tetanus shot
Description of meds given
Dr. Shneil rinsing the wound
The cleaned, bleeding damage
Numbing/disinfecting the wound

Jan 14 2013

VP Biden’s Live Gun Control Hangout

Another example of the amazingly connected times we live in was today’s live, online Google+ Hangout by Vice President Joe Biden, moderated by PBS NewsHour’s Hari Sreenivasan. The half hour was meant as an unscripted fireside chat where Sreenivasan and three invited guests would ask questions of Biden about his newly proposed gun control policies.

A fun surprise for me was that one of the participants was Guy Kawasaki, an author and powerful evangelist for Google+ (hence his being a part of this hangout). He’s followed by hundreds of thousands of people on several different social media platforms, but he is probably still known best for being an original Apple employee and a very strong evangelist for them early on. (Not so much lately.)

I’ve never been a big Joe Biden fan (to me he comes across a bit too much like a used-car salesman) but I give him props for trying to go up against the NRA and tackling this important issue.

Hangout Billboard
Hari Sreenivasan
Joe Biden
Guy Kawasaki

Jan 07 2013

CES Keynote

Watched an incredibly weird CES keynote address live from Las Vegas, given by Dr. Paul Jacobs of San Diego’s own Qualcomm. First time in many years that Microsoft had not given the keynote.

Jacobs went through the usual upcoming product (processor) announcement gloating, which really did sound pretty impressive, but then things started to get strange. Three young actors, portraying Generation “M” characters, took to the stage to act out what being mobile was all about. They were meant to be hip and cool but came across as just really annoyingly awful people.

Then, to everyone’s surprise, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer literally ran onto the stage to take over and talk about Windows 8. Granted, I have never cared for Ballmer at all (always thought of him as a really horrible, sweaty huckster who would try to sell you anything, no matter how terribly made), but seeing him enter like that and start his pitch really irritated me.

Following him came writer/director Guillermo del Toro. I thought this was pretty cool especially since they showed a trailer for his upcoming sci-fi horror movie “Pacific Rim.” I do like him as a director, but they showed a particularly bloody vampire killing clip from Blade II. I couldn’t see the audience in the video but I could just tell that they all thought this very inappropriate.

After del Toro came probably the weirdest and most tweeted about portion of the keynote. Big Bird. He came out with a software developer…dressed in his own terrible Big Bird costume…to talk about a reading app for kids. The app was fine, but the interaction between the puppet and the human was just cringe-worthy. This part couldn’t end quickly enough.

Let’s see…who could possibly follow Big Bird? Why, the totally bald, larger-than-life head of archbishop Desmond Tutu on a video feed, of course! At least he brought some semblance of class back to the proceedings with his praise of Qualcomm’s involvement with world health initiatives.

Then came the attractive Alice Eve, who plays Carol Marcus in the soon-to-be-released new Star Trek movie. She was there to promote another app powered by a Qualcomm chip. A trailer for the Star Trek movie was also shown. This might be sexist, but compared to everything that had come before, at least she was some eye candy. Eye candy that very obviously did not want to be there. And the scripted banter between her and Jacobs was stilted and uncomfortable to watch.

This was then followed by someone driving a brand new, electric Rolls Royce onto the stage. This car had been driven around the world testing a new battery that was controlled by a Qualcomm processor. Nothing helps you relate to the average person more than a car as expensive as some people’s homes.

The video stream of the event could not have ended on a weirder note. Dr. Jacobs closed the keynote by introducing Maroon 5. That in itself is not the weird part. Once they took to the stage they prepared their instruments and mics and then started playing an acoustic version of one of their songs. At least that’s what it looked like since there was no sound! Then, oddly, a woman’s singing voice came over the stream. What the…? Turns out CES didn’t have the rights to rebroadcast the audio of the group so they dubbed a song by Dido over the video. They just should have cut the stream before the band started playing. This was just dumb.

And here I thought I wouldn’t have anything to right about watching a boring old keynote.

Keynote opening
Dr. Jacobs
Steve Ballmer
Guillermo del Toro
Pacific Rim
Alice Eve

Jan 01 2013

Family Christmas, Belated Style

My younger brother and his family came out for a New Year’s visit, which is when we decided to hold our annual family Christmas get-together and dinner. No photos of the actual dinner exist because it was a bit of a haphazard, some eat now, some eat later deal, but at least we got everybody (except Jeri who was unfortunately not feeling well and RJ who was with his own family) to sit for a casual family portrait.

This turned out to be an unexpectedly, well-balance photo with a lot of crossed appendages. Kind of strange, though, to realize that everyone is staring and smiling in unison at an inanimate object about ten feet away.

Dec 17 2012

Slightly Belated Birthday Dinner

All the members of my San Diego family gathered for a belated birthday dinner for me this evening. They included my mom, of course, two siblings, a nephew, his girlfriend, my favorite niece and a brother-in-law. There were no gifts, as is always my want. (Lisa! But thanks for the poop calendar.)

This was the first time in recent memory that mom didn’t ask what I would like for my birthday dinner (wienerschnitzel with mashed potatoes and red cabbage), but I was totally fine with the choice of spaghetti and garlic bread. I do love spaghetti and garlic bread, especially with a tall glass of cold milk.

My mom took the extra step with my cake of designing my Hungarian nickname “Peti” and age (mumble/muffle) into the two-tone batter before baking. Unfortunately, that meant no frosting on top, but the cake was still really good.

Another year down, who knows how many to go. That’s why I feel it’s so important to journal events, even the seemingly insignificant ones. (My birthday is not one of the insignificant ones.) Nobody should ever eventually become nothing more than a series of hard-to-remember memories.

Now I’m hungry for spaghetti again.

The fam
The meal
The cake

Dec 14 2012

My Annual Facebook Birthday Wishes

Collected all of the Happy Birthday wishes I received on Facebook into one single image. Thankfully it always turns out to be a lot of work and that’s a great complaint to have. I am very grateful for all of the good wishes, but I’m not sure I’ll want to do this again next year.

Dec 08 2012

Quick Dog Stop

Had a quick lunch with my mom at Waldo’s Chili Dogs in Clairemont Town Square. After all these years she has finally grown to love hot dogs. They’re quick, delicious and cheap.

My hound of choice for today was a Pastrami Dog. Very tasty.

Dec 07 2012

Google+ Communities

So Google introduced a new feature in their Google+ social environment: Communities. And that was my cue to jump in as quickly as possible. I understood right away that this was something that Google+ had desperately needed to become a more interactive place for all gmailers, not just a few who wanted something other than Facebook.

Communities were being created as quickly as people could discover them. I myself signed up for six of them: Trey Ratcliff’s “The Photo Community”, “San Diego Zoo Fans”, “MiceChat” (a Disney blog), “The Official San Diego Photography Community”, “Disney Parks” and “Disney Photography”.

I commented and posted, and got some immediate feedback from a few people. Not a lot, but it was more interaction than I was seeing before the Communities launched.

I quickly learned that I needed to adjust the notification settings in the Communities and with my gmail. Within a day my little red Google+ notifications box hit 18 (usually it topped at 2 or 3 every few days), and my mail notifications reached 139. Unfortunately, I also learned that most of those notifications were of no interest to me. I even toyed with the idea of creating my own Community, but I couldn’t think of a really interesting one, plus I honestly didn’t want another online forum to moderate.

We’ll see where these Communities take both me and Google+. I really hope this is the jump start that people needed to make it all worth investing their time on.

Mail notifications
Notification Count
Disney Photos
Disney Parks
SD Photography
MiceChat
San Diego Zoo Fans
Photo Community

Dec 02 2012

New iTunes

Upgraded to the new version of iTunes. It looks much cleaner and better organized and I’m sure it won’t take very long to get used to the changes, especially since I literally use iTunes ever single day. Most of the issues will arise from trying to find where all the links have been placed in the new layouts.

Old vs. New iTunes Store

Old vs. New iTunes Music

Old vs. New iTunes Podcasts

 

Nov 28 2012

It Was A Dark And Cloudy Night…

Got this quick shot of our neighbor’s house during a full moon. This is where I sometimes house-sit with eight black cats and occasionally one black dog.

Good thing I’m not superstitious.

Nov 28 2012

Here’s Waldo

Ran a buttload of errands with my mom which included a lunch stop at Waldo’s Chili Dogs at Clairemont Square. I’d eaten there once before and I knew how much my mom likes hot dogs. We both ordered the Avocado Bacon Hot Dog and they were really good. We split a bag of Fritos and I washed my meal down with a Coke.

Can a lunch get any more American than this?

Nov 26 2012

Back At Tune Craft…Again

Had to take the car back to our mechanic at Tune Craft yet again to get ongoing problems taken care of. Second time in about a month after a long string of repairs. The car has been a bit of a lemon since the beginning, but it’s kind of stuck in the middle of that “keep repairing” or “new monthly car payments” area.

At least Shawn, the manager at Tune Craft, always treats us very well and helps out as much as he can, but I do not look forward to the phone call with an estimate on how much this round is going be.

Nov 25 2012

Holidays Rule

Using an Amazon.com coupon code for a $1.99 Christmas album I purchased “Holidays Rule” with songs performed by a wide variety of artists.

Not bad for less than $2 and yay for adding new Christmas music to my collection.

Nov 24 2012

New Butt ‘R Fly

While out in the backyard this morning I watched another Monarch Butterfly emerge from its chrysalis, our fourth in about a week, with another three still to hatch. This one was hiding under the lip of a large, plastic flower pot.

Never get tired of watching this happen.

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