The Contents of a Tesseract

Is now mostly over!

My thyroid’s out - all of it. The folks at Vanderbilt are awesome. They were very good at explaining what was happening, and took really good care of me. Turns out that I did have cancer - multiple places, too. So I’m going in for Radioactive Iodine treatment in August. There’s no rush, I’ve been told, since they took my thyroid out already.

I had one day of fright because we misunderstood which pathology report had the cancer - they had also done scrapings to make sure it hadn’t spread to my trachea, but now everything’s shiny and happy! Ok, I still can’t talk very well, but that’s temporary.

Back to the normal, less frightening stuff of my life. Like costuming - you mean I sew? Whoa.. I did that? Yeah, that was me earlier this week. Hydrocodone is so nice. Kids are getting out of school next week - 4 days late due to the whole H1N1 thing. OF course it had to hit our city of 40,000 people and not anywhere else near here. We’re having to find money to install a french drain in our back yard so our pool won’t turn into a nightmare every time it rains. Had a very hard lesson recently, also about small business owners in this area.

Now, I am a small business owner. I have a lot of friends who are the kindest people to their customers. They do thing in a timely manner, and are always looking for new ways to offer their services to others. But… there’s a glass bead maker, a pool guy, a pool company, and a veterinarian that are not so nice. With the economy this bad, you’d think (at least I did - I’m an optimist) that people would be doing their very best to earn good word of mouth and keep the business opportunities when they come around. You’d think they would want repeat business, as well. Nope. Not these people.

They are happy to say “I’ll do that” and then skip appointments without ever calling to explain. (Pool guy #1 did this 3 times over 2 months!) They will be happy to build a pool and then never return a phone call, and hide in the office until you leave, when the equipment they installed (with 2 year warranty) malfunctions. They will look excited about a project for which you will pay the going rate, but skip off to vacation before generating any results - without calling and leaving you in the lurch for a birthday present. And lastly, they will tell you an estimate on getting your dog fixed, have you electronically sign your agreement, and then charge you $300.00 MORE without calling and asking if you have the money, and refusing to return your dog until they get it. Ok, I know, I’m venting, but we live in a small town. That’s four people I will never do business with again. There aren’t that many others to choose from, and I’m getting tired of being mistaken for an idiot. It’s time to take back the right to good service.

I did, however, find one amazingly capable and honest handyman/carpenter, and one timely, prompt, and honest landscaper. They both showed up when they said they would, did their work quickly and the handyman even charged less than his estimate. I handed their cards to everyone I met for several days afterwards.

Yes, after many months of waiting out the system and driving to Vanderbilt Medical Center, I have been told when my surgery is and what it will be. Next Tuesday, I will be getting my entire thyroid gland removed. It means I’ll be on medication for the rest of my life, but that is not a big hinderance when faced with cancer.

We had a tornado touch down in my town yesterday at the exact moment I was leaving for Nashville. The sirens were screaming, and rain was so dense I had to pull over on the side of the road. I was so worried that I would miss this appointment! I didn’t want anything to stop this surgery, so my friend ‘Rissa and I braved the rain, and only found out about the damage upon our return. Our houses are safe. Our pets are safe. The thing uprooted a bunch of trees about 1.5 miles south of my home. That’s way too close. It continued on for about 2 miles, damaging some apartment homes, a school, and some people’s fences and windows.

Two weeks ago, the husband and I built a playfort/swingset for our kids. The instructions said it would take between 6 and 12 hours to complete, and while my sweet husband was thinking 6, I knew it would be more like 12. It ended up taking close to 9 hours, if naps, lunches, and picture-taking are not included. Roo and Bunny were very helpful, and got to use tools. I suppose that’s why it took longer.

Sewing projects are underway. This time, I’m using one of my own designs. I hope it looks as good when finished as it does in my head!

I’ve been twittering longer than Oprah! I just had to say that somewhere. For such a simplistic thing, it sure has become popular. The let-down, for me, was getting on there and finding that most people really didn’t have much to say. There are people that tweet what their pets are doing (I’m guilty of trying that one), people who are trying to advertise their websites, famous people who are promoting movies, famous people who don’t know what to tweet, so they just tweet everything that happens to them. I guess we all are doing that, though. Some people are more witty than others. I have taken to trying to tweet in Haiku when possible. Weird, but entertaining for me.

I’ve been reading old science fiction lately- books from the 60’s and 70’s that tried to guess where we’d be in the 21st century. Whoa, were they wrong. In some ways, we’re soaring ahead of their expectations. In others, like space travel, we are sadly lacking. The hadron collider and the threat of possible singularity creation was discussed in one of my recent reads. The main plot was about sending messages backwards through time, though. So in our reality, since we don’t have that backwards-time warning system, if minute singularities ARE spit out from the supercollider, we’re in trouble. I need to find that book and tell you the author. I’ll post that next time.