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Susan’s been out of the hospital for over a week now, and things are slowly settling back down to some semblance of a normal routine. She spent six bedridden days in the transplant recovery ward at UCSF waiting for her digestive tract to be stable enough to take medicines orally. Somewhere in the middle of those days was Valentine’s Day, marked by a high glucose reading/rejection scare and a late night ultrasound test (fortunately, all good); and the day after, my birthday, marked by Kaylee getting attacked by a homicidal German Shepherd during our morning walk (fortunately, no blood drawn). Not the best occurrences of those two annual events.

Now she’s at home and adjusting to a new, insulin-free routine: close monitoring of health readings, medicine regimen, and weekly trips to the hospital; plus twice weekly blood draws to help watch for any signs of rejection. So far not quite the blood chemistry isn’t quite perfect, but hopefully that’ll be sorted out with adjustments in medicine dosages in the next few weeks – knock on wood!

Otherwise, she’s mostly just bored, spending a lot of time on the couch as she waits for her abdominal muscles to strengthen. Meanwhile, we’re all very familiar with disinfecting wipes and hand sanitizers – all of us except the dog, that is, who is her usual obliviously unsanitary self. The two of us couldn’t have made it through this without the help of her mom and dad, who while I’m at work are at home entertaining the patient, walking the dog, and housekeeping. What would we do without parents?

We spent most of Thursday waiting in uncertainty for Susan’s pancreas transplant surgery. The bad weather here (rain storm) delayed organ transport, and they still needed to verify the organs once they arrived. Then there was some issue about separating the organs. Finally, Susan was wheeled in for her surgery at 11 pm last night. The surgeon came out at 2:40 am this morning and declared it a success! The transplant went as smoothly as could be hoped and the organ when delivered was in excellent condition. Susan’s parents flew in this afternoon and we visited her in the intensive care unit, she’s doing well. (UCSF puts transplant patients in the ICU as a matter of routine.) Lots of drugs delivered via lots of tubes. She’s sleeping most of the time, nauseous due to painkillers and the strong anti-rejection meds, but able to carry on a conversation when she’s woken up (although she falls back asleep easily). She’s already off insulin as hoped. Her blood glucose is still a little high but the doctors expect it to come down as her new organ adjusts after being on ice for so long. Since she seems to be doing well – blood pressure and heart rate are good – we’re hoping she can be out of the ICU sooner than expected and into the recovery ward for the next week.

Those of you who read my better half’s blog may know that for the last few months, she’s been on the transplant list for a new pancreas. She got THE CALL today.. we dropped everything, hightailed it over to UCSF, waited around for over three hours, and then found out the donor’s family had changed their mind at the last moment, wanted to give him or her another two days to wake up. So we might go through all this again in the next few, or if not, still sounds like it’ll be soon. Fingers crossed!

3:09 am: It’s a go again – Susan’s admitted,  done some pre-op prep, and assuming the organ is viable she’ll be in surgery in late morning or early afternoon. She’s hopefully  asleep. Going to catch a few Zs myself, back at the hospital in five hours.

In 2006, I:

• sold my house in Seattle and moved in with Susan in Oakland;
• went to my first geek convention;
• went on a fantastic vacation in Turkey;
• was sick for a month;
• joined an orchestra as a cellist, then watched it slowly collapse;
• finally found people to play chamber music with, and learned two entire piano trios;
• didn’t climb a single rock;
• took golf lessons – and avoided cruel punishment for it;
• went home to Vancouver once and ate enough dim sum for a year;
• reconnected with friends I hadn’t seen for a combined total of twenty four years;
• read four five of Patrick O’Brian Aubrey-Maturin seagoing novels – only sixteen more to go;
• went to three college football games and one NHL game;
• saw ten movies in theatres, watched too much reality television;
• bought my first new car, sold my old one on eBay;
• temporarily betrayed my main toy squeeze and bought way too many Transformers;
• started allergy shots – and had anaphylaxis three times as a result of a shot;
• got a dog;
• saw another Pixar movie released;
• somehow got my name on another published paper;
• got a patent with my name on it granted;
• learned too much about assembly, multithreading, and in general worked too hard;
• went to two American states I’ve never been to before;
• wrote 7980 words in 23 blog entries (not including this one).

So much for 2006. Bring on 2007!

This is Kaylee, our dog we adopted two weeks ago from Tuffie’s Animal Rescue. Everyone who looks at her sees a different breed, but the best guess is that she’s a cross between a German Shorthair Pointer (where she gets her ears and the ticking on her chest) and a Chesapeake Bay Retriever (where she gets her chocolate wavy coat). As we take more pictures I’ll post them on flickr with the “kaylee” tag.

After four months of searching, I was getting worried about buying a Prius in time for the September 30 deadline for full federal tax credit (it drops to 50% after that and phases out in the following quarter). Toyota Oakland and Alameda were content to offer us the wrong color or wrong package every few weeks or so, but I held out. Finally, fed up with my whining, my fabulous car procurement specialist (aka Susan) e-mailed forty dealerships and found a 2006 Magnetic Grey in Las Vegas with the right trim level. We flew out and picked it up Friday.

My first new car! I’m glad we waited. It’s a beautiful color – originally my second choice, Susan’s first, but I’m very happy with it. The picture above doesn’t do it justice, it’s more of a shade like burnished pewter or dark brushed nickel. I’m still getting used to the smart key system and the push button start thing, but driving it back from Las Vegas yesterday at 85 mph was a breeze compared to driving the rattling death trap that was the Acura.

Oh, and we averaged 49 miles per gallon on the trip. Which was, of course, one of the points of getting that car in the first place.

The most common things that make the muscle in your eyelid twitch are fatigue, stress, and caffeine. Once spasms begin, they may continue off and on for a few days. Then, they disappear. Most people experience this type of eyelid twitch on occasion and find it very annoying. In most cases, you won’t even notice when the twitch has stopped.
– From MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia

This started over the weekend. Fatigue: drove mom to the airport at 5 am – check. Stress: work, family, finding car insurance – I’ll take that check. Caffeine: coffee coke refill please!

Yesterday morning we were woken up by a cop. Turned out at around 6 or 7 am someone decided to break into my car and grab the stereo. The people across the street saw this happening and called the cops, but by the time they showed up the thief had gone. I’m less annoyed about the loss of the stereo than I am about having to drive out to Walnut Creek this morning to get the glass replaced – all for a stereo that should (in theory) be useless, since it’s unlockable without a specific CD – one that says something about Jamie’s former taste in music.

More cars: I’m in the market for a new one, and we’ve been trying out hybrids for a few weeks now. Zero luck trying to get a test drive through the dealerships around here. We managed to test drive the 2005 Prius at Berkeley for about half an hour, but after phoning every Honda dealership within 30 miles we decided we had to rent one from Fox Rent A Car. Through a mishap we got the Prius again for a day, and finally this weekend we rented the Honda Civic. After all that, I’ve decided on the Prius. The cross bar on the rear window is a definite minus, but the Honda’s rear window visibility is far worse for parallel parking. The Prius feels a lot better when driving than the Civic – with the latter, I had a bad passing experience at 40 mph on the highway, and it also handles weirdly when moving from a stop – almost like the car is going backwards for a split second. It tends to roll backwards very easily too. The two clinchers, for me: the Civic’s lack of fold down rear seats means my cello doesn’t fit easily (as I found out when I went to orchestra practice on Sunday), and the Prius’ mileage during our two rental days edged out the Civic (43 mpg vs 38 mpg, both averaged out over at least 50 miles of driving). I’m going to go put a deposit down tomorrow.

And you thought this entry was about that movie of ours.

The house sold, to the third offer. After the inspection, the buyers lowered their offer by $5k, plus asked for window replacement, which would have easily been upwards of a grand. This was moderately annoying since the main contested issue was exterior paint; while I wouldn’t debate the deterioration, I would certainly venture to claim that peeling paint on exterior walls was not something I could easily hide – not something to be tucked discreetly under a painting of flowers – so perhaps one would feel that the issue had been taken into account when I priced the property. Anyways, feeling like some compromise was in order (especially factoring in the avoidance of my March mortgage payment), I countered with a flat $3500 and that was accepted. We celebrated. Then came the hiccup.

When it came time for me to sign the FedExed papers, escrow sent along a closing statement which credited me closing costs of $8500. I didn’t think too hard about it (“hmm – this number is bigger than I was expecting – I like it.”), particularly since the closing costs hadn’t been itemized so I had no idea what was involved; and so I signed on the dotted line. The next day, the money showed up in my account and it was $17k lower than the number on the closing statement. I stewed about this for a weekend, called up escrow on Monday and was informed that the $8500 figure was credited to me when it should have been deducted from me. That same day a revised closing statement showed up showing the deduction instead of a credit.

At this point I hadn’t really questioned where the $8500 number had come from, but thankfully Susan prodded me into questioning it that night. It didn’t help that the figure had now been broken down into far more detail than before and the new statement looked nothing like the statement received prior to closing. I stewed some more that night. Then I chased down my realtor and escrow the next morning, and after a few more phone calls, it was decided that someone screwed up and added $5000 and $3500 together. So I was out $5k. Quite fortunately, a fiscal mess was avoided when the buyer accepted that there was an error and sent another check to escrow, which was eventually passed along to me.

As a computer programmer, I could maybe understand how an OR could mutate into an ADD operation. I’m sure I’ve performed more egregious errors during coding. Slips of the brain. Finger error. My bugs lead to dead pixels though. As a person who has cold hard lucre on the line, I’m far less understanding how a signed piece of paper with the words “seller hereby rejects all buyer provisions” could be misunderstood in such a fashion. Furthermore, a certain lack of responsibility on the part of multiple parties – do I really have to read the closing settlement in such detail? – leaves me shaking my head a bit about the whole affair. There is a moral or two here, about making sure peeling exterior paint is listed in disclosures, and the difficulties inherent in signing escrow papers when out of state and not having someone give line by line explanations, but morals tend to be lost on me.

What’s happened over the last month:

I drove from Seattle to California again with a car filled to the brim with stuff. Mom was wedged in between house plants and was ordered to keep me awake. We left the night before I planned, because we were sick of sleeping on the floor in the empty house. So on Friday after I left work we furiously packed up the remaining items in the house, drove to Portland and stayed there for a night. We made it as far as Ashland on Saturday because I had already made a hotel reservation there and didn’t feel like cancelling it. Sunday morning proved to be the anticlimax: we crossed the Siskiyou pass early and found the roads to be free of snow – I had bought chains in Portland due to warnings about the pass and ended up never needing them. California initially welcomed us with a sea of peasoup fog but soon we were in the sunny Bay Area and miserable Seattle weather became but a memory.

We arrived to find Susan buried among my many boxes of stuff. Over the last month most has been unpacked or put in storage, and we’ve slowly been getting rid of overlapping furniture and electronics – this has prompted a few minor headaches dealing with eBay and craigslist flakes. At least everything arrived intact, including the piano!

The second day after I started work again in Emeryville (coincidentally, only a few days after my seventh anniversary of starting at Pixar), I was there for the announcement by Steve Jobs that Pixar was being acquired by Disney. Obviously I had heard the rampant rumors floating about the Internet but somehow didn’t really believe it was going to happen. I think that’s all I’ll say on the subject. As far as work goes, it’s been fairly intense over the last month. My office situation is as follows: I have an office to myself! I still lack furniture but I’m working on it.

Mom puttered about our house for a bit, then decided on a whim to go to Taiwan to catch Chinese New Year festivitives. This prompted a mad scramble by Susan and I to purchase plane tickets online for Taipei (didn’t work on short notice), then Mom bought surprisingly cheap tickets the old fashioned way (travel agent! paper tickets!) and soon disappeared. After touring Taiwan and Hong Kong she came back this past Saturday, left again for Vancouver today. My mom, role model for retirement.

The house was listed soon after I left. The stager did a great job, even working with the ultraviolet purple paint in the living room (which, by the way, I actually liked) – if you’re selling in Seattle I’ll be glad to provide a reference. Three separate offers were made over the course of two weeks and after a bit of minor haggling the third ultimately proved to be the clincher. I sign the paperwork tomorrow and should close on Friday; and that, for now, closes a “This Old House” chapter of my life.

We’ve been fostering a dog from Smiley Dog Rescue. Her name is Tillie and she’s gone quite far in wearing down my natural aversion to dogs. My allergies have also been less reactive to her, we think it’s because she sheds a lot less than my sister’s dogs whom I visit during the Christmas holidays. So the daily activities include a dog walk, and there’s also the occasional trip to the dog park or adoption event. My crowning geek achievement in January was finding an unused webcam among Susan’s stuff, plugging it into the webserver, running Motion: tada, dog cam! Endless entertainment while we’re at work.

Speaking of geeks, I made it to WonderCon for a day, thanks to Christina. My first convention! Alas, I felt unworthy amongst my fellow convention goers. I really haven’t read enough comic books in the last decade, and hadn’t watched Firefly yet so could not appreciate the true meaning of a Browncoat. (I have however started on addressing that.) At least I did see Frank Miller talk, and that was quite interesting to me as someone who appreciated his Daredevil work.

Brian (fellow Pixarian, also involved in New Brain shenanigans) suggested I try out for the Punk Rock Orchestra. With a week to prepare, I actually practiced cello and auditioned this past Sunday, playing a good old standby (a Bach prelude) and sight reading a Dead Kennedys piece. I think I know how it went, but I’ll avoid jinxing myself until I have it in writing.

That’s about it. Things seem to happen a lot faster around here, don’t they?