Ordinary Day

I must be finally getting caught up on my sleep--because finally, finally, even after knowing about the show for weeks now, I'm starting to feel the proper level of anticipation for seeing my B'ys at Bumbershoot tomorrow night. Watching folks post on the OKP about meeting up beforehand at the beer garden nearest to the Mural Amphitheater stage is helping! So was scarfing a whole new pretty pile of Alan pics off the OKP--though I have a distressingly small number of replies to my call for Alan piccies thread! (Not that I'm hinting or anything, folks... *^_^*)

I hear tell that the Shantyman is now sporting a brand new buzzcut. This is causing quite a bit of consternation amongst his fangirls on the OKP, and now that I've actually seen a pic, I'm not entirely sure I approve. I'll have to give this a proper glance or five tomorrow night, and y'all may rest assured that I will have plenty of commentary on his new do (or lack thereof), as well as every other little detail of the show. And I'll take consolation in the knowledge that it could be worse--it could be Alan with the buzzcut. I think The Doyle might cause a swath of massive coronaries throughout the fandom if he ever does anything to The Hair.

Meanwhile, I know that my beloved solarbird is getting to be okay again after yesterday's shoulder scare if she can whine that she can't attend the Jonathan Coulton show here in Seattle tonight. Hell, I wouldn't have minded going to that myself, and I have to console myself with the knowledge that even if the bike accident hadn't happened, we still would not have made the show on the grounds that we'd be in Vancouver right about now, preparing to watch the B'ys come out and sing at Malkin Bowl! Dara has made cracks about us bootlegging Coulton for her, as well as the GBS show tomorrow night. I told her I would have a very hard time making myself stand still well enough to get a proper quality recording. Because I mean, who the hell stands still at a GBS show? ;)

Speaking of the shoulder scare, Dara wound up having an emergency appointment with a doctor standing in for her usual doc (who's out of town), and the guy pretty much told her that the muscle spasms she's experiencing are most likely due to her muscles just being seriously cranky about her lying around for sixteen days straight in the hospital. So she's on a fleet of painkillers at this point, which has taken the edge off the pain, and the idea at this point is to keep her on the meds all weekend to give her arm a chance to heal up. She says that right now her arm gets cranky still if it has to support its own weight. So we'll see how it goes. I had to cancel her Friday PT appointment as well, since she was way too zonked to go to that and in too much pain besides. The PT folks were very understanding, anyway.

Also, our friend and former renter Danny as well as my brother Marc called to ask after Dara today, which was very nice. And there was a little card with cute little sparrows for her in the envelope with rent from one of our MurkSouth tenants.

Let's see, what else... very quiet day at work yesterday, and mostly I sat around fretting about Dara and wondering if we were going to have to get her into the ER and if I was going to have to leave early. About the only thing I did of note was learn how to set up a virtual machine on my box, and work with my lead a bit to think about the layouts of test boxes between my end of the QA space and the other end, currently occupied by the temp they brought in during my unexpected absence. Also, I am informed that Payroll has agreed to make my next two paychecks be half-time so as to make up the unpaid leave days, which means I don't have to go two weeks without getting paid at all, which is reassuring.

Went out to the shops today to run a bunch of minor errands, and have resolved that I really, really need to yoink myself back into my normal eating habits. The hospital stretch got me hooked onto going into Starbucks for breakfast, and that's got to stop if I expect to keep losing weight. So, as of this weekend, back on the regular Plan.

Got our new tenant moved into the Admiralty at MurkSouth okay, thankfully. He was a nice kid, and patient with me as I tiredly noted that I hadn't done any of this before and that furthermore was fairly spacy after the whole "spouse in hospital" thing.

No writing or editing the last several days, since I haven't had the brain for it. I'm hoping to get in at least a bit of editing this weekend, though. Maybe tonight, maybe at some point tomorrow before the show, definitely on Monday. And no new books started yet either. I'm hoping both of these will return as I continue to get caught up on my sleep! And now I am officially at two months without hearing from Bantam on Faerie Blood, and I'll be at the two-month mark in three more days for Lament as well.

I think that's about it! Likely zzzzzz for the rest of the night.

Dude, I am .2 miles away from Rauros Falls! I think I'm going to scamper off to Isengard next, and follow the pretty half of the Fellowship. Frodo can damn well trudge off to Mordor by himself, and besides, Sam would kill me if I tried anything.

Meanwhile, I went to MurkSouth last night to attempt to change the locks on the Admiralty space, since we have a new guy moving in tomorrow night. solarbird is not back up to speed yet for handling landlady foo, so I get to do that for her till she feels better. So this involved me having to take four locks off three doors, take them down to a nearby key place, and have them redo the locks. That part was quick and painless (even if I screwed up how many keys should be used for how many of these locks), but getting the locks back on the doors, not so much. I had the damndest time of it until I figured out that I had reversed which screws went into which locks on the front door. It would have been nice if I could have figured that out before I got myself irritated enough by constantly dropping the screws in the fading light that I started growling and snarling out loud!

I was pretty cranky by the time I got home around 10pm, too, and Dara, bless her heart, came up and hugged me as soon as she heard me snarling my way into the kitchen. So I hugged her for a bit and complained about my general lock ineptitude, and was reassured that things will probably be okay with the locks--that before Dara had started messing with them, there'd been four different keys for these locks, and reducing them to two is actually a good thing. And that also, the doorknob on the front door of the space was already upside down, so no, I didn't break that. Whew.

So then I had a Mike's hard apple, and hugged Dara some more, and then had a nice hot bath and washed some clothes and went to bed. Where more Dara hugging occurred, and I had the best sleep I'd had in days even if there still wasn't quite enough of it.

In other news, rumors are flying around the OKP that GBS will be putting out another concert DVD, to be entitled "Courage and Patience and Grit: Great Big Sea in Concert", with a show filmed during the Hard and the Easy Tour. Rumored release date is November 21. Must. Have. DVD. NOW. And I am also counting down the days until the release of rachelcaine's fifth Weather Warden book, as well as the next Carbon Leaf album, Love, Loss, Hope, Repeat!

And today I must go to the Polyclinic and have my thyroid levels checked again, since I think they may have gone wonky over the last couple of weeks. I mention this mostly because I am looking forward to the walk. After two weeks of sitting around Harborview, my legs need to be reminded of their daily exercise!

Monday evening miles: 1.8
Tuesday miles: 4.1
Wednesday morning miles: 1.4
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1308.8
Miles out of Rivendell: 850.8
Miles out of Lothlórien: 388.8
Miles to Rauros Falls: 0.2

Solarbird 4.0.0.24 alpha has been RELEASED! ;)

risu and I just got home with Dara and all of her flowers and meds and stuff! We will have to work to get her some outpatient PT because apparently the doctors think that in-home isn't justified, but we will work something out!

DARA IS HOME DARA IS HOME DARA IS HOME DARA IS HOME!

So since I'm running low on leeway for time I can not be at work, I promised to come back in this week and start acting like I have a job again! Here I am, therefore, at my keyboard and slogging through two weeks' worth of backlogged email, trying to figure out what the hell I'm going to do to be productive today. Especially since the one major project that's on the board for attention seems to have slipped. It is very strange being back in now--there's a temp that they've brought in to help cover for me, so now I need to work with him. And I'm all "oh right, I WORK here". And I'm trying very hard to not faceplant in the keyboard, especially since I've already managed to spill a soda this morning all over the keyboard on the Mac. Fortunately, we had a spare keyboard.

I can at least start getting back into posting about more normal things, though! For example, I have to just giggle and giggle that I am a big enough web testin' geek that I sent in a bug report to the greatbigsea.com tech people to inform them that they had a layout issue on the OKP in all browsers except IE. I even sent them a screenshot. I got a kindly note back from one of their folks pledging to send the report on to their tech people, so yay. Definitely the geekiest thing I've done all month, though. ;)

I have of course heard about Pluto's demotion from planet to dwarf planet, which is still making me kind of boggle. I'm vaguely disappointed--I think it would have been way cooler to bump Ceres, Charon, and 2003 UB313 to planet status. It'll be fun to see if the ruling gets reversed; I've been seeing references to pissed-off astronomers all over the world bitching about the vote being hijacked.

I have also heard we've finally gotten the first hurricane of the season, and about the jet crash in Lexington. Yowtch. One of my Lexington friends says his company lost three people on that plane.

solarbird-wise, we're waiting on the word as to when we can move her from the hospital to PT. She really, really wants to do something outpatient, but from what the social worker was telling me this morning that isn't really going to be an option, since they're recommending inpatient PT. Which means she can't come home quite yet, but what can ya do. Dara flat refuses to do inpatient in Tacoma, anyway, so I also told the social worker that we need to push for the Everett facility. And even though we'd all prefer to get Dara home, this'll be better not only for her but also because my boss just went on vacation, so I can't really make her authorize letting me work from home (and therefore be available to take Dara to and from PT).

Dara is at least online this morning and has been IM'ing me every few minutes with "goooooooo hooooooooome home home". Though as of the last little bit, she said a PT person had shown up, so hopefully we'll have some new news soon.

ETA 10:47am: Dara reports now that she has in fact been cleared for water and normal food! Hurray! She also says she passed a cognitive eval as "high end normal (har)". Translation, Dara is still Smart!

Still no word from Bantam, not even my postcards. I hope they've actually opened the manuscripts. I'm starting to get paranoid about whether they actually got them, and whether I didn't somehow forget to include postage on the postcards and envelopes.

And here, have a miles to Rauros Falls update!

Miles back on the 16th: 2.3
Sunday miles: 0.4
Monday morning miles: 1.4
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1301.5
Miles out of Rivendell: 843.5
Miles out of Lothlórien: 381.5
Miles to Rauros Falls: 7.5

The big happy news of the evening is that solarbird has regained control of the Internet! There is not official net access at Harborview, but there is a University of Washington wireless network for which you require a U-dub ID--which Dara has, being a student! So yay, net access for Dara!

Which means she doesn't have to be bored out of her skull for the remainder of her time at the hospital, and besides, it also gives her something to exercise both her fine manual dexterity (the typing) and her brain (reading, posting, etc.). She was quite adamant that I WOULD be leaving her her computer tonight, though we'd been a little worried about leaving it lying around the hospital room. I was delighted to comply, hell, I'm just happy to have her back and making that call for herself. :~)

Meanwhile, I am informed that the game plan over the next few weeks is going to be getting her some intensive PT that we can't do at home, for roughly 1-4 weeks depending on how fast she recovers. The idea here is that they want to make sure her balance and coordination and everything come back okay, and at least two different therapists have raised the idea to me of three-hour daily intensive sessions. Based on our insurance, our options are apparently going to be a facility in Everett, or a facility in Tacoma. When I asked Dara her opinion on this, she said and I quote, "Who in God's name would want to go to Everett?" And, "Who in God's name would want to go to Tacoma?" Hee.

But first the rehab docs want a look at her, and there's a tentative game plan maybe of shifting her to one of these two places maybe on Monday. So hopefully she won't have to stay at Harborview past this weekend. We'll know more tomorrow when they look at her some more, and when the social worker tells me which place has beds available. It'll make visiting a bit trickier since getting to either place will be a pain in the ass--especially since I have to go back to work next week. But if Dara can continue to have net access, that'll help.

More nice things happened today: a shower (which tuckered Dara right the hell out), a LOT of sleeping, and most importantly, her passing her swallow test enough that they started letting her have soft and mushy food today. No water yet; she has to drink soft, honey-consistency liquidy things. Maybe in another day or two she can have water. Or soda.

sksouth gets mad props for bringing spazzkat and me Chinese food tonight, and big thanks to technoshaman for coming by to say hi! A lovely bouquet also showed up from cafiorello and her family, as well as one from kingchiron and darthhellokitty, and another from "Lauren", whose name I did not unfortunately recognize. But if that's somebody reading this post, consider yourself thanked as well. :) And a few more email printouts arrived, too!

But now Dara can get her actual email, because YAY INTERNET!

ETA 10:19pm #1: And OH YEAH, we got her contacts back in for her as well, so now she gets to ditch the old glasses and have her usual level of vision back! Since they're disposable lenses, she can even keep them in. AND, she put them in all by herself. More fine manual dexterity!

ETA 10:19pm #2: RIGHT, the Mystery "Lauren" is kissare, on which I absolutely spaced since I've been too used to thinking of her as her character name from Two Moons. This is what I get for knowing most of you people via your LJ names or your MUSH characters. Apologies on that! I have been an absolute space case this week. Does it show? *^_^*

Oh my gods, what a day, folks.

spazzkat and I have traded off hospital watch with risu, but as of this writing, solarbird has been transferred into a general room at Harborview. She is in room 375, in the Neuro ward, and we left her in the hands of a nice night nurse named Mo! She's still shaky and weak, getting back general motor control, and so very very pissed, but definitely coming back online. So hopefully sometime in the next few days, she'll even be able to come online and tell you all about it herself.

There's been some swearing. And some snark. She told us all about how she was in Woodinville, and then dreaming she was in Germany (possibly because of being surrounded by blonde nurses), and then she was in Mexico, and then she was in the hospital. She also, when one of the doctors came in and introduced herself as Dr. Lipke, mumbled about our friend Joby Lafky. The doctor said, "No, it's Lipke, it's German!" And Dara promptly whipped out the sieg-heil salute.

Today's day nurse was Betty again, and she was really, really cool, chatty and friendly and very grateful to us for looking after Dara so closely while she was busy with the new patient in the room next door. And as the dude with the gurney (his name was Ben) showed up to take Dara upstairs, she told us with a big warm smile that it'd been delightful to meet us and now she never wanted to see us again--at least in her ICU. ;)

Tonight's immediate no-questions-asked addition to sainthood is auntmonkey, who showed up at Harborview tonight with SUSHI for Paul and me, onto which we fell like a pair of ravenous wolves, because OMG SUSHI. She brought us tuna and salmon and yellowtail and unagi rolls.

I am more physically drained and exhausted than I can remember being in a very long time. It's exactly that I've been so wound up all this past week, and suddenly every fiber of my body has relaxed at once. I am utterly thrashed. But it's okay, because the worst part is over. Now we just have to work on convincing Dara to stay put long enough so she can come HOME!

ETA 10:27pm: And oh yes: information on how to email Harborview patients as well as how to send gifts can be found here!

I just teared up hardcore reading this, folks, and I had to share it with you all.

I'd posted earlier that I'd asked folks on the OKP last week to please be singing "Ordinary Day" and "Something Beautiful" for solarbird. Several OKPers had promised to do just that, but tonight I have been informed that some of 'em have gone totally, totally above and beyond the call of duty.

An OKPer who is a musician down in Oz with his own band played these two songs on Dara's behalf at a recent gig, and at the suggestion of his roommate and cousin, another OKPer, the band members and the audience lit sparklers for Dara to send energy for her all the way up here.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is moments like these that make me unutterably proud to be a Great Big Sea fan. This is the band that inspires acts like these out of people with their music. There is no better fandom than Great Big Sea fandom. NONE. :~)

Not much new to report today either, except that Dara did do "great" (or so they told me) on this morning's breathing trial. She also rested and breathed significantly easier today the times I was in the ICU room. Today's day nurse, Lillian, told me that they turned her sedation down again to try to get her weaned down from it, which was good. So we get to see what happens again tomorrow, I guess.

I sang seven or eight GBS ditties to her today, and Lillian told me I had a beautiful voice. Which was nice, but it was nicer to see Dara settle down and sleep at least while I had voice enough for song.

One of the OKPers has asked for our tickets to the Malkin Bowl show, which is also good. If I can't use them, I will prefer to see them in the hands of another OKPer. (Though really, even if I couldn't get them into another fan's hands, I'd still be okay with the B'ys having my dollars, 'cause, well.)

Tonight I will be watching the Great Big DVD again all the way through.

You want to know how to feel like a space case?

Make an appointment to pick up stuff from a cop at the local police station, and then absolutely and utterly forget to do it until you find said cop's voice mail an hour after the fact on your cell phone. Call non-emergency dispatch number to convey message to said cop, apologize profusely, and agree to offer to come get stuff an hour after the fact. Show up as requested, only to get honked at by passing vehicle in the corner closest to the cop station, and pull into the parking lot praying that the three deputies standing outside waiting for you with the bike and backpack aren't about to chastise you for your driving.

(Which they didn't, thankfully, otherwise I would have had a small heart attack on the spot. But I mean, damn. And I was nervous, too, about how we wound up having to stuff the bike into the trunk and hold it sort of shut with the bungee cords from the back of the bike. Which also meant that I couldn't see jack out my back window. I made a point of asking for a confirmation about whether this was going to be a traffic problem, and the deputy who helped me get the bike into the car said that as long as I was only driving to Uplake and his partner didn't see me and stop me, he was cool. So.)

Anyway. I have Dara's bike and backpack now, and now that I've seen the bike, I can see what the cops were saying in terms of "didn't sustain damage consistent with being struck by a vehicle". Apparently what looked like a badly bent back wheel to me at the time of the accident must have been a) me freaking, and b) the bike lying all weird and bent, because now that I've had a look at it in a saner frame of mind, the frame and wheels look more or less okay. I am informed by said cops that the only damage it seems to have sustained is to the brakes and that the back tire is now flat. I suppose this is a tiny bit of reassurance in that we will not have to get Dara a brand new bike. (Though honestly, I won't blame her if she wants to scrap-heap this one.)

Meanwhile, Dara herself remains on the breathing tube as of my leaving the hospital this evening. She had a breathing trial this morning, which went more or less okay although she wound up having to work at the breathing towards the end of it. It is my understanding that there should be another breathing trial tomorrow, but the nurse sounded dubious about the possibility of her coming off the tube tomorrow. We'll just have to see what happens.

I had the day shift by myself while spazzkat took a much-deserved and much-needed break, and I will be doing the same again tomorrow. It has helped today that I finally got to the point of deciding "okay, as long as I'm going to be here and Dara is asleep and stable, I am damn well going to get some writing done", so I worked a lot on editing while I was hanging out in the ICU. I expect this will also help get me through tomorrow and Sunday. How next week and my next round of updating the boss as to why I am not at work is going to go remains to be seen.

Much love and thanks to waysofseeing, mamishka, and sksouth for showing up and providing conversation, snackies, and hugs. Thank you all.

"Stable and slowly, slowly improving" seems to be the continued order of the day with Dara, folks. While I've got this stupid cold in my system, spazzkat's been holding the fort down at the hospital during the day and risu's continued with the night shift, and I just spoke with Paul; he says there's been no particular change yet. During the course of today they have been slowly turning down the ventilator to get her breathing more on her own as well as adjusting the meds she's on to start weaning her towards being able to come off the tube completely, but so far, as of this writing, she's still on the tube. Paul says that they may do an oxygen test tomorrow, and maybe the tube will be out tomorrow, maybe Friday. But it's looking fairly likely that Dara will be in the hospital at least through this weekend. Hopefully at least part of this will be out of the ICU, anyway.

They've continued to wake her up a few times over the course of today, and she's remained responsive and has been able to wiggle her toes on command. Her eyes have been tracking as well. She's had a bit of an issue being able to wiggle her thumbs, and has more been just lifting her hands at those attempts, but I've also noticed that her hands have been quite swollen so it doesn't surprise me much that she doesn't have much fine dexterity right now.

waysofseeing and mamishka have continued to bring Paul food, and lyricae joins the ranks of the heroes today as she brought risu and me home and also has provided homemade chicken soup, which I am now eating in an attempt to get myself functional again so I can resume being at the hospital.

So we're all hanging in there as best we can.

I see that several new folks have Friended my journal; to all y'all, hiya, and I wish that better circumstances could have brought you by. But I am glad to see you nevertheless, and thank you all for checking in.

I've also posted to the OKP about what's going on, and very fine people there have been adding their good wishes to those I have been receiving on Dara's behalf here on LJ. I'd posted there to ask people to sing a few bars of "Ordinary Day" and "Something Beautiful", two of the finest songs by Great Big Sea for power and healing, and a couple of folks who are actual musicians doing gigs even said they'd cover the songs for her. Which was beyond fabulous.

So I take great comfort knowing that folks across three different continents are all thinking of us. Again, thank you all.