One foot dipped into the iPod pond…

I’m cheep. I winced when I gave daughter Katie a $74 shuffle iPod for her birthday. No way would I buy one for myself, however. (Even assuming the rakkity Family Financial Manager, herself, would allow me to). So on Father’s day, when I saw the Office Depot ad for a $9.99 deal on the TrekStor mp3 player, I remarked on it at the breakfast table, never realizing that my sweet one-and-only, mother-to-my-children, FFM, would sneak out immediately and buy it for me.

Now that I’ve played with the TrekStor, I know that it’s far from being an iPod, and it will certainly not work with iTunes, Nevertheless, I’ve loaded 250 MB of free MP3 music onto it already, and have listened to it’s crystal-clear playing of Bach’s Art of Fugue. (Next, I” add some Beatles music.) I’ll definitely use it when I’m at the gym (on the treadmill, but probably not on the racquetball court) and maybe on miscellaneous bike rides, or solo car rides. It plays music through the FM radio without any attachments– it’s better than the Shuffle in that respect. You can save photos on it, and it records voice. I think there’s even a way to extract tunes from iTunes to it.

Maybe I can even send sound files to the Blog from it. Great fun!

–rakkity

Dear Lowlanders,

Last Sunday, my buddy Steve said we should go on a hike this Wednesday. So I contacted beartoother Chuck and asked for suggestions, saying only that, “Steve wants to go high.” Chuck suggested we go to the ghost-town of Hessie (at 9500′ in the Indian Peaks), and start from there. So Wednesday dawned and off the 3 of us went. We found that the melting snow had turned the road near Hessie and the local trails into streams. As we hiked/sloshed our way into the headwaters of Boulder Creek, snow started to fall. Steve hadn’t brought a warm jacket, so I gave him my extra jacket (ever since I got caught in a Sierra snowstorm when I was 19, I’ve always carried spare warmies when hiking in alpine country.For similar reasons, Chuck does too.) We continued on hiking on alternating snowpack, bare ground, and marigold-strewn marshes. I even used my snowshoes for a few minutes (Chuck & Steve preferred to post-hole.) After an hour or snowfall, the sun came out, and we had to doff some layers. It became a glorious spring day in the mountains.

We had to turn back a little early when Steve suddenly discovered that his new boots were disintegrating. (The company he bought them from will remain nameless, but it begins with R and ends with I. I’m sure they’ll replace the boots.)

While we returned towards the trailhead, the sun went back into the clouds, and it started to snow again. We met some surprised hikers coming up the trail. They were wearing shorts and light shirts, and said they’d be going up just a short ways. (I would sure hope so.) Steve stopped a little later and looked up through the falling snow at a greenish hill, and said, “Isn’t that beautiful!” So I made a short movie of it. In the background you can hear the roar of Boulder Creek).

Because the Colorado Front Range had a cold May and early June, the alpine wildflowers haven’t been as prolific as they were last year. But the Marsh Marigolds and Globe Mallows were abundant. They are among the first to appear when the snow melts. And there were zillions of little quarter-inch pink flowers that I identified later as Jacobs Ladder.

Steve’s boots managed to hold together until we returned. On the way back we stopped at the venerable Pioneer Inn and quaffed a Fat Tire Ale to celebrate our safe return to civilization.

-Ed

Mike,

On our way across the pond last month, our Brit Air pilot just missed Greenland.  According to the map monitor on the back of the seat in front of me, we flew just south of the southern tip. (It was cloudy anyway.) But on the way back, we crossed the southern tip, and I got some photos. I’m in the negotiation stages with my hiking buddies to go here on our next backpack trip.

Our flight was probably about the latitude of Paamiut, on the west coast at latitude 62 deg, but I saw no towns. Apparently they were lost in the clouds along the coast.

Some of my pictures show a massive east-west fjord, possibly Lindenow Fjord on the east coast. But that’s just a wild guess.

A few of the shots are crystal clear, the luck of the draw with airplane windows. In one of them you can see the crevasses in a glacier system flowing out of the mountains.

The last few shots are of northern Canada –  the Barren Lands and James Bay, the southern extension of Hudson Bay.  The spring breakup was in progress. Whether it was early or not, as it has been in the last few years, I can’t tell.

–rakkity

Disk not accessible. Abort, Retry, or Fail?

Last Sunday I lost 7 hours out of my life, I wonder if I’ll ever get them back. The day before, I arrived in Huntington Beach, where I had stopped to visit relatives on my way to Berkeley for a science meeting. Everything was normal on Saturday, and I enjoyed a Middle Eastern dinner with my sister, Cecelia, her boyfriend, Chuck, my father, my cousin Dave and his girlfriend Jayne. On Sunday, I drove my dad home from my stepmother’s resthome, and got out of the car to go inside.

That’s where my memory stops: about 2 pm on November 14. My memory restarts at the point where I was sitting on a bed in the emergency room of Fountain Valley hospital, answering questions from two white-coated doctors. One of them was a neurologist, Dr. Lum. He told me that there was a problem with my memory, but it looked like I was going to be all right. They left, and my Dad, who had been sitting nearby, tried to fill me in on what had happened that day. It was too much to absorb, and I was thinking furiously, trying to get “today” into perspective, as he said goodbye, and promised to return tomorrow morning. My right wrist hurt. There was a needle and tubing embedded in it, with translucent tape wrapped around it. What exactly had happened to me? I put a lot of effort into thinking it through.

First I was able to recall that I had come to Huntington Beach on a business trip to Berkeley. But was this before or after the trip? If it was after, then this had to be Thursday. But the month seemed to be October. Or was it? Let’s see… Had I celebrated my birthday on October 11? Yes! Beth. Patrick and Katie gave me presents and a cake. And what about Halloween? Yes. There was that party where I went as a tree! So this was November. And what happened in early November? Jean-Pierre Raulin was visiting from Brazil, and I did go to California for the meeting in Berkeley. That was a Friday, and I flew into San Francisco with a stopover in Denver. Then I stayed somewhere, not in Berkeley at the Golden Bear hotel, where I had been scheduled. Was it in LA? Ah! It was the DoubleTree in Burlingame, where American Airlines put me up when they canceled my flight to Santa Ana Airport. Then my Saturday morning flight was canceled too, and finally I flew into SNA via United, where I was met by my Dad.

Gradually the pieces of my recent past came together. I deduced that I had not gone to the meeting in Berkeley at all. But what day was today? At the earliest, it had to be Sunday, although it could be later. Then I noticed that I was wearing my pants. I was in a very busy “holding” room, with immense activity behind a desk about 10 yards away. (I realized later that it was the E.R.) There was another curtained bed next to mine, with no one in it. Without much experience of hospitals, I didn’t know what floor or department I was in, and was too busy recollecting my thoughts about the last few days and my place in space and time, to ask the orderly any questions when he came in with a wheelchair to roll me up through the halls to a more permanent room. I donned a hospital cloak, and lay back on my new bed, studying the clock, and tried to guess what day it was.

It must be Sunday evening, I decided. A nurse came in and introduced herself as Maria, and I asked her if I could have a pad of paper and a pencil. I rested and worked on my memories. Much later, possibly an hour or two later, when I had nearly forgotten about my request for pencil and paper, Maria came in with them. I thanked her and started writing down my memories of the last few days. Everything fit together up until early afternoon on Sunday, November 14th. Then I noticed my wristband with numbers and letters on it:
“Edward J Schmahl 11/14/99 “ was the top line. So it must be Sunday. and I was admitted to the hospital this afternoon. Memories cascaded in. I recalled the dinner of Saturday night, breakfast on Sunday, and my visit to my stepmother Sophie, and the drive back to Huntington Beach. But after that? Nothing.

The story of the missing 7 hours came in gradually. Beth called, and explained a lot. Apparently I had been feeling bad on Sunday afternoon at Dad’s condo, lay down, and then called her to ask questions. I must have sounded crazy. She was instrumental in getting Dad to take me to the hospital right away, because my scrambled speech and thought patterns could have been caused by a stroke. So, reportedly, during that missing 7-hour period, I was questioned by a neurologist, and I questioned back, repeating the same questions over and over again without comprehending any answers. (At least this is what others told me, not recalling an iota of it.) I was given a CAT scan, which came up negative. All other tests came up negative for brain problems, heart problems, and anything else, with the sole exception: my blood was low in potassium.

The next morning, I had the last few days completely ordered in my mind, with the exception of the 2-9 pm period yesterday. In one of her calls, Beth told me that our neurologist friend Phil had guessed that my condition was “Transient Global Amnesia”. Unknown cause, improbable repeat. Later Monday morning, I checked my chart while I was being wheeled down for a chest X-ray. Diagnosis by Dr. Lum: ‘Transient Global Amnesia”. Finally, when I was tested again by another neurologist, Dr. Julie Thompson, she said that I had (you guessed it) “Transient Global”Amnesia.

It slipped my mind to ask her if I’d ever get those 7 hours back. I’ve always wanted to see a CAT scanner. And I had been inside one, and don’t have a single memory of it!

Ed
Tues, 11/16/99, UA229 en route to BWI.

Today, Wed, I returned to work. Played racquetball against Patrick at the gym. (won 3/3). Still no access to that 7-hour period. But everything else is intact!