15 mins on the elliptical and 15 mins on the recumbent bike - both with intervals and speeds smack between 'this is easy!' and 'oh my god, i can't do this'. Nadia really did a number on me yesterday. My knees hurt, my elbows hurt, my chest hurts oh and my neck hurts. Glad we didn't do any thumb exercises.

There weren't many folks in the gym and even my favorite Thursday front desk boys weren't there. Weird.

Oh well, shower time.

One week of no Nadia session and I totally forgot about the inevitable Thursday muscle screaming. Today it's my six pack - she crushed my cans yesterday. Ouch.

Today's plans are so far pretty vague. Sometime today, tomorrow or Saturday, I need to get to a library return slot. Amira is due in this afternoon to spruce up the joint. So far I have no clue about work or no work for today.

Now would be a good time to head over to the gym but Betty is snuggled up in my lap which is not a rare but not a frequent occurrence. I think I'll just enjoy it a little bit first.

The blue monkey is minutes away from the green chair and then I think it's more ducks. At least a couple. or one more anyway.

Charity Wine Tasting!



December 3, 2009
Charity Wine Tasting with proceeds going to PKD Foundation for research of Polycystic Kidney Desease


Winter Wine Tasting 2009

Bring your friends and enjoy an evening out at the 3rd Annual PKD Foundation Winter Wine Tasting Event. Sample a variety of wines from around the world. Bid on the incredible silent auction items and try your luck with the raffle. Proceeds will benefit the PKD Foundation.

Auction items include a bottle of Dan Aykroyd wine AUTOGRAPHED, decanters, Laguiole steak knives, magnums of wine and much more.

The Wine & Cheese Place will donate 10% of sales to the PKD Foundation.

Date: Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
Time: 7:00pm – 9:00pm
Location: The Wine & Cheese Place – Clayton, MO
Dress: Casual
Tickets: $30 per/person

TAE Effective for Polycystic Kidney and Liver
by Caroline Helwick

MILAN—An intravascular treatment for intractable symptomatic polycystic kidney and liver due to autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD) is highly effective, according to the findings of a Japanese study.

Tatsuya Suwabe, MD, of the Nephrology Center at Toranomon Hospital Kajigaya, Kanagawa, Japan, reported the results from a series of 579 patients with enlarged polycystic kidney and 243 patients with enlarged polycystic liver treated with transcatheter arterial embolization (TAE). Of the 579 patients with enlarged kidneys, 106 also had enlarged livers.

“Since kidney and liver in ADPKD patients are usually supplied by well-developed arteries, we attempted to contract the enlarged organs by TAE, using intravascular platinum microcoils as the embolization material,” Dr. Suwabe said.

Except for patients who died of other causes, all patients undergoing renal TAE had a favorable clinical course. Seventeen patients underwent renal transplantation; 15 had nephrectomy and two did not.

Of the 243 hepatic TAE patients, 202 had a favorable clinical course, but improvement was not observed in 41 patients with severe liver damage marked by massive ascites and cystic infection, he reported.

“TAE is generally more effective for enlarged kidney than liver.…[the] average volume reduction [in the kidney] exceeds 50%, compared with about 20% for the liver,” he said.

In one of the more dramatic examples, a patient with liver-dominant cysts achieved a reduction in total hepatic volume from 9,659 cm3 to 3,225 cm3 and reduction in intrahepatic cyst volume from 8,427 cm3 to 1,736 cm3. Reductions were maintained for one year after TAE. Hepatic parenchyma, however, increased, Dr. Suwabe reported.

“Before hepatic TAE, there is a gradual growth of cysts. After TAE, cysts become less tense and begin to shrink, and the decompressed parenchyma tends to expand in volume and return to its original position,” he explained.

The TAE procedure was well-tolerated both kidney-dominant or liver-dominant patients, though one patient with renal metastasis of bladder cancer died after renal TAE, he noted.

From the October 2009 Issue of Renal And Urology News
Original link

Until There's A Cure
The blog of a family affected by Polycystic Kidney Disease, told from the perspective of Lydia - the teenager sharing the disease with her Father.

http://talk.nhs.uk/members/0b9105ed_2D00_6bcd_2D00_4c42_2D00_9ec7_2D00_5b402e9cf1e9/default.aspx
"My name is Renee and I have polycystic kidney disease, or PKD."

I made my second Please Quit Paying My Taxes call to GMAC this afternoon and ended up with a really excellent customer service person. It took her less than a minute to grasp my issue. And she went right into How Do We Fix This mode. She was quick and polite and organized. She gathered all of the information and put me on hold and came back to tell me that I would hear from her supervisor in 24 to 48 hours.

I told her I was really vested in getting this fixed and if the worst happened and somehow it was next week and I had not heard from her supervisor, what should I do? She said I should call back. I then asked if there was a trick to navigate their telephone tree without an account number or an account. She quickly got the problem there, too and put me on hold again.

When she came back she gave me her supervisor's name and telephone number!

I think there's a very good chance that I could get this fixed and sooner than later!

I have a post-it in the middle of my notes reminding me to make sure this supervisor gives that CSA a giant raise and/or bonus or at least a hearty atta girl!

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

It was a good session. Nadia is so patient with Me The Slug. I can't do stuff because I don't practice and I don't build up the strength I need to do it and I can't breathe enough. But, she keeps at it and is encouraging and nice about it anyway. And she does whoop my ass. Oh and she can't read. I wore my lunges suck t-shirt and she made me do them anyway. Geesh.

Shower time.

I'm waiting now for a sample to be approved and then I will have a nice little bit of work work to do today. In fact, it's beginning to look like this month's paychecks will cover the expenses which is a lovely surprise. Still no word from the boss about the future.

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Still no word from GMAC about my real estate taxes. I'll call again tomorrow if I do not hear anything today. This will be a long haul, I'm sure. I just need to keep at it. I think my tactic tomorrow will be two-fold. 1) You need to stop paying my taxes and 2) you need to tell me where to send the reimbursement for the taxes you mistakenly paid on my property for the last 18 months.

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The Mariners had a much better season this past Summer than the previous few years. They won more games but, more importantly to me, they were way more fun to watch. They seemed to have more fun just being there. A huge part of that was Ken Griffey, Jr. He's just infectious in the best possible way. Today we got news that he will be back for another year. That just makes my day.

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No cancellation from Nadia so I'm guessing the torture is on for our weekly training today as usual.

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I just realized that there is a home Seahawks game the weekend my brother and his wife are here. That will be fun - for them to see what the 'hood turns into on a Seahawks Sunday. I also just realized that Amira's cleaning days fall on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve... looks like adjustments will need to be made. She's due here tomorrow. We'll need to discuss.

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Oh Travis just moved his morning nap from the bed to the couch - I think I'll take this opportunity to go change the sheets and make up the bed!

That's the middle part of a monkey you see there in blue. Oh, wonder what a blue duck would look like? Hmmmm we may well find out!

I just finished this duck from a new pattern and I'm in love with him!

This is an interesting chair full.

The monkey is the latest version and probably the one I will replicate from now on. I finally got those damn ears the way I wanted them.

The brown bear is just a special snowflake. You cannot see what a mishappen mess he is in the photo (a tribute to my photography skills) but trust me. The child that loves him will be the next Mother Theresa.

The blue bear was try #1. The green bear was try #2 and the yellow bear wins. He, like the monkey, will be a regular.

The frog is adorable but what a bitch to make. He's all toes and the toes make him adorable and the toes are the bitch. He's probably a one off.

One of the Google alerts I have set up is to let me know when "susan dennis" turns up. There are many of us but, sadly, only a couple turn up daily. Me and my cyber friend who is a wonderous photographer in Savannah, GA.

But, today, I got an all together different hit. A Susan Dennis made The Standard (masthead says 'No. 1 Victoria's Great South Coast - that's Australia, mate). The article says that a consultant "was confronted by an irate Susan Dennis, the former president of the Friends of the Brolgas Association."

He is planning to fuck up her broglas breeding area. And she is, apparently, on the path to ensure that it's an 'oh no he didn'!'

I had to look up to see where this was... then I had to look up to find out what the fuck a brolgas was.

Then I had to get an image cause if I said, it's a bird, that would not be complete. So I found a nice image but it was too big. Now, I'm trying not to load up this computer with stuff cause my brother is going to reformat the drive when he gets here. So I have no image software on the machine but, turns out the Windows Paint program does a very nice cropping job and other stuff, too. Has it always and I just never looked? Cool.

All in all a very educational Google alert, thank you.

And yes, I have finished the Organization Project!!! Trying now not to wrench elbow patting myself on the back. On to making quiche muffins now.

I got in their earlier than usual today because I wanted to clear the day. If any work comes in, I'll hop on it but otherwise, I am going to finish the desk organization project today. The clutter is giving me the heebie jeebies.

I did 30 minutes on the treadmill - not so fast only 2.7, but switching every 2 minutes between level 1 and level 4. It was good. I am sweaty.

I don't remember not having a television. We had Romper Room and Pinky Lee and Tiddly Winks. But, I was already in my 20s when Sesame Street first appeared. I never watched it but became familiar with it as it leaked into all other aspects of the culture.

When my now 30+ year old nephew was about a year and a half, his brother was born. My Mom flew from North Carolina to San Diego to help out and ended up bringing the 18-month hold home with her for a while so my brother and his wife could spend some quality time with the new one.

My parents had not had small children around in a very long time and discovered issues they had long forgotten - like how difficult it was to keep a nearly 2 year old entertained for 12 hours a day.

They had just gotten their first VCR and my Mom, in a brilliant move, had found and taped an episode of Sesame Street. It saved the day. Alex was mesmerized by the program. My father, who was not a television watcher, even watched it with him.

The problem was, they only had one episode - featuring the letter B. Which Alex was perfectly happy to watch over and over and over and over again. Daddy nearly went nuts. It was great fun for months and even years after to taunt him with B references.

Alex's little girl is now exactly the age he was when he and Daddy learned about B.

It's a duck. I'm trying a new pattern and I'm hopeful.

Someone forgot to close the lid on the yarn basket last night. Someone else only took partial advantage. I think he might have just been too tired from all of the knocking stuff to the floor he did yesterday in the desk organization project.