Not only has Donna lost some weight using the Sickly Colon Diet™, I have lost about 15 pounds. I need to add an extra hole in my belt to hold my pants. Right now they kinda of droop in a semi-fashionable way if I was a lot younger than 54. I have lost enough that the pair of 34 x 34 Levi 501s that have been at the bottom of my closet fit just fine.

This may be showing my age or maybe just my similar proclivities to Fox Mulder and Gregory House, but I seem to remember that Levis 501s were the pant of choice of male stars of XXX movies, no chance of any part of their anatomy getting caught in a zipper during a scene.

Seems just like yesterday I posted last…

The rampant electronic consumerism continues here, I’m blogging on a new laptop, a Toshiba Satellite T135-S1307. The screen is a couple inches smaller than the old Dell, but after a few hours of use it is not really an issue any more. One big advantage is this thing weighs like half as much. Another is the loooong battery life, I’m fairly sure I’ll never get that promised 9+ hours out of it, but right now I’m at 82% left and according to the task tray icon that equates to 6 hours and 3 minutes. Getting it set up on the home network, while not painless, certainly went pretty easy. And all and all Windows 7 hasn’t been too hard to deal with. My only complaint so far is the letter markings on the keys are faint and hard to see in dim light – I know, learn to touch type already.

It is time to replace our current living room stuff, the couch has started to creak when we sit down or get up from it and a seam has split showing stuffing (fortunately it is out of sight mostly.) It is kind of a shame too as the love seat and chair are practically new, because they rarely get used, but anyway, today we started furniture shopping. This could possibly be a six month adventure because we have such different tastes sometimes it is hard to agree on a compromise, on the other hand we always do seem to find something we both like, so it might happen quickly. It didn’t happen this afternoon in the local Rooms To Go.

The weather has still been unseasonably cold around here, looks like it will straighten out this next week, but I did manage to get the top down a couple of days this last week and it did go down again today, so the total below should be up to date.

House was a repeat and Castle was preempted by some nonsense reality show. Thought for sure now that the Olympics were done we would get new shows. At least TDTVS won’t let me down tomorrow.

This Ip Odd thing is turning into a money pit. We needed a set of headphones so Donna could listen, she hates ear buds – $50. We then wanted a dock with speakers for the bedroom – $80. If I want to use in the Miata, I could remove the 6 disc changer in the trunk thereby reclaiming precious space, an adapter is needed – $150.

In a 2006 episode of House MD, John Larroquette is woken from a 10 year coma in hopes to provide a clue as how to cure his son from the same fate. Somewhere along the line he notices a small electronic device and holds it up asking, “What’s this? It says ‘ip odd’?”

Ip Odd is definitely what I’m calling our new 8 Gig Nano. Having decided that these little gizmos are here to stay we opted to plunk down the serious change required to buy an Apple product.

After unpacking our shiny new toy, the second order of business right (right after charging the battery) was to find something to load music to it without having to use iTunes since all my music will be from my private collection, CopyTrans Manager to the rescue.

It has now been a week since Donna has returned home from the hospital and she is making slow and steady progress towards normal. In that week her sister has come and gone, leaving behind a refrigerator and freezer full of cooked food that fits into Donna’s colon friendly menu (and is tasty to boot) and I have gotten about 30 hours of sleep total, none of which has been more than an hour and a half consecutively.

Whenever she gets up to go to the bathroom, I wake up too. I have to turn on the bedside lamp so she can find her way to and from because the Xanax makes her very drowsy. Most nights around 2:00 AM (the doctor thinks because of the steroids) she feels so cold that she has to put on a second long sleeve shirt and a thicker pair of socks. Then for whatever reason, she cannot stay in bed past 4:00 AM and her rattling around in the kitchen making grits keeps me from returning to a full sleep.

Needless to say this is taking its toll on me, even the people at work notice that I look like crap. Yesterday at lunch I went out to the car covered myself with a blanket and tried to get some shut eye. I set the cell phone alarm for 12:55 so I would wake up and get back to the drawing board. Fortunately I woke on m own at 12:53 because I had set the alarm for 12:55 AM!

Today we both had doctor’s appointments, her with the gastro guy to see how things worked out with Monday’s medicine change (very good) and me with the GP to check on my blood pressure (better than I thought.) My GP is her GP and even though it was my appointment he did ask about her some too. When I told him that I was having sleep issues his “cure” was a script for lorazepam and the recommendation that we try sleeping in separate bedrooms. So tonight, because tomorrow is a work day, we are going to give it a try. She will spend the night on the living room couch with the TV and I will stay in the recently vacated back bedroom with the PC and internet radio.

Donna came home from the hospital on Thursday afternoon and her sister showed up later that night for a weeks visit. Because Sandy was here to look after her I actually got to go to work on Friday for the whole day, even did some productive work. After work the temperature was close enough to 60 that I rode home with the top down.

Squeezing in productive sleep has been tricky though, so late night I went to bed at 9:30 and left Donna on the couch “watching” the Olympics. I slept until 2:30 when I woke up and could hear her futzing around. I talked her into coming to bed but lasted barely an hour or two before she had to get up. We tried laying on the couch, but couldn’t go back to sleep, so I made her a bowl of grits. Ten minutes after finishing it she fell asleep on the couch.

Some of the MMC might come over and visit this morning in place of the club’s usual monthly breakfast and after that she and her sister will go out shopping some and my plan is to put the tarp back up over the “carport” that the snow knocked down.

Can you spot the Miata in this picture?

About 4 inches of the fluffy white stuff fell overnight. Here at the hospital the power went off and back on about three times between 7 – 7:30PM and then once again around 10. We could tell when the on/offs happened because the lights would blink while emergency generator kicked on and the TV would go off and not come back on. I talked to my neighbor today and that mirrored his power outages exactly only his lasted a little longer with the 10:00PM one lasting a little over an hour.