She goes in for another MRI in the morning, just to keep track of the monster.
We spend a lot of time together not talking about it, but today she told me that she knew that the average was 5-8 years from diagnosis. That gives her 3-6 years, depending on how stubborn she is. She wants to see Chris graduate, he's ten, so she wants to beat the average by at least two years.
Even, she says, if she has to do it from her bed.
I told her I wanted her to stick around for as long as she could, but that I didn't want her to be in pain.
I got this video from The Smallest Majority. It is a TED.compresentation of Mike Rowe, who stars in a show called "Dirty Jobs" on the Discovery Channel. Be warned, it starts off with a graphic description of castrating lambs.
The one thing that Mike Rowe says in this speech that really stuck out in my mind is where he said that the people who do these dirty jobs are the happiest, most well adjusted people he has ever met.
I work with my hands. The toughest jobs, the ones that take the most time and energy, the machine that everyone else has beat their heads against, the ones that you look at and say "You aren't going to beat me, people made you so I can fix you" are the ones that, at the end, you look back at and realize were the most satisfying.
As a contrast, take a look at the post below where David Brooks pontificates on the "educated class" and think about how many of them are so deeply unhappy that they press their unhappiness on everyone around them. Think about that for a moment, would you rather have beers with Todd Palin or martinis with John Kerry? Why? Who do you think is happier, way down deep in his gut?
I am a believer in education as a means to further yourself, but education without experience is nothing. I don't care where you got your education, but where you got your experience means a great deal to me. One of the biggest idiots I have ever met held a PhD from MIT in electronics, and one of the smartest people I know never finished high school and only got his GED to qualify for a better position in the job he held.
I am reminded of a passage in the Sherlock Holmes story "A Study In Scarlet", where Doctor Watson is astounded that Holmes had no concept of the Copernican theory of the composition of solar systems. From the book:
That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”
Sherlock Holmes was perfectly content in not knowing about things that could not further his own efforts, likening the human brain to an attic that was stuffed with knowledge. "It is a mistake, " he explains, "to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
I am also reminded of a piece in S.M. Stirling's book "Dies the Fire" where one of the main characters remarks that the fact that civilization had advanced to the place where people had the free time to dedicate to learning things like blacksmithing and swordsmanship merely as hobbies was going to be essential to living in a world where people would need to know these things in order to simply survive.
Mike gives you some fancy Greek words for discovery (anagnorisis) and realization (peripeteia). Real life gives you examples of it every day. Work gives you the means to discover those realizations.
The last big block, an L-18 Vortec 8100 496 CID monster, was completed last week in GM's Tonawanda engine plant in New York last week.
The first big block was produced in 1958 and over it's 51 year history was made in displacements from 396 to 496 and placed in everything from work trucks to family sedans and station wagons to performance icons like the Impala, Chevelle, and Corvette.
Motorheads all across the globe mourn it's passing even as greenies celebrate it's demise. Count me among the motorheads. I never owned a vehicle with a GM big block, but then again I'm not dead yet either so there's still time. Five million of them were produced, surely there's still one or two to be had.
As opposed to, say, experimentation and evaluation of results and then posting those experiments and evaluations for others to conduct their own experiments to verify or refute the results.
Last night I heard the new song about the Christmas shoes for the first time.
Great Cthulhu, do you think you could write a more depressing song for the happiest of holidays?
We have gone from chestnuts roasting on an open fire to please give me money so I can buy Momma a new pair of shoes for her own funeral?
And what's the big idea of taking Parson Brown out of "Walking In A Winter Wonderland"? Is anyone but me about sick of the whole PC thing?
Seriously, when you start messing with Christmas carols you have gone too far.
That's it. Bob Rivers is going to sing all the carols around the Refuge this year. If you are going to destroy a Christmas carol, at least make it funny.
Here are some of Palin's jokes at the Gridiron dinner (from John King and various other Twitter feeds): -"It's good to be here though, really, in front of this audience of leading journalists and intellectuals, or as I like to call it, a death panel."
-"I went out for a jog. Or as Newsweek calls it--a photo shoot."
-"Sometimes you've got to trust your instincts and when you don't, you end up in places like this "
-Palin jokes if Biden hadn't been elected and was out selling his book it would be "Going Rogaine"
- "If I need a bald campaign manager, I guess all i am left with is James Carville." (dig at Steve Schmidt)
-Palin jokes big announcement: "Tomorrow I am going to Iowa ......noon to 3p at Barnes & Noble "
-Palin tells Gridiron about her book tour: "The view is better from the bus ... than under it."
-GovPalin at Gridiron jokes normally dem speaker next but: "McCain campaign staff asked if they could have that time for rebuttal."
-Palin jokes book title debate included The Audacity of the North Slope."
-Andrea Mitchell: At press dinner Palin "joked" person next to her on plane looked at picture of Obama and Chinese leader and asked which one is the communist
(That one falls flat, apparently Andrea Mitchell's twitter-fu is weak. The joke was that she was looking at the Newsweek cover of Obama and Chinese leader Hu, and the person in the next seat said "Hu's the communist." She joked that she thought he was asking a question.)
-On being on the same program as (Barney) Frank "And I'm the controversial one?"
"Several thousand scientists have come to the conclusion that climate change is happening. I don't think that's anything that is, quite frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore," press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters this week.
Except that now it's pretty clear that the data used to reach that conclusion is erroneous and cherry picked, and in fact the calculations and models used to manipulate that data is itself fallacious.
There's a reason people don't trust politicians and their spokesmen. Wonder what it is.
Eternal Father, Strong to save, Whose arm hath bound the restless wave, Who bid'st the mighty Ocean deep Its own appointed limits keep; O hear us when we cry to thee, for those in peril on the sea.
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Seriously, don't you have a little old lady to molest at the airport or something?
