The home front

Squaring away tickets for an overseas trip is starting to add an extra layer of complication to my life. On top of worrying about the bar exam, I've got to get organized ... passport is only a couple of years old, so that should be fine, but there's always the decisions on what to bring or leave behind. Laptop's a definite, but there's an issue: the two batteries I have for it are starting to lose life. Maybe it's the wireless network card, but these days, I can't even get an hour's use out of a battery, and if there's gonna be a ten-hour flight ... ah well. The PDA's got a 128-meg memory card, so I should be able to pack in lots and lots of tunes, hopefully enough to last through the flight. Though I don't know how long the PDA's battery would last...

Talked with my buddy Jeff, in the insurance biz, today - prompted by paying the family's home insurance bill. He's doing okay, busy, working, which is good (he owns the firm at this point), but some not-so-great news about our mutual colleague, Mikey O.

Mikey's cancer treatments have apparently been stopped - the chemotherapy has been halted. The word is that he wasn't physically able to handle the punishment any more; I don't know whether there's another avenue they can take, or whether that's the last hope gone. With cancer spreading through liver, stomach, and through the lymph nodes, I suspect that localized radiation therapy is a no-go ... they'd have to physically cut it all out of him, and ... it doesn't sound good. It doesn't sound like Mikey O, with a wife and two pre-school children, will live to see his fortieth birthday.

Somewhere it was once written that a person's allottment of life was three-score years and ten ... it's scary to look at the year on the calendar and wonder whether one's own life is half over. Or worse.

One good friend never saw thirty. And Mikey O took care of himself - as a cop, he had physicals every year, and everyone just missed this completely ...

Not a good sign. Not at all.

oh yeah. real smart.

Anyone want to find me? Just break out the moron detector and look at where it spikes.

Couldn't get to a site on the 'net, so I figured maybe the answer was to reset the cable modem. Since it's in the basement, and it's raining, and the basement has an unfortunate tendency to flood, I needed to find my shoes. I went up to my little office setup over the garage to find it, rolled my desk chair back, and being shoeless, it kinda hurt when I rolled the chair over my toe.

Then when I found my shoes, I went down, reset the modem for about 30 seconds, came up, and the brother, who I'd thought had gone to sleep, complained that he lost something he'd been posting right at the moment I cut power to the cable modem.

Dumkluk. Me.

PS: it didn't help me get to that site anyway.